The Season Six Job, Ch.12
Title: The Season Six Job
Characters: Nate Ford, Eliot Spencer, Alec Hardison, Parker, Sophie Deveraux, Patrick Bonnano, OC
Fandom: Leverage
Spoilers: None - takes place before Season 4 finale, they're still in Boston
Warnings: None for now. No network presidents were harmed during the writing of this fic.
Disclaimer: I do not own blah blah blah
Author's note: A sequel to 'The Occam's Razor Job', following cca one week after. (Parttwo in The Texas Mountain Laurel Series). After all this shit TNT put us
through, there was only one way to deal with it - see what The Team
would do when faced with TV Network. No need to read TORJ first, all you
need to know will be explained.
Special, special, special, special thanks to trappercreekd for Betaing :D
For some reason, LJ is eating my linespacing after paragraph, so I had to do it manually - if something seems strange in formatting, it's not my fault. :D
***
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.
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Watching the first two episodes of the second season, something that was supposed to be just a way to kill time before they headed to the C4 building, ended in disaster, and Florence didn’t have even the slightest clue why, or how.
Parker was nervous. After Betsy left, she went to Eliot and barraged him about minutes and days, and all the things he wasn’t supposed to do - for a moment, between hissed words, Florence thought she mentioned something about heads in boxes, but she decided she had simply misheard - and on the top of that, Parker continued where Nate had stopped last night, and bitched at him about the bomb.
Eliot was patient with her for two entire minutes, but very soon his voice turned into a permanent deadly growl.
Hardison jumped into the fight at the very beginning, trying to stop Parker and making them both more nervous with his attempts to divert their attention, but when Eliot went nasty with his replies, he continued trying to stop him. After both tactics failed, he simply got mad and hissed at both of them, equally - of course they both turned on him in response.
Nate and Sophie were too clever to interfere, though Sophie had the pained expression of a peacemaker who knew when not to engage in already lost battles.
At some point even the mysterious George was mentioned again, Hardison pulled the ‘a punch that I owe you’ card, Eliot’s snarled sentences that were full of ‘idiots’, and Parker yelled about ‘a special angry place.’
Nate chose that point to stop it - he slammed the binders on the table - and Florence noticed he didn’t try to talk to them first.
“Guys,” he said tiredly. “Enough of this shit already. If you want to fight, wait until we leave.”
“You’re not leaving for two hours, and we are mad now,” Parker stated logically, causing a few exasperated sighs. “What?!”
“I said, enough! Hardison, start the second season - all of you - on the sofa, watch it. Eliot, you don’t have to if you can’t-”
Eliot was up before he finished his sentence, and Florence took a few seconds to admire Nate’s tactics. It seemed that when mad, even conmen weren’t immune to reverse psychology.
Eliot went to the sofa and took its right end, and Florence suddenly realized she would be forced to watch it with three pissed off individuals who would continue to fight over her head. Or over her dead body. She looked helplessly at Sophie and Nate, and Sophie sighed.
“Nate, bring chairs, we’ll all take some time to relax. It’s not like we’re in a hurry, we have more than two hours,” Sophie said joining them. Florence was very happy that she managed to catch the outermost left corner, leaving the middle of the sofa for Hardison and Parker - but they both refused to sit by Eliot.
It seemed that Parker didn’t want to sit near Hardison either, she changed places twice, and finally got up, grabbed her by her shoulders and lifted her on her feet. Florence could only gasp - her grasp was like steel, and her fingers dug into her flesh like hooks, without any effort. Parker just moved her and placed her by Eliot, and repeated the same procedure with Sophie who ended up pressed between Parker and Hardison.
The sofa wasn’t that big, and five people on it… this promised to be even more weird than watching the first copy of an episode while sitting on a stack of pizza boxes. Pizza boxes didn’t growl lowly from her right side, nor radiate manic energy from her left.
Eliot turned a little to look at the sitting arrangements, but when his eyes went over her face, he visibly flinched and frowned. Well, the twitching and grimace wasn’t exactly what she expected when she got her hair done.
“Parker,” Eliot said, in a warning, low voice. His eyes were still on her face and Florence thought of a casual remark about that discrepancy, but thought better of it and just sat very still.
“Yes?” Parker sang from her left.
“Give them back.”
One hand stretched from the left, with an open palm - and her emerald earrings in it. Florence reached up to her ear; she couldn’t believe that Parker had lifted her earrings without her noticing it. “I have trouble putting them on, the catches are very small. How did you-” She bit her lip and put them in her pocket. Parker just smiled at her, and frowned at Eliot who sighed and turned away.
