Fic: Rehab
Fic: Rehab
Author: LMX
Fandom: Leverage/Torchwood
Rating: PG-13
Pairings: Eliot Spencer/John Hart, Sophie/Nate
Spoilers: LEVERAGE SEASON 3 FINALE, Torchwood 2.1: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
Warnings: Strong language
AN: So a while back (a *really long while back*) Sheryden asked for John Hart/Eliot Spencer, to which I wrote this in a notebook and failed to write it up for *ages*. So... here it is. As always, I apologise for my inability to write R rated material.
PS: My brain has this amazing skill to give people lol-worthy aliases and not tell me until I've read them for the Nth time. If you spot and can work out why the lols, cookies for you.
PPS: I think I might have missed John's voice/accent here. Too much time listening to Spike has made Rift!Spike's voice a bit blurry, sorry!
--
"So, John." The woman gave him an fake reassuring smile. "Tell me what you're here to achieve today."
"You can't be serious," John rolled his eyes. "You're the one in *my* head, woman. You have to know what this is all in aid of?"
"I'm totally serious," she shot back, over-bright. "Admission that you have a problem is the first stage in recovery."
"Our bosses have decided I'm not behaving in their best interests." John sneered. "So they set me up with you in here."
"For rehabilitation," she clarified, leaning forward in an eager way that showed off her breasts nicely.
"Yeah," John grinned, "Fucking rehab."
"According to your notes," she adjusted her glasses to read the clipboard she held in her lap. "You've been checked in for alcohol, drugs, sex and homicide treatment. That's quite a list. So what do you think is wrong with your behaviour, John?"
John leered gleefully. "Oh, doc. You got no idea."
The doctor held his gaze blandly, as if waiting for him to elaborate. "Tell me, John," she continued when it became obvious he wasn't going to. "When you're not having sex, what do you enjoy doing that involves spending time with other people?"
John pretended to think about it. "Well, I've always enjoy a good kidnapping, even in between all the sex. It's the leather, you know," he added, aside. "Gets me all excited. And massacres are the best time you can have with a big group of people outside sex."
"Anything more... domestic?" she asked, unfazed and still smiling that absent smile.
His heckles neatly jumped to attention. "Say that word around me again, woman, and I won't be quite so well behaved as I have been so far," he snapped.
She frowned, daintily. The expression didn't suit her. "I have on record a... partner," she glanced down to check her clipboard again. "Who shared a home with you a few years back. An agent currently going by the name of Captain Jack Harkness..."
"Captain?" John scoffed before resetting back to the previous levels of anger. "Look, no. That was... non-consensual. We were trapped in a time loop and... Just take that off my record. Now."
"Alright," the doctor said soothingly, making John think unsettlingly of his mother. She made a note on her clipboard that John was sure had nothing to do with taking that off his record. "So other than..." she hesitated as he started to growl. "Do you feel you have connected with any of your lovers?"
"Oh yes." John grinned, appeased. "There was lots of... connecting."
"Do you remember their names for example?" she pressed.
"Now why would I want to do that?" John asked, settling back into his chair casually.
The doc looked up and met his gaze seriously for a second. "It shows a sense of respect for someone you've shared something with."
"Most of them don't last long enough for respect, sweetheart." John chuckled, amused by his own joke.
"Indulge me."
John made a show of thinking hard. "There was this one guy, built like a broomstick with arms. Eddington I think his name was."
"Someone not featured in first year science history, John." She raised an eyebrow, challenging.
"There was one guy on Retro Cardiff, did amazing things with his hands. Oh, and the Rhoeedran over on the Boe Penninsula - tenticles, you know. Nothing like it."
"Let's get past all this objectifying, John," she chastised. Now she was reminding him of the second year science teacher he'd been terrified of. He didn't like the feeling much. "Name one person for me who you cared for, respected - perhaps someone you saw more than once?"
"I told you," he returned sharply, "I don't remember names."
"But you can think of someone?" she pressed.
