The Occam's razor job - Chapter 34 - 2
Title: The Occam's razor Job
Characters: Nate Ford, Eliot Spencer, Alec Hardison, Parker, Sophie Deveraux, Patrick Bonnano
Fandom: Leverage
Spoilers: The Lonely Hearts Club Job, The Boy's night out Job
warnings: Dead people, language, violence, medical bullsh*t, extreme violence in later chapters, and extreme angst
Disclaimer: I do not own blah blah blah
Special, special, special, special thanks to trappercreekd for Betaing :D
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“Can someone explain me what’s going on in here?” Betsy asked quietly while they were watching Parker’s exchange with Eliot, and Sophie looked at Nate. He was sitting with his legs on the table, swinging slowly in the chair, and he wasn’t paying attention to Betsy’s glare at his feet.
“Not… exactly,” Nate shook his head. “It’s too complicated.”
“Oh, I think you didn’t understand, Nate Ford.” Betsy said softly. “I wasn’t asking.”
Sophie hid her smile when Nate’s eyebrows jumped up.
“As far as I know, he did all this to save your lives. You, on your part, did all this to save his. You are all alive, saved and happily reunited, right?” she looked at him as if she was encouraging a kid, head slightly tilted. “So, if there’s an explanation for everybody acting weird, tiptoeing, stuttering and whining, I have to know it. I have to know everything that might interact in his recovery.”
“Yes, I guess you do,” he finally sighed, glancing at the sofa where Hardison tried to occupy Parker with a new game. They couldn’t hear them. “He quit on us before he left the hospital, and he repelled us; that was the conversation with Hardison that you saw. It was… tough and nasty. And we did the same thing to him during the night. That one was even worse.”
“Why?”
“Our reasons… if half of his concentration was directed to us trying to find him, he would get killed. He needed all of it to finish the job. Sophie called him and told him we were leaving town, and that he was dead to us. If he thought we weren't near we would also have a better chance to get close to him unnoticed, and help him in time. He is… extremely hard to catch, trust me.” Nate sighed again. “And his reasons… Patrick saw it first and told us; Eliot was preparing himself to do something unforgivable, and he was sure we would ditch him in disgust after we found out what he had done. Quitting before would spare us the trouble and guilt. Eliot also knew he didn’t have much chance to make it through the night, and he didn’t want us to feel guilty because of his death. Further, and I think the most important thing, he tried to make us believe he wasn’t doing this for us. That way we wouldn’t feel guilty because of all that death he unleashed that night because of us.”
“That is…” Betsy cleared her throat. “…a lot of your guilt circulating around.”
“Yep,” Nate said carefully. “A huge amount of our guilt.”
“And don’t forget that these are only the reasons we figured out,” Sophie said when both of them went into thoughtful silence. “We can’t know what else is going on his mind.”
“Yes, I forgot the last one,” Nate frowned. “He’s afraid he can’t control himself anymore, and that he’ll kill us all. I told you what condition he had been in the last hour before we came here… he was breaking at the seams. I’m not surprised by his reasoning; a hitter who is unreliable and out of control is bad enough… but even worse, he thinks we’ll need protection from him. Running away from us is the only option that he could see. I had to trick him to drag him into the van.”
“And I wondered why his stress levels are near explosion,” Betsy sighed. “That’s not good.”
“We know,” Nate murmured. “We are waiting for him to get together. There’s a chance he’ll deal with all of it. If he doesn’t, I’ll have to do something, and I rather wouldn’t.”
“For now, he is too weak to speak more than a few words, and he is drifting in and out of consciousness,” Betsy said seriously. “He is physically not able to endure any conversation longer than three minutes and if you press him now you’ll do more damage than you think. Wait. He can’t go anywhere.”
“We are waiting, Betsy,” Sophie said quietly. “We don’t like it, but he needs time to see that things haven’t changed.” She bit her lip before she continued. “About that weakness… Is there any chance you can remove that heart monitor? It’s driving him insane… he needs... no, he doesn’t need one more thing that constantly reminds him he is out of function and dependent on someone else.” She didn’t want to tell her directly that Eliot needed a little control back, to be able to hide from them the things he wanted to hide. “I’m sure he wouldn’t have freaked out a few minutes ago if there wasn’t a sound that was telling everybody he’s going… out of control.” Damn, she said it nevertheless, but she needed her to understand.
“Not safe yet. I can now pretty accurately say he’ll live, but it can still change in a second.”
“Come with me.” Sophie got up. “I’ll go and talk with him, he needs to see that everything is normal.”
“Normal? The kids are vibrating around him, scared and stuttering, they are absolutely clueless about what impact they make on him; he’s too lost to completely re-collect himself and think straight. They are very successfully feeding everything he's constructed in his head, and it won’t end well.”
“But that is normal, Betsy. He almost died. We can’t interfere in their behavior, they have to act natural, no matter how weird or scared they seem… if he senses only for a second they are acting and pretending to be normal in front of him, it’s over. We’ll lose him, without any possibility of repair.” She glanced at the two of them, sitting together and playing games. “Besides, he loves them. And they love him. I hope they’ll melt that frozen place in which he’s caught right now.”
They went silent when they neared the bed. Eliot wasn’t sleeping, he stared sightlessly in front of him. She didn’t dare to imagine what he was thinking, but she didn’t have to; his eyes looked haunted.
“Are you planning to die, Eliot Spencer?” Sophie smiled sitting on the bed, waiting for him to look at her. She surprised him and he almost smiled, and she could see in his eyes a few quick responses that would make her smile too… but then that short second ended, and his eyes became cautious again, as if he was trying to figure out what trap she was preparing with that question. It hurt to see that spark vanishing.
“I don’t think so.” He glanced at Betsy. “Why?”
“I hoped you’d sound a little more convincing. I’m trying to persuade Betsy to remove that awful beeping, but she said you need it. C’mon, work with me here.”
He hesitated one moment, and she felt a pang; he was too tired for this. But he finally spoke. “I need a phone. Nate has my silver one here?”
She felt her back goes stiff, but she kept a light smile on her face. “Of course. Bored?”
“No, exhausted. I can’t sleep with that constant sound echoing in my head.” He darted an eyelash blink to Betsy. “With the phone, I can play games until I pass out. I heard from someone… that sleeping and resting are essential-”
“Not bad,” Betsy smirked, stopping him right at the moment his voice started to waver. “But the blinking would look convincing if you were actually able to focus on the target, and not miss me by twelve inches. You’ve just charmed the hell out of the first drawer of the table. Okay.” She turned around and turned machine off, and then took the clamps off his fingers. He watched her with something that looked almost like a smile, Sophie noticed, more in his eyes than on his face.
“I don’t like it… and it’s my call to turn it back on if I see it’s necessary, okay?” Betsy shot him a glare, and went back to Nate.
Sophie was still studying that almost smile, but it vanished before she was able to conclude if it was just for Betsy.
“Thank you,” he said politely. He was watching her as well, and she could guess what he was trying to see in her face. Instead of a response, she curled herself on the bed, hugging her knees, relaxed and smiling.
“I don’t think we had a chance to thank you for what you have done,” she said softly. His freezing was expected, she was sure that any reminder of that was painful right now… but the surprise in his eyes caught her unprepared. If he dared to say that that was his job, she just knew she would hit him.
He said nothing, his eyes were uncertain.
“I’m so glad it’s over now, and we all can be at peace, and rest and recover, without fear and struggle. You know, when all of you were in that corridor…” she hesitated, thinking to finish the sentence with something else, but decided to continue. He deserved the truth. And he earned the right to be the only one to know it. “Eliot… the four of you are the only thing I have,” she said with her voice.
For a moment his eyes were defenseless and she could see all the pain and fear hidden behind the exhaustion, but then she did something that no grifter would do… she averted her eyes from reading further, giving him time to hide it again. She knew where she hit him, and she knew exactly what pain that caused.
Pressing him further now would be a mistake, so she uncurled herself slowly and stood up.
“Try to rest, the fighting is over,” she whispered gently.
But he wasn’t listening to her anymore, his eyes were lowered. She knew she lost him at the moment he slowly reached and took her hand, looking at the purple bruise around her wrist.
“And sometimes, the only way to stop fighting is to lay down your weapons and die,” he whispered.
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***
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Fuck, no… he shouldn’t say that shit.
“Figuratively speaking, of course,” he added with almost no pause, watching her calm thin smile, and a shadow of admonition in her eyes. Nothing in her face showed a sign of tension, but he was still holding her hand and he felt the tremor that ran through it. He scared her. He swallowed a curse, feeling the thumping in his head, knowing the beeping would be jumping by now. She had just removed the warning bell from the beast, and the others couldn’t hear what they were saying. She was alone with him here. And she feared him.
“I could kill you now before they even noticed I moved,” he said with effort, searching her eyes.
She tilted her head, and a little amused smile lit her eyes. “You say that like it’s something new. You could always do that. But, do you want to?”
