The Season Six Job, Ch.24
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
banner for ch.24
Chapter 24
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***
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Voting wasn’t as dull as Eliot thought it might’ve been, mostly because they had one giant thread in which they could post about voting, problems, and offer some sort of encouragement to those who'd had enough of it. For those like him, for example - he had enough after the first three clicks, when he realized that that was it. Open the page. Click M7. Close the page. Repeat.
He set a goal of one hundred votes. Before he reached it, he felt his mind withering, and his eyes glazing. Just one more hour of those stuporous, repetitive moves and he would become a slobbering idiot.
Florence typed quickly beside him, and he used every loading of the page to glance at her screen; she was writing something on her blog. Wing Chun Chicken, said dark green letters. In the pauses while she thought, she went to some bluish page with a bird, sending short messages from many different accounts, often replying to herself.
He couldn’t even sigh in peace, Hardison still chuckled every time he heard him.
He knew he had to stop when he started to envy Nate on the shopping trip.
“How’s that going?” Florence asked right when he rubbed his tired eyes.
“Voting and talking,” he said, un-gritting his teeth with effort. “I read all the comments on the voting thread, and I’m starting to recognize names and their faces - or what goes as a face in this crazy place. I’m asking questions, so they're all around me, very helpful, giving advice to a novice. For example, this -” He glanced to a thread where a few new comments appeared, and he blinked, astounded. “What the hell… why’s this woman sending me a gun!? Is that some sort of tradition, or custom, or am I unwanted?”
“What gun?” Florence read the comment and looked at him as if he had two heads.
“I have to see this,” Hardison was already coming, so he used that chance to sigh, quickly.
“I don’t see any gun,” Florence eyed him almost worriedly, and he carefully selected that part of the comment. She choked, and quickly withdrew to her screen. Hardison bowed to the screen.
“H&K?” the hacker stuttered. “Seriously? You think it’s a gun?”
“It’s Heckler & Koch,” he explained. Florence produced one intelligible sound.
“It’s hugs & kisses, you, you…” Hardison turned around, going back to the dining table, muttering low. “Not even one hour has passed, and hugs & kisses already? Really?”
“I’m nice,” he growled after him. “It’s not my fault you probably had to wait three months for that.”
He returned to voting, bored to the bone.
The next crisis, after another fifty votes, was so strong that he thought about sneaking over to Parker and poking her to wake her up. That told him that he had to concentrate, quickly.
He checked other M7 groups, mainly about the seven actors, and noticed that the majority of the names from the Vote& Promote group were in those, too. They were all voting, just in different polls, and all their strength was scattered. It was worse than running to and fro over the battlefield, shooting one bullet on the left, and then another on the right.
When he - very carefully - asked about it in the thread, he got nine different explanations at the same time, all contradicting.
Interesting.
“You’re staring at the screen and you’re not voting,” Florence said after a few minutes. “Is something wrong?”
“They're not organized,” he said quietly. “There’s just a few of them who monitor the enemy voters-”
“Opponent voters,” Florence corrected him rather coldly. “They aren’t enemies.”
“Okay, okay, our friends from the other side, who are, by the way, beating the crap out of us right now, in a vigorously friendly manner… where I was? Ah, yes, monitoring the… other voters. There are ups and downs in their votes, as if they come in clusters to vote - every time we gain a little advantage, here comes a mass.”
“They are very connected on Twitter. We send calls for help too, but we are not as many.”
“Not only that. Your people vote in the main poll for the Best Series, but they also vote in polls for Best Actor… and they have seven of them. They are doing a barrage fire, instead of a frontal attack, and their strength is being wasted, they’re not advancing in any poll.”
“You know, even if we win in all the polls, it means nothing,” she said quietly, and a weight seemed to settle on her shoulders again, rounding and hunching them.
“They know that,” he nodded to his screen, but he said it with a small smile that he hoped was encouraging. “They also say it would be an important message to C4. They canceled a show that won - might win - the Best Series and the Best Actor category.”
“Internet polls are not influential, only winning the PVA would make, maybe, a difference.”
“So we only have to win that one, too.”
She averted her eyes and said nothing.
“What did I say?”
“The People's Voice Award is the biggest annual award, especially for network and cable,” she murmured. “In our category, we are against the Walking Dead, Burn Notice, Pretty Little Liars and White Collar. It’s hopeless.”
“We won an election for a foreign country. A small one.”
“Eliot, the Walking Dead has more voters than Africa has people. It is a hopeless task.”
He smiled again. “A hopeless task or an impossible task?”
“What’s the difference?”
“There’s none. Both don’t exist.”
“Okay,” she smiled, finally. “I know what you want to say, it’s all in the head, right? But, both the TV and movie business has their own set of laws, predictions, analysis.”
“Perfect.”
“Why?”
“Because you forgot who we are. We break the law for a living.”
