New Fic: Fall Stories (Leverage, Parker/Peggy, Parker/Sophie)
fandom: Leverage
pairing: Parker/Peggy, Parker/Sophie
rating: M for mostly makeouts
words: ~3500
content notes: no standard notes apply.
a/n: I started this right after seeing "The Juror #6 Job," and then took forever to actually finish it. Probably makes more sense if you've seen that episode. Title from the Girlyman song of the same name.
Fall Stories
On Saturday, Parker - or Alice - meets Peggy for coffee. The whole coffee part of the thing is an ordeal: entering the building by the front door, standing in the line with all the other customers, ordering a drink and sitting down without even having the pretext of scoping the place out for potential thievery.
Parker - not Alice - pretends that there's a rare Gauguin hanging on the pillar behind the espresso machine, instead of the picture of a kitten in a coffee cup that's hanging there now. Then she pretends that there are infra-red sensors set up around it, and maybe a pressure detector on the wall. She's just considering adding some guard dogs for variety (her favourite security systems to beat are the ones that combine high tech with low tech, camera eyes with animal eyes, human eyes) when Peggy walks in.
"Oh, Alice, I'm sorry I'm late," is the first thing she says as she approaches the little table that Alice had secured for them. It's the best table in the room, shoved into the back corner near the bathrooms, two relatively solid walls behind it that prevent anyone from sneaking up on them. Peggy drapes the strap of her purse over the chair across from Alice's chair and sits down.
"You don't even have a coffee to drink, why are you sitting?" Alice asks.
Peggy looks taken aback. "Oh, well, I thought I'd say hi first." Then she smiles in a way that makes her look pretty.
"Hi," Alice replies. Parker and Sophie worked on this part. "How are you?"
"I'm great. Glad to be out of the heat." She gestures behind her at the sunny LA afternoon. "I hope you haven't been waiting too long."
"Seventeen minutes," Alice says, because that's how long she's been waiting. "But I don't mind. I made up a story about that picture to pass the time."
Peggy looks where Alice is pointing, the kitten in the coffee cup, then turns back and raises one eyebrow. "I hope nothing terrible happened to the kitten," she says, and she sounds a little like Eliot does when he smiles right before he hits someone, like really she does hope that something terrible happened to the kitten. Alice laughs suddenly, into her coffee, and foam sprays out in a fine mist in front of her.
Peggy laughs, too.
-
Parker watches carefully as Peggy takes the last sip of her coffee, and is about to thank her for a nice time just like Sophie taught her, when Peggy reaches slowly across the table and puts her hand gently on top of Alice's hand.
Parker blinks a lot of times and then almost says something but then doesn't.
"Hey, do you want to get a movie? I heard there's something playing at the place down the street. We could walk there."
Parker walks almost everywhere, unless Hardison is driving them in the van. "Okay," she says, because she figures that Alice would say okay.
Out on the sidewalk, Peggy takes Alice's hand (nails filed carefully so that she can pick locks easily, little calluses along her palm from nylon ropes) in her hand (smooth palms, little papercuts on her index finger) and they walk down the street like that. Parker doesn't think she's ever held hands while walking down a street before, but probably Alice has. Probably it's something that Alice gets to do all the time.
The movie is really funny, which Parker didn't expect because movies that are supposed to be funny usually aren't. She leans over - or maybe Alice leans over - and whispers a joke in Peggy's ear as the heroine, suspended from the ceiling of the museum, does a ridiculous and unnecessary midair flip that would totally set off the motion detectors.
"And what's with the low-cut catsuit?" Parker adds, snorting a little as she laughs.
Peggy smiles at her in the dark, a big smile like the kind Alice probably sees in the mirror all the time, and she holds Alice's hand again.
When the heroine makes her improbable escape from the museum, priceless artifact in hand (or, actually, in cleavage, which strikes Parker as an impractical place to keep stuff - haven't the people who make movies heard of pockets?) Peggy and Alice laugh at the same time, even though no one else in the theatre does.
-
After the movie, Alice walks Peggy to the bus.
"Are you sure this thing's safe?" Alice frowns. It doesn't look very state of the art.
"I think I'll be fine," Peggy grins. "I had a really great time, Alice."
