The Season Six Job, Chapter 27
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
banner for chapter 27:
Chapter 27
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***
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Eliot said goodbye to resting when Hardison got up, and Sophie still hadn’t finished with the clothes. He was lucky she didn’t make him try on every one of them; catching a bullet had some advantages, after all. With the cargo pants and the simple gray shirt he chose from the pile he felt almost human again, so it was worth it.
Hardison, who obviously tried to take Betsy’s orders seriously, pulled the boards covered with papers up to the dining table, instead of displaying his notes on the screens, while the rest of the team and Florence sat around the table.
Orion slept peacefully in the middle of the table, on the piled shirts. He envied him, intensively. He was tired to the bone, and keeping his eyes opened needed concentration; though, the most beautiful pieces Sophie saved for the end - soft pink and something flowery - shot terror through him and enabled him to straighten up. Flee or fight instincts sometimes weren’t so bad.
He got up and started the prep for pasta for six; standing in the kitchen and concentrating on food would keep him functioning a little more. Nate, surprisingly, bought everything he'd listed. He put the bag of soil by the bag of almonds on the kitchen floor, and spent some time looking them, side by side. He stopped when he felt Sophie’s eyes searching his face.
Sophie offered to cut another round of cake and he let her do it only because refusing would be noticed and remembered. Triangles, again.
“The muffin cups are in the upper left cupboard, behind the hidden empty bottles,” she whispered, quietly, not disturbing Hardison’s speech. She perched herself on the kitchen counter chair, keeping an eye on his doings - on him and his moves - and at the same time watching the dining table.
When Hardison played the recording of Florence’s interview on his laptop, he hoped she would go over there to watch it, but she just listened.
“You waved Florence, his target, right in front of Knudsen’s eyes?!” Nate sounded as if he was still deciding if he should he be pissed off, or laugh.
Hardison dived into a long explanation, slowly turning it to the Concerned Lincoln Citizens, and Nate let him do that. Yet, it was clear that he wasn’t happy with the new aspect which he had to calculate into the situation.
So what? They weren’t happy with their sneaking away either. Eliot made double mixture of cake, the third one, and divided it in halves. In one half he mixed cereal, in the other one gummy frogs, trying to hide a grimace of disgust. The grifter’s small smile showed him that it didn’t go unnoticed.
Instead of scowling at her, which he knew would only provoke another gentle smile, he put the onions five inches from her elbow, and started to cut them very slowly, very studiously.
He managed exactly three things - she eeped and ran away to the table; he almost cut himself because he couldn’t see shit through his own tears, and Parker straightened in her chair in alarm.
“What are you doing?” Her voice was high, silencing Hardison’s full report about the barbeque near the mine.
“Bolognese and Puttanesca; both done in less than half an hour. Why?”
“Your chopping is fifty percent slower than the last time when you chopped fennel. It should’ve been quicker by today.”
He sighed, then removed the onions, and chopped the celery at usual speed. “Better?”
“Better,” she lowered herself again, still narrow-eyed and suspicious.
He wiped his eyes with a bare hand, soaking them in onion juice, and cursed silently. This day, disastrous from the very morning, seemed to continue in the same vein.
The last bit of proof was a wave of very nasty dizziness that hit him when he bent to the lower cabinet to grab olive oil - when he straightened up, he had to lean with both hands on the counter to keep himself from falling. He had to do something unheard of - he took a tall chair and brought it inside the kitchen.
Cursing was useless, especially silent cursing, but it felt good.
Hardison finished the explanation, and started with the things that were new to everybody.
“I’m starting to like this Knudsen guy,” Hardison said. “His dealings are elegant and sneaky. Those air pollution monitors he donated to the DNR? They are very good and very useful, everybody would agree on that. Accuracy is very important, and scientists can analyze the contents mechanically and chemically and produce other numbers to show the components and amounts of the particles in the bag. You see, even the most sophisticated models are nothing more than vacuum cleaners that suck a measured amount of air and dust through a HEPA - High Efficiency Particulate Air - filter over a week or so and then weigh the bag.”
“Are they placed in isolate locations? Open to sabotage of any sort?” Nate asked.
“No need to sabotage them,” Hardison said. “The Concerned Lincoln Citizens have explanations in their pamphlet. The monitors tell - accurately - everything that scientists need to know. But, here are the problems. Number one: the pile of dust collected is a total over time - a week- and is thus an average. Are we saying that during four days of the week the mine can really exceed air pollution limits and standards and then on the other three days cut way back, so the average number meets the specifications?”