Nate put his chair to the side of the table so he could see them all, and the screens; Orion happily walked over all five of them, choosing Hardison for his bed, and the first episode of the second season began.
“The main theme of the second season is Family,” Florence said carefully, moving her earrings from the left to the right pocket, just in case.
Parker snorted in disdain. Hardison sneezed. Eliot crossed his arms and scowled.
She decided to keep her mouth shut.
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***
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Sophie was definitely right, Eliot decided when it took only one smirk to piss Parker off and set her on the lunatic ride, and when Hardison gave up on calming them down after only one minute. The hacker didn’t even try the kicked puppy eyes on Parker, and that was alarming, as if he wanted to argue about nothing.
Their usual fights were short and fiery, and they burned out after a few replies, yet this one… when he decided to push them a little to see how they’d react, he forgot to think about how to pull them back, how to stop it, and all the shit got out of control. He also forgot that he wasn’t playing with a full deck as well, and it took much less than he thought for him to become angry too. Sometimes he thought that keeping one calm place in his mind was easier in the middle of morphine hallucinations, than with those two.
Was he really so self absorbed that he didn’t notice something was wrong with all of them? Well, don’t answer that. Of course he was.
When he arrived, Hardison had that glow he radiated when the con was going well, when he had been sucked into cyber space, working hard on whatever he was working on, but he also looked tired. He had noticed that last night; the hacker rarely needed coffee to keep him awake, the orange stuff did that well. He should’ve known then that wasn’t normal, but he let it be. A mistake.
If there was something going on, and they kept it from him, heads would roll. He knew how many ways this Chilean shit could spread over them again, and involving Don Lazzara wasn’t so clever if they wanted to avoid that, but he was pretty sure Nate would tell him that. He might not be able to do anything, but he knew more about that matter than any of them. And wasn’t it just a relaxing thought?
He had also been observing Sophie since she arrived, but that was a dead end. The damn grifter knew how to hide everything that was bothering her very well. He noticed only that she looked tired, which was surprising indeed knowing she was up way too early for her. Yet, he knew her slip of the tongue in the bathroom wasn’t an incident, she did it on purpose, and if Sophie thought he should pay attention to Hardison’s and Parker’s behavior, that meant something.
Parker had been angry at him these past two days, okay, he could understand that. An angry Parker might unnerve Hardison too - angry Parker would even unnerve meditation stones and set them spinning in the air - but there was something… miserable… in their behavior. In normal circumstances, a good, quick fight would only made them grin evilly; now they looked bitter and hurt.
Damn it, he definitely wasn’t the right person to feel anybody’s pulse, not now, not ever. His slight touch, it seemed, only successfully stopped the circulation.
He only managed to piss them off and ruin everybody’s mood, unnerve Nate and scare Florence again. He sat on the sofa, frantically thinking about how to repair the shit he’d done, starting with Parker as the closest one, but then Parker threw Florence beside him. There was no point in fixing anything with her over Florence’s head, so he as well might start with this one first. With a little luck, he would be able to fix the entire sofa, one person at a time.
He cast one sideways glance; yep, definitely scared again. She was sitting with her back stiff, not leaning against the back of the sofa, and her hands were on her knees as if she was sitting in a dentist’s waiting room. Scared, nervous and tense - and what the hell he was supposed to say to her to make it better? He could compliment her appearance, or makeup, or her hair, but she was a fucking client and that sort of conversation wasn’t meant for clients. Her hair radiated a sweet scent that distracted him, and he moved away all of the three inches that he could. He slowly lifted his right arm and put the elbow on the armrest, so he could press his forehead and stop the headache. He could’ve been sleeping now, if he was clever.
The first episode started with explosions and flying cars, with high pitched screeching sounds that didn’t help, and continued with the gathering of all seven, and he didn’t come up with anything to say beyond: Gee, what a nice explosion. Maybe he should just give up and watch in silence, ‘cause the way the things were going, he could only make everything worse.
Nate put his feet on the table and started to rock in the chair, and his eyes casually swept over the sofa. Though his eyes weren’t on him any longer than on everybody else, he knew that the bastard sensed his lack of concentration, and he suppressed urge to tap his fingers on the armrest - sarcastic comments were the last thing he needed right now.