He thought for a second; the thumping in his head brought only a headache this time, not the urge to fight his way from here. Yet, he couldn’t know if it would last and how long; the last time it took only sounds to throw him deep into madness, without any control. That uncertainty was driving him crazy, he couldn’t be sure-.
“No,” he said finally.
“Why do you sound so surprised?” she glanced at her hand. “You didn’t want to kill me when this happened. You could. You had no idea who I was, I stopped you from disconnecting the IVS, and you froze before hitting me.”
“I was probably trying to calculate the best-” he cut off his words and released her hand, letting her go. “Forget it. Sorry I scared you,” he evened his voice and tried to smile.
He told that her he could kill her, and she just smiled… now he tried to smile and her eyes flickered with anger. Fuck, he was too dumb to try to figure her out… he never could. He had been trying to read her since he woke up, but her behavior was apparently normal - too normal. The only thing that he could see was that that normality wasn’t natural, it was there with effort, he felt the tension under every word, every light smile. Most of all, he felt her cautiously probing him - and now he gave her a gold mine to ponder upon. He should know better than to speak with the grifter about all this, he revealed too much.
“You are an idiot, Eliot Spencer.” A trace of that anger was in her voice, but the worry was clearer. And the fear was still there, she couldn’t hide it.
“Yeah, I know. Everybody was telling me that.” He desperately needed to close his eyes, but he didn’t dare to… what? Let her out of his sight, in case she tried to… what? Damn, he was a mess.
He half expected her to retreat now when she was free and able to leave, but she stayed and watched him. “Why do you need a phone?” she asked finally.
“To stop thinking,” he whispered, too tired to make up something that would sound normal. There wasn’t any point in lying to her. Hiding pieces of the truth was still important, but even that seemed insignificant anymore.
“Okay, I’ll bring you the phone.” She leaned over him and slowly removed the hair from his eyes, as if she expected that move would startle him. He knew she did it only to show him that she wasn’t afraid of him. She was really trying. All of them were trying, he had to acknowledge that. He should make these days easier for them, stop snapping and scaring them. They were already too upset with this situation, and he was making it worse with his shit.
“Thank you,” he said politely.
Be nice. He could do that. Maybe they would leave him alone. It was time to start allowing himself to think about all this mess.
And, of course, he had to think of someone who would be good and reliable enough to work with them.
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***
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Hardison almost squeaked when he realized Betsy had removed beeping, and he tried to confront her with her own words about the need of instant revival; Betsy’s eyebrows were raised to the point of connecting with her hair, but except that, she didn’t react to the murmuring hacker who threatened to go to Google and check her decisions.
Nate knew she had years and years of practice with the half crazy families of her patients, and that this was nothing compared to that, but he still admired her stoicism.
“May I go to McRory’s, and get drunk?” Hardison finished his hissing in utter defeat. He didn’t wait for Nate’s response, he went to the shelf and peeked at the bed. He returned with indignation in his eyes.
“Is he alive?” Betsy’s voice was honey. “You better go back and check once more, anything could happen in the next ten seconds.”
Nate was half sure that Hardison was thinking about it, and he hid his smile.
“You can make it faster if you get a long stick and poke him with it every half a minute,” Betsy continued without mercy. “Or rope. Tie it to his leg and yank occasionally to see if he will move.”
“I have a rope,” Parker interjected watching them in turns, trying to figure out what the problem was.
“That’s great, dear. I’ll tell you if we need it.”
“Come on, Parker, we have a game to finish,” Hardison got up again, pulling the thief on her foot. Of course they took the long way around to the sofa, checking the bed first.
“Eliot might regret this,” Nate said. “If they continue to stare at him every two minutes… even a completely normal person would lose his mind.”
“No one here is nearly half normal, much less completely,” she murmured watching Hardison making rainbow unicorns jump off cliffs on big screen. “What’s his problem?”
“Scared.”
“How can you work with someone who panics his ass out when under pressure? He almost passed out when I mentioned a needle. It’s not wise to have a seriously ill man in the same room with someone who is unpredictable and unreliable when he sees blood.”
“What’s the greater accomplishment - to do something that scares you or to do something that doesn’t scare you?” he smiled. “I’ll tell you something that might... no, it’s better he tells you himself.” He turned in the chair. “Hardison! Come back a second.”
Parker followed directly behind the hacker, and Sophie stopped preparing tea to lean on the kitchen counter. Hardison flinched visibly when he saw that attention.
“Ask her about the knife.”
“Fuck, no,” the hacker turned on his heel, but Nate caught his hand and stopped him. He had to admit one thing to Betsy; she erased the smirk and softened her face, seeing his visible discomfort.
“I knew that we might find him late, far away from any help or hospital,” Hardison said after a few seconds of silence, his eyebrows furrowed. “Someone needed to know at least something about all that medical bullshit. I’m not happy about it, it was… horrible. The educational videos from John Hopkins were nasty, but nothing compared to the Youtube ones… those were made by amateurs, I’m afraid. But I learned everything I had to.”
“And what” - Betsy suppressed a sigh - “what you have learned about thoracic surgery from amateur videos on the internet?” Her voice was filled with despair until the very end of sentence.
Hardison swallowed. “Everything I needed to understand what was going on. In fact, one particular video showed me more than any educational. One student was explaining to his colleagues about the layers of the chest using pig ribs. It looks pretty much the same as a human; the skin is the same, the muscle layer, too, even the pleura. The parietal and visceral layers of-”
“Hardison, the knife.”
“I was getting to that part,” he darted an uncertain glance to Betsy. “We didn’t know about the chest tube. And I knew about the tension hemothorax, and what it was doing to him. I was… I planned to stab him with the knife to let the blood out. And I don’t know if I would kill him with that.”
Betsy looked at him, but Nate said nothing. “You almost fainted when you saw the blood in the bag,” she pointed out.
“I had no time for fainting then.” His eyes remained uncertain. “Not that I didn’t want to.”
“For an untrained man, that sort of emergency medicine is almost… insane to try,” she said carefully.
“I’m systematic. I learned not to go under the ribs to avoid nerves and blood vessels, I thought about the pressure needed to cut through the muscle, and the depth that blade had to go between the ribs to slice both the pleu-” he cut off when Sophie made an unintelligible sound and disappeared. “Hey! I was the one who was throwing his guts up, remember?!”
“No, you wouldn’t kill him by doing that,” Betsy said finally. “If it wasn’t for the chest tube, only that could save him. Satisfied?”
“No. Just… relieved,” he smiled and ran away.
Nate held his gaze on her.
“Sixty percent chance,” she sighed. “But much more than the alternative.”
Sophie brought them tea cups, and went to watch the game, and Nate waited until she sat with Parker and Hardison.
“Tell me about the Ebola and Marburg viruses, Betsy,” he smiled.
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***
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It would be damn easy to close his eyes and pretend everything was fine, but Hardison wasn’t a fool. Well, most of the time. Acting like a fool and being a fool wasn’t the same. This time he had mitigating circumstances that were putting his unease on sleep - in an awkward and tense situation, someone’s behavior could easily have be misinterpreted.
Yesterday he wasn’t interpreting anything, he was only freaking out and panicking and hoping that everything would be fine. God, he was his friend! Today, when Eliot woke up and the threat to his life was a little lesser, he didn’t know what to think and what to expect. They were all lost and confused with this; he had never seen someone who barely lived and whose life was still in danger, and he didn’t know what to expect. Google couldn’t tell him what usual behavior was for a victim of… well, basically everything. He was oscillating between his expectations, based on his knowledge about Eliot, and the temptation that everything that didn't fit the prognosis was just a side effect of a near death experience.
As the day slowly moved forward, he dismissed all the soothing excuses, and let his worry search the subject. No matter how weak Eliot was, that shouldn’t change his behavior. It could slow it down, or damp it a little, but the basics should have remained the same. He was waiting all day for him to growl and glare, and be pissed and annoyed - he had managed all that even when he had to whisper through the comms, the strength of his voice had nothing to do with it.
He never expected him to be quiet.
And it was getting worse with every hour that passed. Yep, there were dozens of possible reasons, and he counted them all, but every one of them was logical for a normal person, someone who would be shaken, shocked, insecure and scared by everything that happened. Not Eliot. Eliot should have been cursing and snapping for hours, pissed off because of everything, and angry at them for their watching over him.
Someone had stolen their Eliot and replaced him with a quiet, courtly alien with cautious eyes and hidden tentacles. That creature wasn’t comfortable in his brain - who would be - and his impersonality was showing stronger after every talk, every visit. Instead of getting better, getting more himself, he was receding into… nothing. He was less and less present and the distance he was putting between them was almost palpable.
Hardison remembered part of the conversation with Nate that he was listening to in Estrella, when Eliot said he quit… but that was right before he said he would break his arms and leg, and he dismissed it as a product of the shock… but now, when he thought about it, he wondered if there was more in those words than he could hear.