“If they are monitoring it themselves, calculation is very easy, they can always stay below the limit. And citizens are under the heavy poisons,” Nate quietly said.
“Number two,” Hardison went on. “Assuming that the mine had a problem that their own sensors did not detect, with clouds of nearly invisible pollution, the DNR report could be as much as two weeks behind in alerting citizens - because it takes one week to collect one bag, and at least one week to analyze it and make a report.”
“And two weeks, in the case of severe poisoning, can be lethal,” Sophie almost whispered.
Eliot put the pasta into the boiling water, and spiced the meat ready to be put in with the already frying onions. Yet, he watched Nate, his face that became emptier with every word Hardison said. He knew what that closing meant. He’d seen it before.
“Number three?” Nate said, his voice fell further.
Hardison exhaled and licked his lips. “Number three… the most important one… is that those monitors he provided don’t… The collection bag or filter does not collect particles smaller than two and a half microns. If you are concerned about air quality, the particles smaller than two and a half microns are exactly the ones you should be interested in since they easily pass deep into the lungs and cause real problems. Since these tiny particles pass right through the bag, they are not collected or weighed. Knudsen's mine is a Frac sand mine - there's a huge demand for silica sand right now - and that means Silicosis. With the two-week warning time line, and the possibility of huge amounts of pollution, we're talking about many soon-to-be cases of acute silicosis, which is lethal. The Concerned Lincoln Citizens are downwind from the mine. Their houses. Their schools.”
And that was it. Eliot clearly saw the mind switch in Nate's brain, and heard the click when he set it to 'destroy'.
Calm down, he said to himself, there’s nothing to worry about right now - dealing with Knudsen might bring his mine down with him, too, without the need to stretch any action. This all still could stay within the normal limits, without becoming a war.
Fear and worry clenched into a leaden weight in his belly, and he tried to even his breathing. He needed fucking meditation just to stop thinking.
“And remember, I was talking only about air pollution,” Hardison added with hesitation. “Water pollution, with the chemicals used in drilling water, and radiation and the different shit that's a byproduct of it, I haven't studied yet.”
“Take your time,” Nate said softly, his mind visibly already working at full speed. “This is the entire conversation with Knudsen, see if you can use something.”
Nate played Sophie’s talk with Knudsen, and Eliot’s blood ran cold and boiled at the same time.
Don Lazzara was there. Don Lazzara saw Sophie.
He only heard two sentences from the man That Night, but his voice was carved deep into his mind - calm and slow, so polite it was almost sweet; much more dangerous than Villacorta. The Chilean was a businessman - the Italian was deadly. Don Lazzara held the power of many generations in the line, and his voice carried it, he could feel it.
“Please don’t tell me he was there.” His voice was a barely audible whisper, but it cut through their comments and stopped them. “Please, don’t tell me you sent Sophie to him, to see her.”
“We didn’t know he would be there,” Nate said leaning back in his chair, tenting his fingers together, watching him.
He cut the last tomato with one move and pushed it aside, turning to the table. His anger boiled. “Maybe you would know, if you took us with you, if you told Hardison to track him and to check out the meeting place!”
“And maybe not,” Nate tilted his head a little. “If you have an idea how a grifter could grift a mark without the mark actually seeing her, do share.”
“Don Lazzara is not our mark! Don Lazzara is something we all agreed to avoid at any cost!” Just as he said that, he became aware of all thefuckups they were heading into. “You planned to take him down too, all this time?! After all that crap in the beginning, when you said this would only be an investigation?! Helping the police find evidence? What the hell are you doing, Nate?” His voice was more yelling than snarling by now, but he couldn’t care less.
One corner of Nate’s mouth turned up, in a light, careless smile, and his vision went red.
Sophie was back by his side in a second. He saw her only as a blurred motion in his way, until she laid her hand on his hand still holding the knife. And kept it there.
“Eliot, I took everything I came for, there wasn’t any real danger.” Her soft voice penetrated the hiss of blood pumping in his ears.
“Back off, Sophie,” he snarled. He heard the fear in her recorded voice, they scared her. And they were alone there, because this idiot was spinning out of control again, now, of all times. “This has to stop.”
He had no idea what Nate heard in his voice, but he got up in one swift move. His eyes were burning. “What, exactly, has to stop, Eliot?” he said coming closer.
“You can’t take down Don Lazzara.” He tried to gather all the thoughts reeling in his mind. “And you can’t go against the Frac mine. Not now, Nate!”