"Maybe," John scowled. "Not to say I didn't try to kill him, mind. Or that we didn't fuck each other's brains out after."
"But you respected him?"
John rolled his eyes, scowling. "Sure, let's say that."
"Well then." Her grin was sickeningly bright. "This is progress."
-
Eliot Spencer considered himself cold and hard. He'd been in the business for a good fifteen years now, and he'd caught a lucky break getting in with someone as secure as Moreau. The job was dirty, but it kept him out of the gutter and showed off all his strongest talents to their fullest. He was slowly making himself indispensable to the man's operations. He was also learning not to ask questions, so when an ugly job like this one landed on his metaphorical desk he just took it and did what he had to do.
Research was essential for an efficient kill, and Eliot was never less than entirely efficient. He might have skirted the name of the soon-to-be orphaned two year old, and the news story about the wife who had so mysteriously disappeared. But then it wasn't exactly relevant material.
(Everyone suspected the wife had been having an affair, her death was supposed to be a warning to her District Attorney husband that he was getting a bit too close to Moreau's operation. Moreau hadn't know Eliot well enough back then, and she'd made Eliot's point quite elegantly - he wasn't a butcher, or an enforcer, he made people disappear)
He had plenty of research, even without looking into that to make the man disappear just as easily as his wife. Any maybe this wouldn't have been necessary if it hadn't been for his little tantrum with the wife, maybe the man would have gotten the point and backed off, but he wasn't going to look too carefully at that either.
The only thing niggling at him was the unknown variable. Throughout his career every single job had at least one, but none quite like this. The new addition to the mark's bodyguard retinue was a complete unknown, with an obviously made-up name, terrible taste in clothes and behaviour beyond anything that might be considered acceptable in the most liberal states.
He wasn't entirely sure, but he thought the guy might have slept with his boss. He *was* entirely sure he'd slept with at least two of the other body guards, they talked about him with some kind of awe in the bar after hours.
And it wasn't just that he didn't exist as far as they system was concerned, that was easy enough to do, it was that there was no trace of him *anywhere* that Eliot could find. That either made him very new or very dangerous. And he didn't look new.
Wary of the unknown, Eliot's plan was to target the man when he was home, John Johnson was off doing whatever it was he did when he wasn't working and the nightshift guards were lazing around downstairs. There was an easy route in through an upstairs window with only a little bit of climbing to reach it, and once he was in through that it was only a couple of steps across the room, make the guy dead and leave with his body.
Getting in the window had been as easy as he'd expected, he was getting pretty good at scrambling up the sides of buildings these days, but it took a little bit more effort than he'd anticipated walking passed the obsessively pressed Army uniform handing on the front of the closet door, the next day's power suit hanging on the other door.
Perhaps it was that unexpected pause that meant he wasn't aware of the third person in the room until he turned to approach the bed. It was sloppy really, could have gotten him killed five times over, but all it got him was a broad too-white smile and a drawled: "Well look what piece of pretty just dragged itself in the window."
From there, things went the direction of the knife in the gut he'd been expecting first, not that 'John' didn't get anything for his troubles, but he had the nightguards on his side and the mark screaming bloody murder while trying not to look like he's been in bed with one of his bodyguards.
Eliot still didn't know where John had pulled the knife from, standing there in his all-togethers, bleeding from half a dozen cuts and completely blase about it. So he was kneeling between two guards, shoulders still in place only by benefit of him being quite supple, bleeding from the knife wound in his gut and waiting for the one that ended it all when the guy, John, turns around and says "I've been waiting for you for weeks. I'm fucking bored so stiff I'm leaning towards letting these boys here take you apart. It took you long enough."
And Eliot entered the twilight zone.
-
"So you saved his life?" the doctor interrupted abruptly.
"Well that was the mission. One of the morons from accounts was joyriding on his wife's wrist strap - dirty bastard." John grinned. "And his affair with the attorney's wife meant the kid that would have stopped the guy killing his target never got born, so I had to go in and fix things."