Asking Nate about it would have been wise, if he wasn’t reluctant to disturb him further without a cause… there was a real possibility he was overreacting, and that Eliot was just too weak to give a damn about anything except lying still and resting.
Yet, every time he looked at him, he didn’t see his friend, he saw an alien Cheshire cat who was slowly disappearing without any explanation, piece by piece, becoming invisible and quiet until nothing of it was left. Not even a smile.
He had to do something, to challenge that alien to see where the hell Eliot was inside that thing… and he had no idea how.
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***
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The rain started after they ate, and the soft lights in the room were perfect for a lazy afternoon. The sound of the rain was soothing, they were dozing, reading, watching TV, and just quietly chatting, and everything would look completely normal if they weren’t constantly stopping to go to the other end of the room, to check on Eliot.
Nate spent entire afternoon at the table going through all the data Hardison had accumulated on his laptop, but that was just sorting out and finishing everything. He kept an eye on everybody, though there wasn’t any need for an intervention of any kind; Eliot wasn’t talking. He slept for the most part of the day, and Betsy said that that was the best thing that he could do for now. Hardison, a little encouraged by her appreciation of his skills, tried at one point to draw any prognosis from her, but she just told him to Google the recovery time of a gunshot wound, plus severe Hypovolemic shock and bleeding out, to add that together and multiply by three, and then to ask her again.
She was talking about months, but Hardison sat, narrowed his eyes, and said he gave him two weeks to start walking again. Nate was giving him eight days, but he didn’t contribute to their exchange.
They’d all slept a few hours during the day, and no one was tired. That was good because Betsy said that this night might be as hard as the last was, but at the same time, it made the day seem much longer than it really was.
The tension grew when Eliot woke up. Nate was right when he thought that removing the beeping would bring a new nuisance, but it seemed Eliot tolerated their constant visits pretty well. He wasn’t conscious all the time, so he maybe didn’t notice every one of them, but from his watching place Nate could see that he wasn’t visibly upset with the rest.
They were the ones who were upset, even Sophie. Eliot answered their questions with short words, he didn’t ask for anything, and he seemed completely absent.
Sophie gave him a phone, and that was it, he was gone. For hours, all they could get from him was a polite ‘yes, thank you’, and more often, ‘no, thank you’.
When evening brought the fever and Betsy connected the heart monitor back up, even she started to look worried when he just said ‘okay, thank you’, and smiled.
Things were speeding up.
Nate sent Hardison to hack into the Department of Defense.
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***
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Allowing himself to think about everything was a huge fucking mistake. It was too early, he had misjudged his strength.
It was easy when all the facts were blurred images, mixed and distorted, he could baffle himself a little further, but now, with a clear mind, following the trail of death that he left behind was terrifying. The tightening in his chest had nothing to do with the wound.
He couldn’t even brace himself, much less to curl into a ball and crawl into some dark corner, to stay there for days until he stopped counting, and counting, and acknowledging all the faces, adding them to the final score.
He could force himself to stop, but he didn’t. He never did.
He owed them that. He had to remember them, every one.
He spent hours with outward smiles and inward screams, trying to lay relaxed while feeling like jumping up and tearing the bed into pieces. Being grateful for the pain was something that would surprise him, if he had strength to think about it - but the blurry eyes, immobility and weakness was a perfect cover for everything. Even Betsy couldn’t see anything underneath it, and he could get rid of all the visitors only with short replies and with a few smiles. Even when he was too absent to actually hear their stupid questions, wrong answers, yes instead or no, or vice versa, were explainable. He managed to hide everything from them, all except the constant shaking of his hands.
Their covers, on the other hand, were starting to break through the day, and the relaxed-everything’s-fine-just-rest masks were falling down, revealing their worry and anger and tension that would deeply upset him if he wasn’t occupied with the people he killed. The people he loved were, for now, less important.
Two weeks. He needed two fucking weeks in a dark, small room, with no sounds, without anything in it, to settle all this in his head and in his heart… and he was captured here in the lit room with people.
Thank god, the fever blurred everything again when the endless hours turned into night, and he didn’t have to pretend he was doing something with the phone, except staring at it blindly for hours, holding it just to hide the trembling.
The shredding machine in his head worked all night, successfully destroying any coherent thought. Even the most persistent ones were easier to disperse into incoherent words that didn’t upset him, and he welcomed the fever, though it was tiresome and painful. The only thing he had to do was stay silent, which with the labored breathing wasn’t hard, and try not to pass out. That was a little easier, because this time Betsy allowed cold compresses, and they were waking him up every time he would almost drift away. Only completely awake he was sure he wouldn’t snap. He had no means to know if he would stop this time before killing Sophie, or someone else, again.
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***
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Tonight Nate and Parker were sent to sleep, but Hardison wasn’t allowed to be near Eliot unless they needed him. Sophie and Betsy didn’t look disturbed because of the fever, they said it wasn’t as high as it was the previous night. They didn’t have to be alerted all the time, and Eliot was much calmer. He decided to trust them, and not panic every time he peeked at the bed and saw Eliot’s restless attempts to free himself from whatever he thought was restricting him at that moment. If they said he was calmer, he was calmer.
Hardison used the quiet of the night and dimmed lights to finish his work; he wasn’t sure if it would be smarter to use level A or level B hazmat suits, and he searched for the specifications and chose colors. The orange ones were cool. That kept him occupied and far away from the domestic problems for awhile, and damn, it felt good to use his brain on something so clean and easy as planting the documents into the Department of Homeland security. Unfortunately, like everything funny, it ended too fast, bringing him back into the apartment.
His task was to bring coffee to Betsy and Sophie and to be near in case they needed him, so he did just that. He even occasionally tried to entertain them when they came to sit at the table in turns. He had no idea if it worked, but at least Betsy wasn’t glaring at him nonstop anymore.
The alien life form in the bed was confusing him even more now, than when he was relatively cool headed during the day. Eliot didn’t speak, he just occasionally replied to their questions when the fever was lower. Hardison figured out that Betsy was checking his consciousness with simple questions that demanded only a yes or no answer. When Sophie was asking them, she got only those answers, the shortest possible. When Betsy was asking, he replied with sentences. And he wasn’t sleeping at all, although Betsy did everything besides drugging him to make him sleep. When Hardison was near the bed, no matter if Eliot was aware of reality, or deeply out of it, his tension grew visibly, the same way he reacted the first day.
When he noticed that at the moment Sophie went away from the bed, Eliot was slipping and relaxing, Hardison realized that they were the problem here, not his condition or weakness. And for the first time during those days, he asked himself if his conversation with Eliot, when he told him he was leaving the team, and that they were dead weight, was completely made up, or if he had just convinced himself that Eliot said all that because he wanted them far away from danger.
Eliot’s repeated words about quitting came into his mind again. It was possible that Eliot really thought better about all this, and realized that it was too much for him. After all, Hardison was the reason he was shot in the first place. And they were the reason for everything he had to do, which almost killed him, again. Not to mention that he had to fight them all, in the beginning, and play against their moves.
After all this, he thought, no, he prayed, for little peace, and for things to be like they used to be - they all needed that. This thought was simply… unbearable. It wasn’t fair. They did everything to get him back, and stories like this one ought to have a happy ending. No fucking riding into the sunset, leaving the teary-eyed villagers… it wasn’t allowed.
When Sophie, tired and upset, came to the table, he poured her another coffee. The grifter should have known much more about Eliot’s behavior, it was impossible that she didn’t read him. And if she knew, Nate knew too. They were, again, not telling them everything they needed to know. Nate and Sophie were just silently watching them all, not interfering in anything, especially Nate.
“This shit is much more complicated than it seems, isn’t it?” he asked quietly. She flinched… she must have been really tired to be caught so unprepared.
“People are complicated, Hardison, that’s nothing new.” She looked at her coffee while speaking, but he could see the dark worry under her eyelashes.
“Wouldn’t solving the problem be easier, if all people engaged in it knew what’s really going on? I’m not starting with the trust issues again, I’m sure there is a reason for keeping things from us, but… maybe we should know.”
“Not if giving trust to someone means betraying someone else’s.” She looked up, not a trace of a smile in her eyes. “Sometimes is better to not know too much. That makes our moves…cleaner, not burdened by things about the others that weren’t ours to know.”
And what could the two of them know about Eliot’s behavior, and Parker and him didn’t? When, precisely? The question gave him an answer at the same time - something important was said or done in those short minutes at Estrella, when the shooting started, when Nate asked him to leave only him and Sophie on the line with Eliot, and cut himself and Parker off. Damn, that was a question of trust. Maybe it really wasn’t for them to know - but at the same time, he felt that a clue to all of this just lay there.
“Let it go.” She was watching him. She held his hand on the table and smiled. “And don’t worry. You’ll know what to do, if needed.”