“But we can take down Knudsen? Is he a comfortably small mob boss for you?” That crooked smile appeared again, driving him completely nuts. What the hell he was trying to do? If this was just another poke at him, this time he might learn not to play with things he couldn’t control.
“You used Sophie on both of them as an inspector, and let them see her! Knudsen’s men saw her in the corridor, she’s burned from now on. The goons know about me and Hardison - and I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them saw you in the C4 building as a police inspector when you talked to Brewer! We were running out of possibilities even before we started proper recon. And we're crippled. Going after them, all of them, is fucking suicide.” He had to stop before he had to catch his breath, and he pushed away Sophie’s hand. “Even if I’m in the best condition, it would be too dangerous, too damn risky! Now, it’s madness!”
“Do I look like a madman, Eliot?”
“We can pull off this Season Six Job - maybe. We have to take down mobsters and Knudsen, so we’ll do it, or we’ll die. That's two jobs, Nate, at the same time, two. Fucking. Jobs! We’ve never done that before, not even when we all were at our best. I can’t protect you! And now, as if doing two jobs isn’t bad enough, isn’t deadly enough, you’re going after the Frac mine and Don Lazzara!!”
“We’re not talking about four jobs, Eliot. We are talking about the center of gravity. About one point, exactly.”
He stared at him.
Then he looked the rest of the team, frozen and silent. He would get them all killed, they would follow him in whatever crazy and suicidal plan he went with.
But he wouldn’t. Not this time.
They couldn’t do it without a hitter, they couldn’t even start that madness without him.
“You’ve lost your fucking mind,” he said quietly, with effort. He slowly put away the knife and wiped his hands. “Move away,” he snarled when Nate came one step closer. That stopped him.
He threw the rag on the counter, took his keys, and left.
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***
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The first half an hour he managed to drive without a single thought, mind clear, entirely blocking out the whole conversation, forcing himself to calm down. His control was better, he could do that now; control over the body and the mind were equally important, one without the other was useless.
The only thing he couldn’t control - and he tried, he fucking tried - were feelings. And that was trouble. Anger and fear were spinning inside, feeding each other until they melted into one, familiar: despair. Helplessness.
At that point he gave up, turned west and started to speed up, keeping Boston at his back.
He had no idea what he was doing and that drove him crazy. He wasn’t used to irrational behavior, he didn’t do that. He was the rational and steady one. Or he used to be.
No, really, what he was doing?
Of all the crazy things he could do, this one was perhaps the most futile. This wasn’t solving anything, wasn’t changing things. And the facts were cruel and cold.
He couldn’t leave them.
Even now - and he'd been driving less than an hour - he was restless because he wasn’t there, with them, because they were alone in the apartment marked on a mobster’s list as the last known trace of Florence, and no fucking control could stop all the disaster scenarios from playing out in his mind. He couldn’t control himself, but he needed to keep the situation under control, that was helping. When he was there, things seemed to be covered.
If they weren’t already in danger and if a client’s life wasn’t threatened, he would leave. Without a hitter, they would be forced to stay put - Nate would be forced to stop - and it would pay off in the long term… but leaving them now would mean only letting them get killed.
They could pull off Season Six. If he got himself together - and he was still trying to make himself function - they might be able to take Knudsen down. He already dreaded that. And there wasn’t any word, any feeling that could describe what he felt about going after Don Lazzara and the Frac mine at the same time. Except despair.
He was supposed to protect them. To keep them alive from mobsters. And he had to bring a fucking chair into the kitchen, because he wasn’t able to stay on his feet.
The speedometer showed 120. His heartbeat was catching up.
Well, this was functioning. Rage and fear made him more alive again, more concentrated. He would pay for this, very soon, but for now he felt the old synchronicity of the mind and body, the sharpness that he missed for so long. It wasn’t important that even his shoulders were trembling from the effort, and the buzzing in his head went into an alarming frequency - speed was keeping him on the edge. The fall would be nasty, and quick, but now he needed this no matter what cost he’d pay.
His mind and body were occupied with this concentration, but the damn feelings couldn’t be stopped.
Nate had been joking when he said that he was insecure and scared - but now, without a doubt, and with a painful clarity, he realized how right Nate really was. With only one objection - he wasn’t insecure and scared. He was ruined and terrified.
He almost lost control of the car when it hit him, and for a few seconds he was fighting to stay on the road - no traffic around him, thank god - but the anger and fear were still burning their way out and he pressed the gas pedal again.
