Leverage fanfic: One time Eliot Spencer felt like a monster...
Title: One time Eliot Spencer felt like a monster, and six times the team showed him he wasn't one.
Author: ella_bee
Rating: Um, PG13-ish?
Characters/Pairing: Eliot Spencer, gen
Word Count: 5250
Spoilers: Episode tags for Season 3 and 4, post Big Bang Job
Warnings: Talking about something that Eliot did in his past... kinda.
Disclaimer: I don't own anything.
Summary: The title is pretty self explanatory, right?
Notes: This was written for leveragexchange in June for kc749. Cross-posted to AO3.
Prompt: "The team showing Eliot that he is NOT a monster"
Before.
He crouched on the far side of the hill, watching the flames as they engulfed the house. It wouldn't take long now for the sounds of sirens to wake the neighbourhood and he would have to leave soon - but right now he was watching the fire consume the house and the lives of the people within it.
He felt the familiar twinge in his gut of regret, and while he normally hardened himself around it, this time he felt it.
No, he thought. This time he allowed himself to feel it.
He shook his head as if to shake away the thought and his cropped hair barely moved. He rubbed his hand over the short bristles and grimaced, but his eyes never left the house and his muscles never relaxed. They stayed taut in the crouch he was in, ready to spring into action as soon as it was needed.
The sirens started screaming and they were matched with another scream from inside the house. A child had woken up despite the deliberately defective smoke alarms, and she was framed in the window that had been painted shut. He could see her struggling with it, and the screaming was inside his head now too.
He shook his head again, trying to shake the loose the errant thoughts. He was a soldier. The government trained, moulded, and shaped him into the best soldier they could make him, and then made him --
Well, he wasn't actually a soldier anymore. He hadn't been a soldier for a long time.
They turned him into an assassin.
He wondered what the percentage of people like him left the service. They created him. Now they hunted him.
No, soldier wasn't the word he used anymore.
The girl in the window was smart, despite her age. The youngest, he remembered. Only eight. But she found something hard and shattered the window - allowing the smoke out, giving her a chance. Still, the rush of fresh oxygen made the fire burn more brightly, too.
The fire trucks were starting to set up and she put a blanket over the sharp glass, crawling through the window to the porch roof - crawling to safety. He crouched, still out of sight. He brushed his hand over the short military crop again, still unable to tear his eyes away from this slight young girl, her dark hair swirling around her and her nightgown bristling in the wind.
Her determined face reminded him of another young girl he once knew - her long strawberry hair trailing behind her as she ran through the hay-bales, his own long straw coloured hair mimicking hers.
He watched the firemen brace the ladder against the roof, and the brave little girl giving directions to all the sleeping occupants - but he knew that it was now likely too late. He also knew that he had failed.
The mission was to eliminate the family. That they wanted the child's father dead, and it was their style to take the rest of the family with him. That it was a warning for anyone else who dared go against them.
But right at that moment he wasn't a valued member of a team, or a soldier, or a mercenary. He could see himself clearly through that little girl's eyes - the girl that no longer had a house, or a family, or anything to call her own. No. He wasn't a soldier.
He was a monster.
He finally moved, knowing that this time it was different. He wasn't one of them. His short hair felt wrong, and there was nothing he wanted more than to return to his home of corn mazes and twin strawberry blonde braids.
He finally moved from his crouch and could feel the girl's eyes pierce through him. Something inside him had broken, and for the first time he wasn't on the path to destruction. He had no idea where he was going.
He only knew that he couldn't go back.
***
1. The Big Bang Job.
The team had returned to Boston to regroup. It was supposed to be soothing and calming, being home, but he felt like he had left himself in that warehouse - on that tarmac. They were all doing research; they were all recovering, not knowing how close they all had come to total disaster that job. Or, maybe they did, but in a different way. He did hear Hardison's excited jabbering about an exploding train...
His hair brushed into his eyes and he felt himself move into Nate's upstairs bathroom without conscious thought. His hands were moving of their own accord, rummaging, looking under the sink, through the drawers, and then finally found what he was looking for in a bin in a linen closet.
He stood in front of the mirror with the clippers in his hand, and as much as he tried to the shake the thoughts loose, they clung on. His eyes were hard but if he looked really closely he could almost, almost see some resemblance of the person he used to be.
But in that warehouse? He had gone back to being the soldier. No, not the soldier, he corrected in his mind. The mercenary.
He clutched the clippers and in his mind they turned into a gun. He pressed the button and it whirred to life, the buzzing -- which he thought would give him some peace - instead placed him back in that warehouse.
The hum of the clippers became the sound of the yelling and the glugging of the lubricant coating the floor.
The soft taptaptap on the door became gunshots.
He could almost feel them entering his torso and he reacted accordingly - he convulsed, but brought the gun - no, clippers - in front of him.
He realized what he had done a mere second after he did it, and he slowly lowered the clippers as he forced himself to slowly open the door.
Nate was standing there, a tumbler in one hand and a beer in the other. He set the cold beer down on the bathroom countertop, leaned on the door frame, and stared at Eliot until Eliot turned away.
He didn't need the drink. He wasn't Nate. He glared at the cold beer and Eliot could hear the ice cubes hitting the sides of Nate's glass as the other man took a drink.
"It's cold," Nate finally ventured, still staring at Eliot as if he had no idea how to interact with him.
Eliot looked at Nate through the reflection in the mirror without really seeing him and he finally shrugged, putting the clippers back on the counter and taking the beer.
Nate nodded as if his world was made right again. "I won't tell them," he said, as if this was the logical next extension of the conversation. Maybe it was. "In case you worried. Or..." He trailed off, and Eliot remembered the chaos of the tarmac. "What I said before about the warehouse - I won't tell them."
Eliot nodded, feeling a little bit better, but he still flashed back to Parker's face when he told her not to ask him what he's done. He didn't want to tell her about then. He didn't want to tell her about now.