"But you could have just let him die?" she pressed, a little frown creasing her brow cutely.
"Important things in the lad's future apparently." John shrugged absently. "They both needed to make it through the night. It was bad enough going through and fixing everything the baby would have affected in the couple of months it would have been alive. Don't know how many Agents it woulda taken to fix the timeline losing either one of those guys. Heavy hitters the both."
"So you respected them both? For the worth of their life?"
"That's a leading question," John shot back, scowling.
"I'm not judging you, John," she soothed, echoing his mother again. "This is about working out why this problem exists and working to rectify it."
John crossed his arms and leant back in the chair. "Respect for the worth of their lives is... it's the first line of the handbook," he replied grudgingly. "I *like* my job."
"What was the assassin's name?" she asked.
"He never told me his name. He was an assassin. Secretive, like."
-
"I'm Eliot Spencer."
The stranger - ever more strange - had Eliot's blood all over his hands from where he was patching him up, Eliot figured giving him a name was the least he could do. Hell, if the guy had been waiting for him he probably already knew his name, though he didn't know how that could be.
"What?" he replied blandly.
"Eliot Spencer," Eliot repeated. "It's my name."
"Right. Right." The guy shook his head, then offered his bloody hand. "Rob Nottingham."
Eliot resisted the urge to roll his eyes. Yeah, like that was a real name.
Twenty minutes later, Eliot really didn't care that it wasn't a real name.
-
"Does violence heighten the enjoyment of sex for you, John?"
John scowled as his very detailed description was interrupted. "Look, you know all this. You're a visualisation of my own consciousness, with additional training to act as a shrink. Why don't you know the answer to these questions?"
"Does it bother you that I know so much about you?" she asked, with a smile that terrified John.
"I haven't been outside my own head, or this calendar date for nearly a month. How is talking about this stuff with myself going to get me out of here?" John demanded, standing to kick the wall viciously.
"Did you see him again after that?" the doctor asked, still smiling in that absent way that suggested she was thinking about something much worse.
"Yes, alright?" John growled back. "I saw him six different times, and we fought and fucked every time."
"What about later in his lifetime?" she pressed. "Did you know he had undergone some rehabilitation himself? The computer provides quite a large amount of data on his recovery."
"Poor schmuck." John commiserated.
"I think we should take a day trip and visit him," she decided, giving him a speculative look. "You complained about being locked in, perhaps this will help?"
"Do I have a choice?"
"Don't try so hard to sound like you don't like the idea, John." Her smile was all-knowing, and made John's skin crawl. "I can see the interest all over you."
"If the only thing you had to look at was an aspect of your consciousness, you'd be ready to fuck anything that moved too," John growled back.
"Hmm..." she frowned. "Perhaps it is too soon to be..."
"Alright, I'm interested!" John shouted. "Fine!"
"Good. I do think this will be good for you, John."
-
Eliot was still waiting for Parker to haul her acquired gold through the terminal building when he spotted John standing by the baggage reclaim, looking not a day older than when he'd seen him last - the bastard - and leering at him with clear intent.
Eliot quickly checked the position of each member of his team and headed over, a little wary. However much fun he'd had in John's company, that was from a lifetime ago when casual violence had still been his aphrodisiac of choice. He didn't want one of those games to flow over to one of the team, especially not since Moreau's dethronement was going to lead to a serious power vacuum in high dark places and John was just psycho enough to try and fill that space by killing the five of them.
"Hi," Eliot greeted when he was close enough, not stepping into reach. He still wasn't convinced he'd ever heard the man's real name, and calling him John in his head was just habit. It wasn't like John ever used his name in return.
"Been a while, sweet-cheeks." John grinned, looking Eliot up and down with something dirty in his eyes. "There's a rumour going around that you've been rehabilitated."
"Old news, asshole," Eliot shot back. "Not killed anyone in at least..." he stumbled to a stop. "Twenty-four hours," he finished with a sick grin, uncomfortable with the pride the memory of that carnage filled him with.