Yes, he was ruined and terrified - of course he was. Gunshots and dark threw him back into deranged ruin; his right arm was useless, he couldn’t allow himself to even stretch it out completely because of the stitches; he could walk short distances, with a lot of resting; he couldn’t force himself even once to look at the passenger’s seat, scared of whom he might see there. Exhaustion was turning his mind off, a black out was dangerous for everybody near him. Weak, unreliable, still weary and still half mad.
Betsy was right. Any other person would be sitting up in bed right now, happy with the progress, looking forward to the first steps. With a walker.
And yet, he had to decide - now - if they would have a hitter or not. Now. Simple as that.
The roaring of the machine was nothing compared to the roaring in his brain. No pressing the pedal could help to clear that mess, to help him solve that shit. To clear out all that garbage.
What the hell could he do? What the hell Nate was doing?
He laughed. Fuck, the last time he laughed with this choking pain in his heart was before Barclay. Then, the decision to force himself to live just a little longer seemed easier than this one now - to force himself to keep them alive. To function. To help. To protect them.
Ruined and terrified.
He was so absorbed in the turmoil that he only then became aware of the hills and woods all around him - no traffic, no people, just the roaring and screeching of tires. He left all the main roads, choosing smaller ones, until he ended up on a narrow path through the woods. He was alone - finally, completely alone. Free to think, to feel, to listen to his own messages and signs.
And all led to only one thing, one truth.
The difference between their life and death, was him.
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***
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Responsibility was a bitch. So was reality. Together, working as a pair, they seemed very determined to make this as hard as they could, adding aggravating circumstances to his every thought. He was so tired of fighting his own shit, and the shit that surrounded him.
He was tired, by now, of even pressing the gas and holding the wheel, and his concentration couldn’t follow the speed. He slowed down when he started to drift away, driving on auto pilot, not really seeing anything.
He couldn’t win this fight, not in this condition.
He remembered what he had told Florence. No winning. Just refusing to lose.
And just like that, in a second and without warning, he knew what he had to do.
The only thing he could do to start functioning again, was to continue to be ruined and terrified. To stop fighting it, trying to win. That was futile and it would only exhaust him more. He needed his entire strength for other things, other fights. To defeat himself, he only needed a decision.
This time, when he laughed, there wasn’t any pain in that sound.
He fought those feelings, and tried to escape, and the more he struggled, the stronger their grasp was, more devastating. He had beat his own body and forbid it to die - he had analyzed it and learned everything he needed to put it under control. He could do it again, with a much stronger enemy this time - but that enemy was within his reach now. He could be used, as he used that damn morphine pump, studied it and made it work for him; this enemy - him, ruined and terrified - could be sectioned into pieces until it came under his control. That would be enough to avoid losing, and he needed nothing more for now.
He slowed down more, as his mind slowed down too, until the roaring in his head became just a soft whisper. Keeping his eyes open became a heavy effort, falling off the adrenaline high hit him in seconds.
He should go back. He had no idea how long he had been driving, where he was, and how long he could stay awake before he crashed down. No earbud, no phone. He wasn’t used to making such mistakes, dammit. Weariness was blurring everything around him, and he removed his foot from the gas pedal, barely aware of it.
He turned the car off the road and stopped it, turning the engine off.
It was so strange to hear the silence again. He could hear only his own breathing - still uneven and ragged as if he'd ran - but the calmness in his mind finally matched the calmness around him. Mistakes weren’t important anymore - only his reaction to them was. And that was the only difference he needed.
When he managed to unclench his grasp on the wheel, his hands were shaking, again, badly… but this time he just smiled. The almonds had been waiting for them all this time.
Yet almonds couldn’t fix the weariness, couldn’t do anything to the hole in his lung, and make it healed. Just to try, he slowly and carefully reached with his right arm, forcing himself to turn to the passenger’s seat.
The empty seat. No Tapia. No Alejandro.
Before he touched the back seat, the move painfully pulled all the muscles in his chest and shoulder and he had to stop. Easy, just easy… it’d come in time. He only had to wait. Every move of his arm became heavy effort, but this time he just observed it, neutrally, without freaking out; gravity was pulling him with seemingly triple strength and…
Gravity. Fuck.
He slowly leaned forward and rested his forehead on the wheel.
The center of the gravity. That bastard. Now he knew what Nate was trying to do.
That might even work, was his last thought before everything around him became gray and blurred, and finally black.