“Yeah, right,” he sighed and got up. He was left to figure this shit out on his own, and he was lousy at that sort of thing. Only he could say that Eliot’s strange behavior had something to do with them, and that they had a major problem knocking on the door.
He let her drink her coffee at peace and went to the bed. He had no idea what he had hoped for - any sign that he was wrong, perhaps.
The amount of strength Eliot was spending to keep himself awake during the entire night would be exhausting even for a completely healthy man, and Betsy was angry. All the shit was connected all over him again, including the mask. “You sound like Darth Vader with that mask,” he said leaning on the table, in a casual, relaxed pose.
“I don’t have… pointy ears.” Eliot's reply was barely a sound through the plastic that distorted the words, but he didn’t remove it like he was doing the whole day.
“I won’t deign to respond to that,” he said lightly.
“Yep. I thought so.” he closed his eyes after saying that, a clear sign that conversation was over, and Hardison was again left without a clue… he wasn’t able to talk much, too exhausted because of the fever, and this might mean just that. Or he just ditched him, again, like he was doing for hours.
Betsy ended his thinking about another attempt, waving him to leave, and he obeyed, deciding that tomorrow might be the time for starting pressing harder.
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***
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Morning didn’t bring sleep and it was a good thing, because they didn’t stop coming near him. Eliot stayed awake floating in the fog, too tired to even be pissed off because he felt worse than the day before. When Betsy decided it was time for him to try to eat, he drank a few sips of meager soup just to get rid of her. Eating was the last thing on his mind.
Hardison emerged from the fog at one point, bringing him fucking crackers, and it took all of his control to listen to his explanation about the necessity of eating them; Betsy had obviously reported his lack of appetite to the committee at the dining table. The hacker tried to act normal, but he kept his distance, and Eliot was wondering what would happen if he said he would take it, how Hardison would perform the actual delivery of the package - throwing it on the bed, or putting it on the stick and pushing it closer. He was almost willing to try it, but he didn’t see the point; it was better to just pretend that there was nothing unusual happening. He didn’t want to scare him further so he just smiled and thanked him, politely explaining why he wouldn’t eat now. The only result he got was that, besides scared, Hardison now looked pretty much pissed off. But he continued to come, over and over again, and it was driving him crazy, it was more and more difficult to hide that he was becoming pissed off too. At some point he realized that his being nice was useless; the more polite he was, the angrier the hacker became, so he just pretended to sleep.
Sophie was upset too. She was constantly visiting, for god’s sake, and he barely managed to focus when she was near him. She wasn’t saying anything, leaving him to guess what was on her mind, which was even worse than any grifting she could perform on him. He couldn’t wait for her, for any of them, to go away, so he could stop trying to respond, and just drift away.
When they were near, he feared he might slip and do something, and they were near all the time - he couldn’t rest, he didn't dare to relax, and the more nervous he was becoming, the more his control was slipping away - damn, he felt half crazy, unable to stop that vicious circle.
The phone helped. When he was staring at it, or typing, they would stop by the shelf, just peek over it, and return to the others, so he finally had enough time to think without being constantly interrupted.
The damage he did to the team was beyond any repair, and he made a mental note to say that to Nate when he finally decided to come near him again; he didn’t come close to the bed after their last talk about George, yesterday morning. It was a relief - one less to deal with.
Nate’s visible withdrawal from the situation should have been a sign for the others, but the mixed signals were confusing him; he wasn’t able to determine if Nate had told them about his quitting and leaving or not. Sometimes they’d been too complicated to read even in the simplest reactions, and this confusion was nothing new for him. And he had to admit to himself that he was very far away from normal thinking; at the moment it was difficult to connect two simple thoughts together. He concentrated harder, and concluded that Nate didn’t tell them anything yet. If he did, they would be much more relaxed, knowing he would leave as soon he was able to stand up on his own - the amount of distress he was reading in their every move could only be explained by their ignorance. He would be distressed too if he was left to think he would have to work again with a person who he feared and felt uncomfortable with.
He had to tell Nate everything that he thought about this brilliant idea to bring him here again, even after he knew what exactly would happen with them, and how they would feel. He had no idea how that idiot could think they would deal with all this shit, with all the deaths. Nate should have taken him to any hospital and left, no matter the danger. Surviving was his job, after all.
That thought reminded him that it would be useful to look a little more recovered, to prepare Betsy for another round of negotiations about a transfer. He had to sleep. And rest. Fuck, he would even eat if it was necessary to loosen her up a bit.
This was the morning of the third day here - somehow, the parallels with hospital were inevitable - he counted that he had one more day of this hell before he succeeded in transferring to the hospital, and he had to use it wisely.
The team couldn’t be saved, but he could make sure that nothing he did came here after him.
The phone helped with his search for a reliable hitter, too, but the results were discouraging. He could count twenty names with the appropriate skills without thinking. He could think of ten of them who would be willing to work in this field. Four of them were even honest, they would never screw the team they worked with. But, he couldn’t find anyone who would know how to… handle them.
All four of them were unbearable. Any decent hitter would kill them all after just one job - hell, after the initial briefing - and that was a fact. Where the hell he was supposed to find someone who would keep Nate on a leash when he started to complicate plans, drunk or not… who would endure Sophie’s drama, Parker’s… everything, and Hardison’s constant geekish babbling? Even if he found someone phlegmatic and calm - to the level of being half zombie, one should really be brainless to live through their insanity - that person wouldn’t care about them. Wouldn’t know what’s the right response for every emergency and distress, for every one of them. An accumulation of wrong moves would lead to a disaster, very soon.
In the end, he didn't have even one name. And it was a dead end.
What now? They couldn’t work without a hitter, for Christ’s sake.
He was so lost in thought that Bonnano had to cough three times before he noticed he was standing before him.
“I remember that look,” the cop smirked. “What devious thing is reeling on your mind now? Betsy said you should be resting, and if I tell her you’re not…”
“Reasonable suspicion is not evidence,” he said. “Try to prove to her I’m thinking about anything.”
“Right, like she needs the evidence to act. By the way, she gave me three minutes.”
Patrick looked completely exhausted, not like someone who had one day and one night of rest, his clothes looked like he had been sleeping in the park for two nights, and his belly abruptly went very cold. “It continued into the second night, right?” he asked. “It didn’t stop. They are still killing each other.”
“Nate said I can’t disturb you with anything,” Bonnano said carefully. “I can not confirm nor deny that information.”
“How many dead?”
“Nate forbid me to tell you.”
“Fuck you and him, Patrick, I have to know-” he stopped himself when a new thought jumped in. “Why are you here? Will you arrest me?”
Bonnano pushed few things aside on the table and sat on it. “No, I won’t arrest you. There are no accusations on you for anything,” he said watching him. “I have to ask myself why you, for a second, sounded so… hopeful?”
Why the hell he was surrounded by people who were so fucking smart? It was becoming tiresome.
He evened his face into plain tired. “They are all here. All the time. A quiet, dark cell would be welcomed. Have you ever spent more than half an hour with all of them at once?”
“Almost, and I don’t want to repeat that experience.” Patrick glanced at the table where everybody was pretending they were occupied with something, giving them privacy. “I brought you something that might help.” He opened the lowest drawer on the table, and put something that he pulled out of his jacket into it. “I count you would know when it won’t be too early to use this. If Betsy finds it, cover my ass, or I’ll kill you.”
“Don’t be naïve. I’ll immediately blame you to direct her wrath away from me.”
“She also said you are a little apathetic and that I should try a motivational speech of some sort.” He eyed him critically. “You do look like shit.”
Much to his surprise that made him laugh, and he hid painful wincing. “If this is your idea of a motivational speech-”
“What? See? It worked,” Patrick grinned. “So, when are you leaving?”
For a moment he thought that Patrick was using old techniques of interrogation, first relaxing the subject, then the real questions afterward, and it took a few seconds before he connected what he wanted to say. Of course the cop was studying his pause, so he covered it with taking the mask and inhaling.
“The third day,” he sighed, suddenly tired to the bone. “No, the third day isn’t the frontier I put before myself… I can stay in bed longer than that… if necessary.”
“I see now why she said only three minutes.” His eyes were serious now. “Don’t do anything stupid this time.”
“Define stupid.”
“Oh, I don’t think you’ll have problems with that definition.”
“Patrick.” Betsy’s voice was sweet and gentle when she called him, and he waved a sign he was coming.
“Nothing stupid,” he glared at him once more and turned to leave, but stopped after one step, hesitating. “Her son was in the hospital for two months last year, when we worked on a gang case,” he said quietly. “We couldn’t prove anything, but I was pretty sure Alejandro Rojas put him there. I thought you would like to know that.”
He looked into his calm eyes. Bonnano understood much more that he showed - but some things were too much for his experience.
Eliot forced himself to smile. “Of course I would like to know that. Thank you.” No, he wouldn’t. But it didn’t matter.
