Fanfiction || Superhero || Parker/Sophie || Part One

[cuzimastripper]

Title: Superhero
Author: Sapphire Smoke cuzimastripper
Beta(s): dolfynrider
Fandom: Leverage
Rating: NC-17
Pairing(s): Parker/Sophie (heavy mentions of Parker/Hardison)
Timeline: "The Grave Danger Job"
Completed Length: 13,694 words
Summary: Parker used to feel like a superhero, but now she's a mess of confusing emotions and it's making her feel a bit too human for her liking.
A/N: I've rewritten this story more times than I have any other. It's seriously insanity. I think, finally, I'm happy with it though lol. This is split into two parts due to LJ's word limit on posts.

“Or maybe that’s why they call it falling in love.”

If this was what falling in love felt like, Parker wanted no part of it. Her heart was beating so hard inside of her chest that she was sure it was going to burst into a thousand tiny pieces of bloody, pulmonary confetti. Her throat was tight; an asphyxiation she couldn’t stop no matter how much she tried to remember to breathe. She couldn’t think, she couldn’t feel. The numbness had settled in when she heard Hardison struggle for his next breath; he was suffocating, dying. He was going to die there in that grave because she wasn’t fast enough, she wasn’t good enough. Her thoughts were no longer coherent; rather blurs of images she wasn’t even sure were real. Parker felt like vomiting up her entire stomach as she ordered Hardison, desperately, to not give up. She needed him. Damn it, she needed him!

And that scared the living hell out of her.

Emotions. It was a word Parker knew the definition of, yet had a hard time understanding what it really meant to feel. Her childhood wasn’t exactly filled with time spent drawing techno-colored rainbows and cheerfully bright butterflies. Kids who drew the world in color could see the beauty in it. They could see the sky, the stars; they could feel the wind on their cheeks and the earth beneath their feet. They could feel love. They could feel alive.

Parker could feel none of those things as a child. And honestly, she was probably better off.

It was a survival instinct for her; to see the world in black and white, to feel numb to the wind and disconnected from the earth. Without emotions the pain dulled to a prickle; nothing could hurt her, nothing could touch her. She was invincible, she was a superhero. He tried to break her in half, he tried to beat her bloody; he was a four eyed monster and everyone looked so tiny to him from up there. Be he couldn’t hurt her. She had hardened herself; creating an impenetrable armor that blocked out the agonizing colors of her world. She couldn’t be touched because she could run, she could fly. She was so much more disciplined than everyone else; the next phase of humanity. She was purpose without hesitation.

And then she met them; her team, her family.

Suddenly cracks began to form in the armor Parker had given herself. She could see the colors of the sky; feel the warmth of unexpected contentment. It was something she never thought she needed, though found her body craved. But the unknown was a terrifying place; a weakness Parker knew she couldn’t properly deal with. So she clutched onto the last of her armor, desperately trying to protect herself from something she tried to deny, yet knew in her heart was inevitable: she was being stripped of her super powers; she was becoming a real person.

It shattered today; the rest of her armor. It shattered into a billion pieces and left Parker alone and naked; a turtle without its shell. It was too much for her; an overwhelming suffocation that made her body weak and her stomach turn. It ended up hitting her all in one go, like a freight train with no brakes barreling towards the edge of a cliff. Parker felt like she was being torn from every direction; her head swam with incoherent thoughts of pretzels and Belgrade as her finger pressed firmly against the gun’s trigger. The sound that followed was deafening.

For one, agonizingly long moment Parker was afraid she had shot him; that maybe he was too weak to move and now Hardison was lying there, bleeding out beneath the shallow earth. For the first time in the last twelve hours, Parker felt herself grind to a complete stop as her brain replayed the horror of that scenario over and over in her mind. The dirt, the blood, the tears.

The sound of the coffin opening nearly made her fall over. Nate, Sophie, and Eliot were helping him up; hugging, loving, connecting to Hardison to make their family whole again. But the onslaught of emotions left Parker broken and weak. Her muscles felt like sludge, her heart like a rock. She looked at Hardison; the first man she had ever seen in true color, and she couldn’t see anything else besides a blur of complexity and feeling. He stared back at her and it was blinding, invading; it stole her breath away and made her fear she would suffocate again. So she turned away, her last hope for protection.