Alice nods, because she did too, and then she leans forward and kisses Peggy on the cheek, on her cheek that's warm and flushed in the September air. Peggy pulls back, and tilts her head, and then she kisses Alice on the lips, and her cheek was warm but her mouth is hot, even for the brief kiss, and her lips are soft and slick.
"I'll call you," Peggy says, right before blushing, ducking her head to look at her shoes, and running off into the bus. She turns and waves at the last second, so Alice waves back.
-
"How was your coffee with Peggy?" Sophie asks, the next day.
"I like being Alice," Parker says. But she likes being Parker, too, so she cinches the zipline harness tight around her waist and hips and leaps from the top of a very tall building, air rushing against her body as she falls, that perfect free feeling of falling, and she falls for a long time before she stops herself.
-
On Wednesday, Peggy and Alice go ice skating indoors to escape the heat, and when Alice slips on the slick surface (Alice maybe isn't very coordinated, Parker thinks) Peggy grabs her elbow and keeps her from falling and then wraps their arms together, placing a firm hand around Alice's bicep and holding her up, up. Parker probably feels cynical when Peggy kisses her, right there on the ice, tilting Parker's jaw up slightly with her mitten-clad fingers, slightly scratchy wool-covered fingers. But Alice likes the puppy-love feeling that bubbles up inside of her when she feels Peggy's warm breath puff against her own.
On Sunday, Peggy and Alice get food at a restaurant and then go to have coffee - more coffee - at Peggy's house. Parker almost doesn't think about how easy it would be to bypass the rudimentary security system or how much fun it would be to scale her way up the outside wall to the second-story window, the bedroom window that Parker is seeing now from the inside, because Alice and Peggy are on Peggy's bed and kissing really slowly and Alice puts her hand up under Peggy's shirt and feels her breast, hot soft skin, and then Parker pulls back and stops the kissing.
"I don't think you know me very well," Parker says, seriously, furrowing her eyebrows. Peggy looks confused.
"That's okay," she says, eventually, and her eyes drop down to Parker's frowning mouth. And then she says, "I know plenty."
-
"You've been spending a lot of time with Peggy," Sophie says, in that tone that's almost like her therapist-tone, but not quite.
"I like her," Parker says. Sophie laces her fingers together to make a step out of her hands, and Parker puts her foot into Sophie's hands even though it's completely unnecessary, letting Sophie boost her up into the ventilation shaft. Parker's been climbing into ventilation shafts since she was ten years old, all on her own, but there's something nice about Sophie's long-fingered hands and the way they brace her ankle, something that reminds Parker of the way that Peggy took Alice's arm while they were ice skating.
"What kinds of things do you do together?" Sophie's voice sounds cavernous, now, echoing down the bright metal of the duct, but also quiet and intimate inside her ear from the transmitters they wear. Parker thinks about Peggy's fingers and her lips and the way she uses her tongue, and she doesn't answer Sophie's question. Instead she concentrates on getting through the duct system without breathing too much - these places are dusty, that's what they don't show in those movies like the one she saw with Peggy, you get covered in dust and sometimes there are bugs.
When she shimmies out the air vent at the other side, she says to Sophie, "We do lots of things. Coffee things."
Sophie doesn't say anything else.
-
There's a time when Alice wakes up in Peggy's bed, and she's cold from sleeping by the air conditioner but happy, and she kisses Peggy and kisses her until she's awake and then remembers that she's supposed to be at the office. That's how she puts it to Peggy - supposed to be at the office - and Peggy asks why a bookkeeper has to work on a Sunday but then doesn't press too much.
When Parker shows up at work, maybe still smelling like Alice (or Peggy), Nate gives her a disapproving look.
"You've been spending a lot of time with Peggy," Nate says, but not quite in the same way that Sophie said it the week before. "I'm worried that it might not be good for you to be Alice White so much."
There are times when Nate reminds Parker of her dad, her first dad, the one who mattered. So she doesn't say, but you told me to be Alice in the first place, and she doesn't say, but I thought Parker wasn't good enough either, because people who are like dads don't care about those kinds of things. So she just shrugs.
"Sorry I'm late," she says, like she says to Peggy when Alice is late because Parker was busy stealing something. "When do we get the money?"
Nate laughs at the mercenary glint in her eye, at Parker being Parker, and then the meeting goes on and it turns out that they're going to get the money tomorrow, which is nice.