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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
banner for chapter 27:
Chapter 27
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***
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Eliot said goodbye to resting when Hardison got up, and Sophie still hadn’t finished with the clothes. He was lucky she didn’t make him try on every one of them; catching a bullet had some advantages, after all. With the cargo pants and the simple gray shirt he chose from the pile he felt almost human again, so it was worth it.
Hardison, who obviously tried to take Betsy’s orders seriously, pulled the boards covered with papers up to the dining table, instead of displaying his notes on the screens, while the rest of the team and Florence sat around the table.
Orion slept peacefully in the middle of the table, on the piled shirts. He envied him, intensively. He was tired to the bone, and keeping his eyes opened needed concentration; though, the most beautiful pieces Sophie saved for the end - soft pink and something flowery - shot terror through him and enabled him to straighten up. Flee or fight instincts sometimes weren’t so bad.
He got up and started the prep for pasta for six; standing in the kitchen and concentrating on food would keep him functioning a little more. Nate, surprisingly, bought everything he'd listed. He put the bag of soil by the bag of almonds on the kitchen floor, and spent some time looking them, side by side. He stopped when he felt Sophie’s eyes searching his face.
Sophie offered to cut another round of cake and he let her do it only because refusing would be noticed and remembered. Triangles, again.
“The muffin cups are in the upper left cupboard, behind the hidden empty bottles,” she whispered, quietly, not disturbing Hardison’s speech. She perched herself on the kitchen counter chair, keeping an eye on his doings - on him and his moves - and at the same time watching the dining table.
When Hardison played the recording of Florence’s interview on his laptop, he hoped she would go over there to watch it, but she just listened.
“You waved Florence, his target, right in front of Knudsen’s eyes?!” Nate sounded as if he was still deciding if he should he be pissed off, or laugh.
Hardison dived into a long explanation, slowly turning it to the Concerned Lincoln Citizens, and Nate let him do that. Yet, it was clear that he wasn’t happy with the new aspect which he had to calculate into the situation.
So what? They weren’t happy with their sneaking away either. Eliot made double mixture of cake, the third one, and divided it in halves. In one half he mixed cereal, in the other one gummy frogs, trying to hide a grimace of disgust. The grifter’s small smile showed him that it didn’t go unnoticed.
Instead of scowling at her, which he knew would only provoke another gentle smile, he put the onions five inches from her elbow, and started to cut them very slowly, very studiously.
He managed exactly three things - she eeped and ran away to the table; he almost cut himself because he couldn’t see shit through his own tears, and Parker straightened in her chair in alarm.
“What are you doing?” Her voice was high, silencing Hardison’s full report about the barbeque near the mine.
“Bolognese and Puttanesca; both done in less than half an hour. Why?”
“Your chopping is fifty percent slower than the last time when you chopped fennel. It should’ve been quicker by today.”
He sighed, then removed the onions, and chopped the celery at usual speed. “Better?”
“Better,” she lowered herself again, still narrow-eyed and suspicious.
He wiped his eyes with a bare hand, soaking them in onion juice, and cursed silently. This day, disastrous from the very morning, seemed to continue in the same vein.
The last bit of proof was a wave of very nasty dizziness that hit him when he bent to the lower cabinet to grab olive oil - when he straightened up, he had to lean with both hands on the counter to keep himself from falling. He had to do something unheard of - he took a tall chair and brought it inside the kitchen.
Cursing was useless, especially silent cursing, but it felt good.
Hardison finished the explanation, and started with the things that were new to everybody.
“I’m starting to like this Knudsen guy,” Hardison said. “His dealings are elegant and sneaky. Those air pollution monitors he donated to the DNR? They are very good and very useful, everybody would agree on that. Accuracy is very important, and scientists can analyze the contents mechanically and chemically and produce other numbers to show the components and amounts of the particles in the bag. You see, even the most sophisticated models are nothing more than vacuum cleaners that suck a measured amount of air and dust through a HEPA - High Efficiency Particulate Air - filter over a week or so and then weigh the bag.”
“Are they placed in isolate locations? Open to sabotage of any sort?” Nate asked.
“No need to sabotage them,” Hardison said. “The Concerned Lincoln Citizens have explanations in their pamphlet. The monitors tell - accurately - everything that scientists need to know. But, here are the problems. Number one: the pile of dust collected is a total over time - a week- and is thus an average. Are we saying that during four days of the week the mine can really exceed air pollution limits and standards and then on the other three days cut way back, so the average number meets the specifications?”