That put a real smile on her face. “Just when I managed to put that thought deep, deep in my mind,” she said. She looked as if she wanted to add something, but her laptop made a quiet ‘ping’. “A message,” she murmured again and went back to her typing.
He opened the page. Voted. Closed it. Repeated.
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***
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Sophie knew that Nate volunteering to shop for Eliot would end in nagging; he obviously thought that buying shirts was something you do in five minutes. The last twenty minutes he was silent, and he just followed her around, carrying the bags, looking more and more lost.
“This one,” she showed him a pale green one, and he pursed his lips. “What?”
“It’s silk. It looks like Florence’s blouse. It’s even a similar color. You won’t make him wear that, ever.”
“It’s classy.”
“He needs shirts, so he can change while he is in the apartment, he doesn’t need an entire wardrobe. Besides, if he wears it - and he might even try it, just to please you, so don’t put him in that position - what if Florence decides to wear her green blouse the same day? This one looks like something that ABBA would wear onstage, it needs only glitter.”
For a second she thought about engaging in an argument over silk-cotton-colors-glitter, but it was a lost cause. Yet, it reminded her of something else, so she just put the chosen shirt into the bag and smiled. “I’m glad Florence will work with Eliot. He smiles more when she’s near,” she said lightly.
“Is that so?” He eyed the next shirt she took and grimaced. “Pink? Sophie…”
“Don’t be old fashioned. Pink is the new orange. Besides, it will add a little color to his face. I bought gray ones, one black, olive, and a pretty one, white with little blue flowers- what?”
“Nothing,” he sighed, peering into the bags, pretending he wasn’t counting them. “Florence is doing much better than I thought. Except he scares her. We all do.”
“I wouldn’t call it ‘scaring’,” she said carefully, and he raised his head to look at her face.
“What do you mean? He’s not flirting.”
“Exactly. He’s not flirting.”
No response.
“Nate,” she sighed. “He is not flirting.”
He looked at her. “I just said that.”
She bit out another frustrated sigh and smiled. “For someone who’s supposed to be a genius, you’re completely dumb when it comes to relationships and feelings, aren’t you? That was a rhetorical question, you don’t have to answer it…I’m just repeating the common truth.”
“So, you think his not-flirting is something that we should consider? Why? You have to be in the mood to flirt, and he isn’t - don’t you think he has enough shirts already? Why red? Who the hell wears red?”
“For some people, it's a natural, instinctive reaction. For him, precisely.” She waited, putting the red shirt with the others. He tilted his head, looking at her with interest. He really had no clue.
“For him, running around and fighting is natural, too, but he can’t do that now,” he said. “I don’t see why flirting would be any differ- besides, why is that so important?”
“How come you can read every mark, but you’re unable to understand basic-” she stopped, took a deep breath, and continued. “Okay, let’s put it this way. You have a mark, and you know his natural reactions. He suddenly stops one of his usual behaviors. A natural one, instinctive, that’s not influenced by his wealth or state. What would you think about it? Just shrug and continue, or notice it?”
“Okay, consider it noticed,” he grinned casually, but she noticed a switch in his mind when his eyes narrowed. “What now?”
“Nothing,” she shook her head with a huff of laughter. “Bring those shirts, I’m going to find those awful trousers with so many pockets that he wears… you’re sure he wouldn’t rather-”
“Completely, absolutely sure. Without any doubt.”
Men.
“Wait just a second.” Nate took his phone and dialed, shaking his head when she reached for another shirt. “Good day. I’d like to confirm an appointment with Mr. Knudsen. Inspector Olivia Lohman is on her way and… ah, he’s expecting her? Good, excellent. I had to check, the Inspector doesn’t like canceled meet- right, of course. No problem. Good day to you, too.”
“Are you trying to hurry me?” she smiled when he ended the call.
“I wouldn’t dare, dear.” He glanced at his watch. “We have only forty more minutes to find two or three pairs of pants.”
“Forty minutes! That’s not enough even to look at all the-”
“I know,” he said solemnly. “Tragic, isn’t it?”
She frowned, turned on her heel, and hurried.
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***
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Uh-oh. It was good to receive messages, that meant they were open and friendly people who liked to communicate - and when did that become something good? - but when he read the message, he had to rub his temples with both hands, to shake off the headache.
Damn.
He cleared his throat. “Hardison, do we know how to make a banner for promotion?” he asked carefully.
“Do we know?” the hacker repeated. “You mean, Hardison, make me a banner so I can brag about it in the group and - Florence, take a look, and tell me how the one that asked him that looks?”
It was too late to scroll down, Florence quickly eyed the picture. “Pretty, redhead, young.”
“Figures.”
“She’s one of the admins of the page,” he growled. “You said to be helpful, so I am.”