When Nate turned back to the screens, he peeked at the others - sulking and tense, with no signs of relaxing or improving their mood. Poking at them now might prove to be a very serious mistake. Yet, it was his fault they were all miserable, and he ought to do something. He took one deep breath, and cleared his throat. Nobody paid any attention to him, they were all staring at some crying girl on the screens, though he could feel a slight shift of attention around Sophie. He couldn’t be sure, though, she was barely visible behind Florence and Hardison.
He sighed again, and shifted uncomfortably.
Sophie’s head slowly turned in his direction. Fuck. Was there anything he could do, think or feel, that could go unnoticed? They were worse than sharks - to draw a shark's attention, one had to bleed in the water - for them, it was enough to rearrange his feet to make himself more comfortable, and they all were looking at him like a pack of hungry velociraptors. He should run back to his bed and leave them all to calm down by themselves.
For the last time, he tried to concentrate on the screens - there was dramatic music, four of seven had thoughtful expressions, the other three looked like they were constipated and in severe trouble because of it - yep, two of them were shirtless for no apparent reason - and there was some waiting for someone to say something that stretched to eternity, with the camera rotating crazily around all of them, which made his headache stronger.
This was starting to piss him off, seriously, and the sooner he said something, the better for - he reached over and lightly touched Florence’s forearm, to draw her attention.
She screamed, jumped away and landed in Hardison’s lap, followed by an outburst of music that reached the crescendo. Chris Larabee said something important. Orion hissed and jumped over Parker’s head, Nate almost fell when he lost his balance, and Sophie narrowed her eyes.
What the hell just happened? He just-
He sighed at the five aghast stares, full of fucking accusation.
He stared back for a second, then looked at Florence. “I wanted to ask you about your hair conditioner,” he said evenly, trying not to blink.
“What?!” Florence squeaked, freeing herself from Hardison. “What the fu - hair conditioner?! They were just deciding to fight for - we were all waiting to see - and you startle me with hair conditioner?!”
Breath in, breath out. “Well, Nate’s bathroom doesn’t have any-”
“What’s wrong with you, really?” Parker hissed at him. “We missed their decision!”
“Excuse me, but nobody told me that today is NotCommentingOnEpisodesFuckingFriday!” he growled. “Yesterday ya’ll didn’t stop babbling for five episodes!”
“It’s not Friday!” Parker rolled her eyes.
“Babbling?” Florence choked, and he barely stopped himself from burying his face in his hand. He knew he should have kept his mouth shut.
Hardison was looking at him like he just chewed off Parker2000’s left wheel and spit it into his lunch.
“Chris said, 'let’s do it',” he pointed out. “What the fuck he could say when that girl was crying, huh? As if you didn’t know that he’d say that. What’s the big deal, why can’t a guy ask about damn conditioner without all this consternation?”
“It’s Garnier,” Florence said coldly after a moment’s silence. “Avocado oil and shea butter. Happy?”
“Extremely,” he growled, “My life just stopped being meaningless, and the world is in order again. Thank you.” He crossed his arms and returned his gaze to the screens. So much for polite conversation that could ease the atmosphere - damn idiots. They were fucking crazy - and don’t pretend you didn’t know that - and this one was catching up with them pretty damn fast. Speaking of bad influences, yep, she had to spend more time with Parker and Hardison, that would surely improve her mental state. The poor woman had been normal when she came.
After one huff, Florence carefully sat back, Parker stopped darting him angry stares, and Hardison started the episode again, shaking his head with a sorrowful grimace that made his blood boil.
Sophie gently shooed Nate from his chair, chasing him onto the sofa between Parker and Hardison, and took it for herself. He refused to acknowledge her lazy smile. Damn grifter. It was all her fault.
Fucking drama queens, all of them.
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***
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Florence spent the rest of the episode trying to decide whom to grab like Parker grabbed her, and put him or her in her spot on the sofa. Nate was out of the question, Hardison looked too heavy, Parker would bite her head off if she tried, and that left only Sophie. Somehow, she was reluctant in the beginning, and the more time that passed from Eliot’s outburst, the more stupid she would feel doing that.
She drew herself as far as she could from him, almost sticking herself to Hardison, who as a response moved closer to Nate, and it ended with Parker being pressed against the other end.
But she couldn’t stop herself from nervously biting her nail. What the hell was wrong with her hair conditioner? She cursed her short locks because she couldn’t bring a whip to her nose to smell it, not that she would do that so visibly, and she tried to figure out what the man had against her hair. More importantly, why did he have to tell her that, so subtly masked with an innocent question.
Hardison’s sneezing gave her one possible answer - what if he was allergic to avocado, or shea butter? He surely sat as far from her as he could… but he wasn’t sneezing.