“If they are monitoring it themselves, calculation is very easy, they can always stay below the limit. And citizens are under the heavy poisons,” Nate quietly said.
“Number two,” Hardison went on. “Assuming that the mine had a problem that their own sensors did not detect, with clouds of nearly invisible pollution, the DNR report could be as much as two weeks behind in alerting citizens - because it takes one week to collect one bag, and at least one week to analyze it and make a report.”
“And two weeks, in the case of severe poisoning, can be lethal,” Sophie almost whispered.
Eliot put the pasta into the boiling water, and spiced the meat ready to be put in with the already frying onions. Yet, he watched Nate, his face that became emptier with every word Hardison said. He knew what that closing meant. He’d seen it before.
“Number three?” Nate said, his voice fell further.
Hardison exhaled and licked his lips. “Number three… the most important one… is that those monitors he provided don’t… The collection bag or filter does not collect particles smaller than two and a half microns. If you are concerned about air quality, the particles smaller than two and a half microns are exactly the ones you should be interested in since they easily pass deep into the lungs and cause real problems. Since these tiny particles pass right through the bag, they are not collected or weighed. Knudsen's mine is a Frac sand mine - there's a huge demand for silica sand right now - and that means Silicosis. With the two-week warning time line, and the possibility of huge amounts of pollution, we're talking about many soon-to-be cases of acute silicosis, which is lethal. The Concerned Lincoln Citizens are downwind from the mine. Their houses. Their schools.”
And that was it. Eliot clearly saw the mind switch in Nate's brain, and heard the click when he set it to 'destroy'.
Calm down, he said to himself, there’s nothing to worry about right now - dealing with Knudsen might bring his mine down with him, too, without the need to stretch any action. This all still could stay within the normal limits, without becoming a war.
Fear and worry clenched into a leaden weight in his belly, and he tried to even his breathing. He needed fucking meditation just to stop thinking.
“And remember, I was talking only about air pollution,” Hardison added with hesitation. “Water pollution, with the chemicals used in drilling water, and radiation and the different shit that's a byproduct of it, I haven't studied yet.”
“Take your time,” Nate said softly, his mind visibly already working at full speed. “This is the entire conversation with Knudsen, see if you can use something.”
Nate played Sophie’s talk with Knudsen, and Eliot’s blood ran cold and boiled at the same time.
Don Lazzara was there. Don Lazzara saw Sophie.
He only heard two sentences from the man That Night, but his voice was carved deep into his mind - calm and slow, so polite it was almost sweet; much more dangerous than Villacorta. The Chilean was a businessman - the Italian was deadly. Don Lazzara held the power of many generations in the line, and his voice carried it, he could feel it.
“Please don’t tell me he was there.” His voice was a barely audible whisper, but it cut through their comments and stopped them. “Please, don’t tell me you sent Sophie to him, to see her.”
“We didn’t know he would be there,” Nate said leaning back in his chair, tenting his fingers together, watching him.
He cut the last tomato with one move and pushed it aside, turning to the table. His anger boiled. “Maybe you would know, if you took us with you, if you told Hardison to track him and to check out the meeting place!”
“And maybe not,” Nate tilted his head a little. “If you have an idea how a grifter could grift a mark without the mark actually seeing her, do share.”
“Don Lazzara is not our mark! Don Lazzara is something we all agreed to avoid at any cost!” Just as he said that, he became aware of all thefuckups they were heading into. “You planned to take him down too, all this time?! After all that crap in the beginning, when you said this would only be an investigation?! Helping the police find evidence? What the hell are you doing, Nate?” His voice was more yelling than snarling by now, but he couldn’t care less.
One corner of Nate’s mouth turned up, in a light, careless smile, and his vision went red.
Sophie was back by his side in a second. He saw her only as a blurred motion in his way, until she laid her hand on his hand still holding the knife. And kept it there.
“Eliot, I took everything I came for, there wasn’t any real danger.” Her soft voice penetrated the hiss of blood pumping in his ears.
“Back off, Sophie,” he snarled. He heard the fear in her recorded voice, they scared her. And they were alone there, because this idiot was spinning out of control again, now, of all times. “This has to stop.”
He had no idea what Nate heard in his voice, but he got up in one swift move. His eyes were burning. “What, exactly, has to stop, Eliot?” he said coming closer.
“You can’t take down Don Lazzara.” He tried to gather all the thoughts reeling in his mind. “And you can’t go against the Frac mine. Not now, Nate!”