-
"You don't talk about yourself very much," Peggy says, one night, to Alice. They're sitting on the couch and watching another movie, a movie about robbing a casino that doesn't make any sense to Parker. She turns and blinks at Peggy.
"What do you want to know? My date of birth, social security number, my parents' names - I have all that information."
"Hey, you don't have to be like that. I just meant." Peggy pauses, as if trying to figure out what she meant. "You said that thing a few weeks ago, that I didn't know you very well. I want to know you better."
Oh. For some reason, Parker finds herself blurting out: "I'm not a - "
But then she stops herself. I'm not a bookkeeper, she could say, or I'm not a nice girl, or she could say, I'm not really a girl at all, I'm a thief. But she doesn't say any of those things, and then after a few seconds, Peggy speaks again.
"You've never been with a woman before," she says. And actually, Parker hasn't, not really, not unless you count the girls in the orphanages where she'd waited for her next set of parents, the girls she kissed when she was young. Parker's kissed people since she's stopped being young, but none of those people were women.
"No," she says, even though this isn't what she meant to confess to.
"That's okay," Peggy says. And then she says, all in one breath, "I love you," and she kisses Parker - or Alice - on her jaw, quickly.
Alice closes her eyes and doesn't say it back but she holds Peggy really tight instead, holds her and kisses her mouth.
-
Sophie's hand braces against the waist of Parker's dress and with her other hand she grips the little metal tab, pulling the zipper up so that the dress is drawn tight around Parker's ribs and breasts. When Parker looks down, hey, there's cleavage, and she thinks maybe that Alice could wear something like this sometimes, that Alice might like to dress up in something fancy sometimes. Alice did go a little wild at her sister's wedding, after all. It says so on her Facebook page.
"Turn around," Sophie says. Parker spins a little on her heel, then wobbles - both she and Alice wear comfortable, practical shoes, most of the time. Sophie is dressed up too, has heels and cleavage and fancy earrings too, which isn't so unusual for Sophie who's always the flirt in the cons. But it feels different this time, because this time Parker's the flirt too, Sophie's been giving her lessons.
"So remember," Sophie intones, "take small steps, sit close to him, cross your legs slowly, lean forward, touch your own neck and hair." It seems like a lot to remember: much harder than remembering all the potential escape routes in a building or remembering how much explosive will make how much boom. It's a lot more like remembering how to be Alice after Parker hasn't been Alice for a few days.
"Hey Sophie," Parker asks, as Sophie's hands pluck at Parker's dress and Sophie's fingertips tease at the little curls of Parker's hairdo.
"Yes?" Sophie stops fussing and looks up, but her hands stay on Parker's bare shoulders, resting there as if by coincidence. Parker has learned that Sophie doesn't ever touch people by coincidence, just like Parker is never out of control when she's falling.
"Is it hard sometimes, to remember who you are? When you're playing a character."
Sophie doesn't answer right away, just skims her palms down Parker's arms and draws away. Then she says, "Is this about Alice?"
Parker nods, because it is.
Sophie nods back, as if this is what she expected. "Well," she says slowly, "I can tell you that the most important thing for any actor is to ground the character in herself. No matter who you're playing, there's always some quality in them that corresponds to a quality that you have, too. So to make a character real, you start from that place, where you and your character are the same. It makes the performance authentic."
Parker wrinkles her nose, then nods. It's time for them to go be seductive, so Parker doesn't ask the other question about what you do if you don't know what's real to begin with. Sophie tucks the duffel bag with the clothes they were wearing before into the farthest bathroom stall, and then they're ready to go.
Sophie trails her fingers down Parker's forearm towards her wrist, then takes her hand, pressing them together palm to palm and holding there. Then they walk out into the party.
"George," Sophie says to the mark, her hand still warm against Parker's. "Have you met my sister?"
-
One day, not even a day where they're dressed up in pretty clothes, not even a day when they're jumping off tall buildings, Parker sees Sophie's smile, open for her in a way that Sophie's smiles are never open for the marks or even for Nate, and Parker wants to kiss her, realises that she wants to kiss her, and so she does.