.
.
Characters: Nate Ford, Eliot Spencer, Alec Hardison, Parker, Sophie Deveraux, Patrick Bonnano
Fandom: Leverage
Spoilers: The Lonely Hearts Club Job, The Boy's night out Job
warnings: Dead people, language, violence, medical bullsh*t, extreme violence in later chapters, and extreme angst
Disclaimer: I do not own blah blah blah
Special, special, special, special thanks to trappercreekd for Betaing :D
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****
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“Can someone explain me what’s going on in here?” Betsy asked quietly while they were watching Parker’s exchange with Eliot, and Sophie looked at Nate. He was sitting with his legs on the table, swinging slowly in the chair, and he wasn’t paying attention to Betsy’s glare at his feet.
“Not… exactly,” Nate shook his head. “It’s too complicated.”
“Oh, I think you didn’t understand, Nate Ford.” Betsy said softly. “I wasn’t asking.”
Sophie hid her smile when Nate’s eyebrows jumped up.
“As far as I know, he did all this to save your lives. You, on your part, did all this to save his. You are all alive, saved and happily reunited, right?” she looked at him as if she was encouraging a kid, head slightly tilted. “So, if there’s an explanation for everybody acting weird, tiptoeing, stuttering and whining, I have to know it. I have to know everything that might interact in his recovery.”
“Yes, I guess you do,” he finally sighed, glancing at the sofa where Hardison tried to occupy Parker with a new game. They couldn’t hear them. “He quit on us before he left the hospital, and he repelled us; that was the conversation with Hardison that you saw. It was… tough and nasty. And we did the same thing to him during the night. That one was even worse.”
“Why?”
“Our reasons… if half of his concentration was directed to us trying to find him, he would get killed. He needed all of it to finish the job. Sophie called him and told him we were leaving town, and that he was dead to us. If he thought we weren't near we would also have a better chance to get close to him unnoticed, and help him in time. He is… extremely hard to catch, trust me.” Nate sighed again. “And his reasons… Patrick saw it first and told us; Eliot was preparing himself to do something unforgivable, and he was sure we would ditch him in disgust after we found out what he had done. Quitting before would spare us the trouble and guilt. Eliot also knew he didn’t have much chance to make it through the night, and he didn’t want us to feel guilty because of his death. Further, and I think the most important thing, he tried to make us believe he wasn’t doing this for us. That way we wouldn’t feel guilty because of all that death he unleashed that night because of us.”
“That is…” Betsy cleared her throat. “…a lot of your guilt circulating around.”
“Yep,” Nate said carefully. “A huge amount of our guilt.”
“And don’t forget that these are only the reasons we figured out,” Sophie said when both of them went into thoughtful silence. “We can’t know what else is going on his mind.”
“Yes, I forgot the last one,” Nate frowned. “He’s afraid he can’t control himself anymore, and that he’ll kill us all. I told you what condition he had been in the last hour before we came here… he was breaking at the seams. I’m not surprised by his reasoning; a hitter who is unreliable and out of control is bad enough… but even worse, he thinks we’ll need protection from him. Running away from us is the only option that he could see. I had to trick him to drag him into the van.”
“And I wondered why his stress levels are near explosion,” Betsy sighed. “That’s not good.”
“We know,” Nate murmured. “We are waiting for him to get together. There’s a chance he’ll deal with all of it. If he doesn’t, I’ll have to do something, and I rather wouldn’t.”
“For now, he is too weak to speak more than a few words, and he is drifting in and out of consciousness,” Betsy said seriously. “He is physically not able to endure any conversation longer than three minutes and if you press him now you’ll do more damage than you think. Wait. He can’t go anywhere.”
“We are waiting, Betsy,” Sophie said quietly. “We don’t like it, but he needs time to see that things haven’t changed.” She bit her lip before she continued. “About that weakness… Is there any chance you can remove that heart monitor? It’s driving him insane… he needs... no, he doesn’t need one more thing that constantly reminds him he is out of function and dependent on someone else.” She didn’t want to tell her directly that Eliot needed a little control back, to be able to hide from them the things he wanted to hide. “I’m sure he wouldn’t have freaked out a few minutes ago if there wasn’t a sound that was telling everybody he’s going… out of control.” Damn, she said it nevertheless, but she needed her to understand.
“Not safe yet. I can now pretty accurately say he’ll live, but it can still change in a second.”
“Come with me.” Sophie got up. “I’ll go and talk with him, he needs to see that everything is normal.”
“Normal? The kids are vibrating around him, scared and stuttering, they are absolutely clueless about what impact they make on him; he’s too lost to completely re-collect himself and think straight. They are very successfully feeding everything he's constructed in his head, and it won’t end well.”
“But that is normal, Betsy. He almost died. We can’t interfere in their behavior, they have to act natural, no matter how weird or scared they seem… if he senses only for a second they are acting and pretending to be normal in front of him, it’s over. We’ll lose him, without any possibility of repair.” She glanced at the two of them, sitting together and playing games. “Besides, he loves them. And they love him. I hope they’ll melt that frozen place in which he’s caught right now.”
They went silent when they neared the bed. Eliot wasn’t sleeping, he stared sightlessly in front of him. She didn’t dare to imagine what he was thinking, but she didn’t have to; his eyes looked haunted.
“Are you planning to die, Eliot Spencer?” Sophie smiled sitting on the bed, waiting for him to look at her. She surprised him and he almost smiled, and she could see in his eyes a few quick responses that would make her smile too… but then that short second ended, and his eyes became cautious again, as if he was trying to figure out what trap she was preparing with that question. It hurt to see that spark vanishing.
“I don’t think so.” He glanced at Betsy. “Why?”
“I hoped you’d sound a little more convincing. I’m trying to persuade Betsy to remove that awful beeping, but she said you need it. C’mon, work with me here.”
He hesitated one moment, and she felt a pang; he was too tired for this. But he finally spoke. “I need a phone. Nate has my silver one here?”
She felt her back goes stiff, but she kept a light smile on her face. “Of course. Bored?”
“No, exhausted. I can’t sleep with that constant sound echoing in my head.” He darted an eyelash blink to Betsy. “With the phone, I can play games until I pass out. I heard from someone… that sleeping and resting are essential-”
“Not bad,” Betsy smirked, stopping him right at the moment his voice started to waver. “But the blinking would look convincing if you were actually able to focus on the target, and not miss me by twelve inches. You’ve just charmed the hell out of the first drawer of the table. Okay.” She turned around and turned machine off, and then took the clamps off his fingers. He watched her with something that looked almost like a smile, Sophie noticed, more in his eyes than on his face.
“I don’t like it… and it’s my call to turn it back on if I see it’s necessary, okay?” Betsy shot him a glare, and went back to Nate.
Sophie was still studying that almost smile, but it vanished before she was able to conclude if it was just for Betsy.
“Thank you,” he said politely. He was watching her as well, and she could guess what he was trying to see in her face. Instead of a response, she curled herself on the bed, hugging her knees, relaxed and smiling.
“I don’t think we had a chance to thank you for what you have done,” she said softly. His freezing was expected, she was sure that any reminder of that was painful right now… but the surprise in his eyes caught her unprepared. If he dared to say that that was his job, she just knew she would hit him.
He said nothing, his eyes were uncertain.
“I’m so glad it’s over now, and we all can be at peace, and rest and recover, without fear and struggle. You know, when all of you were in that corridor…” she hesitated, thinking to finish the sentence with something else, but decided to continue. He deserved the truth. And he earned the right to be the only one to know it. “Eliot… the four of you are the only thing I have,” she said with her voice.
For a moment his eyes were defenseless and she could see all the pain and fear hidden behind the exhaustion, but then she did something that no grifter would do… she averted her eyes from reading further, giving him time to hide it again. She knew where she hit him, and she knew exactly what pain that caused.
Pressing him further now would be a mistake, so she uncurled herself slowly and stood up.
“Try to rest, the fighting is over,” she whispered gently.
But he wasn’t listening to her anymore, his eyes were lowered. She knew she lost him at the moment he slowly reached and took her hand, looking at the purple bruise around her wrist.
“And sometimes, the only way to stop fighting is to lay down your weapons and die,” he whispered.
.
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***
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Fuck, no… he shouldn’t say that shit.
“Figuratively speaking, of course,” he added with almost no pause, watching her calm thin smile, and a shadow of admonition in her eyes. Nothing in her face showed a sign of tension, but he was still holding her hand and he felt the tremor that ran through it. He scared her. He swallowed a curse, feeling the thumping in his head, knowing the beeping would be jumping by now. She had just removed the warning bell from the beast, and the others couldn’t hear what they were saying. She was alone with him here. And she feared him.
“I could kill you now before they even noticed I moved,” he said with effort, searching her eyes.
She tilted her head, and a little amused smile lit her eyes. “You say that like it’s something new. You could always do that. But, do you want to?”