He took a swig of his beer and this time studied Nate. He was awkward, sure, but he wasn't flinching as Eliot shifted closer to him, and he didn't avert his eyes when Eliot looked back at him. He was just there, his presence calming him down and somehow anchoring him in the present.
When he finally put the clippers back in the bin, and made a move to leave the bathroom, Nate finally spoke again. "They don't need to know, but for the record, it wouldn't change things with them."
Eliot snorted. Of course it would. "It changed things with you."
Nate shrugged, and finally his smirk returned. "Yeah," he said with a shrug. "It made me trust you more."
***
2. The Queen's Gambit.
He grumbled as he rolled out of bed and even though it had been days since they landed back on home soil, he still felt vulnerable. Sure, the weight had been compromised, and they got the girl back from her negligent step-father... but Sterling still won.
Well, maybe this was the first time the outcome was more like a tie. However, in Eliot's case? He still definitely lost.
He fixed on the moments in the car, where even though Nate was the mastermind and the one that knew Sterling the best, he was the one that needed to be neutralized for Sterling's plan to work.
He was still the threat, the one to be worried about, the one that Sterling was scared of. He was still the one that needed to be drugged.
It didn't matter that if he knew that Sterling's daughter was at stake; Eliot would have done everything he could have to make sure she got out all right; it didn't matter that he would have done that for anyone's child, not just because they knew Sterling.
No. To someone that knew his past and who he had become; he was still a monster.
He stumbled to the kitchen to turn on the kettle, but it wasn't until he was peering into his fridge to find the eggs that he felt eyes on him. He became hyper aware, his senses stretching the extents of his apartment and beyond, trying to place where the assailant might come from, or where they might be hiding. Whoever it was, they were behind him.
He reacted quickly, spinning around and using a sweet potato as a projectile, launching it at the angle that would hit a full grown man in the solar plexus.
Instead, the petite girl moved quickly out of the way, and it bounced harmlessly off her shoulder. "OW!" she cried anyway, even though he could tell it was more for show.
"Dammit, Parker!" It wasn't often that he used those two words in that combination, but there they were. He shifted for something more familiar. "There's something wrong with you."
She pouted, but it was more of a playful pout than actual hurt. However, you never could tell with her. "What are you doing here, Parker?"
She paused. "I was hungry?" she asked as a question, and it was one of her worse attempts at a lie.
"Parker," he started slowly, knowing that she could spook easily, "are you okay?"
She shrugged. "I was worried about you. You didn't get to punch Sterling this time, and you were angry."
He was stunned. For all of Parker's weird quirks and social ineptitudes, she still managed to see things that the others didn't, even if she got them slightly wrong.
"I wasn't angry about not getting to punch Sterling," he said as he went back to searching for eggs, and now spinach and cheese to make an omelette for him and Parker, noting that the part of his brain that made sure that Parker actually ate more than cereal and cookies was clearly still working. "I was..." he hesitated, not knowing how much he wanted to tell her.
"You didn't like that he drugged you."
That was a safe answer. "Yeah."
"Nate was mad too, but he was madder that Sterling didn't trust him with the real thing we had to steal." She shrugged. "We were the distraction. I get that."
Eliot stopped. As the team's thief, she often had a different perspective on the plan and mission. Usually she just played her part, but every once in a while, she surprised them all. "You've done similar things?"
She shrugged. "Sure. I mean, the trick is actually to get in and out without anyone noticing you're there, but if you trip the alarm you want all the attention somewhere else. Things that are showy are the best - fires and explosions, and sometimes you can use events that are already happening like sporting events and parades." She paused. "Or chess tournaments," she said as almost an afterthought.
"So you get it," Eliot repeated her earlier words.
"Well, the distraction part. I still don't like that he drugged you. You could have hit him for that. And that he lied. We probably would have just gotten Olivia for him without lying. But mostly the drugging. And I don't actually want you to have a glass eye. It might interfere with the punching."
Non sequitur about the glass eye aside, Eliot thought about it as the eggs sizzled on the frying pan. If he thought about it from Parker's perspective, then he was the distraction for the team so that Sterling could get a clean getaway - not that he was the monster that needed to be taken care of so that Sterling could burn the team. Huh.
He looked back at Parker. "Thanks for coming here Parker," he said softly, as if he was afraid anyone else would hear it.
"Oh, you're feeling better?" she asked, as if disappointed.
Eliot was confused. "Wasn't that what you wanted?"
"Well, I was really angry when I was trapped up there on the roof, but then I got to jump off it, and I felt a lot better. So, since you didn't get to punch anyone..." She trailed off and picked up the backpacks that he didn't notice before. "I thought you might want to come skydiving?"
He stared at her wide-eyed as the eggs started to burn on the pan, but he was unable to tear his gaze away from her. He sputtered three times before finally settling on repeating what he said before with a shake of his head. "There's something wrong with you." As he said it, she shot back a cheerful grin, and he couldn't have felt more accepted.
***
3. The Experimental Job.
He got up from the bar stool, massaging his shoulder as he glanced around. It had been quite a while since he had been holed up in that underground bunker. The jury was deliberating. There had been time for an entire trial to occur, and he still shivered every time he thought about being locked up down there.
He put back another shot, the words "here we go" still echoing in his head. Nate had gone, and the bar was unusually quiet for this time of night, but he noticed Hardison sitting in a back booth, his laptop open in front of him and large headphones covering his ears.
Eliot grabbed a cold beer, walked over, and slid into the booth across from him, Hardison not even blinking. Sure, Eliot was stealthy, but he didn't want to startle the poor boy when he finally looked up, so he sighed heavily and shifted, giving him an indication that he was there.
Hardison finally acknowledged him, a glass of what looked like some sort of girly cocktail to his side. He seemed tired, and void of the normal intensity that he normally had when engrossed in a project. "Hey, what's up?" Eliot tried.
Hardison shook his head and rubbed his eyes. "Just this case, it..." he shrugged. "Naw, it doesn't matter."