There's no one else around the office - they've all gone to get lunch and pretend to be South African diamond merchants - so it's quiet and Parker can only hear the sounds of the building around them: the hum of the fridge in the lunchroom, the soft rattle of the air conditioning. Sophie's mouth is soft and tastes like lipstick; they kiss for what feels like a long time.
"Parker," Sophie says, after they've stopped kissing. She didn't know she wanted it, but it's nice to hear her own name spoken like that, soft like that, with love like that, so she kisses Sophie again, briefly, just for the joy of it.
"No," Sophie says, "I can't."
Parker doesn't know quite what to say to this, so she says, "You touch me all the time."
Sophie looks a little ashamed. "I know I do. I - wanted to touch you, but I shouldn't have. You're with Peggy."
Parker shakes her head. "Alice is with Peggy."
"Parker," Sophie says patiently, "you are Alice."
"Oh," Parker says.
-
Parker - and Alice - don't do anything about it for a while; Peggy calls, but Alice doesn't call back; Sophie shoots her little glances every now and then, as if about to ask her a question, but Parker leaves the room before she can say anything. Before either of them can say anything.
She ends up hanging out with Eliot and Alec a lot.
"Do you guys ever wonder what's real?" she asks them once, while they're eating lunch on a stakeout. The target is in her apartment, and hasn't moved in 1.6 hours. Parker suspects she's having a nap.
"There is no real," Eliot says around a big bite of his quarter-pounder with cheese, "there are only actions, and the patterns of actions in the world."
Alec and Parker turn to look at him.
"What?" Eliot says, sounding cranky. "I can be deep."
"No, you can't," Alec says. "It doesn't suit you. And it freaks me the hell out." He pauses for a bite of his own burger. "Even though I must say that I happen to agree with you in this case. Money, people, companies, houses, this van we're sitting in - they're all made out of air, electronic impulses. I can move them, change them, make them bigger or smaller, all without altering their essential nature in any way."
"There is no essential nature," Eliot grumbles, flicking his hair out of his face and looking even more annoyed than before.
"Maybe you guys are the wrong people to have this conversation with," Parker muses.
-
Alice calls Peggy on a Wednesday and asks to see her the next afternoon. Peggy agrees, but sounds confused over the phone, like she wants to sound cold but doesn't know how. Sophie would know how to sound cold, even if she didn't feel cold, but the difference is that Sophie never pretends that she isn't pretending, not even to herself.
When Alice sees Peggy, she kisses her on the mouth to say hello, right there in the little coffee shop where they first met.
"You're breaking up with me," Peggy says, like the words were already in her mouth and they escaped as soon as she opened her lips.
"I love you," Alice says. Then she looks at the floor.
"But you're breaking up with me."
"Yes." Parker looks up from the floor. "But I love you."
Peggy nods, because this is what she was expecting, but then she cries a little anyway, as if she'd been pretending to herself that she didn't know what she was expecting.
They talk for a long time, and then they leave, and Parker puts Peggy on the bus (which still doesn't look safe) and then it's over.
-
"I broke up with Peggy," Parker says, quietly, to Sophie, while the men aren't in the room.
"Really," Sophie says. Sophie is never visibly taken by surprise, but Parker thinks she might be surprised this time.
-
Over the next few weeks, Parker can feel something there between them, and she knows because Sophie's taught her that Sophie is giving her signals: she touches Parker sometimes, more than is necessary, and she smiles at her a lot, and she touches her own neck and hair when Parker's around. Parker smiles to herself and sometimes she signals back: she gives Sophie a flower she found outside and she touches back and she holds Sophie's hand when they're pretending to be sisters.
"I'm still not sure about this," Sophie says one day, as Parker buckles the buckles and pulls the straps snug around them. "Down the stairwell was one thing, but this is - " she looks over the edge of the building - "oh, oh, this is very high up."
"Don't worry," Parker says, grinning. This is her favourite part, right before the jump. "Trust me."
"I do, I just - " but whatever Sophie was going to say is cut off when Parker throws them off the edge, face to face and legs twined together, falling perfectly through the air, bodies in space, unconnected to any world outside of this one, any reality except each other.
As they fall, Sophie still looks terrified, so Parker leans in close and puts her lips to Sophie's ear and against the whip of the wind around them she says, "Do you want to get coffee sometime?"
Sophie looks at her, and laughs, and Parker can't hear her but she can see Sophie's lips form the word yes: yes as they fall together through the night, tethered and free.