“But we can take down Knudsen? Is he a comfortably small mob boss for you?” That crooked smile appeared again, driving him completely nuts. What the hell he was trying to do? If this was just another poke at him, this time he might learn not to play with things he couldn’t control.
“You used Sophie on both of them as an inspector, and let them see her! Knudsen’s men saw her in the corridor, she’s burned from now on. The goons know about me and Hardison - and I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them saw you in the C4 building as a police inspector when you talked to Brewer! We were running out of possibilities even before we started proper recon. And we're crippled. Going after them, all of them, is fucking suicide.” He had to stop before he had to catch his breath, and he pushed away Sophie’s hand. “Even if I’m in the best condition, it would be too dangerous, too damn risky! Now, it’s madness!”
“Do I look like a madman, Eliot?”
“We can pull off this Season Six Job - maybe. We have to take down mobsters and Knudsen, so we’ll do it, or we’ll die. That's two jobs, Nate, at the same time, two. Fucking. Jobs! We’ve never done that before, not even when we all were at our best. I can’t protect you! And now, as if doing two jobs isn’t bad enough, isn’t deadly enough, you’re going after the Frac mine and Don Lazzara!!”
“We’re not talking about four jobs, Eliot. We are talking about the center of gravity. About one point, exactly.”
He stared at him.
Then he looked the rest of the team, frozen and silent. He would get them all killed, they would follow him in whatever crazy and suicidal plan he went with.
But he wouldn’t. Not this time.
They couldn’t do it without a hitter, they couldn’t even start that madness without him.
“You’ve lost your fucking mind,” he said quietly, with effort. He slowly put away the knife and wiped his hands. “Move away,” he snarled when Nate came one step closer. That stopped him.
He threw the rag on the counter, took his keys, and left.
.
.
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***
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The first half an hour he managed to drive without a single thought, mind clear, entirely blocking out the whole conversation, forcing himself to calm down. His control was better, he could do that now; control over the body and the mind were equally important, one without the other was useless.
The only thing he couldn’t control - and he tried, he fucking tried - were feelings. And that was trouble. Anger and fear were spinning inside, feeding each other until they melted into one, familiar: despair. Helplessness.
At that point he gave up, turned west and started to speed up, keeping Boston at his back.
He had no idea what he was doing and that drove him crazy. He wasn’t used to irrational behavior, he didn’t do that. He was the rational and steady one. Or he used to be.
No, really, what he was doing?
Of all the crazy things he could do, this one was perhaps the most futile. This wasn’t solving anything, wasn’t changing things. And the facts were cruel and cold.
He couldn’t leave them.
Even now - and he'd been driving less than an hour - he was restless because he wasn’t there, with them, because they were alone in the apartment marked on a mobster’s list as the last known trace of Florence, and no fucking control could stop all the disaster scenarios from playing out in his mind. He couldn’t control himself, but he needed to keep the situation under control, that was helping. When he was there, things seemed to be covered.
If they weren’t already in danger and if a client’s life wasn’t threatened, he would leave. Without a hitter, they would be forced to stay put - Nate would be forced to stop - and it would pay off in the long term… but leaving them now would mean only letting them get killed.
They could pull off Season Six. If he got himself together - and he was still trying to make himself function - they might be able to take Knudsen down. He already dreaded that. And there wasn’t any word, any feeling that could describe what he felt about going after Don Lazzara and the Frac mine at the same time. Except despair.
He was supposed to protect them. To keep them alive from mobsters. And he had to bring a fucking chair into the kitchen, because he wasn’t able to stay on his feet.
The speedometer showed 120. His heartbeat was catching up.
Well, this was functioning. Rage and fear made him more alive again, more concentrated. He would pay for this, very soon, but for now he felt the old synchronicity of the mind and body, the sharpness that he missed for so long. It wasn’t important that even his shoulders were trembling from the effort, and the buzzing in his head went into an alarming frequency - speed was keeping him on the edge. The fall would be nasty, and quick, but now he needed this no matter what cost he’d pay.
His mind and body were occupied with this concentration, but the damn feelings couldn’t be stopped.
Nate had been joking when he said that he was insecure and scared - but now, without a doubt, and with a painful clarity, he realized how right Nate really was. With only one objection - he wasn’t insecure and scared. He was ruined and terrified.
He almost lost control of the car when it hit him, and for a few seconds he was fighting to stay on the road - no traffic around him, thank god - but the anger and fear were still burning their way out and he pressed the gas pedal again.