“Sure, we do know how to make banners.” Hardison’s quick reply was even more worrying than his grinning. Everything about this shit was worrying. “Do you want roses, or ribbons around it, or little hearts that would surround-”
There was no point in glaring when Hardison was barely able to see him, but it felt good. “Something simple. Dark background.” He was sure he said it calmly, but Florence flinched. Not only was he forced to do this, he also wasn’t allowed to be pissed off because of it… the next thing, he would have to look like he was enjoying it.
“No problem, one simple banner coming your way. By the way, you can’t see him because of the sofa, but Orion is crawling behind it in a very suspicious manner.”
Florence jumped up immediately; he kept George near the chairs and sofa after the cat’s attack on the table, but it seemed that the temptation was too big for him. Florence quickly brought George back to the table. Orion sprinted up and down the room three times, and stopped on sofa’s backrest, with his ears low and tail switching. Eliot watched him, fascinated, expecting hissing or something even worse, but he suddenly jumped down with a low, gentle murmur, ran over to Florence and snuggled.
She cooed over him, but he wasn’t deceived by that - the monster was now only one meter away from the table and George, and they had no excuse to chase him away.
He darted him a ‘I know what you’re doing’ stare, and started to vote again, not paying attention to the purring and pure innocence on his left.
Another fifty votes.
His hand started to feel strange. He restrained himself from asking Hardison how long it took to get that carpal syndrome, the reply would be impossible to survive.
Click, click, click.
People did this for hours? For a living? He masked a sigh with quiet coughing.
A low chuckle, nevertheless.
He posted one excited Yay! <3 when they managed to pass Castle. It lasted only four minutes, mainly because all the voters stopped voting and came to the thread to say, 'yay'.
He hated his life.
He waited until Castle’s voters lost their advantage - probably going to their threads to say 'Yay', too - but just when he thought they might take the lead again, the Supernatural voters jumped in all at the same time, and raised their numbers.
Slamming the laptop into the screens would scare Florence, he reminded himself. Before he could think of some other way to express all the futility of this, Florence’s phone rang, startling her. Orion jumped away and disappeared. Good.
“Nate?” she asked, as if surprised that Nate had her number, and listened, glancing twice at her laptop.
“Yes, I can, sure. Aghast, outraged reactions? No problem.”
She ended the call and looked at him. “Nate wants me to write a couple of short articles that will show how the news about cancellation is being taken. The emphasis is on the consternation. Later Hardison will put them on the websites of all the important newspapers.” She glanced at the hacker who was poking at his laptop with one finger, moved over one meter away from him. “He can do that?” she asked quietly. “Hack into the New York Times and just plant an article? Without anyone noticing it? With one eye and one finger?”
“They’ll notice after a while, and remove it. Then he’ll repeat the process.”
“Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people will read it,” she said quietly, as if for herself.
“Yep.” Dear Lord, he almost said 'Yay'. “He’ll do that with all the important newspapers that have a large readership, and keep the articles up for days, until you write the new ones. It’ll start an avalanche, and the smaller houses will follow the trend and write their own articles to match ours. If our luck holds, they will all be in the same tone. If not, he’ll monitor every mention of M7 and remove the negative ones.”
“That sounds simple when you say it.”
“It is simple… for him.”
It was interesting to monitor the rising and falling of hope on her face - she clearly liked this new step. He could tell she believed it could work, by the speed she typed, producing articles faster than he could write one comment in a thread.
It wasn’t polite to constantly peek at her screen, but he couldn’t help it, he was fascinated by the change in her writing style. It was as if five different people wrote them, not just one. He was sure not even a thorough analysis could tell it was the same author. For the last few days, he had been trying to figure out how her brain worked while watching the episodes she wrote entirely herself, without co-writers, and he failed. For now.
“Do you two need anything?” Hardison asked, getting up, and he quickly continued his clicking, just waving his offer off.
“No, thank you,” Florence said politely. “Maybe later.”
“Your loss,” the hacker said throwing his empty soda bottle into trash in the kitchen. He started to open and close cupboards, murmuring something about his frogs, and Eliot darted an irate look at him; noise could wake Parker up.
“Uhm.” Hardison said only that, standing frozen, holding the fridge door open.
“You okay?” he eyed him; he didn’t look like he was dizzy, more like deep in thought.
“The fridge is completely full. So is the freezer.”
“And?”
“And why did they say twice, at least, that they are going to buy groceries after the briefing?”
“To have an excuse to leave apartment and all this mess, and spend a few hours alone, in silence, without us?”
Just as he said that, he realized Florence flinched again. There was no point adding to her guilt, so he continued without pause. “And Sophie mentioned buying clothes for me, she told me…” he trailed off for a moment. “Yep, shopping was mentioned more than twice. Sounds like being groundwork laid. For what?”
Hardison quickly returned to his laptop. “Their earbuds are not on, so that must mean they’re not doing anything,” he said hopefully. “They wouldn’t leave us here and go do something…” now it was his turn to pause, thinking. “Oh, yes they would. They surely would. The three of us ain’t able to do anything, so they went to do something without us, without telling us. They made it look like shopping so we wouldn’t-”
“Stop. Stop right now. Why’s everybody lately more paranoid than me?”