It was hard to run from your heart though.

When Hardison’s lips pressed against her cheek later that night, Parker was sure that he burned her. Fire shot through her veins, igniting something deep within her that made her feel like she was floating midair on a strawberry cupcake filled with pure elation and rainbow colored unicorns. It was like a drug, that feeling Hardison gave her. It was dangerous; it left her vulnerable and needy with an addiction she was sure she could never sate.

“Thanks for not hanging up the phone…”

Parker’s hand twitched against the bar as he pulled away, his breath ticking her oversensitive skin. She nodded mutely; wanting to reach for him, wanting to hold onto him and never let go. It took every ounce of willpower she had inside her to suppress the urge. Her knuckles turned white as she gripped the side of the bar, feeling him walk away but not daring to look at him go.

It was hard for Parker to sleep after that night. It was hard for her live with what she knew, with who she was now. She wasn’t stupid; even without Sophie’s help she knew what was going on. Hardison had left his mark on her that night; he broke down the last barriers of her superhero armor and turned her into a helpless civilian who could do nothing else but wait around to be crushed by the weight of reality and the inevitable pain it would cause her. Because Parker knew better, she damn well knew better than to think that this wouldn’t end with her heart being torn from her chest.

(The stone was cold beneath her fingertips as she scaled the side of the old Victorian manor without thought or question to her actions. Familiar. Numb. Purposeful. The window, located on the third floor, second to the right of the large oak tree, had always seen through her more than she has of it.)

Parker watched her mother die from that - a broken heart; her father having left when she was five years old to make a new life with some diseased ridden whore, forgetting them and the responsibility he had to them entirely. Her mom drank herself to death within a year, drowning her pain and her tears in that burning poison.

(It was autonomous; the way nimble fingers disabled tiny wires, preventing the comfort of an alert to her presence. She didn’t like to be announced. Only important people were announced. The wood of the pane was heavy with familiarity; the opening. Her opening. Feet against wood, hand against railing. She wasn’t alone. But that was the point.)

And then she watched Sophie leave two summers ago because of the very same thing; Nate being too self-involved to see that he was destroying the woman that he couldn’t even begin to function properly without. Sophie’s heartbreak tore their family apart and forced them to take in a stepsibling who had entirely too large of breasts that all of the boys stared at when they thought she wasn’t looking. Tara wasn’t bad or anything - she actually smelt quite nice - but it was kind of like trying to force a puzzle piece in the wrong spot; it might happen to look right, but that didn’t mean it fit.

(A scream. There was screaming now and something being thrown at her. A pillow maybe, it usually was a pillow. Then finally a stern, “Parker, we talked about this. It’s the middle of the bloody night; you scared me nearly half to death. Honestly, one of these days…”)

Parker often wondered how Sophie managed to stop the pain. It had once suffocated her so much that she ran away from them, from everything, just to breathe. Parker was sure she would never see the grifter again; she was convinced the pain would envelop Sophie and crush the life from her, just like it did to her mother. But Sophie came back a little more whole than when she left. For someone who was broken - as they all were in one way or another - that conclusion was unfathomable. Sophie had a secret, a reason she got better, but she never told and so Parker never knew. It left her with no solutions, no way to make her whole again if she broke, and so she found herself fearful of the scenario’s inception more than anything else in the world.

(“Are you alright?” Concern. There was always a lot of that. “Parker?”)

She wouldn’t let herself get attached to him though; Hardison. She wouldn’t connect with him. She avoided him entirely most days because she refused to let him fill her with the love she knew part of her ached to receive. But Hardison was dangerous - an explosion of emotions that in actuality was nothing like falling from a building. When Parker flew through the air, she had no fear. Yet when her eyes would connect with Hardison’s and she ended up feeling more exposed than she ever had in her entire life, she found she was more scared of him in that moment than she was of horses.