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pairing: Parker/Peggy, Parker/Sophie
rating: M for mostly makeouts
words: ~3500
content notes: no standard notes apply.
a/n: I started this right after seeing "The Juror #6 Job," and then took forever to actually finish it. Probably makes more sense if you've seen that episode. Title from the Girlyman song of the same name.
Fall Stories
On Saturday, Parker - or Alice - meets Peggy for coffee. The whole coffee part of the thing is an ordeal: entering the building by the front door, standing in the line with all the other customers, ordering a drink and sitting down without even having the pretext of scoping the place out for potential thievery.
Parker - not Alice - pretends that there's a rare Gauguin hanging on the pillar behind the espresso machine, instead of the picture of a kitten in a coffee cup that's hanging there now. Then she pretends that there are infra-red sensors set up around it, and maybe a pressure detector on the wall. She's just considering adding some guard dogs for variety (her favourite security systems to beat are the ones that combine high tech with low tech, camera eyes with animal eyes, human eyes) when Peggy walks in.
"Oh, Alice, I'm sorry I'm late," is the first thing she says as she approaches the little table that Alice had secured for them. It's the best table in the room, shoved into the back corner near the bathrooms, two relatively solid walls behind it that prevent anyone from sneaking up on them. Peggy drapes the strap of her purse over the chair across from Alice's chair and sits down.
"You don't even have a coffee to drink, why are you sitting?" Alice asks.
Peggy looks taken aback. "Oh, well, I thought I'd say hi first." Then she smiles in a way that makes her look pretty.
"Hi," Alice replies. Parker and Sophie worked on this part. "How are you?"
"I'm great. Glad to be out of the heat." She gestures behind her at the sunny LA afternoon. "I hope you haven't been waiting too long."
"Seventeen minutes," Alice says, because that's how long she's been waiting. "But I don't mind. I made up a story about that picture to pass the time."
Peggy looks where Alice is pointing, the kitten in the coffee cup, then turns back and raises one eyebrow. "I hope nothing terrible happened to the kitten," she says, and she sounds a little like Eliot does when he smiles right before he hits someone, like really she does hope that something terrible happened to the kitten. Alice laughs suddenly, into her coffee, and foam sprays out in a fine mist in front of her.
Peggy laughs, too.
-
Parker watches carefully as Peggy takes the last sip of her coffee, and is about to thank her for a nice time just like Sophie taught her, when Peggy reaches slowly across the table and puts her hand gently on top of Alice's hand.
Parker blinks a lot of times and then almost says something but then doesn't.
"Hey, do you want to get a movie? I heard there's something playing at the place down the street. We could walk there."
Parker walks almost everywhere, unless Hardison is driving them in the van. "Okay," she says, because she figures that Alice would say okay.
Out on the sidewalk, Peggy takes Alice's hand (nails filed carefully so that she can pick locks easily, little calluses along her palm from nylon ropes) in her hand (smooth palms, little papercuts on her index finger) and they walk down the street like that. Parker doesn't think she's ever held hands while walking down a street before, but probably Alice has. Probably it's something that Alice gets to do all the time.
The movie is really funny, which Parker didn't expect because movies that are supposed to be funny usually aren't. She leans over - or maybe Alice leans over - and whispers a joke in Peggy's ear as the heroine, suspended from the ceiling of the museum, does a ridiculous and unnecessary midair flip that would totally set off the motion detectors.
"And what's with the low-cut catsuit?" Parker adds, snorting a little as she laughs.
Peggy smiles at her in the dark, a big smile like the kind Alice probably sees in the mirror all the time, and she holds Alice's hand again.
When the heroine makes her improbable escape from the museum, priceless artifact in hand (or, actually, in cleavage, which strikes Parker as an impractical place to keep stuff - haven't the people who make movies heard of pockets?) Peggy and Alice laugh at the same time, even though no one else in the theatre does.
-
After the movie, Alice walks Peggy to the bus.
"Are you sure this thing's safe?" Alice frowns. It doesn't look very state of the art.
"I think I'll be fine," Peggy grins. "I had a really great time, Alice."