“’Cause you’re still half dead so your paranoia is muted as well?”
Florence knocked on the table and both of them looked at her. “And what would they do?” she asked. “There’s nothing. They can’t do anything with C4 now, and certainly can’t do anything with Knudsen and the mobsters. Nate said that the recon will start when all of you get better.”
Eliot pushed the laptop away, not liking sudden unease. He remembered thinking that was something strange about that damn shopping, but there could be hundreds of explanations. “Can you track their phones, Hardison? Just in case.”
“Already on it. Sophie’s turned off, and Nate’s on. They took Lucille, but I don’t have any tracking devices in her, I’ve cleaned it completely when we brought all the bags from-”
Fuck. Nate had gone to the bags twice, while they waited for the briefing to start. He quickly stood up - too quickly - waited until the sudden dizziness passed, and went to check them.
“Hardison, come here. Nate was plundering this bag, see what’s missing. They took something from it, and you may be right. They are doing something.”
It took only one look for Hardison to start cursing. “This one was full of IDs, bugs, cameras and tracking devices.”
He said nothing, just stared into the bag for a few seconds. “Wake up Parker,” he said and turned around, going back to the bed to fetch his phone. When Nate answered he put him on speakerphone. “Where the hell are you?” he tried to speak normally, but he was too pissed off. “And don’t start with shopping, groceries, clothes, we know you’re doing something.”
“Are you pissed because we’re doing something, or because we left you out of it?” came the calm reply; he could feel the bastard smirking.
“Nate, this is stupid, you’re going without backup,” Hardison jumped in. “Come back and wait, we’re not in a hurry.”
“What are you doing?” Eliot didn’t wait for Nate’s reply, he knew what he would say. “If you’re going to the mobsters, I swear I will-”
“Look, we’ll be back in a couple of hours, so just stay there and relax, we’re not doing anything dangerous,” Nate replied still calmly, but that smile was clear, too.
“We could go with you, you should’ve told us-”
“Ah, you could help us, right?” That sounded just a bit strange, as if his smile widened. “There is no need to go alone when you have a team to back you up, is that what you’re saying, Eliot? ‘Cause going alone to do things is all of a sudden stupid, right? And leaving the team behind, clueless, is also stupid, when you’re on the receiving end? The poor team will now have to guess what the hell we’re up to, where we are, the team will have to track us all over town, trying to guess our steps, unable to be close and help us. An awful, awful feeling, isn’t it?”
Sophie’s chuckle in the background added to the sting. “Relax,” Nate continued seriously. “There’ll be enough reasons to get pissed off when you see the classy shirts that Sophie bought. Stay there, all of you, and I’ll call you when we finish, okay?” He ended the call before any of them could say anything.
“He turned the phone off, no tracking,” Hardison checked his laptop. “But we can be sure they’re going back to sand excavation camp.”
The camp full of mobsters.
“They won’t do anything risky,” Hardison said carefully. “They’ll probably just monitor it for awhile, see the best way to get in, that sort of thing. But, that place is too isolated from everything. They’ll have to leave Lucille far away and go closer by foot, and if they’re discovered, a lot of shit can go wrong in the middle of nothing.”
“You’re starting to make sense,” Eliot murmured, still thinking. “And that’s a frightening experience. Florence, will you, please, go and find me something to wear from Nate’s closets upstairs? Hardison, you have the Challenger’s keys?”
“Can I drive?” Parker’s sleepy voice startled them both.
“No,” they replied at the same time.
“But he said we must stay here,” Florence turned around halfway to the stairs. “Was that an order?”
“I see it as a suggestion,” Hardison grinned. “We’ll go there just to be close, if needed, monitor the situation, and return here before them - they won’t even notice we were there. In and out, unnoticed.”
“Well, that can’t go wrong, right?” Florence sighed and continued upstairs.
Sitting here and doing nothing was out of the question, and none of them were that bad that they couldn’t endure the drive. What they would be able to do when they get there - if needed - was another question. He glanced at Parker who was stretching before getting up, trying to make her leg function before the first step, and Hardison who went to turn off two laptops, and who almost stumbled on the stair he missed though he was looking right at it.
He hesitated, watching them, but when he opened his mouth to speak, Hardison raised his hand.
“Don’t even think about saying it. Seriously, man, don’t. Not the time, or the place for that shit. We are all going.”
So he said nothing. Hardison was right. Again. This day was disastrous.
“You should let me drive,” Parker said quietly. “We’ll be too late; it’s more than an hour drive, and we don’t know if they're already there.”
“Don’t worry, mama,” Hardison’s grin broadened. “I have an idea.”
Yep, Florence was right… this couldn’t go wrong, definitely.
He sighed, and tried to concentrate on his breathing.