(Her voice, with a tone full of comfort and understanding, tried instantly to fix what was broken. She did that; she had always done that. Maybe she liked to do it. Maybe she didn’t have a choice. Maybe it was a distraction.)

“Parker, hey,” Sophie prodded gently, climbing out of her expensive bed with her expensive sheets to compliment her expensive tastes. Wealth was beauty to Sophie. Wealth was everything to Sophie. The brunette’s hands took hold of her shoulders, nudging her softly out of her trance. “What’s wrong?” she asked carefully, eyes searching Parker’s for any sign of an answer. “You look… a bit zonked, honestly. You haven’t taken anything, have you?”

“No.”

Her voice sounded strange coming out of her mouth; she had heard it solely inside of her head for so long that the audibility of it startled her. Parker’s eyes flickered up to meet Sophie’s; her hopelessness reflected in the grifter’s concern. She didn’t know why she came here, really. She was sure she didn’t actually make the conscious decision to climb into Sophie’s bedroom window at three in the morning, startling the older women out of bed. Yet there she was, all five feet seven inches of her standing in the middle of a room that surrounded her with pretty trinkets and attractively contrasting colors, and quite suddenly and unexpectedly, Parker felt about an inch tall.

Sophie looked at her for a moment, though quickly came to the conclusion that Parker was not going to share her thoughts at this point in time. “Do you want to stay the night?” Sophie asked instead, and not for the first time. This was time number six in the last four years that Parker found herself unable to sleep by herself, her thoughts rushing too fast and too hard, making everything turn into a blur of techno-colored madness that kept her awake for hours. She never told Sophie this, but somehow she knew. Somehow, she could make the craziness stop long enough so she could sleep.

Parker nodded mutely, only vaguely aware of what was actually going on in front of her.

She was placed on the bed momentarily with Sophie climbing behind her, yawning slightly as she situated herself into the position that was beginning to feel more belonging than strange lately. Her legs fell to either side of the thief as her hands ran up pale skin, nails emitting an involuntary shiver. “Close your eyes,” Sophie instructed softly.

Parker closed her eyes, forcing the blurs of color to become solid darkness. But she still felt like she was moving; still felt like she was running a marathon that had no hope of an end. She was rushing, leaving, falling, screaming. She wanted her armor back; she wanted to be whole again and stop being this squishy slug-like bit that lived in a constant panic that the floodgates were going to open again.

Parker couldn’t deal with that. She couldn’t deal with another graveyard emotional equivalent. She grew up without learning that there needed to be a balance with feelings like these, which from her understanding were supposed to be incredibly common. Affection, butterflies, smiles. They were normal for everyone else. But not for Parker. She couldn’t separate her emotions, she couldn’t compartmentalize them and feel them at the proper times because she went so long without feeling any at all that now she was getting crushed under the weight of not just one human feeling, but all of them combined. She couldn’t love Hardison like he loved her; she couldn’t love him normal - instead when she thought of him she cried with a smile, hating the compassion and chaos-peace of the insane, mind-numbing putrid beauty that crushed the wings he gave her to fly. It was too much. She needed it to end.

Sophie’s thumbs pressed into the base of Parker’s skull, showing the thief brief stars behind her lids that temporarily blinded her from the chaotic motions in her mind. “Count,” Sophie requested softly, running her nails up the thief’s head; a motion the grifter knew distracted Parker immensely due to the anticipation she felt. She was waiting for something, but she never had been able to find out what. The end she constantly waited for never came, whatever it was.

“Five,” Parker began.

“Five what?”

Fingers kneaded the muscles in the back of Parker’s neck, causing a momentary pause as the motion blurs in her mind flickered like an old movie. “Five crying moms,” Parker answered, almost forgetting for a moment to use Sophie’s backwards system that somehow enabled her to find out what was wrong with the frequently non-responsive thief without actually having to be told specifically. Usually it would feel invading, but Sophie made the colors dull and the thoughts slow, so she found it didn’t matter in the long run.

“Go on,” Sophie encouraged softly.