He thought for a second; the thumping in his head brought only a headache this time, not the urge to fight his way from here. Yet, he couldn’t know if it would last and how long; the last time it took only sounds to throw him deep into madness, without any control. That uncertainty was driving him crazy, he couldn’t be sure-.
“No,” he said finally.
“Why do you sound so surprised?” she glanced at her hand. “You didn’t want to kill me when this happened. You could. You had no idea who I was, I stopped you from disconnecting the IVS, and you froze before hitting me.”
“I was probably trying to calculate the best-” he cut off his words and released her hand, letting her go. “Forget it. Sorry I scared you,” he evened his voice and tried to smile.
He told that her he could kill her, and she just smiled… now he tried to smile and her eyes flickered with anger. Fuck, he was too dumb to try to figure her out… he never could. He had been trying to read her since he woke up, but her behavior was apparently normal - too normal. The only thing that he could see was that that normality wasn’t natural, it was there with effort, he felt the tension under every word, every light smile. Most of all, he felt her cautiously probing him - and now he gave her a gold mine to ponder upon. He should know better than to speak with the grifter about all this, he revealed too much.
“You are an idiot, Eliot Spencer.” A trace of that anger was in her voice, but the worry was clearer. And the fear was still there, she couldn’t hide it.
“Yeah, I know. Everybody was telling me that.” He desperately needed to close his eyes, but he didn’t dare to… what? Let her out of his sight, in case she tried to… what? Damn, he was a mess.
He half expected her to retreat now when she was free and able to leave, but she stayed and watched him. “Why do you need a phone?” she asked finally.
“To stop thinking,” he whispered, too tired to make up something that would sound normal. There wasn’t any point in lying to her. Hiding pieces of the truth was still important, but even that seemed insignificant anymore.
“Okay, I’ll bring you the phone.” She leaned over him and slowly removed the hair from his eyes, as if she expected that move would startle him. He knew she did it only to show him that she wasn’t afraid of him. She was really trying. All of them were trying, he had to acknowledge that. He should make these days easier for them, stop snapping and scaring them. They were already too upset with this situation, and he was making it worse with his shit.
“Thank you,” he said politely.
Be nice. He could do that. Maybe they would leave him alone. It was time to start allowing himself to think about all this mess.
And, of course, he had to think of someone who would be good and reliable enough to work with them.
.
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***
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Hardison almost squeaked when he realized Betsy had removed beeping, and he tried to confront her with her own words about the need of instant revival; Betsy’s eyebrows were raised to the point of connecting with her hair, but except that, she didn’t react to the murmuring hacker who threatened to go to Google and check her decisions.
Nate knew she had years and years of practice with the half crazy families of her patients, and that this was nothing compared to that, but he still admired her stoicism.
“May I go to McRory’s, and get drunk?” Hardison finished his hissing in utter defeat. He didn’t wait for Nate’s response, he went to the shelf and peeked at the bed. He returned with indignation in his eyes.
“Is he alive?” Betsy’s voice was honey. “You better go back and check once more, anything could happen in the next ten seconds.”
Nate was half sure that Hardison was thinking about it, and he hid his smile.
“You can make it faster if you get a long stick and poke him with it every half a minute,” Betsy continued without mercy. “Or rope. Tie it to his leg and yank occasionally to see if he will move.”
“I have a rope,” Parker interjected watching them in turns, trying to figure out what the problem was.
“That’s great, dear. I’ll tell you if we need it.”
“Come on, Parker, we have a game to finish,” Hardison got up again, pulling the thief on her foot. Of course they took the long way around to the sofa, checking the bed first.
“Eliot might regret this,” Nate said. “If they continue to stare at him every two minutes… even a completely normal person would lose his mind.”
“No one here is nearly half normal, much less completely,” she murmured watching Hardison making rainbow unicorns jump off cliffs on big screen. “What’s his problem?”
“Scared.”
“How can you work with someone who panics his ass out when under pressure? He almost passed out when I mentioned a needle. It’s not wise to have a seriously ill man in the same room with someone who is unpredictable and unreliable when he sees blood.”
“What’s the greater accomplishment - to do something that scares you or to do something that doesn’t scare you?” he smiled. “I’ll tell you something that might... no, it’s better he tells you himself.” He turned in the chair. “Hardison! Come back a second.”
Parker followed directly behind the hacker, and Sophie stopped preparing tea to lean on the kitchen counter. Hardison flinched visibly when he saw that attention.
“Ask her about the knife.”
“Fuck, no,” the hacker turned on his heel, but Nate caught his hand and stopped him. He had to admit one thing to Betsy; she erased the smirk and softened her face, seeing his visible discomfort.
“I knew that we might find him late, far away from any help or hospital,” Hardison said after a few seconds of silence, his eyebrows furrowed. “Someone needed to know at least something about all that medical bullshit. I’m not happy about it, it was… horrible. The educational videos from John Hopkins were nasty, but nothing compared to the Youtube ones… those were made by amateurs, I’m afraid. But I learned everything I had to.”
“And what” - Betsy suppressed a sigh - “what you have learned about thoracic surgery from amateur videos on the internet?” Her voice was filled with despair until the very end of sentence.
Hardison swallowed. “Everything I needed to understand what was going on. In fact, one particular video showed me more than any educational. One student was explaining to his colleagues about the layers of the chest using pig ribs. It looks pretty much the same as a human; the skin is the same, the muscle layer, too, even the pleura. The parietal and visceral layers of-”
“Hardison, the knife.”
“I was getting to that part,” he darted an uncertain glance to Betsy. “We didn’t know about the chest tube. And I knew about the tension hemothorax, and what it was doing to him. I was… I planned to stab him with the knife to let the blood out. And I don’t know if I would kill him with that.”
Betsy looked at him, but Nate said nothing. “You almost fainted when you saw the blood in the bag,” she pointed out.
“I had no time for fainting then.” His eyes remained uncertain. “Not that I didn’t want to.”
“For an untrained man, that sort of emergency medicine is almost… insane to try,” she said carefully.
“I’m systematic. I learned not to go under the ribs to avoid nerves and blood vessels, I thought about the pressure needed to cut through the muscle, and the depth that blade had to go between the ribs to slice both the pleu-” he cut off when Sophie made an unintelligible sound and disappeared. “Hey! I was the one who was throwing his guts up, remember?!”
“No, you wouldn’t kill him by doing that,” Betsy said finally. “If it wasn’t for the chest tube, only that could save him. Satisfied?”
“No. Just… relieved,” he smiled and ran away.
Nate held his gaze on her.
“Sixty percent chance,” she sighed. “But much more than the alternative.”
Sophie brought them tea cups, and went to watch the game, and Nate waited until she sat with Parker and Hardison.
“Tell me about the Ebola and Marburg viruses, Betsy,” he smiled.
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***
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It would be damn easy to close his eyes and pretend everything was fine, but Hardison wasn’t a fool. Well, most of the time. Acting like a fool and being a fool wasn’t the same. This time he had mitigating circumstances that were putting his unease on sleep - in an awkward and tense situation, someone’s behavior could easily have be misinterpreted.
Yesterday he wasn’t interpreting anything, he was only freaking out and panicking and hoping that everything would be fine. God, he was his friend! Today, when Eliot woke up and the threat to his life was a little lesser, he didn’t know what to think and what to expect. They were all lost and confused with this; he had never seen someone who barely lived and whose life was still in danger, and he didn’t know what to expect. Google couldn’t tell him what usual behavior was for a victim of… well, basically everything. He was oscillating between his expectations, based on his knowledge about Eliot, and the temptation that everything that didn't fit the prognosis was just a side effect of a near death experience.
As the day slowly moved forward, he dismissed all the soothing excuses, and let his worry search the subject. No matter how weak Eliot was, that shouldn’t change his behavior. It could slow it down, or damp it a little, but the basics should have remained the same. He was waiting all day for him to growl and glare, and be pissed and annoyed - he had managed all that even when he had to whisper through the comms, the strength of his voice had nothing to do with it.
He never expected him to be quiet.
And it was getting worse with every hour that passed. Yep, there were dozens of possible reasons, and he counted them all, but every one of them was logical for a normal person, someone who would be shaken, shocked, insecure and scared by everything that happened. Not Eliot. Eliot should have been cursing and snapping for hours, pissed off because of everything, and angry at them for their watching over him.
Someone had stolen their Eliot and replaced him with a quiet, courtly alien with cautious eyes and hidden tentacles. That creature wasn’t comfortable in his brain - who would be - and his impersonality was showing stronger after every talk, every visit. Instead of getting better, getting more himself, he was receding into… nothing. He was less and less present and the distance he was putting between them was almost palpable.
Hardison remembered part of the conversation with Nate that he was listening to in Estrella, when Eliot said he quit… but that was right before he said he would break his arms and leg, and he dismissed it as a product of the shock… but now, when he thought about it, he wondered if there was more in those words than he could hear.
