"Family" - Chapter 2
“Family” - Chapter 2
Nate stood in an empty office, absently swirling a half-full glass of bourbon, and wondering at the strange turns his life had taken. Five years ago, he thought he’d spend the rest of his life with his wife, his son, and that damned company, chasing thieves to the far reaches of the globe and back. He never would have believed that in a few years time he’d be working with those same thieves. And he certainly never could have imagined missing them.
But he had. In the brief time they’d been apart, he had been shocked to find himself drinking more and more as the days wore on, much to Sophie’s concern. He didn’t understand it at first. He had gotten the revenge he had been craving, confessed his darkest secret to his (ex!, Sophie’s voice piped up in his head) wife, and was finally, if not making peace with, then moving past his son’s death. So why did he feel that aching emptiness?
He’d dragged himself to the bathroom mirror, and stared into his own bloodshot eyes trying to puzzle it out. He suddenly noticed how empty the hotel room was, how hollow without the others’ childish bickering.
And he missed it. Almost desperately, in the way he yearned for the soft tapping of keys from Hardison’s computer, and the soothing scent of Eliot‘s own blend of tea, and Parker’s strange and unusual entrances.
No one was as surprised as him.
The front door opened, pulling him from his musings, and he smiled a bit at the familiar sound of Hardison and Parker’s good-natured arguing, and Sophie’s temperate voice. He pretended that his chest didn’t tighten a bit at the absence of the rough Southern drawl mingling with the others.
They walked into the room, Sophie’s arms laden with bags, and Parker’s curled protectively around a potted plant. Hardison’s face was twisted into an expression of half amusement, and half exasperation, long arms gesticulating wildly as he tried to explain to her “You can’t feed it steak, Parker.”
“Why not? It’s my little carnivore, aren’t you,” she cooed at the plant.
“It’s a Venus Fly Trap, Parker, it eats flies.”
She seemed to consider this for a moment, then decided “Well, it’s Eliot’s plant. I’ll ask him when he comes back.”
The silence that greeted that comment was not unlike that which you’d find at a funeral parlor. Long, and heavy, where people scarcely dared to breathe for the chance of breaking it.
“Parker…” Hardison finally began.
Nate cut him off. “Yeah, Parker. When Eliot comes back.”
She smiled then, and left the room, informing them that she was going to put “the little carnivore” in Eliot’s office for him.
Eliot’s office. The office Parker had insisted upon, that Sophie had carefully furnished, and Hardison had optimistically outfitted with a new computer system. The office that they couldn’t bring themselves to enter once the work was done and it was full with things, but still so startlingly empty. Save for Parker, who believed wholeheartedly that Eliot was coming back. When asked why she was so certain, she would only reply “Because we’re his family.”
Nate wished he could believe that. But he knew better than the others of Eliot’s background, knew that even “family” could only push so hard before he’d be forced to either push back or break.
But Eliot was strangely, fiercely loyal. And when it came to family, he never pushed back. No matter how broken he became because of it.
Eliot always seemed so strong, so unflappable, so solid, that Nate sometimes forgot how many times he’d been pieced back together.
They say hindsight’s 20/20, and looking back, it’s so clear to Nate that that brief moment on the tarmac, when Eliot had stopped moving away from them, and they’d all paused, it was a silent plea, to “Please ask me to stay.”
But Nate hadn't heard it then, as he'd stood stubbornly, his back turned against his team, wasting precious minutes.
He hadn’t heard it until he was seated in his hotel, staring vacantly out the window, replaying every second in his head, and only then noticing the painful, shaking sigh that had preceded the stilted steps of Eliot’s boots.
Then he’d heard it.
He heard it so loud that he went through the hotel’s well-stocked mini-bar trying to drown out the noise.
Parker bounced back into the room, bringing Nate once more into the present.
He tore his eyes away from her smiling face, looking down at the drink in his hand, and drained it in one long swallow.
Nathan knew better than the other’s of Eliot’s past.
That’s why he knew just how big of a mistake he’d made.
What he didn’t know was how to tell Parker that Eliot wasn’t coming back.