The Two Sons Job: 5/9
Title: The Two Sons Job: Echoes
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: gen, referenced past Eliot/Amie, Eliot/Dean
Verse: Steal The Sky
Fandoms: Leverage, Firefly, Supernatural, White Collar
Summary: Concering old friends, past history, father-son relationships, and the Burke Seven.
Notes: For the Suicide Attempt square on my H/c bingo card.
This is the Steal the Sky version of The Two Horse Job and will, suprise suprise, focus mostly on Eliot's history.
I need a banner for this story/verse. Maybe I should attempt to overcome my photoshop!fail.
Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Three, Chapter Four
Warning: Dub-con and Non-con. These references may actually become depictions depending on how the story goes but I'll change the warnings to refflect that if it happens. A character also spends portions of this fic somewhat suicidal thought there's no depictions of the actual act.
Sometimes, when Eliot looked back, he almost let himself believe he died on that mission.
He went into the warehouse with every intention of getting killed. He’d go down in a hail of bullets and the pain would stop.
He remembered laying in the dirt, in a growing pool of his own blood, the cold soaking into him and easing him toward sleep. It wasn’t a fatal injury but if he stayed there long enough, if he didn’t stop the bleeding, death would come claim him eventually.
And then a light in the darkness, someone searching, hope and fear, and then there was Peter there at his side telling him to hold on, that help was coming.
He remembered looking at Peter, mouth moving to tell him this was what he wanted…
But Peter’s hand was on his arm, the warmth seeping in through his skin like the first rain at the end of the dry season on his home world and Spencer suddenly could do little more than sob from relief.
Peter stayed with him until medical help came, kept that contact as they loaded him onto a gurney and took him to the hospital the calm order of Peter’s mind just enough to keep the old terror at bay.
He could feel Peter’s rage and horror as he read through the medical file he’d been given and the slow burning determination it became.
He had meant to die on the mission. When Peter told him he was safe there Spencer was pretty sure a part of him did.
oOo
Peter stayed with him until the nurses gave him something to put him to sleep. When he woke up the next day he could sense traces of the agent in the room. He’d left but he’d returned several times.
Eliot closed his eyes and focused on that sensation. Thirty six hours without his meds meant he was Drifting more but he could feel Peter’s presence and he could almost believe the night before hadn’t been a dream.
He felt them before they arrived. The warmth and silk soft touch on his mind from the day before as they passed through the sterilized building.
Somewhere beyond his room Peter stopped and the other came through his door.
She felt soft, a trace of a smell he couldn’t place drifting around her, a faint echo of a mind tucked within gentleness, a secondary rhythm, hand absently settling over her stomach as she crossed to the foot of his bed that light mixing with worry and fixing on him.
“Hello. I’m Elizabeth Burke.”
oOo
He was on the ledge again.
It had been awhile.
Not really.
If he was honest with himself the edge was where he’d spent most of his life.
He didn’t really remember the Wayne clan. The Ares project had stripped just about all of his memory from those few years after he was taken in, maybe all of his memory from the before time together. Some days he wondered if the handful of memories he had of a blistering sun and running horses and a faint hint of homemade soap he always assumed were memories of his home world were anything more than lies he’d told himself when he was grasping for some kind of comfort.
Some of the earliest things he remembers after the Ares project was how he’d get lost in the remembered worlds of those around him before they started medicating his gift into silence.
He’d been on the ledge then. He hadn’t known the word for it but he’d known with every fiber of his being that he wanted the hell to end. The pain, the terror, the constant rush and fall of his gift as he was thrown from mind to mind and into the black expanse so much greater than the black above that lurked in the hearts of the men who’d turned a five year old’s mind into their plaything.
He’d been pushed to that ledge over and over in the following months. Shock treatments and new medications and drugs that made the world break into tiny pieces with words and orders as sharp as shards of that glass reality cutting into his mind.
He suppressed the memory but it was there. Always there.
The Spencer clan had taken him in. They’d kept him close. Kept a watch. He’d find out later they were never told about the time he’d broken from his restraints and tried to stab himself but they’d seen it in his eyes.
He remembered her. Third Sister Spencer. She was the youngest in the clan. A year younger than him. Back before either of them had names, when he was just Fourth Brother.
Her smiles had been so bright. Her mind had been free of darkness.
Sometimes he thinks it was in her dreams that he found those memories but she was a member of a bloodline, William’s daughter. She’d been born on Olympus.