Eliot studied him. For all of Hardison's bravado, he really did just want to be respected in what he does. He still always felt like he had to prove something. And this job? It didn't really inspire confidence. Eliot shrugged. This was Hardison. If he wanted to talk, he'd talk.
It was only another minute before Eliot's thoughts are confirmed. "It's just... I was going though everything that happened on that job, and I screwed up. I just... I didn't get it done."
Eliot nodded. "It was hard one. But we got through it."
Hardison scoffed. "Barely."
Eliot shrugged again, waiting for Hardison to get to what was really bugging him.
"I mean, sure, I was playing video games and having Sophie coach me through the wine tasting, but..." he shakes his head, a self deprecating smile finally gracing his lips. "People, you know? And I almost really screwed things up with Parker, too."
Eliot chuckled. "I did hear Parker ramble about cross stitching for like, hours when I was trying to sleep. Seriously, both when she was writing that damned essay and when you brushed her off. I mean, I get that you separated my comm from yours, but you left Parker on?"
Hardison buried his head in his hands, and Eliot took a strange delight in his distress. "I know. I listened to it after. What the hell happened to me when I was with those guys? I turned into the kind of guy that we take down."
Hardison continued to talk, not realizing the Eliot was becoming stiller and stiller, trying to breathe through the pounding in his ears, and trying to figure out what it was that was causing the pounding in the first place.
"Because I was right. You can't fake cool! And tried, and I failed. And then you're all, even though I've got hypothermia and no sleep, I still got what it takes to freak out the professional interrogator out. I mean, whoa, brah, it was like, BAM, you know?" Eliot watched him put up his hand for their trademark high five but he left him hanging.
Eliot finally realized what it was that had started the pounding in his ears, the shortness of breath, the stillness. It was that he had heard him. And that he thought it was some kind of joke.
Hardison put his hand forward again as if Eliot simply hadn't seen it the first time, but his excitement at Eliot's storytelling was quickly dissipating. "El?" He finally asked, his expression going from enthusiasm to concern.
Eliot tried to smile, tried to seem light-hearted, but he hadn't reacted quickly enough. Hardison had put it together. His demeanour had changed from concern to something more primitive. Fear, Eliot finally decided. Hardison was afraid.
Eliot shifted to leave and got half way up before Hardison's hand covered his arm. His reflexes were screaming at him to react, and it took all his will power not to lunge at the younger man. But even, the touch was soft, not threatening. His expression had shifted back to concern.
"I also heard what you did when you found out I was blown." He paused, and Eliot finally looked back into his dark eyes that were showing nothing even close to fear. Hardison's voice had dropped, and Eliot saw a rare moment where all his bravado was gone and it was just vulnerability. "Thank you," he said, in barely a whisper.
Eliot sat back down. "Do you always record everything we say?"
"Dude, I don't erase anything."
"Can you erase that?"
"Yeah, man, of course." He typed a few quick keystrokes and nodded. "There. Gone." He waved his hands like a magician. "Never there."
Eliot nodded, thankful, and this time Hardison let him leave.
He had just let out a sigh of relief before Hardison called after again. "It doesn't matter, you know."
Eliot turned back. "What?"
Hardison was quiet again. "It doesn't matter, what you did before. You saved me in there. You did." He shrugged. "And you will. Anyway..." He closed his computer and got up to leave, putting his fist up like the end of their handshake, and then touching it to his heart.
"Hey," Eliot responded, finally cracking a smile. "Age of the geek, right?"
The genuine smile on Hardison's face erased the last bit of tension from the moment, and Eliot began to feel warmth for the first time since the job ended. Age of the geek, indeed.
***
4. The Girls' / Boys' Night Out Job(s).
He didn't expect to see Tara. Sure, he knew that she had been in town through Sophie, but when she didn't make plans to see the rest of them, it didn't really bother him. So, it surprised him when she came into the bar a few days later, strutting across the floor, sliding into the booth across from him, and stealing a drink from his beer like she never left.
He raised his eyebrows at her and she mimicked him back, playing his game of who would speak first. She won. She always did.
"I heard you had quite the evening at the embassy."
"And quite the next morning," she said with a cheeky smile.
He scoffed and stole his drink back, and even though she had been gone for over a year, they settled into easy small talk as she ordered a drink of her own and some food. "I hear you guys got into the middle of a gang war."
Eliot shrugged. "We did all right."
"And you had quite the next morning."
He smirked and took a swig from his bottle, letting his smile do all the talking. The conversation continued amicably; he had some stories about some of their jobs, she recalled some of the better grifts she'd done recently.
Finally the conversation snaked back to that night. "I had a lot of fun with the girls and Mattingly, but I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall seeing the five of you interact."
"Bonanno asked about you, he's quite taken, actually." That earned him a smile, and he continued. "Shelley asked about you too. I didn't know that you guys knew each other."
"We crossed paths a long time ago and then again from time to time." Eliot just nodded. He and Tara had actually almost crossed paths almost twenty years ago - he was receiving some of his specialized training at Quantico and she was debriefing after a mission. It was weird to think that they had such similar origin stories, while others that went through the same training were still working for the Marine Corp, or Special Forces, or Military Intelligence.
She said what he was thinking. "It's funny that he's stayed so positive. He still believes."
It's something that Eliot's thought about a lot. The government saw something in him at an early age that made him elite. They gave him the special training. They turned him into something... bigger than just the soldier.
And then...
And then they turned him into such an efficient killing machine that he didn't see the difference between the good guys and the bad guys anymore. So why not get paid for it, right?
But Shelley still believed. Shelley had never felt like a monster. And Tara marvelled at that fact just as much as he did.
"But you're still out there, fighting the good fight," she added, as if she followed his train of thought exactly. "Sometimes it's nice to stop an embassy bombing."
Her attention faded away and he could feel drift of her thoughts. They were both past the possibility of redemption, but it was good to know where they stood. They weren't blindly following like Shelley. They were questioning. They were critical. They saw the world for what it was, and tried to make it a better place so others didn't have to turn out like them.