.
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
banner for ch.24
Chapter 24
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.
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***
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Voting wasn’t as dull as Eliot thought it might’ve been, mostly because they had one giant thread in which they could post about voting, problems, and offer some sort of encouragement to those who'd had enough of it. For those like him, for example - he had enough after the first three clicks, when he realized that that was it. Open the page. Click M7. Close the page. Repeat.
He set a goal of one hundred votes. Before he reached it, he felt his mind withering, and his eyes glazing. Just one more hour of those stuporous, repetitive moves and he would become a slobbering idiot.
Florence typed quickly beside him, and he used every loading of the page to glance at her screen; she was writing something on her blog. Wing Chun Chicken, said dark green letters. In the pauses while she thought, she went to some bluish page with a bird, sending short messages from many different accounts, often replying to herself.
He couldn’t even sigh in peace, Hardison still chuckled every time he heard him.
He knew he had to stop when he started to envy Nate on the shopping trip.
“How’s that going?” Florence asked right when he rubbed his tired eyes.
“Voting and talking,” he said, un-gritting his teeth with effort. “I read all the comments on the voting thread, and I’m starting to recognize names and their faces - or what goes as a face in this crazy place. I’m asking questions, so they're all around me, very helpful, giving advice to a novice. For example, this -” He glanced to a thread where a few new comments appeared, and he blinked, astounded. “What the hell… why’s this woman sending me a gun!? Is that some sort of tradition, or custom, or am I unwanted?”
“What gun?” Florence read the comment and looked at him as if he had two heads.
“I have to see this,” Hardison was already coming, so he used that chance to sigh, quickly.
“I don’t see any gun,” Florence eyed him almost worriedly, and he carefully selected that part of the comment. She choked, and quickly withdrew to her screen. Hardison bowed to the screen.
“H&K?” the hacker stuttered. “Seriously? You think it’s a gun?”
“It’s Heckler & Koch,” he explained. Florence produced one intelligible sound.
“It’s hugs & kisses, you, you…” Hardison turned around, going back to the dining table, muttering low. “Not even one hour has passed, and hugs & kisses already? Really?”
“I’m nice,” he growled after him. “It’s not my fault you probably had to wait three months for that.”
He returned to voting, bored to the bone.
The next crisis, after another fifty votes, was so strong that he thought about sneaking over to Parker and poking her to wake her up. That told him that he had to concentrate, quickly.
He checked other M7 groups, mainly about the seven actors, and noticed that the majority of the names from the Vote& Promote group were in those, too. They were all voting, just in different polls, and all their strength was scattered. It was worse than running to and fro over the battlefield, shooting one bullet on the left, and then another on the right.
When he - very carefully - asked about it in the thread, he got nine different explanations at the same time, all contradicting.
Interesting.
“You’re staring at the screen and you’re not voting,” Florence said after a few minutes. “Is something wrong?”
“They're not organized,” he said quietly. “There’s just a few of them who monitor the enemy voters-”
“Opponent voters,” Florence corrected him rather coldly. “They aren’t enemies.”
“Okay, okay, our friends from the other side, who are, by the way, beating the crap out of us right now, in a vigorously friendly manner… where I was? Ah, yes, monitoring the… other voters. There are ups and downs in their votes, as if they come in clusters to vote - every time we gain a little advantage, here comes a mass.”
“They are very connected on Twitter. We send calls for help too, but we are not as many.”
“Not only that. Your people vote in the main poll for the Best Series, but they also vote in polls for Best Actor… and they have seven of them. They are doing a barrage fire, instead of a frontal attack, and their strength is being wasted, they’re not advancing in any poll.”
“You know, even if we win in all the polls, it means nothing,” she said quietly, and a weight seemed to settle on her shoulders again, rounding and hunching them.
“They know that,” he nodded to his screen, but he said it with a small smile that he hoped was encouraging. “They also say it would be an important message to C4. They canceled a show that won - might win - the Best Series and the Best Actor category.”
“Internet polls are not influential, only winning the PVA would make, maybe, a difference.”
“So we only have to win that one, too.”
She averted her eyes and said nothing.
“What did I say?”
“The People's Voice Award is the biggest annual award, especially for network and cable,” she murmured. “In our category, we are against the Walking Dead, Burn Notice, Pretty Little Liars and White Collar. It’s hopeless.”
“We won an election for a foreign country. A small one.”
“Eliot, the Walking Dead has more voters than Africa has people. It is a hopeless task.”
He smiled again. “A hopeless task or an impossible task?”
“What’s the difference?”
“There’s none. Both don’t exist.”
“Okay,” she smiled, finally. “I know what you want to say, it’s all in the head, right? But, both the TV and movie business has their own set of laws, predictions, analysis.”
“Perfect.”
“Why?”
“Because you forgot who we are. We break the law for a living.”