She had pulled him back from that ledge.
For years and years she had always pulled him back. Even when they grew up. Even when they traveled to new worlds and fought and she began to carry the scars of beatings like his.
She always pulled him back.
oOo
“Aimee.” He whispered, stirring, feeling the heavy weight on consciousness surge into his mind. He reached for her mind out of habit, out of…
His mind brushed another. He sensed an echo heartbeat. So…
Reality crashed down around him, the last faint hints of the confused dreams his medications allowed him shifting and terrorpain seared across his senses.
Blindly he reached out, grasping with his hands and mind for her.
“Breathe, El,” a soft voice said, taking his hand.
Elizabeth Burke, his mind provided.
He was staying with his new handler, Burke.
Peter. His mind corrected him. The man had given him permission to use his first name and the man was more than worthy of respect.
It didn’t explain why Elizabeth was watching him sleep but she’d been keeping a watch on him since he’d arrived days ago.
Calm flowed into him through the touch. By now Peter had been told about his condition and Spencer could feel that knowledge weighing on Elizabeth’s mind.
“Who is she?” Elizabeth asked. “You call her name when you sleep.”
He holds himself down. Bruising. Hot breath. Claiming his mouth. His mouth claiming. He bites marks into his own skin.
“Eliot?”
He jerks at the sound of his own name. An alien sound.
He turns to look toward her, hand tightening around Elizabeth’s hand, reaching for that echo-heartbeat, wondering. Wondering.
A bitter smile forms across his face and he wonders and wanders closer to the ledge. “Aimee is my wife.”
Watching. Watching. Always watching. There would always be someone watching. She comforts him and tells him to watch only her. She tries to pull him closer to her. Tries to breathe comfort into him. Like always.
Her eyes aren’t bright and when she screams so does he.
He turns his head away, counting the echoed heart’s beating. It’s rhythm is off. Something’s wrong. He should say something.
But he knows in that moment the echo is already fading. Little soul.
Little soul.
The verse was no place for a little soul.
He buries the echo down and pulls his hand from Elizabeth and wishes only for silence.
oOo
It was an odd place to be, that ledge.
Sure, the long road up to it was as simple as nothing left worth the fight against gravity or as complicate as anything in the verse.
But when he get to that edge, where a step forward is all that’s left.
It was an odd sort of clarity.
He was tired and he was going to rest. It was his decision and his decision alone.
Finally.
And after, we he’d taken that step only to be caught…
The clarity went away, confusion between being too tired and the part of him that had fought this long and that slow burning anger flaring back one more time and the part that just ached to see Amie one last time.
But there was still an echo of clarity. Still the sense that it was just a little out of sight, waiting.
You never really left the ledge. You just learned to live there.
oOo
Despite the supposedly time sensitive nature of the case days passed slowly. A week would go by before Peter started bringing Eliot into the office. His wounds needed time to heal and Eliot could feel their watching eyes and he knew they were aware his intent had been to die.
That he would not let himself go back to Olympus in anything but a body bag.
But in those slow days something shifted.
He was introduced to their puppy, his first prolonged contact with a “pet”, and the animal’s soft simple mind was soothing.
Elizabeth refused to let him train in any way that exacerbated his injuries and was horrified to discover he didn’t know what to do with himself without that fallback. She pulled him into the kitchen, insisting he outline for her what he could actually eat, and then kept him occupied by teaching him how to cook. He’d sit close by and watch and listen as she argued over the phone or worked over forms. She’d recently started a catering business.
Five days in he quieted the noise of his mind by watching and listening to her work on a seating chart. When she went to answer a call he’d slipped over, nudging around the markers, getting lost in the problem. It was all logistics really.
An hour later he’d sat back to notice her watching him with a smile. The puzzle was solved and he could feel the wonder in her own mind. The praise was silent but he could feel the warmth in his gut.
“Try this one.” She handed him a file and started looking over his work. He stared at the mix of symbols that meant nothing to him, trying to figure out how to solve this puzzle of reading, to get that warmth back. “You can’t read.” The voice caused him to look up at her. It was a statement, not a question, with empathy but no pity in her voice.
He shook his head.
She put aside the work she’d been doing and reached for a clean data-sheet.