And there, for a second, sitting across from someone who understood him on a level that his other teammates didn't, he didn't feel like such a monster. He wasn't saved, but he wasn't completely damned, either.
More important that either, he wasn't alone.
***
5. The Last Dam Job.
They scattered. Boston was way too hot for them right now, and they had to get away.
There actually hadn't been too many times that they've been apart since they came together almost four years ago. Sure, there had been the time between their first job and the relocation to LA, there was the three months after they had to blow up their LA offices, and then the six months after that until they met back up in Boston. There was the six months that they pulled jobs without Nate... but they weren't really apart then. And then after San Lorenzo they were supposed to take a break, but it was only two weeks before Nate called them all back in.
So they had some time off, and Eliot actually had no idea what to do with himself. He just knew he had to have some time alone.
Well, maybe not alone. If he was completely alone, the voices in his head would become too loud and he wouldn't have anything to drown them out.
No, he didn't know how to be alone. Not anymore. Still, he wasn't completely sure how to be around people either.
He jumped planes around the world, not knowing where he was going or why he chose the locations he did. He just couldn't stop moving. Maybe if he became jet lagged enough he could finally drop into a dreamless sleep.
He didn't ever dare sleep on the airplanes. He still had too many enemies out there.
He found himself staring at the departures screen, a passport in his hands, and opportunity in front of him. He didn't want to go back to Portugal, despite how much the pull was for him to go there. He could still hear the sirens whenever even the country name was mentioned, and sometimes when a gust of wind caught a child's hair just right...
He found his feet carrying him to the ticket counter, going a place that he knew he was welcome, even if it did have its own risks. He felt the pull of going to the first place in his previous life that he actually did something right, when he finally fought against his monster tendencies.
San Lorenzo.
He checked into the familiar hotel but was still cagey. He still felt like he had eyes on him, like Latimer was still out there, like Dubenich was still pulling their strings.
Perhaps it wasn't a good idea to go back to the last place he saw his former master, the one that embraced the side of him that he was trying so hard to redeem.
But he was already damned. Maybe it was a good idea to go to the home of the first person that had seen the side of him that was struggling against the monster inside.
He knew where every camera in the hotel was, and still he felt another set of eyes of him that didn't have military precision or malice intent.
"You really shouldn't be here," he spoke out loud, and she stepped out from behind a statue that commemorated her very existence.
"But I love it here," she said with a pout. "I like to pop in whenever I have the chance."
"Sophie!" Eliot spat out, incredulous. "What if someone recognizes you?"
She shrugged, her lips turning up at one side into a smirk. "That's half the fun." She walked over to him and brought her voice to a whisper. "I'm like Elvis..." she trailed off and pulled out a 20 Royal Note, "but my picture is more widely circulated."
He hooked her arm through his and dragged her to a secluded corridor, and while he was rough she followed like it was her idea to take a leisurely stroll. She leaned up against the wall in the hallway, and he crowded her. "What are you doing here, Sophie?"
She shed her confidence and glamour as easily as if was an overcoat, designed to protect her from the elements and the outside world. She even shivered, slightly, when she looked at him - really looked at him - for the first time that day. "I was worried about you," she ventured, the playfulness and mock seduction from earlier gone.
He was stunned into silence. "Why?" he finally asked, when the quiet finally became unbearable.
He was still too close to her, invading her personal space, but that had never bothered her before. Or, she had never let him see that it bothered her. Yet, she didn't look directly at him when she answered, "It was just under a year ago that we were here last. That we were tracking Moreau, and before that when I told you that you weren't that man anymore... that you couldn't kill Atherton."
He took a step back from her. "I didn't."
"No. But something changed in you. And you just seemed to fight harder..." she shook her head as if she was still trying to make sense of it. "And then you held that gun..." she trailed off again, still looking in the distance somewhere to her left. "And you wanted to shoot Dubenich. You wanted to save Nate."
It was quiet again and he could see everything drop into place, and she finally looked at him, really looked at him. "It's because you already think that you're beyond saving."
He took a step back then, she finally saying out loud everything he had been feeling inside. "I was right, though. You're not that man."
"But I was." His voice sound strangled, and it came out unbidden. "When it changed last year - I went back and..." He trailed off, his willpower completely gone. He was just so tired.
"Shhh..." Sophie started, putting her hands on his shoulders, and making sure he was there, in the present, with her. "Eliot, you're not a monster. You saved us. You've always saved us. We're still here, because of you."
He sank into her embrace and she murmured into his ear all the things that a mother, sister, friend would say, until he started to feel like himself again, maybe for the first time in a year. "Now, let's go visit Flores and get of here, yeah?"
He nodded. Maybe he didn't believe in himself, but having Sophie - a person who didn't really believe in anything - believe in him? Maybe the sirens would be a little quieter, next time.
Maybe.
***
After.
They got called back in. They knew it was going to happen sooner or later; they didn't know how to be apart for any length of time. They scattered to all corners of the globe, but it didn't take long before they were meeting up in random locations and having some fun before separating, and then coming back together in all the combinations and permutations possible.
He did some freelance work for the government again - nothing quite as hinky as Pakistan, but even as he was surrounded by his service buddies he longed to hear Parker's sharp laugh and Hardison's boastful teasing.
When he got the call, he dropped everything else he was doing. Nothing else ever seemed quite as important. None of his service buddies welcomed him quite as much as Nate's team did.
When he got to Portland, they told stories about where they had been, but it was unnecessary - keeping tabs on each other was just as second nature as breathing now. They fit together like they had never been apart.
They've seen him. They knew him. And they accepted him in spite of who he was - maybe even because of who he was.
Even though the city was new and the new headquarters were different, it was all exactly the same. He brushed his long hair back as he brought in the vegetables he had just bought at a farmers' marker. All this was different, but it was similar too.
He used to think that he couldn't go back to before, to the corn mazes and twin strawberry blonde braids. Maybe he still can't, but what he was coming back to now was much better than the before.