Alice nods, because she did too, and then she leans forward and kisses Peggy on the cheek, on her cheek that's warm and flushed in the September air. Peggy pulls back, and tilts her head, and then she kisses Alice on the lips, and her cheek was warm but her mouth is hot, even for the brief kiss, and her lips are soft and slick.
"I'll call you," Peggy says, right before blushing, ducking her head to look at her shoes, and running off into the bus. She turns and waves at the last second, so Alice waves back.
-
"How was your coffee with Peggy?" Sophie asks, the next day.
"I like being Alice," Parker says. But she likes being Parker, too, so she cinches the zipline harness tight around her waist and hips and leaps from the top of a very tall building, air rushing against her body as she falls, that perfect free feeling of falling, and she falls for a long time before she stops herself.
-
On Wednesday, Peggy and Alice go ice skating indoors to escape the heat, and when Alice slips on the slick surface (Alice maybe isn't very coordinated, Parker thinks) Peggy grabs her elbow and keeps her from falling and then wraps their arms together, placing a firm hand around Alice's bicep and holding her up, up. Parker probably feels cynical when Peggy kisses her, right there on the ice, tilting Parker's jaw up slightly with her mitten-clad fingers, slightly scratchy wool-covered fingers. But Alice likes the puppy-love feeling that bubbles up inside of her when she feels Peggy's warm breath puff against her own.
On Sunday, Peggy and Alice get food at a restaurant and then go to have coffee - more coffee - at Peggy's house. Parker almost doesn't think about how easy it would be to bypass the rudimentary security system or how much fun it would be to scale her way up the outside wall to the second-story window, the bedroom window that Parker is seeing now from the inside, because Alice and Peggy are on Peggy's bed and kissing really slowly and Alice puts her hand up under Peggy's shirt and feels her breast, hot soft skin, and then Parker pulls back and stops the kissing.
"I don't think you know me very well," Parker says, seriously, furrowing her eyebrows. Peggy looks confused.
"That's okay," she says, eventually, and her eyes drop down to Parker's frowning mouth. And then she says, "I know plenty."
-
"You've been spending a lot of time with Peggy," Sophie says, in that tone that's almost like her therapist-tone, but not quite.
"I like her," Parker says. Sophie laces her fingers together to make a step out of her hands, and Parker puts her foot into Sophie's hands even though it's completely unnecessary, letting Sophie boost her up into the ventilation shaft. Parker's been climbing into ventilation shafts since she was ten years old, all on her own, but there's something nice about Sophie's long-fingered hands and the way they brace her ankle, something that reminds Parker of the way that Peggy took Alice's arm while they were ice skating.
"What kinds of things do you do together?" Sophie's voice sounds cavernous, now, echoing down the bright metal of the duct, but also quiet and intimate inside her ear from the transmitters they wear. Parker thinks about Peggy's fingers and her lips and the way she uses her tongue, and she doesn't answer Sophie's question. Instead she concentrates on getting through the duct system without breathing too much - these places are dusty, that's what they don't show in those movies like the one she saw with Peggy, you get covered in dust and sometimes there are bugs.
When she shimmies out the air vent at the other side, she says to Sophie, "We do lots of things. Coffee things."
Sophie doesn't say anything else.
-
There's a time when Alice wakes up in Peggy's bed, and she's cold from sleeping by the air conditioner but happy, and she kisses Peggy and kisses her until she's awake and then remembers that she's supposed to be at the office. That's how she puts it to Peggy - supposed to be at the office - and Peggy asks why a bookkeeper has to work on a Sunday but then doesn't press too much.
When Parker shows up at work, maybe still smelling like Alice (or Peggy), Nate gives her a disapproving look.
"You've been spending a lot of time with Peggy," Nate says, but not quite in the same way that Sophie said it the week before. "I'm worried that it might not be good for you to be Alice White so much."
There are times when Nate reminds Parker of her dad, her first dad, the one who mattered. So she doesn't say, but you told me to be Alice in the first place, and she doesn't say, but I thought Parker wasn't good enough either, because people who are like dads don't care about those kinds of things. So she just shrugs.
"Sorry I'm late," she says, like she says to Peggy when Alice is late because Parker was busy stealing something. "When do we get the money?"
Nate laughs at the mercenary glint in her eye, at Parker being Parker, and then the meeting goes on and it turns out that they're going to get the money tomorrow, which is nice.