She definitely didn’t need a reason to feel miserable before going to the meeting, nor she should spend her time there looking at her hair to see what was wrong with it. Maybe it was simply ugly to him. She sternly decided to throw that shit out of her head and concentrate on the screens, and it worked.
The end of the first episode was good. She was always damn proud of the first and last two episodes of the season, they were very important for the audience and ratings, and the second episode that was just about to begin was maybe her favorite of all. The drama, angst, internal conflicts, fights inside the group, betrayal and lies, and her most favorite part - one part of the group turning against the other.
It only took ten minutes before she sensed a shift in the atmosphere. A disturbance in the Force, right at the end of Act 1.
She enjoyed one of the most beautiful dialogues she have ever written, where Vin and Chris, in a painful, emotional and very ugly talk seemingly ditched one another and broke the group in two, tearing apart all the bonds that tied them. Both actors gave Oscar-worthy performances, showing all the turmoil and pain with every beat of their hearts. Then she noticed that Eliot wasn’t watching it at all. He stared at the coffee table, his forehead resting on his fingers.
The sofa started to tremble. Parker shifted nervously, tapping her right foot on the floor, and in only few seconds it became so fast that Sophie had to lean from her chair and tap her gently on her knee to stop it. She never would have thought that Parker could be so moved by somebody’s acting, she would bet that Hardison would be the one that would tear up a little. He looked emotional enough.
She cast a sideways glance to the left, completely ignoring the rudeness on her right and she met a stone cold, barely breathing mask, who studied the coffee table was as well, unable to rise his eyes to the screen. Hardison’s face was ashen.
Uh-oh.
She checked the coffee table, just in case, but there was nothing interesting going on on it.
At the moment Vin drew a gun on Chris - and damn, she admired how he had his eyes full of tears and managed not to shed them - Hardison jumped to his feet, stopping the recording.
“We should continue this later, you’re forgetting traffic jams,” his voice was flat and empty. “You should leave now if you want to get there on time.” With that he turned on his heel and went away.
“Yep, you’re probably right,” Nate said rubbing his temples, head bowed. Looking at the coffee table.
“You’re acting stupid.” Eliot’s voice was a quiet rasp, but it worked on Hardison as if he had yelled.
“Stupid?” he hissed from behind them. “You know what? Fuck. You. Enjoy your episodes, I have more important things to do here!”
For a moment Florence was sure that Hardison would share the window’s destiny, judging by the way Eliot tensed like a spring. “Toughen up a bit, will ya’, asshole?” he snarled.
“No, thanks - I’ve seen the results of that kind of toughing up. Leave me alone.”
Parker’s foot started that crazy dance again, and for a moment that was only thing that could be heard in the silence.
Florence had no idea what was happening, but this wasn’t, definitely, friendly bickering, and her stomach went cold. That damn episode obviously hit close to home, stirring up old quarrels, and somehow she knew that pointing out the happy end wouldn’t work to solve this.
Parker was only one who was still looking at the screens, though the recording was stopped; a close plan of Vin pointing the gun at Chris, with all the pain on his face, frozen in the moment before he pulled the trigger - and looking at her pale face and eyes glued to the screen, Florence started to understand a few very important things.
Sophie’s eyes gave her the final answers; she watched the younger three with dark shadows that hid deeply burried sorrow.
“Maybe we should take the two of them with us, Nate,” Sophie stated quietly. “I'd rather not leave them all-” She stopped when Eliot pushed away the coffee table and stood up in one quick, absolutely non-weak move. He shot a glare at her and moved away without a word.
Florence quickly checked; he wasn’t going to the windows, he went to the bed.
By the time she turned to them again, Parker was watching Nate too, waiting for his answer.
He crossed his arms and continued to look at that damn table, and the silence spread for a few moments more, before he finally almost smiled. “No,” he said. Florence could recognize the final word of the one who was making decisions. “That shit has to be solved, one way or another. We have a job to do. They have shit to solve. Simple as that. Get ready.”
That wasn’t the brightest idea, she wanted to say, but she had no words in that matter… yet if she didn’t feel that leaving three dangerous people in the same room, people that had just fuckyou-ed each other and went to opposite sides, wouldn’t lead to explosion, Nate and Sophie should know that even better.
Parker curled herself into her corner of the sofa, but Nate ignored Sophie’s pleading eyes, and hoisted himself up. He picked the binders off the dining table, where Hardison sat with his laptop and tablet, and just left, without a word to any of them.
Sophie and Florence had no choice but to follow him, leaving behind a room full of silence.