He was home.
End.
Author: ella_bee
Rating: Um, PG13-ish?
Characters/Pairing: Eliot Spencer, gen
Word Count: 5250
Spoilers: Episode tags for Season 3 and 4, post Big Bang Job
Warnings: Talking about something that Eliot did in his past... kinda.
Disclaimer: I don't own anything.
Summary: The title is pretty self explanatory, right?
Notes: This was written for leveragexchange in June for kc749. Cross-posted to AO3.
Prompt: "The team showing Eliot that he is NOT a monster"
Before.
He crouched on the far side of the hill, watching the flames as they engulfed the house. It wouldn't take long now for the sounds of sirens to wake the neighbourhood and he would have to leave soon - but right now he was watching the fire consume the house and the lives of the people within it.
He felt the familiar twinge in his gut of regret, and while he normally hardened himself around it, this time he felt it.
No, he thought. This time he allowed himself to feel it.
He shook his head as if to shake away the thought and his cropped hair barely moved. He rubbed his hand over the short bristles and grimaced, but his eyes never left the house and his muscles never relaxed. They stayed taut in the crouch he was in, ready to spring into action as soon as it was needed.
The sirens started screaming and they were matched with another scream from inside the house. A child had woken up despite the deliberately defective smoke alarms, and she was framed in the window that had been painted shut. He could see her struggling with it, and the screaming was inside his head now too.
He shook his head again, trying to shake the loose the errant thoughts. He was a soldier. The government trained, moulded, and shaped him into the best soldier they could make him, and then made him --
Well, he wasn't actually a soldier anymore. He hadn't been a soldier for a long time.
They turned him into an assassin.
He wondered what the percentage of people like him left the service. They created him. Now they hunted him.
No, soldier wasn't the word he used anymore.
The girl in the window was smart, despite her age. The youngest, he remembered. Only eight. But she found something hard and shattered the window - allowing the smoke out, giving her a chance. Still, the rush of fresh oxygen made the fire burn more brightly, too.
The fire trucks were starting to set up and she put a blanket over the sharp glass, crawling through the window to the porch roof - crawling to safety. He crouched, still out of sight. He brushed his hand over the short military crop again, still unable to tear his eyes away from this slight young girl, her dark hair swirling around her and her nightgown bristling in the wind.
Her determined face reminded him of another young girl he once knew - her long strawberry hair trailing behind her as she ran through the hay-bales, his own long straw coloured hair mimicking hers.
He watched the firemen brace the ladder against the roof, and the brave little girl giving directions to all the sleeping occupants - but he knew that it was now likely too late. He also knew that he had failed.
The mission was to eliminate the family. That they wanted the child's father dead, and it was their style to take the rest of the family with him. That it was a warning for anyone else who dared go against them.
But right at that moment he wasn't a valued member of a team, or a soldier, or a mercenary. He could see himself clearly through that little girl's eyes - the girl that no longer had a house, or a family, or anything to call her own. No. He wasn't a soldier.
He was a monster.
He finally moved, knowing that this time it was different. He wasn't one of them. His short hair felt wrong, and there was nothing he wanted more than to return to his home of corn mazes and twin strawberry blonde braids.
He finally moved from his crouch and could feel the girl's eyes pierce through him. Something inside him had broken, and for the first time he wasn't on the path to destruction. He had no idea where he was going.
He only knew that he couldn't go back.
***
1. The Big Bang Job.
The team had returned to Boston to regroup. It was supposed to be soothing and calming, being home, but he felt like he had left himself in that warehouse - on that tarmac. They were all doing research; they were all recovering, not knowing how close they all had come to total disaster that job. Or, maybe they did, but in a different way. He did hear Hardison's excited jabbering about an exploding train...
His hair brushed into his eyes and he felt himself move into Nate's upstairs bathroom without conscious thought. His hands were moving of their own accord, rummaging, looking under the sink, through the drawers, and then finally found what he was looking for in a bin in a linen closet.
He stood in front of the mirror with the clippers in his hand, and as much as he tried to the shake the thoughts loose, they clung on. His eyes were hard but if he looked really closely he could almost, almost see some resemblance of the person he used to be.
But in that warehouse? He had gone back to being the soldier. No, not the soldier, he corrected in his mind. The mercenary.
He clutched the clippers and in his mind they turned into a gun. He pressed the button and it whirred to life, the buzzing -- which he thought would give him some peace - instead placed him back in that warehouse.
The hum of the clippers became the sound of the yelling and the glugging of the lubricant coating the floor.
The soft taptaptap on the door became gunshots.
He could almost feel them entering his torso and he reacted accordingly - he convulsed, but brought the gun - no, clippers - in front of him.
He realized what he had done a mere second after he did it, and he slowly lowered the clippers as he forced himself to slowly open the door.
Nate was standing there, a tumbler in one hand and a beer in the other. He set the cold beer down on the bathroom countertop, leaned on the door frame, and stared at Eliot until Eliot turned away.
He didn't need the drink. He wasn't Nate. He glared at the cold beer and Eliot could hear the ice cubes hitting the sides of Nate's glass as the other man took a drink.
"It's cold," Nate finally ventured, still staring at Eliot as if he had no idea how to interact with him.
Eliot looked at Nate through the reflection in the mirror without really seeing him and he finally shrugged, putting the clippers back on the counter and taking the beer.
Nate nodded as if his world was made right again. "I won't tell them," he said, as if this was the logical next extension of the conversation. Maybe it was. "In case you worried. Or..." He trailed off, and Eliot remembered the chaos of the tarmac. "What I said before about the warehouse - I won't tell them."
Eliot nodded, feeling a little bit better, but he still flashed back to Parker's face when he told her not to ask him what he's done. He didn't want to tell her about then. He didn't want to tell her about now.
He took a swig of his beer and this time studied Nate. He was awkward, sure, but he wasn't flinching as Eliot shifted closer to him, and he didn't avert his eyes when Eliot looked back at him. He was just there, his presence calming him down and somehow anchoring him in the present.