At nights he’d sit with Peter as he watched sports and studied the case files. Peter talked to him about the case and the sports and eventually other things. Other cases he’d worked on. The members of his team. His life on a world that wasn’t quite the rim but was too pastoral for a core world before a scholarship and the agency.
Stories about Elizabeth.
Slowly Eliot started to respond. The missions he’d done. The skills he’d gained and places he’d fought. His gift.
There were other things, so many other things, that he couldn’t put into words. Not yet. Not ever.
The game would end and Peter would send Eliot off to bed with a look that explicitly instructed him to not do anything stupid and Eliot would go.
He’d fall to sleep to the slow easy silk rhythm of echoes of heartbeats and the soft rain of this short time in paradise he’d been granted.
He would not allow himself to be taken back to Olympus alive, but he’d live here as long as he could.
oOo
He learned to live on the edge a long time before he met Peter.
It was the short stop before the fall, that moment he never saw coming, that won him a grace period.
oOo
It was a Sunday. Peter would be taking him back to work the next day and Spencer knew that it was only a matter of time before the case ended and he was sent home.
He was allowed to train that day. He trained hard to get back into shape but also to ensure he was as sharp a knife as he could be.
They’d be going into danger together, he and Peter. Spencer’s survival didn’t matter but Peter…
He would bring Peter home or die trying.
“Eliot.” Peter’s voice said behind him and Eliot quickened his pace, wanting to finish the practice set before the conversation, sensing the foreboding in Peter. After a moment there was a flicker of something else so brief…
He came to a stop and turned.
“You don’t like to stop fighting.” Peter stated, knocking Eliot off guard. He walked closer, trapping Eliot’s eyes. “If you stop it’s over. You lose. That’s the end of it. The odds are stacked against you Eliot. But the only chance you have of winning is to keep playing until the odds change.”
“Do you really think I’ll ever win?” Eliot asked. “No one’s ever escaped Olympus before and lived.”
“Then be the first.” Peter told him. “Someone has to be.”
He turned and walked away and Spencer…
It wasn’t an immediate change. But a hope was conceived and took root. Carried like an echo of a heartbeat inside of his chest. Something new to replace the thing that had died. Foraged and refined and shaped and crafted and someday…
In a year’s time that echo would scream into life and another would pass into The Black and he’d settle down to live on that ledge and look for a chance to rise again.
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: gen, referenced past Eliot/Amie, Eliot/Dean
Verse: Steal The Sky
Fandoms: Leverage, Firefly, Supernatural, White Collar
Summary: Concering old friends, past history, father-son relationships, and the Burke Seven.
Notes: For the Suicide Attempt square on my H/c bingo card.
This is the Steal the Sky version of The Two Horse Job and will, suprise suprise, focus mostly on Eliot's history.
I need a banner for this story/verse. Maybe I should attempt to overcome my photoshop!fail.
Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Three, Chapter Four
Warning: Dub-con and Non-con. These references may actually become depictions depending on how the story goes but I'll change the warnings to refflect that if it happens. A character also spends portions of this fic somewhat suicidal thought there's no depictions of the actual act.
Sometimes, when Eliot looked back, he almost let himself believe he died on that mission.
He went into the warehouse with every intention of getting killed. He’d go down in a hail of bullets and the pain would stop.
He remembered laying in the dirt, in a growing pool of his own blood, the cold soaking into him and easing him toward sleep. It wasn’t a fatal injury but if he stayed there long enough, if he didn’t stop the bleeding, death would come claim him eventually.
And then a light in the darkness, someone searching, hope and fear, and then there was Peter there at his side telling him to hold on, that help was coming.
He remembered looking at Peter, mouth moving to tell him this was what he wanted…
But Peter’s hand was on his arm, the warmth seeping in through his skin like the first rain at the end of the dry season on his home world and Spencer suddenly could do little more than sob from relief.
Peter stayed with him until medical help came, kept that contact as they loaded him onto a gurney and took him to the hospital the calm order of Peter’s mind just enough to keep the old terror at bay.
He could feel Peter’s rage and horror as he read through the medical file he’d been given and the slow burning determination it became.
He had meant to die on the mission. When Peter told him he was safe there Spencer was pretty sure a part of him did.
oOo
Peter stayed with him until the nurses gave him something to put him to sleep. When he woke up the next day he could sense traces of the agent in the room. He’d left but he’d returned several times.
Eliot closed his eyes and focused on that sensation. Thirty six hours without his meds meant he was Drifting more but he could feel Peter’s presence and he could almost believe the night before hadn’t been a dream.