“Four disappearing grifters.” Sophie didn’t seem to be expecting that and her hands stilled for a moment. But after a moment they resumed their decent down Parker’s arms, kneading out the tension the thief stored within her. The flickers of blurs slowed and then sped up without warning, suddenly making Parker feel very nauseas as she tried to keep up with her own mind. Hearts and Hardisons, Sophies and mothers, coffins and deaths multiplied, stretched, and merged in an onslaught of vertigo so powerful that Parker opened her eyes and immediately, frantically tried to scramble out of Sophie’s bed before she puked all over her nice sheets. She couldn’t deal with this.

“No, stop it, Parker,” Sophie ordered strongly, immediately hooking her arms underneath Parker’s before pulling her towards her, forcing the thief’s back to collide with her breasts in a way that could not have felt very pleasant. She cradled Parker’s head with both of her hands as she kept her pinned, fingertips pressing against her temples. Her grip was like a vice; the power in it startling Parker for a moment. “Close your eyes and tell me three.” It was no longer a request; it was a demand that matched the power of the tight grip that held her firmly in place. No excuses, no questions, just action. Sophie was going to fix her whether Parker wanted her to or not. “Don’t stop. Don’t think. Breathe. In…”

…Out. Parker still felt ill but began to breathe as Sophie instructed, submitting to her demand without even a thought to fight against it like she normally would. As she closed her eyes again, trapped in the place between chaos and freedom, she spit out without hesitation, “Three broken hearts.” Sophie’s grip on her tightened slightly and its dominance was utterly distracting. Parker could feel her friend’s lips just a hair’s width away from her ear as she encouraged in a low voice:

“Good girl. Two?”

This wasn’t how this usually went. Sophie had never held her in a way that seemed more possessive than comforting. Then again, Parker could usually get through these exercises without the intense need to escape; apparently this was Sophie’s solution to keep her where she needed to be. Still, the feeling of the woman’s breath on her neck and the acute awareness of the rise and fall of breasts behind her made the blurs dim for a moment to allow room for complete perplexion. For the first time in weeks, Parker wasn’t overly aware of everything she felt; instead it was replaced by the bewilderment of not being able to identify anything she was feeling in that moment. She knew she had felt it before, but not when it was by itself. Usually it was mixed in, like how the chocolate chips were in cookie dough; complimenting each other by contrasting.

This was different though. This was strong; seemingly unable to be watered down.

Parker had been silent for an unusually long amount of time, too wrapped up in her thoughts to answer. To rectify that and keep her on track, Sophie suddenly grasped blonde hair in both of her fists, pulling hard enough to make her point; she was supposed to be counting. The sound that left Parker’s lips was foreign to her ears and it seemed to also be a little bit bad since Sophie noticeably froze behind her for a moment.

But Parker couldn’t help it. It was a weird feeling, allowing herself to be trapped by someone who usually made their point with words, not by grabbing parts of her that Parker would normally kill people for trying to grab. But she couldn’t move. Part of her didn’t want to anyway. The thief’s head was turned at an angle, half against Sophie’s shoulder and neck as the grifter held her in place by her hair. It made her feel incredibly vulnerable, but strangely also made her feel safer than she’d felt in quite awhile. The world would burn before Sophie hurt her, she knew that. “Two runaway civilians,” Parker finally answered, her voice sounding incredibly breathy for some reason.

The blurs, the motions in her mind, had slowed to unexpected crawl sometime during all the pulling and pinning. It wasn’t long before they faded almost completely, giving way to the curiosity that ended up overshadowing the fear. Parker desperately tried to understand what was going on; Sophie had never gotten her to calm down before “one” and the endless breathing exercises that followed that number, yet all of a sudden she found herself with a clarity she hadn’t known in weeks. Though due to the current position Parker found herself in, clarity turned to confusion within a matter of moments.

“One?” Sophie requested, her grip noticeably slacking. She must have known something worked. Sophie always knew when things happened before anyone. Psychic, maybe, though she denies having the superpower. Nails were massaging Parker’s scalp again softly, though Sophie still had her in a hold that Parker would be unable to get herself out of without the use of violence. Parker couldn’t use violence on her family though.