When he finally put the clippers back in the bin, and made a move to leave the bathroom, Nate finally spoke again. "They don't need to know, but for the record, it wouldn't change things with them."
Eliot snorted. Of course it would. "It changed things with you."
Nate shrugged, and finally his smirk returned. "Yeah," he said with a shrug. "It made me trust you more."
***
2. The Queen's Gambit.
He grumbled as he rolled out of bed and even though it had been days since they landed back on home soil, he still felt vulnerable. Sure, the weight had been compromised, and they got the girl back from her negligent step-father... but Sterling still won.
Well, maybe this was the first time the outcome was more like a tie. However, in Eliot's case? He still definitely lost.
He fixed on the moments in the car, where even though Nate was the mastermind and the one that knew Sterling the best, he was the one that needed to be neutralized for Sterling's plan to work.
He was still the threat, the one to be worried about, the one that Sterling was scared of. He was still the one that needed to be drugged.
It didn't matter that if he knew that Sterling's daughter was at stake; Eliot would have done everything he could have to make sure she got out all right; it didn't matter that he would have done that for anyone's child, not just because they knew Sterling.
No. To someone that knew his past and who he had become; he was still a monster.
He stumbled to the kitchen to turn on the kettle, but it wasn't until he was peering into his fridge to find the eggs that he felt eyes on him. He became hyper aware, his senses stretching the extents of his apartment and beyond, trying to place where the assailant might come from, or where they might be hiding. Whoever it was, they were behind him.
He reacted quickly, spinning around and using a sweet potato as a projectile, launching it at the angle that would hit a full grown man in the solar plexus.
Instead, the petite girl moved quickly out of the way, and it bounced harmlessly off her shoulder. "OW!" she cried anyway, even though he could tell it was more for show.
"Dammit, Parker!" It wasn't often that he used those two words in that combination, but there they were. He shifted for something more familiar. "There's something wrong with you."
She pouted, but it was more of a playful pout than actual hurt. However, you never could tell with her. "What are you doing here, Parker?"
She paused. "I was hungry?" she asked as a question, and it was one of her worse attempts at a lie.
"Parker," he started slowly, knowing that she could spook easily, "are you okay?"
She shrugged. "I was worried about you. You didn't get to punch Sterling this time, and you were angry."
He was stunned. For all of Parker's weird quirks and social ineptitudes, she still managed to see things that the others didn't, even if she got them slightly wrong.
"I wasn't angry about not getting to punch Sterling," he said as he went back to searching for eggs, and now spinach and cheese to make an omelette for him and Parker, noting that the part of his brain that made sure that Parker actually ate more than cereal and cookies was clearly still working. "I was..." he hesitated, not knowing how much he wanted to tell her.
"You didn't like that he drugged you."
That was a safe answer. "Yeah."
"Nate was mad too, but he was madder that Sterling didn't trust him with the real thing we had to steal." She shrugged. "We were the distraction. I get that."
Eliot stopped. As the team's thief, she often had a different perspective on the plan and mission. Usually she just played her part, but every once in a while, she surprised them all. "You've done similar things?"
She shrugged. "Sure. I mean, the trick is actually to get in and out without anyone noticing you're there, but if you trip the alarm you want all the attention somewhere else. Things that are showy are the best - fires and explosions, and sometimes you can use events that are already happening like sporting events and parades." She paused. "Or chess tournaments," she said as almost an afterthought.
"So you get it," Eliot repeated her earlier words.
"Well, the distraction part. I still don't like that he drugged you. You could have hit him for that. And that he lied. We probably would have just gotten Olivia for him without lying. But mostly the drugging. And I don't actually want you to have a glass eye. It might interfere with the punching."
Non sequitur about the glass eye aside, Eliot thought about it as the eggs sizzled on the frying pan. If he thought about it from Parker's perspective, then he was the distraction for the team so that Sterling could get a clean getaway - not that he was the monster that needed to be taken care of so that Sterling could burn the team. Huh.
He looked back at Parker. "Thanks for coming here Parker," he said softly, as if he was afraid anyone else would hear it.
"Oh, you're feeling better?" she asked, as if disappointed.
Eliot was confused. "Wasn't that what you wanted?"
"Well, I was really angry when I was trapped up there on the roof, but then I got to jump off it, and I felt a lot better. So, since you didn't get to punch anyone..." She trailed off and picked up the backpacks that he didn't notice before. "I thought you might want to come skydiving?"
He stared at her wide-eyed as the eggs started to burn on the pan, but he was unable to tear his gaze away from her. He sputtered three times before finally settling on repeating what he said before with a shake of his head. "There's something wrong with you." As he said it, she shot back a cheerful grin, and he couldn't have felt more accepted.
***
3. The Experimental Job.
He got up from the bar stool, massaging his shoulder as he glanced around. It had been quite a while since he had been holed up in that underground bunker. The jury was deliberating. There had been time for an entire trial to occur, and he still shivered every time he thought about being locked up down there.
He put back another shot, the words "here we go" still echoing in his head. Nate had gone, and the bar was unusually quiet for this time of night, but he noticed Hardison sitting in a back booth, his laptop open in front of him and large headphones covering his ears.
Eliot grabbed a cold beer, walked over, and slid into the booth across from him, Hardison not even blinking. Sure, Eliot was stealthy, but he didn't want to startle the poor boy when he finally looked up, so he sighed heavily and shifted, giving him an indication that he was there.
Hardison finally acknowledged him, a glass of what looked like some sort of girly cocktail to his side. He seemed tired, and void of the normal intensity that he normally had when engrossed in a project. "Hey, what's up?" Eliot tried.
Hardison shook his head and rubbed his eyes. "Just this case, it..." he shrugged. "Naw, it doesn't matter."