He felt them before they arrived. The warmth and silk soft touch on his mind from the day before as they passed through the sterilized building.
Somewhere beyond his room Peter stopped and the other came through his door.
She felt soft, a trace of a smell he couldn’t place drifting around her, a faint echo of a mind tucked within gentleness, a secondary rhythm, hand absently settling over her stomach as she crossed to the foot of his bed that light mixing with worry and fixing on him.
“Hello. I’m Elizabeth Burke.”
oOo
He was on the ledge again.
It had been awhile.
Not really.
If he was honest with himself the edge was where he’d spent most of his life.
He didn’t really remember the Wayne clan. The Ares project had stripped just about all of his memory from those few years after he was taken in, maybe all of his memory from the before time together. Some days he wondered if the handful of memories he had of a blistering sun and running horses and a faint hint of homemade soap he always assumed were memories of his home world were anything more than lies he’d told himself when he was grasping for some kind of comfort.
Some of the earliest things he remembers after the Ares project was how he’d get lost in the remembered worlds of those around him before they started medicating his gift into silence.
He’d been on the ledge then. He hadn’t known the word for it but he’d known with every fiber of his being that he wanted the hell to end. The pain, the terror, the constant rush and fall of his gift as he was thrown from mind to mind and into the black expanse so much greater than the black above that lurked in the hearts of the men who’d turned a five year old’s mind into their plaything.
He’d been pushed to that ledge over and over in the following months. Shock treatments and new medications and drugs that made the world break into tiny pieces with words and orders as sharp as shards of that glass reality cutting into his mind.
He suppressed the memory but it was there. Always there.
The Spencer clan had taken him in. They’d kept him close. Kept a watch. He’d find out later they were never told about the time he’d broken from his restraints and tried to stab himself but they’d seen it in his eyes.
He remembered her. Third Sister Spencer. She was the youngest in the clan. A year younger than him. Back before either of them had names, when he was just Fourth Brother.
Her smiles had been so bright. Her mind had been free of darkness.
Sometimes he thinks it was in her dreams that he found those memories but she was a member of a bloodline, William’s daughter. She’d been born on Olympus.
She had pulled him back from that ledge.
For years and years she had always pulled him back. Even when they grew up. Even when they traveled to new worlds and fought and she began to carry the scars of beatings like his.
She always pulled him back.
oOo
“Aimee.” He whispered, stirring, feeling the heavy weight on consciousness surge into his mind. He reached for her mind out of habit, out of…
His mind brushed another. He sensed an echo heartbeat. So…
Reality crashed down around him, the last faint hints of the confused dreams his medications allowed him shifting and terrorpain seared across his senses.
Blindly he reached out, grasping with his hands and mind for her.
“Breathe, El,” a soft voice said, taking his hand.
Elizabeth Burke, his mind provided.
He was staying with his new handler, Burke.
Peter. His mind corrected him. The man had given him permission to use his first name and the man was more than worthy of respect.
It didn’t explain why Elizabeth was watching him sleep but she’d been keeping a watch on him since he’d arrived days ago.
Calm flowed into him through the touch. By now Peter had been told about his condition and Spencer could feel that knowledge weighing on Elizabeth’s mind.
“Who is she?” Elizabeth asked. “You call her name when you sleep.”
He holds himself down. Bruising. Hot breath. Claiming his mouth. His mouth claiming. He bites marks into his own skin.
“Eliot?”
He jerks at the sound of his own name. An alien sound.
He turns to look toward her, hand tightening around Elizabeth’s hand, reaching for that echo-heartbeat, wondering. Wondering.
A bitter smile forms across his face and he wonders and wanders closer to the ledge. “Aimee is my wife.”
Watching. Watching. Always watching. There would always be someone watching. She comforts him and tells him to watch only her. She tries to pull him closer to her. Tries to breathe comfort into him. Like always.
Her eyes aren’t bright and when she screams so does he.
He turns his head away, counting the echoed heart’s beating. It’s rhythm is off. Something’s wrong. He should say something.
But he knows in that moment the echo is already fading. Little soul.
Little soul.
The verse was no place for a little soul.
He buries the echo down and pulls his hand from Elizabeth and wishes only for silence.
oOo
It was an odd place to be, that ledge.
Sure, the long road up to it was as simple as nothing left worth the fight against gravity or as complicate as anything in the verse.