-
"You don't talk about yourself very much," Peggy says, one night, to Alice. They're sitting on the couch and watching another movie, a movie about robbing a casino that doesn't make any sense to Parker. She turns and blinks at Peggy.
"What do you want to know? My date of birth, social security number, my parents' names - I have all that information."
"Hey, you don't have to be like that. I just meant." Peggy pauses, as if trying to figure out what she meant. "You said that thing a few weeks ago, that I didn't know you very well. I want to know you better."
Oh. For some reason, Parker finds herself blurting out: "I'm not a - "
But then she stops herself. I'm not a bookkeeper, she could say, or I'm not a nice girl, or she could say, I'm not really a girl at all, I'm a thief. But she doesn't say any of those things, and then after a few seconds, Peggy speaks again.
"You've never been with a woman before," she says. And actually, Parker hasn't, not really, not unless you count the girls in the orphanages where she'd waited for her next set of parents, the girls she kissed when she was young. Parker's kissed people since she's stopped being young, but none of those people were women.
"No," she says, even though this isn't what she meant to confess to.
"That's okay," Peggy says. And then she says, all in one breath, "I love you," and she kisses Parker - or Alice - on her jaw, quickly.
Alice closes her eyes and doesn't say it back but she holds Peggy really tight instead, holds her and kisses her mouth.
-
Sophie's hand braces against the waist of Parker's dress and with her other hand she grips the little metal tab, pulling the zipper up so that the dress is drawn tight around Parker's ribs and breasts. When Parker looks down, hey, there's cleavage, and she thinks maybe that Alice could wear something like this sometimes, that Alice might like to dress up in something fancy sometimes. Alice did go a little wild at her sister's wedding, after all. It says so on her Facebook page.
"Turn around," Sophie says. Parker spins a little on her heel, then wobbles - both she and Alice wear comfortable, practical shoes, most of the time. Sophie is dressed up too, has heels and cleavage and fancy earrings too, which isn't so unusual for Sophie who's always the flirt in the cons. But it feels different this time, because this time Parker's the flirt too, Sophie's been giving her lessons.
"So remember," Sophie intones, "take small steps, sit close to him, cross your legs slowly, lean forward, touch your own neck and hair." It seems like a lot to remember: much harder than remembering all the potential escape routes in a building or remembering how much explosive will make how much boom. It's a lot more like remembering how to be Alice after Parker hasn't been Alice for a few days.
"Hey Sophie," Parker asks, as Sophie's hands pluck at Parker's dress and Sophie's fingertips tease at the little curls of Parker's hairdo.
"Yes?" Sophie stops fussing and looks up, but her hands stay on Parker's bare shoulders, resting there as if by coincidence. Parker has learned that Sophie doesn't ever touch people by coincidence, just like Parker is never out of control when she's falling.
"Is it hard sometimes, to remember who you are? When you're playing a character."
Sophie doesn't answer right away, just skims her palms down Parker's arms and draws away. Then she says, "Is this about Alice?"
Parker nods, because it is.
Sophie nods back, as if this is what she expected. "Well," she says slowly, "I can tell you that the most important thing for any actor is to ground the character in herself. No matter who you're playing, there's always some quality in them that corresponds to a quality that you have, too. So to make a character real, you start from that place, where you and your character are the same. It makes the performance authentic."
Parker wrinkles her nose, then nods. It's time for them to go be seductive, so Parker doesn't ask the other question about what you do if you don't know what's real to begin with. Sophie tucks the duffel bag with the clothes they were wearing before into the farthest bathroom stall, and then they're ready to go.
Sophie trails her fingers down Parker's forearm towards her wrist, then takes her hand, pressing them together palm to palm and holding there. Then they walk out into the party.
"George," Sophie says to the mark, her hand still warm against Parker's. "Have you met my sister?"
-
One day, not even a day where they're dressed up in pretty clothes, not even a day when they're jumping off tall buildings, Parker sees Sophie's smile, open for her in a way that Sophie's smiles are never open for the marks or even for Nate, and Parker wants to kiss her, realises that she wants to kiss her, and so she does.
There's no one else around the office - they've all gone to get lunch and pretend to be South African diamond merchants - so it's quiet and Parker can only hear the sounds of the building around them: the hum of the fridge in the lunchroom, the soft rattle of the air conditioning. Sophie's mouth is soft and tastes like lipstick; they kiss for what feels like a long time.