That put a real smile on her face. “Just when I managed to put that thought deep, deep in my mind,” she said. She looked as if she wanted to add something, but her laptop made a quiet ‘ping’. “A message,” she murmured again and went back to her typing.
He opened the page. Voted. Closed it. Repeated.
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***
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Sophie knew that Nate volunteering to shop for Eliot would end in nagging; he obviously thought that buying shirts was something you do in five minutes. The last twenty minutes he was silent, and he just followed her around, carrying the bags, looking more and more lost.
“This one,” she showed him a pale green one, and he pursed his lips. “What?”
“It’s silk. It looks like Florence’s blouse. It’s even a similar color. You won’t make him wear that, ever.”
“It’s classy.”
“He needs shirts, so he can change while he is in the apartment, he doesn’t need an entire wardrobe. Besides, if he wears it - and he might even try it, just to please you, so don’t put him in that position - what if Florence decides to wear her green blouse the same day? This one looks like something that ABBA would wear onstage, it needs only glitter.”
For a second she thought about engaging in an argument over silk-cotton-colors-glitter, but it was a lost cause. Yet, it reminded her of something else, so she just put the chosen shirt into the bag and smiled. “I’m glad Florence will work with Eliot. He smiles more when she’s near,” she said lightly.
“Is that so?” He eyed the next shirt she took and grimaced. “Pink? Sophie…”
“Don’t be old fashioned. Pink is the new orange. Besides, it will add a little color to his face. I bought gray ones, one black, olive, and a pretty one, white with little blue flowers- what?”
“Nothing,” he sighed, peering into the bags, pretending he wasn’t counting them. “Florence is doing much better than I thought. Except he scares her. We all do.”
“I wouldn’t call it ‘scaring’,” she said carefully, and he raised his head to look at her face.
“What do you mean? He’s not flirting.”
“Exactly. He’s not flirting.”
No response.
“Nate,” she sighed. “He is not flirting.”
He looked at her. “I just said that.”
She bit out another frustrated sigh and smiled. “For someone who’s supposed to be a genius, you’re completely dumb when it comes to relationships and feelings, aren’t you? That was a rhetorical question, you don’t have to answer it…I’m just repeating the common truth.”
“So, you think his not-flirting is something that we should consider? Why? You have to be in the mood to flirt, and he isn’t - don’t you think he has enough shirts already? Why red? Who the hell wears red?”
“For some people, it's a natural, instinctive reaction. For him, precisely.” She waited, putting the red shirt with the others. He tilted his head, looking at her with interest. He really had no clue.
“For him, running around and fighting is natural, too, but he can’t do that now,” he said. “I don’t see why flirting would be any differ- besides, why is that so important?”
“How come you can read every mark, but you’re unable to understand basic-” she stopped, took a deep breath, and continued. “Okay, let’s put it this way. You have a mark, and you know his natural reactions. He suddenly stops one of his usual behaviors. A natural one, instinctive, that’s not influenced by his wealth or state. What would you think about it? Just shrug and continue, or notice it?”
“Okay, consider it noticed,” he grinned casually, but she noticed a switch in his mind when his eyes narrowed. “What now?”
“Nothing,” she shook her head with a huff of laughter. “Bring those shirts, I’m going to find those awful trousers with so many pockets that he wears… you’re sure he wouldn’t rather-”
“Completely, absolutely sure. Without any doubt.”
Men.
“Wait just a second.” Nate took his phone and dialed, shaking his head when she reached for another shirt. “Good day. I’d like to confirm an appointment with Mr. Knudsen. Inspector Olivia Lohman is on her way and… ah, he’s expecting her? Good, excellent. I had to check, the Inspector doesn’t like canceled meet- right, of course. No problem. Good day to you, too.”
“Are you trying to hurry me?” she smiled when he ended the call.
“I wouldn’t dare, dear.” He glanced at his watch. “We have only forty more minutes to find two or three pairs of pants.”
“Forty minutes! That’s not enough even to look at all the-”
“I know,” he said solemnly. “Tragic, isn’t it?”
She frowned, turned on her heel, and hurried.
.
.
.
***
.
Uh-oh. It was good to receive messages, that meant they were open and friendly people who liked to communicate - and when did that become something good? - but when he read the message, he had to rub his temples with both hands, to shake off the headache.
Damn.
He cleared his throat. “Hardison, do we know how to make a banner for promotion?” he asked carefully.
“Do we know?” the hacker repeated. “You mean, Hardison, make me a banner so I can brag about it in the group and - Florence, take a look, and tell me how the one that asked him that looks?”
It was too late to scroll down, Florence quickly eyed the picture. “Pretty, redhead, young.”
“Figures.”
“She’s one of the admins of the page,” he growled. “You said to be helpful, so I am.”