But when he get to that edge, where a step forward is all that’s left.
It was an odd sort of clarity.
He was tired and he was going to rest. It was his decision and his decision alone.
Finally.
And after, we he’d taken that step only to be caught…
The clarity went away, confusion between being too tired and the part of him that had fought this long and that slow burning anger flaring back one more time and the part that just ached to see Amie one last time.
But there was still an echo of clarity. Still the sense that it was just a little out of sight, waiting.
You never really left the ledge. You just learned to live there.
oOo
Despite the supposedly time sensitive nature of the case days passed slowly. A week would go by before Peter started bringing Eliot into the office. His wounds needed time to heal and Eliot could feel their watching eyes and he knew they were aware his intent had been to die.
That he would not let himself go back to Olympus in anything but a body bag.
But in those slow days something shifted.
He was introduced to their puppy, his first prolonged contact with a “pet”, and the animal’s soft simple mind was soothing.
Elizabeth refused to let him train in any way that exacerbated his injuries and was horrified to discover he didn’t know what to do with himself without that fallback. She pulled him into the kitchen, insisting he outline for her what he could actually eat, and then kept him occupied by teaching him how to cook. He’d sit close by and watch and listen as she argued over the phone or worked over forms. She’d recently started a catering business.
Five days in he quieted the noise of his mind by watching and listening to her work on a seating chart. When she went to answer a call he’d slipped over, nudging around the markers, getting lost in the problem. It was all logistics really.
An hour later he’d sat back to notice her watching him with a smile. The puzzle was solved and he could feel the wonder in her own mind. The praise was silent but he could feel the warmth in his gut.
“Try this one.” She handed him a file and started looking over his work. He stared at the mix of symbols that meant nothing to him, trying to figure out how to solve this puzzle of reading, to get that warmth back. “You can’t read.” The voice caused him to look up at her. It was a statement, not a question, with empathy but no pity in her voice.
He shook his head.
She put aside the work she’d been doing and reached for a clean data-sheet.
At nights he’d sit with Peter as he watched sports and studied the case files. Peter talked to him about the case and the sports and eventually other things. Other cases he’d worked on. The members of his team. His life on a world that wasn’t quite the rim but was too pastoral for a core world before a scholarship and the agency.
Stories about Elizabeth.
Slowly Eliot started to respond. The missions he’d done. The skills he’d gained and places he’d fought. His gift.
There were other things, so many other things, that he couldn’t put into words. Not yet. Not ever.
The game would end and Peter would send Eliot off to bed with a look that explicitly instructed him to not do anything stupid and Eliot would go.
He’d fall to sleep to the slow easy silk rhythm of echoes of heartbeats and the soft rain of this short time in paradise he’d been granted.
He would not allow himself to be taken back to Olympus alive, but he’d live here as long as he could.
oOo
He learned to live on the edge a long time before he met Peter.
It was the short stop before the fall, that moment he never saw coming, that won him a grace period.
oOo
It was a Sunday. Peter would be taking him back to work the next day and Spencer knew that it was only a matter of time before the case ended and he was sent home.
He was allowed to train that day. He trained hard to get back into shape but also to ensure he was as sharp a knife as he could be.
They’d be going into danger together, he and Peter. Spencer’s survival didn’t matter but Peter…
He would bring Peter home or die trying.
“Eliot.” Peter’s voice said behind him and Eliot quickened his pace, wanting to finish the practice set before the conversation, sensing the foreboding in Peter. After a moment there was a flicker of something else so brief…
He came to a stop and turned.
“You don’t like to stop fighting.” Peter stated, knocking Eliot off guard. He walked closer, trapping Eliot’s eyes. “If you stop it’s over. You lose. That’s the end of it. The odds are stacked against you Eliot. But the only chance you have of winning is to keep playing until the odds change.”
“Do you really think I’ll ever win?” Eliot asked. “No one’s ever escaped Olympus before and lived.”
“Then be the first.” Peter told him. “Someone has to be.”
He turned and walked away and Spencer…
It wasn’t an immediate change. But a hope was conceived and took root. Carried like an echo of a heartbeat inside of his chest. Something new to replace the thing that had died. Foraged and refined and shaped and crafted and someday…
In a year’s time that echo would scream into life and another would pass into The Black and he’d settle down to live on that ledge and look for a chance to rise again.