"Eliot?" Sophie's voice behind him made his stomach do an uncomfortable twist, two different lives crossing paths and making him feel worse for the comparisons his mind was providing between what had gone on in that warehouse and the raid John had joined him on a while back.
John's eyes widened a little as Sophie draped herself over Eliot's shoulder casually, and Eliot's hands itched for a weapon. "Well hello gorgeous," John smarmed. "We need to get to know each other better."
"Problem, Eliot?" Sophie whispered in his ear.
"Not yet," he replied tersely. "This guy helped me get out from under Moreau, back when."
"You went back to the big bad?" John asked, something vaguely like real concern in his eyes.
"No," Eliot answered bluntly. Until he was sure what John wanted, and whose side he was on, he wasn't going to tell him what they'd just done to 'the big bad'.
"Well... good." John replied, forcefully uncaring, as if he'd just realised he'd shown his hand.
"You still sleeping with anything that moves?" Eliot asked, feeling the need to continue the conversation, or at least not willing to turn his back on John just yet.
"Well, that depends how resistant your lovely friend here is to the idea." John took a step forwards and Eliot cringed when Nate stepped up from his other side with a sharp:
"I think not."
"Well then," John grinned and Eliot relaxed a touch. "How about it, Eliot?"
Eliot wavered for a moment. "I'll be in Boston," he replied, almost despite himself. "Look me up."
-
"Oh John!" the doc was almost buzzing with something. "You have no idea how impressive that was! Given the setting and your record I expected to have to use the shock collar a lot more than that. And you remembered his name!"
"The other one said it," John frowned at her enthusiasm.
"But you *remembered* it, John." She grinned. "You retained and recalled. That's important."
"If you say so."
"Now," the doctor took a seat and gestured to the other. "Let's get to the bottom of this Captain Jack Harkness situation."
- - - -
Nearly two years later, John wished he could have had a chance to tell his mental shrink that jealousy was a far better for motivator for remembering a name than any kind of respect. Ianto Jones was going to stick in his mind for a very long time.
Author: LMX
Fandom: Leverage/Torchwood
Rating: PG-13
Pairings: Eliot Spencer/John Hart, Sophie/Nate
Spoilers: LEVERAGE SEASON 3 FINALE, Torchwood 2.1: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
Warnings: Strong language
AN: So a while back (a *really long while back*) Sheryden asked for John Hart/Eliot Spencer, to which I wrote this in a notebook and failed to write it up for *ages*. So... here it is. As always, I apologise for my inability to write R rated material.
PS: My brain has this amazing skill to give people lol-worthy aliases and not tell me until I've read them for the Nth time. If you spot and can work out why the lols, cookies for you.
PPS: I think I might have missed John's voice/accent here. Too much time listening to Spike has made Rift!Spike's voice a bit blurry, sorry!
--
"So, John." The woman gave him an fake reassuring smile. "Tell me what you're here to achieve today."
"You can't be serious," John rolled his eyes. "You're the one in *my* head, woman. You have to know what this is all in aid of?"
"I'm totally serious," she shot back, over-bright. "Admission that you have a problem is the first stage in recovery."
"Our bosses have decided I'm not behaving in their best interests." John sneered. "So they set me up with you in here."
"For rehabilitation," she clarified, leaning forward in an eager way that showed off her breasts nicely.
"Yeah," John grinned, "Fucking rehab."
"According to your notes," she adjusted her glasses to read the clipboard she held in her lap. "You've been checked in for alcohol, drugs, sex and homicide treatment. That's quite a list. So what do you think is wrong with your behaviour, John?"
John leered gleefully. "Oh, doc. You got no idea."
The doctor held his gaze blandly, as if waiting for him to elaborate. "Tell me, John," she continued when it became obvious he wasn't going to. "When you're not having sex, what do you enjoy doing that involves spending time with other people?"