“One death,” Parker finished quietly. The finality of the countdown paved the way for the next few moments’ silence in the room. Parker still hadn’t opened her eyes, having found herself concentrating a bit too much on the sound of Sophie’s breathing. It was a little heavier than normal. Sophie still had a firm grip on her, but it must have been without her knowledge that she continued to keep it, because when she pulled away suddenly, letting Parker go, it seemed like the position she found them in startled her a little.

While it was nice to be allotted freedom, strangely Parker found herself missing the contact and contentment Sophie’s hold had given her. Though Sophie had let her go, she still stayed in the same position behind her. Parker’s feet dangled off the edge of the bed as she held the edge of the mattress, opening her eyes to look down at the floor paneling. She wanted to turn around, but something told her that might be a bad idea right now.

It was a good while until Sophie spoke. “Are you feeling better?” Parker nodded mutely, overly aware of each beat of her heart; they were heavier, faster. She was nervous for some reason, which didn’t make much sense seeing as a moment ago she was comfortable being with Sophie. But something was wrong; she could feel it in the air of the room. “That’s good,” Sophie replied. There was a pause before Sophie apologized softly, “I’m sorry I had to do that to you, Parker.”

“Do what?” Parker asked, not really sure what Sophie was apologizing for. It had worked, didn’t it? She still didn’t turn to look at her, instead choosing to stare at her shoes as she swayed them back and forth slightly.

“Control you.”

Oh.

Parker shrugged lightly. “I think I liked it,” she told her, because she was pretty sure she did. It wasn’t often - or ever, for that matter - that she relinquished control to someone else. But when she gave it to Sophie, or maybe more accurately when Sophie took it from her, it lifted some kind of weight from her that Parker didn’t even realize had been crushing her on top of everything else.

“I know,” Sophie answered, still sounding a little guilty about something that Parker didn’t think she should have guilt about. “It wouldn’t have worked if you didn’t.”

“Then why are you sorry?” Parker asked, finally turning her head over her shoulder to look at Sophie curiously.

The question was left unanswered; a decision Parker’s sure was made consciously. “Look… I know what happened was traumatizing,” Sophie told her softly, changing the subject back to the reason the thief showed up in the first place. “It broke something in all of us, Parker; not just you. But I also realize you’re dealing with something so much more than just the possibility of loss. You’re changing, probably much too rapidly for you to know how to deal with on your own. You’ve lost the ability to control your emotions, which is probably terrifying to you seeing as you spent a great deal of your life exercising so much control over them that you could choose when, and when not, to feel them.”

“Stop,” Parker pleaded softly as she wrapped her arms around herself, pulling herself off the bed as she stood up, trying to think of anything else than what was being said to her. If she thought about it the chaos would come back. If she thought about it she would break again. She had spent so much of her life being broken; all she wanted was two goddamn seconds of something more than pain and confusion in her life.

Sophie sighed as she watched Parker pace back and forth, trying to distract herself from reality again. “All I was trying to say is that if you want, I may be able to help you.” Sophie’s offer made Parker stop mid stride, turning to look at her.

“You can make it stop?”

“I can try to help you find the balance you need,” Sophie corrected; a promise without eye contact as she picked invisible lint from the sheets. “I won’t help you rebuild your walls, Parker. I won’t help you shut down again.”

“Why do you look like that?” Parker asked suddenly, wanting to know. Sophie’s face turned from slight guilt to full on quizzical, not understanding the question. “Like you’re doing something wrong by helping me. If you don’t want to, then don’t.”

“What?” Sophie asked automatically, though seemed to understand rather quickly because that was followed up with an, “Oh. No, it’s not that I don’t want to. It’s…” she sighed softly, running her fingers through her hair as her cheeks colored to a slight rosy hue. “I think I may have gotten a bit carried away earlier and honestly I’m embarrassed about it; I only meant to help and I had a feeling that would, but I didn’t mean for it to end up seeming so blatantly sexual. I don’t want to be the one to confuse you, Parker.”