Yes, he was ruined and terrified - of course he was. Gunshots and dark threw him back into deranged ruin; his right arm was useless, he couldn’t allow himself to even stretch it out completely because of the stitches; he could walk short distances, with a lot of resting; he couldn’t force himself even once to look at the passenger’s seat, scared of whom he might see there. Exhaustion was turning his mind off, a black out was dangerous for everybody near him. Weak, unreliable, still weary and still half mad.
Betsy was right. Any other person would be sitting up in bed right now, happy with the progress, looking forward to the first steps. With a walker.
And yet, he had to decide - now - if they would have a hitter or not. Now. Simple as that.
The roaring of the machine was nothing compared to the roaring in his brain. No pressing the pedal could help to clear that mess, to help him solve that shit. To clear out all that garbage.
What the hell could he do? What the hell Nate was doing?
He laughed. Fuck, the last time he laughed with this choking pain in his heart was before Barclay. Then, the decision to force himself to live just a little longer seemed easier than this one now - to force himself to keep them alive. To function. To help. To protect them.
Ruined and terrified.
He was so absorbed in the turmoil that he only then became aware of the hills and woods all around him - no traffic, no people, just the roaring and screeching of tires. He left all the main roads, choosing smaller ones, until he ended up on a narrow path through the woods. He was alone - finally, completely alone. Free to think, to feel, to listen to his own messages and signs.
And all led to only one thing, one truth.
The difference between their life and death, was him.
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***
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Responsibility was a bitch. So was reality. Together, working as a pair, they seemed very determined to make this as hard as they could, adding aggravating circumstances to his every thought. He was so tired of fighting his own shit, and the shit that surrounded him.
He was tired, by now, of even pressing the gas and holding the wheel, and his concentration couldn’t follow the speed. He slowed down when he started to drift away, driving on auto pilot, not really seeing anything.
He couldn’t win this fight, not in this condition.
He remembered what he had told Florence. No winning. Just refusing to lose.
And just like that, in a second and without warning, he knew what he had to do.
The only thing he could do to start functioning again, was to continue to be ruined and terrified. To stop fighting it, trying to win. That was futile and it would only exhaust him more. He needed his entire strength for other things, other fights. To defeat himself, he only needed a decision.
This time, when he laughed, there wasn’t any pain in that sound.
He fought those feelings, and tried to escape, and the more he struggled, the stronger their grasp was, more devastating. He had beat his own body and forbid it to die - he had analyzed it and learned everything he needed to put it under control. He could do it again, with a much stronger enemy this time - but that enemy was within his reach now. He could be used, as he used that damn morphine pump, studied it and made it work for him; this enemy - him, ruined and terrified - could be sectioned into pieces until it came under his control. That would be enough to avoid losing, and he needed nothing more for now.
He slowed down more, as his mind slowed down too, until the roaring in his head became just a soft whisper. Keeping his eyes open became a heavy effort, falling off the adrenaline high hit him in seconds.
He should go back. He had no idea how long he had been driving, where he was, and how long he could stay awake before he crashed down. No earbud, no phone. He wasn’t used to making such mistakes, dammit. Weariness was blurring everything around him, and he removed his foot from the gas pedal, barely aware of it.
He turned the car off the road and stopped it, turning the engine off.
It was so strange to hear the silence again. He could hear only his own breathing - still uneven and ragged as if he'd ran - but the calmness in his mind finally matched the calmness around him. Mistakes weren’t important anymore - only his reaction to them was. And that was the only difference he needed.
When he managed to unclench his grasp on the wheel, his hands were shaking, again, badly… but this time he just smiled. The almonds had been waiting for them all this time.
Yet almonds couldn’t fix the weariness, couldn’t do anything to the hole in his lung, and make it healed. Just to try, he slowly and carefully reached with his right arm, forcing himself to turn to the passenger’s seat.
The empty seat. No Tapia. No Alejandro.
Before he touched the back seat, the move painfully pulled all the muscles in his chest and shoulder and he had to stop. Easy, just easy… it’d come in time. He only had to wait. Every move of his arm became heavy effort, but this time he just observed it, neutrally, without freaking out; gravity was pulling him with seemingly triple strength and…
Gravity. Fuck.
He slowly leaned forward and rested his forehead on the wheel.
The center of the gravity. That bastard. Now he knew what Nate was trying to do.
That might even work, was his last thought before everything around him became gray and blurred, and finally black.
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