Characters: Nate Ford, Eliot Spencer, Alec Hardison, Parker, Sophie Deveraux, Patrick Bonnano, OC
Fandom: Leverage
Spoilers: None - takes place before Season 4 finale, they're still in Boston
Warnings: None for now. No network presidents were harmed during the writing of this fic.
Disclaimer: I do not own blah blah blah
Author's note: A sequel to 'The Occam's Razor Job', following cca one week after. (Parttwo in The Texas Mountain Laurel Series). After all this shit TNT put us
through, there was only one way to deal with it - see what The Team
would do when faced with TV Network. No need to read TORJ first, all you
need to know will be explained.
Special, special, special, special thanks to trappercreekd for Betaing :D
For some reason, LJ is eating my linespacing after paragraph, so I had to do it manually - if something seems strange in formatting, it's not my fault. :D
***
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Watching the first two episodes of the second season, something that was supposed to be just a way to kill time before they headed to the C4 building, ended in disaster, and Florence didn’t have even the slightest clue why, or how.
Parker was nervous. After Betsy left, she went to Eliot and barraged him about minutes and days, and all the things he wasn’t supposed to do - for a moment, between hissed words, Florence thought she mentioned something about heads in boxes, but she decided she had simply misheard - and on the top of that, Parker continued where Nate had stopped last night, and bitched at him about the bomb.
Eliot was patient with her for two entire minutes, but very soon his voice turned into a permanent deadly growl.
Hardison jumped into the fight at the very beginning, trying to stop Parker and making them both more nervous with his attempts to divert their attention, but when Eliot went nasty with his replies, he continued trying to stop him. After both tactics failed, he simply got mad and hissed at both of them, equally - of course they both turned on him in response.
Nate and Sophie were too clever to interfere, though Sophie had the pained expression of a peacemaker who knew when not to engage in already lost battles.
At some point even the mysterious George was mentioned again, Hardison pulled the ‘a punch that I owe you’ card, Eliot’s snarled sentences that were full of ‘idiots’, and Parker yelled about ‘a special angry place.’
Nate chose that point to stop it - he slammed the binders on the table - and Florence noticed he didn’t try to talk to them first.
“Guys,” he said tiredly. “Enough of this shit already. If you want to fight, wait until we leave.”
“You’re not leaving for two hours, and we are mad now,” Parker stated logically, causing a few exasperated sighs. “What?!”
“I said, enough! Hardison, start the second season - all of you - on the sofa, watch it. Eliot, you don’t have to if you can’t-”
Eliot was up before he finished his sentence, and Florence took a few seconds to admire Nate’s tactics. It seemed that when mad, even conmen weren’t immune to reverse psychology.
Eliot went to the sofa and took its right end, and Florence suddenly realized she would be forced to watch it with three pissed off individuals who would continue to fight over her head. Or over her dead body. She looked helplessly at Sophie and Nate, and Sophie sighed.
“Nate, bring chairs, we’ll all take some time to relax. It’s not like we’re in a hurry, we have more than two hours,” Sophie said joining them. Florence was very happy that she managed to catch the outermost left corner, leaving the middle of the sofa for Hardison and Parker - but they both refused to sit by Eliot.
It seemed that Parker didn’t want to sit near Hardison either, she changed places twice, and finally got up, grabbed her by her shoulders and lifted her on her feet. Florence could only gasp - her grasp was like steel, and her fingers dug into her flesh like hooks, without any effort. Parker just moved her and placed her by Eliot, and repeated the same procedure with Sophie who ended up pressed between Parker and Hardison.
The sofa wasn’t that big, and five people on it… this promised to be even more weird than watching the first copy of an episode while sitting on a stack of pizza boxes. Pizza boxes didn’t growl lowly from her right side, nor radiate manic energy from her left.
Eliot turned a little to look at the sitting arrangements, but when his eyes went over her face, he visibly flinched and frowned. Well, the twitching and grimace wasn’t exactly what she expected when she got her hair done.
“Parker,” Eliot said, in a warning, low voice. His eyes were still on her face and Florence thought of a casual remark about that discrepancy, but thought better of it and just sat very still.
“Yes?” Parker sang from her left.
“Give them back.”
One hand stretched from the left, with an open palm - and her emerald earrings in it. Florence reached up to her ear; she couldn’t believe that Parker had lifted her earrings without her noticing it. “I have trouble putting them on, the catches are very small. How did you-” She bit her lip and put them in her pocket. Parker just smiled at her, and frowned at Eliot who sighed and turned away.