Eliot studied him. For all of Hardison's bravado, he really did just want to be respected in what he does. He still always felt like he had to prove something. And this job? It didn't really inspire confidence. Eliot shrugged. This was Hardison. If he wanted to talk, he'd talk.
It was only another minute before Eliot's thoughts are confirmed. "It's just... I was going though everything that happened on that job, and I screwed up. I just... I didn't get it done."
Eliot nodded. "It was hard one. But we got through it."
Hardison scoffed. "Barely."
Eliot shrugged again, waiting for Hardison to get to what was really bugging him.
"I mean, sure, I was playing video games and having Sophie coach me through the wine tasting, but..." he shakes his head, a self deprecating smile finally gracing his lips. "People, you know? And I almost really screwed things up with Parker, too."
Eliot chuckled. "I did hear Parker ramble about cross stitching for like, hours when I was trying to sleep. Seriously, both when she was writing that damned essay and when you brushed her off. I mean, I get that you separated my comm from yours, but you left Parker on?"
Hardison buried his head in his hands, and Eliot took a strange delight in his distress. "I know. I listened to it after. What the hell happened to me when I was with those guys? I turned into the kind of guy that we take down."
Hardison continued to talk, not realizing the Eliot was becoming stiller and stiller, trying to breathe through the pounding in his ears, and trying to figure out what it was that was causing the pounding in the first place.
"Because I was right. You can't fake cool! And tried, and I failed. And then you're all, even though I've got hypothermia and no sleep, I still got what it takes to freak out the professional interrogator out. I mean, whoa, brah, it was like, BAM, you know?" Eliot watched him put up his hand for their trademark high five but he left him hanging.
Eliot finally realized what it was that had started the pounding in his ears, the shortness of breath, the stillness. It was that he had heard him. And that he thought it was some kind of joke.
Hardison put his hand forward again as if Eliot simply hadn't seen it the first time, but his excitement at Eliot's storytelling was quickly dissipating. "El?" He finally asked, his expression going from enthusiasm to concern.
Eliot tried to smile, tried to seem light-hearted, but he hadn't reacted quickly enough. Hardison had put it together. His demeanour had changed from concern to something more primitive. Fear, Eliot finally decided. Hardison was afraid.
Eliot shifted to leave and got half way up before Hardison's hand covered his arm. His reflexes were screaming at him to react, and it took all his will power not to lunge at the younger man. But even, the touch was soft, not threatening. His expression had shifted back to concern.
"I also heard what you did when you found out I was blown." He paused, and Eliot finally looked back into his dark eyes that were showing nothing even close to fear. Hardison's voice had dropped, and Eliot saw a rare moment where all his bravado was gone and it was just vulnerability. "Thank you," he said, in barely a whisper.
Eliot sat back down. "Do you always record everything we say?"
"Dude, I don't erase anything."
"Can you erase that?"
"Yeah, man, of course." He typed a few quick keystrokes and nodded. "There. Gone." He waved his hands like a magician. "Never there."
Eliot nodded, thankful, and this time Hardison let him leave.
He had just let out a sigh of relief before Hardison called after again. "It doesn't matter, you know."
Eliot turned back. "What?"
Hardison was quiet again. "It doesn't matter, what you did before. You saved me in there. You did." He shrugged. "And you will. Anyway..." He closed his computer and got up to leave, putting his fist up like the end of their handshake, and then touching it to his heart.
"Hey," Eliot responded, finally cracking a smile. "Age of the geek, right?"
The genuine smile on Hardison's face erased the last bit of tension from the moment, and Eliot began to feel warmth for the first time since the job ended. Age of the geek, indeed.
***
4. The Girls' / Boys' Night Out Job(s).
He didn't expect to see Tara. Sure, he knew that she had been in town through Sophie, but when she didn't make plans to see the rest of them, it didn't really bother him. So, it surprised him when she came into the bar a few days later, strutting across the floor, sliding into the booth across from him, and stealing a drink from his beer like she never left.
He raised his eyebrows at her and she mimicked him back, playing his game of who would speak first. She won. She always did.
"I heard you had quite the evening at the embassy."
"And quite the next morning," she said with a cheeky smile.
He scoffed and stole his drink back, and even though she had been gone for over a year, they settled into easy small talk as she ordered a drink of her own and some food. "I hear you guys got into the middle of a gang war."
Eliot shrugged. "We did all right."
"And you had quite the next morning."
He smirked and took a swig from his bottle, letting his smile do all the talking. The conversation continued amicably; he had some stories about some of their jobs, she recalled some of the better grifts she'd done recently.
Finally the conversation snaked back to that night. "I had a lot of fun with the girls and Mattingly, but I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall seeing the five of you interact."
"Bonanno asked about you, he's quite taken, actually." That earned him a smile, and he continued. "Shelley asked about you too. I didn't know that you guys knew each other."
"We crossed paths a long time ago and then again from time to time." Eliot just nodded. He and Tara had actually almost crossed paths almost twenty years ago - he was receiving some of his specialized training at Quantico and she was debriefing after a mission. It was weird to think that they had such similar origin stories, while others that went through the same training were still working for the Marine Corp, or Special Forces, or Military Intelligence.
She said what he was thinking. "It's funny that he's stayed so positive. He still believes."
It's something that Eliot's thought about a lot. The government saw something in him at an early age that made him elite. They gave him the special training. They turned him into something... bigger than just the soldier.
And then...
And then they turned him into such an efficient killing machine that he didn't see the difference between the good guys and the bad guys anymore. So why not get paid for it, right?
But Shelley still believed. Shelley had never felt like a monster. And Tara marvelled at that fact just as much as he did.
"But you're still out there, fighting the good fight," she added, as if she followed his train of thought exactly. "Sometimes it's nice to stop an embassy bombing."
Her attention faded away and he could feel drift of her thoughts. They were both past the possibility of redemption, but it was good to know where they stood. They weren't blindly following like Shelley. They were questioning. They were critical. They saw the world for what it was, and tried to make it a better place so others didn't have to turn out like them.