Asking Nate about it would have been wise, if he wasn’t reluctant to disturb him further without a cause… there was a real possibility he was overreacting, and that Eliot was just too weak to give a damn about anything except lying still and resting.
Yet, every time he looked at him, he didn’t see his friend, he saw an alien Cheshire cat who was slowly disappearing without any explanation, piece by piece, becoming invisible and quiet until nothing of it was left. Not even a smile.
He had to do something, to challenge that alien to see where the hell Eliot was inside that thing… and he had no idea how.
.
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***
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The rain started after they ate, and the soft lights in the room were perfect for a lazy afternoon. The sound of the rain was soothing, they were dozing, reading, watching TV, and just quietly chatting, and everything would look completely normal if they weren’t constantly stopping to go to the other end of the room, to check on Eliot.
Nate spent entire afternoon at the table going through all the data Hardison had accumulated on his laptop, but that was just sorting out and finishing everything. He kept an eye on everybody, though there wasn’t any need for an intervention of any kind; Eliot wasn’t talking. He slept for the most part of the day, and Betsy said that that was the best thing that he could do for now. Hardison, a little encouraged by her appreciation of his skills, tried at one point to draw any prognosis from her, but she just told him to Google the recovery time of a gunshot wound, plus severe Hypovolemic shock and bleeding out, to add that together and multiply by three, and then to ask her again.
She was talking about months, but Hardison sat, narrowed his eyes, and said he gave him two weeks to start walking again. Nate was giving him eight days, but he didn’t contribute to their exchange.
They’d all slept a few hours during the day, and no one was tired. That was good because Betsy said that this night might be as hard as the last was, but at the same time, it made the day seem much longer than it really was.
The tension grew when Eliot woke up. Nate was right when he thought that removing the beeping would bring a new nuisance, but it seemed Eliot tolerated their constant visits pretty well. He wasn’t conscious all the time, so he maybe didn’t notice every one of them, but from his watching place Nate could see that he wasn’t visibly upset with the rest.
They were the ones who were upset, even Sophie. Eliot answered their questions with short words, he didn’t ask for anything, and he seemed completely absent.
Sophie gave him a phone, and that was it, he was gone. For hours, all they could get from him was a polite ‘yes, thank you’, and more often, ‘no, thank you’.
When evening brought the fever and Betsy connected the heart monitor back up, even she started to look worried when he just said ‘okay, thank you’, and smiled.
Things were speeding up.
Nate sent Hardison to hack into the Department of Defense.
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***
.
Allowing himself to think about everything was a huge fucking mistake. It was too early, he had misjudged his strength.
It was easy when all the facts were blurred images, mixed and distorted, he could baffle himself a little further, but now, with a clear mind, following the trail of death that he left behind was terrifying. The tightening in his chest had nothing to do with the wound.
He couldn’t even brace himself, much less to curl into a ball and crawl into some dark corner, to stay there for days until he stopped counting, and counting, and acknowledging all the faces, adding them to the final score.
He could force himself to stop, but he didn’t. He never did.
He owed them that. He had to remember them, every one.
He spent hours with outward smiles and inward screams, trying to lay relaxed while feeling like jumping up and tearing the bed into pieces. Being grateful for the pain was something that would surprise him, if he had strength to think about it - but the blurry eyes, immobility and weakness was a perfect cover for everything. Even Betsy couldn’t see anything underneath it, and he could get rid of all the visitors only with short replies and with a few smiles. Even when he was too absent to actually hear their stupid questions, wrong answers, yes instead or no, or vice versa, were explainable. He managed to hide everything from them, all except the constant shaking of his hands.
Their covers, on the other hand, were starting to break through the day, and the relaxed-everything’s-fine-just-rest masks were falling down, revealing their worry and anger and tension that would deeply upset him if he wasn’t occupied with the people he killed. The people he loved were, for now, less important.
Two weeks. He needed two fucking weeks in a dark, small room, with no sounds, without anything in it, to settle all this in his head and in his heart… and he was captured here in the lit room with people.
Thank god, the fever blurred everything again when the endless hours turned into night, and he didn’t have to pretend he was doing something with the phone, except staring at it blindly for hours, holding it just to hide the trembling.
The shredding machine in his head worked all night, successfully destroying any coherent thought. Even the most persistent ones were easier to disperse into incoherent words that didn’t upset him, and he welcomed the fever, though it was tiresome and painful. The only thing he had to do was stay silent, which with the labored breathing wasn’t hard, and try not to pass out. That was a little easier, because this time Betsy allowed cold compresses, and they were waking him up every time he would almost drift away. Only completely awake he was sure he wouldn’t snap. He had no means to know if he would stop this time before killing Sophie, or someone else, again.
.
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***
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Tonight Nate and Parker were sent to sleep, but Hardison wasn’t allowed to be near Eliot unless they needed him. Sophie and Betsy didn’t look disturbed because of the fever, they said it wasn’t as high as it was the previous night. They didn’t have to be alerted all the time, and Eliot was much calmer. He decided to trust them, and not panic every time he peeked at the bed and saw Eliot’s restless attempts to free himself from whatever he thought was restricting him at that moment. If they said he was calmer, he was calmer.
Hardison used the quiet of the night and dimmed lights to finish his work; he wasn’t sure if it would be smarter to use level A or level B hazmat suits, and he searched for the specifications and chose colors. The orange ones were cool. That kept him occupied and far away from the domestic problems for awhile, and damn, it felt good to use his brain on something so clean and easy as planting the documents into the Department of Homeland security. Unfortunately, like everything funny, it ended too fast, bringing him back into the apartment.
His task was to bring coffee to Betsy and Sophie and to be near in case they needed him, so he did just that. He even occasionally tried to entertain them when they came to sit at the table in turns. He had no idea if it worked, but at least Betsy wasn’t glaring at him nonstop anymore.
The alien life form in the bed was confusing him even more now, than when he was relatively cool headed during the day. Eliot didn’t speak, he just occasionally replied to their questions when the fever was lower. Hardison figured out that Betsy was checking his consciousness with simple questions that demanded only a yes or no answer. When Sophie was asking them, she got only those answers, the shortest possible. When Betsy was asking, he replied with sentences. And he wasn’t sleeping at all, although Betsy did everything besides drugging him to make him sleep. When Hardison was near the bed, no matter if Eliot was aware of reality, or deeply out of it, his tension grew visibly, the same way he reacted the first day.
When he noticed that at the moment Sophie went away from the bed, Eliot was slipping and relaxing, Hardison realized that they were the problem here, not his condition or weakness. And for the first time during those days, he asked himself if his conversation with Eliot, when he told him he was leaving the team, and that they were dead weight, was completely made up, or if he had just convinced himself that Eliot said all that because he wanted them far away from danger.
Eliot’s repeated words about quitting came into his mind again. It was possible that Eliot really thought better about all this, and realized that it was too much for him. After all, Hardison was the reason he was shot in the first place. And they were the reason for everything he had to do, which almost killed him, again. Not to mention that he had to fight them all, in the beginning, and play against their moves.
After all this, he thought, no, he prayed, for little peace, and for things to be like they used to be - they all needed that. This thought was simply… unbearable. It wasn’t fair. They did everything to get him back, and stories like this one ought to have a happy ending. No fucking riding into the sunset, leaving the teary-eyed villagers… it wasn’t allowed.
When Sophie, tired and upset, came to the table, he poured her another coffee. The grifter should have known much more about Eliot’s behavior, it was impossible that she didn’t read him. And if she knew, Nate knew too. They were, again, not telling them everything they needed to know. Nate and Sophie were just silently watching them all, not interfering in anything, especially Nate.
“This shit is much more complicated than it seems, isn’t it?” he asked quietly. She flinched… she must have been really tired to be caught so unprepared.
“People are complicated, Hardison, that’s nothing new.” She looked at her coffee while speaking, but he could see the dark worry under her eyelashes.
“Wouldn’t solving the problem be easier, if all people engaged in it knew what’s really going on? I’m not starting with the trust issues again, I’m sure there is a reason for keeping things from us, but… maybe we should know.”
“Not if giving trust to someone means betraying someone else’s.” She looked up, not a trace of a smile in her eyes. “Sometimes is better to not know too much. That makes our moves…cleaner, not burdened by things about the others that weren’t ours to know.”
And what could the two of them know about Eliot’s behavior, and Parker and him didn’t? When, precisely? The question gave him an answer at the same time - something important was said or done in those short minutes at Estrella, when the shooting started, when Nate asked him to leave only him and Sophie on the line with Eliot, and cut himself and Parker off. Damn, that was a question of trust. Maybe it really wasn’t for them to know - but at the same time, he felt that a clue to all of this just lay there.
“Let it go.” She was watching him. She held his hand on the table and smiled. “And don’t worry. You’ll know what to do, if needed.”