Nate put his chair to the side of the table so he could see them all, and the screens; Orion happily walked over all five of them, choosing Hardison for his bed, and the first episode of the second season began.
“The main theme of the second season is Family,” Florence said carefully, moving her earrings from the left to the right pocket, just in case.
Parker snorted in disdain. Hardison sneezed. Eliot crossed his arms and scowled.
She decided to keep her mouth shut.
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***
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Sophie was definitely right, Eliot decided when it took only one smirk to piss Parker off and set her on the lunatic ride, and when Hardison gave up on calming them down after only one minute. The hacker didn’t even try the kicked puppy eyes on Parker, and that was alarming, as if he wanted to argue about nothing.
Their usual fights were short and fiery, and they burned out after a few replies, yet this one… when he decided to push them a little to see how they’d react, he forgot to think about how to pull them back, how to stop it, and all the shit got out of control. He also forgot that he wasn’t playing with a full deck as well, and it took much less than he thought for him to become angry too. Sometimes he thought that keeping one calm place in his mind was easier in the middle of morphine hallucinations, than with those two.
Was he really so self absorbed that he didn’t notice something was wrong with all of them? Well, don’t answer that. Of course he was.
When he arrived, Hardison had that glow he radiated when the con was going well, when he had been sucked into cyber space, working hard on whatever he was working on, but he also looked tired. He had noticed that last night; the hacker rarely needed coffee to keep him awake, the orange stuff did that well. He should’ve known then that wasn’t normal, but he let it be. A mistake.
If there was something going on, and they kept it from him, heads would roll. He knew how many ways this Chilean shit could spread over them again, and involving Don Lazzara wasn’t so clever if they wanted to avoid that, but he was pretty sure Nate would tell him that. He might not be able to do anything, but he knew more about that matter than any of them. And wasn’t it just a relaxing thought?
He had also been observing Sophie since she arrived, but that was a dead end. The damn grifter knew how to hide everything that was bothering her very well. He noticed only that she looked tired, which was surprising indeed knowing she was up way too early for her. Yet, he knew her slip of the tongue in the bathroom wasn’t an incident, she did it on purpose, and if Sophie thought he should pay attention to Hardison’s and Parker’s behavior, that meant something.
Parker had been angry at him these past two days, okay, he could understand that. An angry Parker might unnerve Hardison too - angry Parker would even unnerve meditation stones and set them spinning in the air - but there was something… miserable… in their behavior. In normal circumstances, a good, quick fight would only made them grin evilly; now they looked bitter and hurt.
Damn it, he definitely wasn’t the right person to feel anybody’s pulse, not now, not ever. His slight touch, it seemed, only successfully stopped the circulation.
He only managed to piss them off and ruin everybody’s mood, unnerve Nate and scare Florence again. He sat on the sofa, frantically thinking about how to repair the shit he’d done, starting with Parker as the closest one, but then Parker threw Florence beside him. There was no point in fixing anything with her over Florence’s head, so he as well might start with this one first. With a little luck, he would be able to fix the entire sofa, one person at a time.
He cast one sideways glance; yep, definitely scared again. She was sitting with her back stiff, not leaning against the back of the sofa, and her hands were on her knees as if she was sitting in a dentist’s waiting room. Scared, nervous and tense - and what the hell he was supposed to say to her to make it better? He could compliment her appearance, or makeup, or her hair, but she was a fucking client and that sort of conversation wasn’t meant for clients. Her hair radiated a sweet scent that distracted him, and he moved away all of the three inches that he could. He slowly lifted his right arm and put the elbow on the armrest, so he could press his forehead and stop the headache. He could’ve been sleeping now, if he was clever.
The first episode started with explosions and flying cars, with high pitched screeching sounds that didn’t help, and continued with the gathering of all seven, and he didn’t come up with anything to say beyond: Gee, what a nice explosion. Maybe he should just give up and watch in silence, ‘cause the way the things were going, he could only make everything worse.
Nate put his feet on the table and started to rock in the chair, and his eyes casually swept over the sofa. Though his eyes weren’t on him any longer than on everybody else, he knew that the bastard sensed his lack of concentration, and he suppressed urge to tap his fingers on the armrest - sarcastic comments were the last thing he needed right now.
When Nate turned back to the screens, he peeked at the others - sulking and tense, with no signs of relaxing or improving their mood. Poking at them now might prove to be a very serious mistake. Yet, it was his fault they were all miserable, and he ought to do something. He took one deep breath, and cleared his throat. Nobody paid any attention to him, they were all staring at some crying girl on the screens, though he could feel a slight shift of attention around Sophie. He couldn’t be sure, though, she was barely visible behind Florence and Hardison.