"Parker," Sophie says, after they've stopped kissing. She didn't know she wanted it, but it's nice to hear her own name spoken like that, soft like that, with love like that, so she kisses Sophie again, briefly, just for the joy of it.
"No," Sophie says, "I can't."
Parker doesn't know quite what to say to this, so she says, "You touch me all the time."
Sophie looks a little ashamed. "I know I do. I - wanted to touch you, but I shouldn't have. You're with Peggy."
Parker shakes her head. "Alice is with Peggy."
"Parker," Sophie says patiently, "you are Alice."
"Oh," Parker says.
-
Parker - and Alice - don't do anything about it for a while; Peggy calls, but Alice doesn't call back; Sophie shoots her little glances every now and then, as if about to ask her a question, but Parker leaves the room before she can say anything. Before either of them can say anything.
She ends up hanging out with Eliot and Alec a lot.
"Do you guys ever wonder what's real?" she asks them once, while they're eating lunch on a stakeout. The target is in her apartment, and hasn't moved in 1.6 hours. Parker suspects she's having a nap.
"There is no real," Eliot says around a big bite of his quarter-pounder with cheese, "there are only actions, and the patterns of actions in the world."
Alec and Parker turn to look at him.
"What?" Eliot says, sounding cranky. "I can be deep."
"No, you can't," Alec says. "It doesn't suit you. And it freaks me the hell out." He pauses for a bite of his own burger. "Even though I must say that I happen to agree with you in this case. Money, people, companies, houses, this van we're sitting in - they're all made out of air, electronic impulses. I can move them, change them, make them bigger or smaller, all without altering their essential nature in any way."
"There is no essential nature," Eliot grumbles, flicking his hair out of his face and looking even more annoyed than before.
"Maybe you guys are the wrong people to have this conversation with," Parker muses.
-
Alice calls Peggy on a Wednesday and asks to see her the next afternoon. Peggy agrees, but sounds confused over the phone, like she wants to sound cold but doesn't know how. Sophie would know how to sound cold, even if she didn't feel cold, but the difference is that Sophie never pretends that she isn't pretending, not even to herself.
When Alice sees Peggy, she kisses her on the mouth to say hello, right there in the little coffee shop where they first met.
"You're breaking up with me," Peggy says, like the words were already in her mouth and they escaped as soon as she opened her lips.
"I love you," Alice says. Then she looks at the floor.
"But you're breaking up with me."
"Yes." Parker looks up from the floor. "But I love you."
Peggy nods, because this is what she was expecting, but then she cries a little anyway, as if she'd been pretending to herself that she didn't know what she was expecting.
They talk for a long time, and then they leave, and Parker puts Peggy on the bus (which still doesn't look safe) and then it's over.
-
"I broke up with Peggy," Parker says, quietly, to Sophie, while the men aren't in the room.
"Really," Sophie says. Sophie is never visibly taken by surprise, but Parker thinks she might be surprised this time.
-
Over the next few weeks, Parker can feel something there between them, and she knows because Sophie's taught her that Sophie is giving her signals: she touches Parker sometimes, more than is necessary, and she smiles at her a lot, and she touches her own neck and hair when Parker's around. Parker smiles to herself and sometimes she signals back: she gives Sophie a flower she found outside and she touches back and she holds Sophie's hand when they're pretending to be sisters.
"I'm still not sure about this," Sophie says one day, as Parker buckles the buckles and pulls the straps snug around them. "Down the stairwell was one thing, but this is - " she looks over the edge of the building - "oh, oh, this is very high up."
"Don't worry," Parker says, grinning. This is her favourite part, right before the jump. "Trust me."
"I do, I just - " but whatever Sophie was going to say is cut off when Parker throws them off the edge, face to face and legs twined together, falling perfectly through the air, bodies in space, unconnected to any world outside of this one, any reality except each other.
As they fall, Sophie still looks terrified, so Parker leans in close and puts her lips to Sophie's ear and against the whip of the wind around them she says, "Do you want to get coffee sometime?"
Sophie looks at her, and laughs, and Parker can't hear her but she can see Sophie's lips form the word yes: yes as they fall together through the night, tethered and free.
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