“Yeah, right,” he sighed and got up. He was left to figure this shit out on his own, and he was lousy at that sort of thing. Only he could say that Eliot’s strange behavior had something to do with them, and that they had a major problem knocking on the door.
He let her drink her coffee at peace and went to the bed. He had no idea what he had hoped for - any sign that he was wrong, perhaps.
The amount of strength Eliot was spending to keep himself awake during the entire night would be exhausting even for a completely healthy man, and Betsy was angry. All the shit was connected all over him again, including the mask. “You sound like Darth Vader with that mask,” he said leaning on the table, in a casual, relaxed pose.
“I don’t have… pointy ears.” Eliot's reply was barely a sound through the plastic that distorted the words, but he didn’t remove it like he was doing the whole day.
“I won’t deign to respond to that,” he said lightly.
“Yep. I thought so.” he closed his eyes after saying that, a clear sign that conversation was over, and Hardison was again left without a clue… he wasn’t able to talk much, too exhausted because of the fever, and this might mean just that. Or he just ditched him, again, like he was doing for hours.
Betsy ended his thinking about another attempt, waving him to leave, and he obeyed, deciding that tomorrow might be the time for starting pressing harder.
.
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***
.
Morning didn’t bring sleep and it was a good thing, because they didn’t stop coming near him. Eliot stayed awake floating in the fog, too tired to even be pissed off because he felt worse than the day before. When Betsy decided it was time for him to try to eat, he drank a few sips of meager soup just to get rid of her. Eating was the last thing on his mind.
Hardison emerged from the fog at one point, bringing him fucking crackers, and it took all of his control to listen to his explanation about the necessity of eating them; Betsy had obviously reported his lack of appetite to the committee at the dining table. The hacker tried to act normal, but he kept his distance, and Eliot was wondering what would happen if he said he would take it, how Hardison would perform the actual delivery of the package - throwing it on the bed, or putting it on the stick and pushing it closer. He was almost willing to try it, but he didn’t see the point; it was better to just pretend that there was nothing unusual happening. He didn’t want to scare him further so he just smiled and thanked him, politely explaining why he wouldn’t eat now. The only result he got was that, besides scared, Hardison now looked pretty much pissed off. But he continued to come, over and over again, and it was driving him crazy, it was more and more difficult to hide that he was becoming pissed off too. At some point he realized that his being nice was useless; the more polite he was, the angrier the hacker became, so he just pretended to sleep.
Sophie was upset too. She was constantly visiting, for god’s sake, and he barely managed to focus when she was near him. She wasn’t saying anything, leaving him to guess what was on her mind, which was even worse than any grifting she could perform on him. He couldn’t wait for her, for any of them, to go away, so he could stop trying to respond, and just drift away.
When they were near, he feared he might slip and do something, and they were near all the time - he couldn’t rest, he didn't dare to relax, and the more nervous he was becoming, the more his control was slipping away - damn, he felt half crazy, unable to stop that vicious circle.
The phone helped. When he was staring at it, or typing, they would stop by the shelf, just peek over it, and return to the others, so he finally had enough time to think without being constantly interrupted.
The damage he did to the team was beyond any repair, and he made a mental note to say that to Nate when he finally decided to come near him again; he didn’t come close to the bed after their last talk about George, yesterday morning. It was a relief - one less to deal with.
Nate’s visible withdrawal from the situation should have been a sign for the others, but the mixed signals were confusing him; he wasn’t able to determine if Nate had told them about his quitting and leaving or not. Sometimes they’d been too complicated to read even in the simplest reactions, and this confusion was nothing new for him. And he had to admit to himself that he was very far away from normal thinking; at the moment it was difficult to connect two simple thoughts together. He concentrated harder, and concluded that Nate didn’t tell them anything yet. If he did, they would be much more relaxed, knowing he would leave as soon he was able to stand up on his own - the amount of distress he was reading in their every move could only be explained by their ignorance. He would be distressed too if he was left to think he would have to work again with a person who he feared and felt uncomfortable with.
He had to tell Nate everything that he thought about this brilliant idea to bring him here again, even after he knew what exactly would happen with them, and how they would feel. He had no idea how that idiot could think they would deal with all this shit, with all the deaths. Nate should have taken him to any hospital and left, no matter the danger. Surviving was his job, after all.
That thought reminded him that it would be useful to look a little more recovered, to prepare Betsy for another round of negotiations about a transfer. He had to sleep. And rest. Fuck, he would even eat if it was necessary to loosen her up a bit.
This was the morning of the third day here - somehow, the parallels with hospital were inevitable - he counted that he had one more day of this hell before he succeeded in transferring to the hospital, and he had to use it wisely.
The team couldn’t be saved, but he could make sure that nothing he did came here after him.
The phone helped with his search for a reliable hitter, too, but the results were discouraging. He could count twenty names with the appropriate skills without thinking. He could think of ten of them who would be willing to work in this field. Four of them were even honest, they would never screw the team they worked with. But, he couldn’t find anyone who would know how to… handle them.
All four of them were unbearable. Any decent hitter would kill them all after just one job - hell, after the initial briefing - and that was a fact. Where the hell he was supposed to find someone who would keep Nate on a leash when he started to complicate plans, drunk or not… who would endure Sophie’s drama, Parker’s… everything, and Hardison’s constant geekish babbling? Even if he found someone phlegmatic and calm - to the level of being half zombie, one should really be brainless to live through their insanity - that person wouldn’t care about them. Wouldn’t know what’s the right response for every emergency and distress, for every one of them. An accumulation of wrong moves would lead to a disaster, very soon.
In the end, he didn't have even one name. And it was a dead end.
What now? They couldn’t work without a hitter, for Christ’s sake.
He was so lost in thought that Bonnano had to cough three times before he noticed he was standing before him.
“I remember that look,” the cop smirked. “What devious thing is reeling on your mind now? Betsy said you should be resting, and if I tell her you’re not…”
“Reasonable suspicion is not evidence,” he said. “Try to prove to her I’m thinking about anything.”
“Right, like she needs the evidence to act. By the way, she gave me three minutes.”
Patrick looked completely exhausted, not like someone who had one day and one night of rest, his clothes looked like he had been sleeping in the park for two nights, and his belly abruptly went very cold. “It continued into the second night, right?” he asked. “It didn’t stop. They are still killing each other.”
“Nate said I can’t disturb you with anything,” Bonnano said carefully. “I can not confirm nor deny that information.”
“How many dead?”
“Nate forbid me to tell you.”
“Fuck you and him, Patrick, I have to know-” he stopped himself when a new thought jumped in. “Why are you here? Will you arrest me?”
Bonnano pushed few things aside on the table and sat on it. “No, I won’t arrest you. There are no accusations on you for anything,” he said watching him. “I have to ask myself why you, for a second, sounded so… hopeful?”
Why the hell he was surrounded by people who were so fucking smart? It was becoming tiresome.
He evened his face into plain tired. “They are all here. All the time. A quiet, dark cell would be welcomed. Have you ever spent more than half an hour with all of them at once?”
“Almost, and I don’t want to repeat that experience.” Patrick glanced at the table where everybody was pretending they were occupied with something, giving them privacy. “I brought you something that might help.” He opened the lowest drawer on the table, and put something that he pulled out of his jacket into it. “I count you would know when it won’t be too early to use this. If Betsy finds it, cover my ass, or I’ll kill you.”
“Don’t be naïve. I’ll immediately blame you to direct her wrath away from me.”
“She also said you are a little apathetic and that I should try a motivational speech of some sort.” He eyed him critically. “You do look like shit.”
Much to his surprise that made him laugh, and he hid painful wincing. “If this is your idea of a motivational speech-”
“What? See? It worked,” Patrick grinned. “So, when are you leaving?”
For a moment he thought that Patrick was using old techniques of interrogation, first relaxing the subject, then the real questions afterward, and it took a few seconds before he connected what he wanted to say. Of course the cop was studying his pause, so he covered it with taking the mask and inhaling.
“The third day,” he sighed, suddenly tired to the bone. “No, the third day isn’t the frontier I put before myself… I can stay in bed longer than that… if necessary.”
“I see now why she said only three minutes.” His eyes were serious now. “Don’t do anything stupid this time.”
“Define stupid.”
“Oh, I don’t think you’ll have problems with that definition.”
“Patrick.” Betsy’s voice was sweet and gentle when she called him, and he waved a sign he was coming.
“Nothing stupid,” he glared at him once more and turned to leave, but stopped after one step, hesitating. “Her son was in the hospital for two months last year, when we worked on a gang case,” he said quietly. “We couldn’t prove anything, but I was pretty sure Alejandro Rojas put him there. I thought you would like to know that.”
He looked into his calm eyes. Bonnano understood much more that he showed - but some things were too much for his experience.
Eliot forced himself to smile. “Of course I would like to know that. Thank you.” No, he wouldn’t. But it didn’t matter.
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