“Sure, we do know how to make banners.” Hardison’s quick reply was even more worrying than his grinning. Everything about this shit was worrying. “Do you want roses, or ribbons around it, or little hearts that would surround-”
There was no point in glaring when Hardison was barely able to see him, but it felt good. “Something simple. Dark background.” He was sure he said it calmly, but Florence flinched. Not only was he forced to do this, he also wasn’t allowed to be pissed off because of it… the next thing, he would have to look like he was enjoying it.
“No problem, one simple banner coming your way. By the way, you can’t see him because of the sofa, but Orion is crawling behind it in a very suspicious manner.”
Florence jumped up immediately; he kept George near the chairs and sofa after the cat’s attack on the table, but it seemed that the temptation was too big for him. Florence quickly brought George back to the table. Orion sprinted up and down the room three times, and stopped on sofa’s backrest, with his ears low and tail switching. Eliot watched him, fascinated, expecting hissing or something even worse, but he suddenly jumped down with a low, gentle murmur, ran over to Florence and snuggled.
She cooed over him, but he wasn’t deceived by that - the monster was now only one meter away from the table and George, and they had no excuse to chase him away.
He darted him a ‘I know what you’re doing’ stare, and started to vote again, not paying attention to the purring and pure innocence on his left.
Another fifty votes.
His hand started to feel strange. He restrained himself from asking Hardison how long it took to get that carpal syndrome, the reply would be impossible to survive.
Click, click, click.
People did this for hours? For a living? He masked a sigh with quiet coughing.
A low chuckle, nevertheless.
He posted one excited Yay! <3 when they managed to pass Castle. It lasted only four minutes, mainly because all the voters stopped voting and came to the thread to say, 'yay'.
He hated his life.
He waited until Castle’s voters lost their advantage - probably going to their threads to say 'Yay', too - but just when he thought they might take the lead again, the Supernatural voters jumped in all at the same time, and raised their numbers.
Slamming the laptop into the screens would scare Florence, he reminded himself. Before he could think of some other way to express all the futility of this, Florence’s phone rang, startling her. Orion jumped away and disappeared. Good.
“Nate?” she asked, as if surprised that Nate had her number, and listened, glancing twice at her laptop.
“Yes, I can, sure. Aghast, outraged reactions? No problem.”
She ended the call and looked at him. “Nate wants me to write a couple of short articles that will show how the news about cancellation is being taken. The emphasis is on the consternation. Later Hardison will put them on the websites of all the important newspapers.” She glanced at the hacker who was poking at his laptop with one finger, moved over one meter away from him. “He can do that?” she asked quietly. “Hack into the New York Times and just plant an article? Without anyone noticing it? With one eye and one finger?”
“They’ll notice after a while, and remove it. Then he’ll repeat the process.”
“Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people will read it,” she said quietly, as if for herself.
“Yep.” Dear Lord, he almost said 'Yay'. “He’ll do that with all the important newspapers that have a large readership, and keep the articles up for days, until you write the new ones. It’ll start an avalanche, and the smaller houses will follow the trend and write their own articles to match ours. If our luck holds, they will all be in the same tone. If not, he’ll monitor every mention of M7 and remove the negative ones.”
“That sounds simple when you say it.”
“It is simple… for him.”
It was interesting to monitor the rising and falling of hope on her face - she clearly liked this new step. He could tell she believed it could work, by the speed she typed, producing articles faster than he could write one comment in a thread.
It wasn’t polite to constantly peek at her screen, but he couldn’t help it, he was fascinated by the change in her writing style. It was as if five different people wrote them, not just one. He was sure not even a thorough analysis could tell it was the same author. For the last few days, he had been trying to figure out how her brain worked while watching the episodes she wrote entirely herself, without co-writers, and he failed. For now.
“Do you two need anything?” Hardison asked, getting up, and he quickly continued his clicking, just waving his offer off.
“No, thank you,” Florence said politely. “Maybe later.”
“Your loss,” the hacker said throwing his empty soda bottle into trash in the kitchen. He started to open and close cupboards, murmuring something about his frogs, and Eliot darted an irate look at him; noise could wake Parker up.
“Uhm.” Hardison said only that, standing frozen, holding the fridge door open.
“You okay?” he eyed him; he didn’t look like he was dizzy, more like deep in thought.
“The fridge is completely full. So is the freezer.”
“And?”
“And why did they say twice, at least, that they are going to buy groceries after the briefing?”
“To have an excuse to leave apartment and all this mess, and spend a few hours alone, in silence, without us?”
Just as he said that, he realized Florence flinched again. There was no point adding to her guilt, so he continued without pause. “And Sophie mentioned buying clothes for me, she told me…” he trailed off for a moment. “Yep, shopping was mentioned more than twice. Sounds like being groundwork laid. For what?”
Hardison quickly returned to his laptop. “Their earbuds are not on, so that must mean they’re not doing anything,” he said hopefully. “They wouldn’t leave us here and go do something…” now it was his turn to pause, thinking. “Oh, yes they would. They surely would. The three of us ain’t able to do anything, so they went to do something without us, without telling us. They made it look like shopping so we wouldn’t-”
“Stop. Stop right now. Why’s everybody lately more paranoid than me?”