He sighed again, and shifted uncomfortably.
Sophie’s head slowly turned in his direction. Fuck. Was there anything he could do, think or feel, that could go unnoticed? They were worse than sharks - to draw a shark's attention, one had to bleed in the water - for them, it was enough to rearrange his feet to make himself more comfortable, and they all were looking at him like a pack of hungry velociraptors. He should run back to his bed and leave them all to calm down by themselves.
For the last time, he tried to concentrate on the screens - there was dramatic music, four of seven had thoughtful expressions, the other three looked like they were constipated and in severe trouble because of it - yep, two of them were shirtless for no apparent reason - and there was some waiting for someone to say something that stretched to eternity, with the camera rotating crazily around all of them, which made his headache stronger.
This was starting to piss him off, seriously, and the sooner he said something, the better for - he reached over and lightly touched Florence’s forearm, to draw her attention.
She screamed, jumped away and landed in Hardison’s lap, followed by an outburst of music that reached the crescendo. Chris Larabee said something important. Orion hissed and jumped over Parker’s head, Nate almost fell when he lost his balance, and Sophie narrowed her eyes.
What the hell just happened? He just-
He sighed at the five aghast stares, full of fucking accusation.
He stared back for a second, then looked at Florence. “I wanted to ask you about your hair conditioner,” he said evenly, trying not to blink.
“What?!” Florence squeaked, freeing herself from Hardison. “What the fu - hair conditioner?! They were just deciding to fight for - we were all waiting to see - and you startle me with hair conditioner?!”
Breath in, breath out. “Well, Nate’s bathroom doesn’t have any-”
“What’s wrong with you, really?” Parker hissed at him. “We missed their decision!”
“Excuse me, but nobody told me that today is NotCommentingOnEpisodesFuckingFriday!” he growled. “Yesterday ya’ll didn’t stop babbling for five episodes!”
“It’s not Friday!” Parker rolled her eyes.
“Babbling?” Florence choked, and he barely stopped himself from burying his face in his hand. He knew he should have kept his mouth shut.
Hardison was looking at him like he just chewed off Parker2000’s left wheel and spit it into his lunch.
“Chris said, 'let’s do it',” he pointed out. “What the fuck he could say when that girl was crying, huh? As if you didn’t know that he’d say that. What’s the big deal, why can’t a guy ask about damn conditioner without all this consternation?”
“It’s Garnier,” Florence said coldly after a moment’s silence. “Avocado oil and shea butter. Happy?”
“Extremely,” he growled, “My life just stopped being meaningless, and the world is in order again. Thank you.” He crossed his arms and returned his gaze to the screens. So much for polite conversation that could ease the atmosphere - damn idiots. They were fucking crazy - and don’t pretend you didn’t know that - and this one was catching up with them pretty damn fast. Speaking of bad influences, yep, she had to spend more time with Parker and Hardison, that would surely improve her mental state. The poor woman had been normal when she came.
After one huff, Florence carefully sat back, Parker stopped darting him angry stares, and Hardison started the episode again, shaking his head with a sorrowful grimace that made his blood boil.
Sophie gently shooed Nate from his chair, chasing him onto the sofa between Parker and Hardison, and took it for herself. He refused to acknowledge her lazy smile. Damn grifter. It was all her fault.
Fucking drama queens, all of them.
.
.
.
***
.
Florence spent the rest of the episode trying to decide whom to grab like Parker grabbed her, and put him or her in her spot on the sofa. Nate was out of the question, Hardison looked too heavy, Parker would bite her head off if she tried, and that left only Sophie. Somehow, she was reluctant in the beginning, and the more time that passed from Eliot’s outburst, the more stupid she would feel doing that.
She drew herself as far as she could from him, almost sticking herself to Hardison, who as a response moved closer to Nate, and it ended with Parker being pressed against the other end.
But she couldn’t stop herself from nervously biting her nail. What the hell was wrong with her hair conditioner? She cursed her short locks because she couldn’t bring a whip to her nose to smell it, not that she would do that so visibly, and she tried to figure out what the man had against her hair. More importantly, why did he have to tell her that, so subtly masked with an innocent question.
Hardison’s sneezing gave her one possible answer - what if he was allergic to avocado, or shea butter? He surely sat as far from her as he could… but he wasn’t sneezing.