And there, for a second, sitting across from someone who understood him on a level that his other teammates didn't, he didn't feel like such a monster. He wasn't saved, but he wasn't completely damned, either.
More important that either, he wasn't alone.
***
5. The Last Dam Job.
They scattered. Boston was way too hot for them right now, and they had to get away.
There actually hadn't been too many times that they've been apart since they came together almost four years ago. Sure, there had been the time between their first job and the relocation to LA, there was the three months after they had to blow up their LA offices, and then the six months after that until they met back up in Boston. There was the six months that they pulled jobs without Nate... but they weren't really apart then. And then after San Lorenzo they were supposed to take a break, but it was only two weeks before Nate called them all back in.
So they had some time off, and Eliot actually had no idea what to do with himself. He just knew he had to have some time alone.
Well, maybe not alone. If he was completely alone, the voices in his head would become too loud and he wouldn't have anything to drown them out.
No, he didn't know how to be alone. Not anymore. Still, he wasn't completely sure how to be around people either.
He jumped planes around the world, not knowing where he was going or why he chose the locations he did. He just couldn't stop moving. Maybe if he became jet lagged enough he could finally drop into a dreamless sleep.
He didn't ever dare sleep on the airplanes. He still had too many enemies out there.
He found himself staring at the departures screen, a passport in his hands, and opportunity in front of him. He didn't want to go back to Portugal, despite how much the pull was for him to go there. He could still hear the sirens whenever even the country name was mentioned, and sometimes when a gust of wind caught a child's hair just right...
He found his feet carrying him to the ticket counter, going a place that he knew he was welcome, even if it did have its own risks. He felt the pull of going to the first place in his previous life that he actually did something right, when he finally fought against his monster tendencies.
San Lorenzo.
He checked into the familiar hotel but was still cagey. He still felt like he had eyes on him, like Latimer was still out there, like Dubenich was still pulling their strings.
Perhaps it wasn't a good idea to go back to the last place he saw his former master, the one that embraced the side of him that he was trying so hard to redeem.
But he was already damned. Maybe it was a good idea to go to the home of the first person that had seen the side of him that was struggling against the monster inside.
He knew where every camera in the hotel was, and still he felt another set of eyes of him that didn't have military precision or malice intent.
"You really shouldn't be here," he spoke out loud, and she stepped out from behind a statue that commemorated her very existence.
"But I love it here," she said with a pout. "I like to pop in whenever I have the chance."
"Sophie!" Eliot spat out, incredulous. "What if someone recognizes you?"
She shrugged, her lips turning up at one side into a smirk. "That's half the fun." She walked over to him and brought her voice to a whisper. "I'm like Elvis..." she trailed off and pulled out a 20 Royal Note, "but my picture is more widely circulated."
He hooked her arm through his and dragged her to a secluded corridor, and while he was rough she followed like it was her idea to take a leisurely stroll. She leaned up against the wall in the hallway, and he crowded her. "What are you doing here, Sophie?"
She shed her confidence and glamour as easily as if was an overcoat, designed to protect her from the elements and the outside world. She even shivered, slightly, when she looked at him - really looked at him - for the first time that day. "I was worried about you," she ventured, the playfulness and mock seduction from earlier gone.
He was stunned into silence. "Why?" he finally asked, when the quiet finally became unbearable.
He was still too close to her, invading her personal space, but that had never bothered her before. Or, she had never let him see that it bothered her. Yet, she didn't look directly at him when she answered, "It was just under a year ago that we were here last. That we were tracking Moreau, and before that when I told you that you weren't that man anymore... that you couldn't kill Atherton."
He took a step back from her. "I didn't."
"No. But something changed in you. And you just seemed to fight harder..." she shook her head as if she was still trying to make sense of it. "And then you held that gun..." she trailed off again, still looking in the distance somewhere to her left. "And you wanted to shoot Dubenich. You wanted to save Nate."
It was quiet again and he could see everything drop into place, and she finally looked at him, really looked at him. "It's because you already think that you're beyond saving."
He took a step back then, she finally saying out loud everything he had been feeling inside. "I was right, though. You're not that man."
"But I was." His voice sound strangled, and it came out unbidden. "When it changed last year - I went back and..." He trailed off, his willpower completely gone. He was just so tired.
"Shhh..." Sophie started, putting her hands on his shoulders, and making sure he was there, in the present, with her. "Eliot, you're not a monster. You saved us. You've always saved us. We're still here, because of you."
He sank into her embrace and she murmured into his ear all the things that a mother, sister, friend would say, until he started to feel like himself again, maybe for the first time in a year. "Now, let's go visit Flores and get of here, yeah?"
He nodded. Maybe he didn't believe in himself, but having Sophie - a person who didn't really believe in anything - believe in him? Maybe the sirens would be a little quieter, next time.
Maybe.
***
After.
They got called back in. They knew it was going to happen sooner or later; they didn't know how to be apart for any length of time. They scattered to all corners of the globe, but it didn't take long before they were meeting up in random locations and having some fun before separating, and then coming back together in all the combinations and permutations possible.
He did some freelance work for the government again - nothing quite as hinky as Pakistan, but even as he was surrounded by his service buddies he longed to hear Parker's sharp laugh and Hardison's boastful teasing.
When he got the call, he dropped everything else he was doing. Nothing else ever seemed quite as important. None of his service buddies welcomed him quite as much as Nate's team did.
When he got to Portland, they told stories about where they had been, but it was unnecessary - keeping tabs on each other was just as second nature as breathing now. They fit together like they had never been apart.
They've seen him. They knew him. And they accepted him in spite of who he was - maybe even because of who he was.
Even though the city was new and the new headquarters were different, it was all exactly the same. He brushed his long hair back as he brought in the vegetables he had just bought at a farmers' marker. All this was different, but it was similar too.
He used to think that he couldn't go back to before, to the corn mazes and twin strawberry blonde braids. Maybe he still can't, but what he was coming back to now was much better than the before.
He was home.
End.