“’Cause you’re still half dead so your paranoia is muted as well?”
Florence knocked on the table and both of them looked at her. “And what would they do?” she asked. “There’s nothing. They can’t do anything with C4 now, and certainly can’t do anything with Knudsen and the mobsters. Nate said that the recon will start when all of you get better.”
Eliot pushed the laptop away, not liking sudden unease. He remembered thinking that was something strange about that damn shopping, but there could be hundreds of explanations. “Can you track their phones, Hardison? Just in case.”
“Already on it. Sophie’s turned off, and Nate’s on. They took Lucille, but I don’t have any tracking devices in her, I’ve cleaned it completely when we brought all the bags from-”
Fuck. Nate had gone to the bags twice, while they waited for the briefing to start. He quickly stood up - too quickly - waited until the sudden dizziness passed, and went to check them.
“Hardison, come here. Nate was plundering this bag, see what’s missing. They took something from it, and you may be right. They are doing something.”
It took only one look for Hardison to start cursing. “This one was full of IDs, bugs, cameras and tracking devices.”
He said nothing, just stared into the bag for a few seconds. “Wake up Parker,” he said and turned around, going back to the bed to fetch his phone. When Nate answered he put him on speakerphone. “Where the hell are you?” he tried to speak normally, but he was too pissed off. “And don’t start with shopping, groceries, clothes, we know you’re doing something.”
“Are you pissed because we’re doing something, or because we left you out of it?” came the calm reply; he could feel the bastard smirking.
“Nate, this is stupid, you’re going without backup,” Hardison jumped in. “Come back and wait, we’re not in a hurry.”
“What are you doing?” Eliot didn’t wait for Nate’s reply, he knew what he would say. “If you’re going to the mobsters, I swear I will-”
“Look, we’ll be back in a couple of hours, so just stay there and relax, we’re not doing anything dangerous,” Nate replied still calmly, but that smile was clear, too.
“We could go with you, you should’ve told us-”
“Ah, you could help us, right?” That sounded just a bit strange, as if his smile widened. “There is no need to go alone when you have a team to back you up, is that what you’re saying, Eliot? ‘Cause going alone to do things is all of a sudden stupid, right? And leaving the team behind, clueless, is also stupid, when you’re on the receiving end? The poor team will now have to guess what the hell we’re up to, where we are, the team will have to track us all over town, trying to guess our steps, unable to be close and help us. An awful, awful feeling, isn’t it?”
Sophie’s chuckle in the background added to the sting. “Relax,” Nate continued seriously. “There’ll be enough reasons to get pissed off when you see the classy shirts that Sophie bought. Stay there, all of you, and I’ll call you when we finish, okay?” He ended the call before any of them could say anything.
“He turned the phone off, no tracking,” Hardison checked his laptop. “But we can be sure they’re going back to sand excavation camp.”
The camp full of mobsters.
“They won’t do anything risky,” Hardison said carefully. “They’ll probably just monitor it for awhile, see the best way to get in, that sort of thing. But, that place is too isolated from everything. They’ll have to leave Lucille far away and go closer by foot, and if they’re discovered, a lot of shit can go wrong in the middle of nothing.”
“You’re starting to make sense,” Eliot murmured, still thinking. “And that’s a frightening experience. Florence, will you, please, go and find me something to wear from Nate’s closets upstairs? Hardison, you have the Challenger’s keys?”
“Can I drive?” Parker’s sleepy voice startled them both.
“No,” they replied at the same time.
“But he said we must stay here,” Florence turned around halfway to the stairs. “Was that an order?”
“I see it as a suggestion,” Hardison grinned. “We’ll go there just to be close, if needed, monitor the situation, and return here before them - they won’t even notice we were there. In and out, unnoticed.”
“Well, that can’t go wrong, right?” Florence sighed and continued upstairs.
Sitting here and doing nothing was out of the question, and none of them were that bad that they couldn’t endure the drive. What they would be able to do when they get there - if needed - was another question. He glanced at Parker who was stretching before getting up, trying to make her leg function before the first step, and Hardison who went to turn off two laptops, and who almost stumbled on the stair he missed though he was looking right at it.
He hesitated, watching them, but when he opened his mouth to speak, Hardison raised his hand.
“Don’t even think about saying it. Seriously, man, don’t. Not the time, or the place for that shit. We are all going.”
So he said nothing. Hardison was right. Again. This day was disastrous.
“You should let me drive,” Parker said quietly. “We’ll be too late; it’s more than an hour drive, and we don’t know if they're already there.”
“Don’t worry, mama,” Hardison’s grin broadened. “I have an idea.”
Yep, Florence was right… this couldn’t go wrong, definitely.
He sighed, and tried to concentrate on his breathing.
.