Parker furrowed her brow, letting that information sink in. It made sense though now, why her heart rate increased and her breathing shallowed; what Sophie was doing was arousing. Which honestly perplexed Parker a little bit; she never really expected to have those kinds of thoughts about Sophie. It had actually been so long that she felt that way that she obviously didn’t even remember how it made her body react. She tilted her head to the side, as if assessing Sophie as something new; different. She kind of was now. “You think I’m going to want to have sex with you?” she asked, hoping she came to the right conclusion. Sometimes it was hard to understand Sophie’s point; Parker thinks that maybe she does that on purpose sometimes.

Sophie smirked slightly. “I know better than to presume how your brain works, Parker.” It was an answer that wasn’t really an answer and it confused Parker, which must have been evident by the look on her face. Sophie shook her head lightly. “Never mind, we’ll discuss this another time. It’s late; we should probably both get some sleep.”

(Sleep was something only she got those nights, for Parker would rather stand watch over one of her most prized possessions than leave it vulnerable. If it broke, she would break.)

The digital clock read five thirty-four in the morning and the small bit of sunlight that was streaming into the room left Parker only half hidden by the shadows. There was a stir, a groan, and Parker turned from the window to look at the body half hidden under the covers. She stepped back, crouching down to be enveloped by the darkness the bureau cast over the right corner of the room, knowing she shouldn’t be in here. People always yelled when she hid in places she wasn’t supposed to, misunderstanding her intentions when she watched them.

Sophie sat up a little, squinting from the rising sun. Her face was scrunched up a little in confusion as she stared at the window Parker was at not moments previously, like she knew someone had been there even though Parker was sure she left nothing disturbed. She yawned before her eyes did a once over of the room, but Parker found herself holding her breath as Sophie’s eyes lingered a bit too long on her hiding space.

“Parker?” Sophie asked quietly, like she couldn’t really be sure if she was there or not. Parker didn’t answer. Sophie looked around the room once more before seemingly deciding she must have been imagining things as she lay back down in her bed. It was a good twenty minutes until Parker risked coming out, not wanting to disturb her.

She probably should have waited longer.

“You’re not as quiet as you think you are, you know.”

Parker practically jumped from the unexpected sound of Sophie’s voice as she tried to make her way back over to the window. Instead she turned around halfway to her destination, being met with brown eyes that stared into hers, one eyebrow cocked in her direction. Parker shifted her eyes to the left guiltily; it wasn’t often she got caught doing… well, anything. “Uh, hi.”

Sophie looked a little amused though through her haze of tiredness. She rubbed her eyes sleepily before sliding to the other side of the bed, holding up the covers in invitation. “Come on, get in; you need to sleep.”

Parker noticeably hesitated.

“Or at least let me lie with you until I fall back asleep,” Sophie compromised in the middle of the yawn, motioning to the covers again. Parker raised an eyebrow, not buying that excuse. Sophie just wanted her to get into bed so she could sleep. But she can’t sleep here. It’s just not something she does. Sleeping here is weird, for some reason. Besides, Parker tried to sleep in the guestroom once; it was frilly and made of smiles and lace with a nice big bed that should probably feel welcoming, yet only felt distant and cold. It felt wrong in there; fake, and so Parker much preferred being in a room that wasn’t filled with lies.

“I’m not a stuffed animal.”

“Yet you try to provide me comfort while I sleep,” Sophie countered. Parker squished her face to the side, unhappy that Sophie knew what she was doing in here. It seemed less important when it was known, somehow. Not that a stuffed animal could do her job, of course. That would be ridiculous. But comfort was comfort, no matter which level it lay on.

“Your security system is a joke,” Parker answered, as way of explanation. Sophie smirked slightly, amused by her assessment.

“To you, maybe. But there’s no one else in the world like you, Parker.”

Parker liked the way she said that and she smiled slightly, though aimed it towards the floor. She heard Sophie yawn again; this time much bigger. She was so sleepy. “Fine,” Sophie relented softly, tugging the covers up over her as she settled into her pillow, eyes closed. “Just please try to be quiet; you may not want to sleep tonight, but I’d like to get what little I can.”