She definitely didn’t need a reason to feel miserable before going to the meeting, nor she should spend her time there looking at her hair to see what was wrong with it. Maybe it was simply ugly to him. She sternly decided to throw that shit out of her head and concentrate on the screens, and it worked.
The end of the first episode was good. She was always damn proud of the first and last two episodes of the season, they were very important for the audience and ratings, and the second episode that was just about to begin was maybe her favorite of all. The drama, angst, internal conflicts, fights inside the group, betrayal and lies, and her most favorite part - one part of the group turning against the other.
It only took ten minutes before she sensed a shift in the atmosphere. A disturbance in the Force, right at the end of Act 1.
She enjoyed one of the most beautiful dialogues she have ever written, where Vin and Chris, in a painful, emotional and very ugly talk seemingly ditched one another and broke the group in two, tearing apart all the bonds that tied them. Both actors gave Oscar-worthy performances, showing all the turmoil and pain with every beat of their hearts. Then she noticed that Eliot wasn’t watching it at all. He stared at the coffee table, his forehead resting on his fingers.
The sofa started to tremble. Parker shifted nervously, tapping her right foot on the floor, and in only few seconds it became so fast that Sophie had to lean from her chair and tap her gently on her knee to stop it. She never would have thought that Parker could be so moved by somebody’s acting, she would bet that Hardison would be the one that would tear up a little. He looked emotional enough.
She cast a sideways glance to the left, completely ignoring the rudeness on her right and she met a stone cold, barely breathing mask, who studied the coffee table was as well, unable to rise his eyes to the screen. Hardison’s face was ashen.
Uh-oh.
She checked the coffee table, just in case, but there was nothing interesting going on on it.
At the moment Vin drew a gun on Chris - and damn, she admired how he had his eyes full of tears and managed not to shed them - Hardison jumped to his feet, stopping the recording.
“We should continue this later, you’re forgetting traffic jams,” his voice was flat and empty. “You should leave now if you want to get there on time.” With that he turned on his heel and went away.
“Yep, you’re probably right,” Nate said rubbing his temples, head bowed. Looking at the coffee table.
“You’re acting stupid.” Eliot’s voice was a quiet rasp, but it worked on Hardison as if he had yelled.
“Stupid?” he hissed from behind them. “You know what? Fuck. You. Enjoy your episodes, I have more important things to do here!”
For a moment Florence was sure that Hardison would share the window’s destiny, judging by the way Eliot tensed like a spring. “Toughen up a bit, will ya’, asshole?” he snarled.
“No, thanks - I’ve seen the results of that kind of toughing up. Leave me alone.”
Parker’s foot started that crazy dance again, and for a moment that was only thing that could be heard in the silence.
Florence had no idea what was happening, but this wasn’t, definitely, friendly bickering, and her stomach went cold. That damn episode obviously hit close to home, stirring up old quarrels, and somehow she knew that pointing out the happy end wouldn’t work to solve this.
Parker was only one who was still looking at the screens, though the recording was stopped; a close plan of Vin pointing the gun at Chris, with all the pain on his face, frozen in the moment before he pulled the trigger - and looking at her pale face and eyes glued to the screen, Florence started to understand a few very important things.
Sophie’s eyes gave her the final answers; she watched the younger three with dark shadows that hid deeply burried sorrow.
“Maybe we should take the two of them with us, Nate,” Sophie stated quietly. “I'd rather not leave them all-” She stopped when Eliot pushed away the coffee table and stood up in one quick, absolutely non-weak move. He shot a glare at her and moved away without a word.
Florence quickly checked; he wasn’t going to the windows, he went to the bed.
By the time she turned to them again, Parker was watching Nate too, waiting for his answer.
He crossed his arms and continued to look at that damn table, and the silence spread for a few moments more, before he finally almost smiled. “No,” he said. Florence could recognize the final word of the one who was making decisions. “That shit has to be solved, one way or another. We have a job to do. They have shit to solve. Simple as that. Get ready.”
That wasn’t the brightest idea, she wanted to say, but she had no words in that matter… yet if she didn’t feel that leaving three dangerous people in the same room, people that had just fuckyou-ed each other and went to opposite sides, wouldn’t lead to explosion, Nate and Sophie should know that even better.
Parker curled herself into her corner of the sofa, but Nate ignored Sophie’s pleading eyes, and hoisted himself up. He picked the binders off the dining table, where Hardison sat with his laptop and tablet, and just left, without a word to any of them.
Sophie and Florence had no choice but to follow him, leaving behind a room full of silence.