Parker nodded shortly before returning to her place by the window. She stole small glances at Sophie while the grifter tried to fall back asleep, wondering why she allowed her to stay. No one ever had before. Everyone kicked her out and yelled things about privacy and politeness. Sometimes they threw things. It was usually Eliot who threw things as her; not hard things, not hurtful things, but things anyway. He really hated when she made forts inside of his bedroom closet for some reason, even though the dimensions and architectural structure was ideal for it.

Six seventeen in the morning; that was when Parker rose from her perch on the window to carefully cross the room to Sophie’s bed. Six nineteen was when she realized Sophie was actually quite pretty while she slept; like a princess lucky enough to not lie on the pea. Six twenty-three was when she discovered that the grifter had somehow stopped her from thinking about the crazy stuff for over three hours, which prompted the smile at six twenty-four and the contemplation that maybe she should never leave at six thirty-one. But six forty-two was her favorite minute, as that was the moment Sophie chose to reach out in her sleep and cover Parker’s hand with hers.

(Touching was always so odd for Parker, but her hand was like silk in her palm and her fingers were too needy to ignore. They wanted to tangle. Wrap up in each other. Play with each other, as fingers do; as friends do.)

But she was too numb to feel their gentle caress this time. As Sophie’s hand slipped into hers, Parker barely acknowledged it. She stared vacantly across the waiting room of the ER, unable to think or feel. “He’ll be alright, Parker,” Sophie tried to tell her softly; “the bullet was through and through; it missed his vital organs. He’ll be okay.”

It didn’t matter if it was life threatening or not, that wasn’t the point. Someone shot her… Hardison. Someone shot Hardison.

Eliot walked up to them, nodding at Parker but addressing Sophie. “How’s she doin’?” Parker wanted to scream at him, tell him he shouldn’t be asking how she was doing; he should be worried about Hardison. But she didn’t move, nor utter a sound. It was as if her body no longer took commands from her brain. There was so much screaming before; so much fear, blood, and revenge. But it was when Hardison was in surgery that Parker finally looked down at her hand, still stained red along with most of the clothes she had on, and realized she couldn’t fucking handle this anymore. People like her were not meant to have feelings like this.

So she shut down.

“Not good,” Sophie replied, a sympathetic look crossing her face as she took in Parker’s unmoving, unspeaking figure.

“Hey, Parker,” Eliot exclaimed, snapping in her face like she was some sort of dog. “Hardison’s gonna be fine; seriously. You’re makin’ this into somethin’ bigger than it is and if ya don’t quit Nate’s gonna start sending you to a shrink.”

The said shrink-sender was currently pacing up and down the hallway about twenty feet away, mumbling to himself.

The people were blurs and their voices were like echoes. Reality was too distorted to make sense of the pain that flooded their lives. It felt like she was being sucked into a black hole; something that should feel rather familiar to her by now but instead filled her with a sense of suffocating fear. But instead of running from it she stood stock still, her limbs uncooperative and her muscles feeling of sludge covered molasses.

The hand left hers; a movement that left Parker cold as she fell through reality into a land of her own making.

“She shouldn’t be here, Sophie. She obviously can’t handle it and havin’ to lock her up in the loony bin is the last damn thing we need right now. Seriously.”

“I know.” Eyes flickered over in her direction; voice hushed yet not quiet enough. Parker wasn’t deaf, she wasn’t stupid. She just couldn’t move. Couldn’t speak. But she could hear them, though they seemed to think she couldn’t. “I’ll take her back to my house; call me when Hardison wakes up, yeah?”

Eliot nodded shortly before turning his gaze over to Nate, who was still pacing back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth…

“I don’t want to go.”

(But it was never said out loud. Words filled her head that never left her mouth; a desperation that was meant to be screamed yet was swallowed by silence. Words were nothing unless they were spoken. Nothing was everything unless it was accepted that things were real.)

GO TO PART TWO..