John pretended to think about it. "Well, I've always enjoy a good kidnapping, even in between all the sex. It's the leather, you know," he added, aside. "Gets me all excited. And massacres are the best time you can have with a big group of people outside sex."
"Anything more... domestic?" she asked, unfazed and still smiling that absent smile.
His heckles neatly jumped to attention. "Say that word around me again, woman, and I won't be quite so well behaved as I have been so far," he snapped.
She frowned, daintily. The expression didn't suit her. "I have on record a... partner," she glanced down to check her clipboard again. "Who shared a home with you a few years back. An agent currently going by the name of Captain Jack Harkness..."
"Captain?" John scoffed before resetting back to the previous levels of anger. "Look, no. That was... non-consensual. We were trapped in a time loop and... Just take that off my record. Now."
"Alright," the doctor said soothingly, making John think unsettlingly of his mother. She made a note on her clipboard that John was sure had nothing to do with taking that off his record. "So other than..." she hesitated as he started to growl. "Do you feel you have connected with any of your lovers?"
"Oh yes." John grinned, appeased. "There was lots of... connecting."
"Do you remember their names for example?" she pressed.
"Now why would I want to do that?" John asked, settling back into his chair casually.
The doc looked up and met his gaze seriously for a second. "It shows a sense of respect for someone you've shared something with."
"Most of them don't last long enough for respect, sweetheart." John chuckled, amused by his own joke.
"Indulge me."
John made a show of thinking hard. "There was this one guy, built like a broomstick with arms. Eddington I think his name was."
"Someone not featured in first year science history, John." She raised an eyebrow, challenging.
"There was one guy on Retro Cardiff, did amazing things with his hands. Oh, and the Rhoeedran over on the Boe Penninsula - tenticles, you know. Nothing like it."
"Let's get past all this objectifying, John," she chastised. Now she was reminding him of the second year science teacher he'd been terrified of. He didn't like the feeling much. "Name one person for me who you cared for, respected - perhaps someone you saw more than once?"
"I told you," he returned sharply, "I don't remember names."
"But you can think of someone?" she pressed.
"Maybe," John scowled. "Not to say I didn't try to kill him, mind. Or that we didn't fuck each other's brains out after."
"But you respected him?"
John rolled his eyes, scowling. "Sure, let's say that."
"Well then." Her grin was sickeningly bright. "This is progress."
-
Eliot Spencer considered himself cold and hard. He'd been in the business for a good fifteen years now, and he'd caught a lucky break getting in with someone as secure as Moreau. The job was dirty, but it kept him out of the gutter and showed off all his strongest talents to their fullest. He was slowly making himself indispensable to the man's operations. He was also learning not to ask questions, so when an ugly job like this one landed on his metaphorical desk he just took it and did what he had to do.
Research was essential for an efficient kill, and Eliot was never less than entirely efficient. He might have skirted the name of the soon-to-be orphaned two year old, and the news story about the wife who had so mysteriously disappeared. But then it wasn't exactly relevant material.
(Everyone suspected the wife had been having an affair, her death was supposed to be a warning to her District Attorney husband that he was getting a bit too close to Moreau's operation. Moreau hadn't know Eliot well enough back then, and she'd made Eliot's point quite elegantly - he wasn't a butcher, or an enforcer, he made people disappear)
He had plenty of research, even without looking into that to make the man disappear just as easily as his wife. Any maybe this wouldn't have been necessary if it hadn't been for his little tantrum with the wife, maybe the man would have gotten the point and backed off, but he wasn't going to look too carefully at that either.
The only thing niggling at him was the unknown variable. Throughout his career every single job had at least one, but none quite like this. The new addition to the mark's bodyguard retinue was a complete unknown, with an obviously made-up name, terrible taste in clothes and behaviour beyond anything that might be considered acceptable in the most liberal states.
He wasn't entirely sure, but he thought the guy might have slept with his boss. He *was* entirely sure he'd slept with at least two of the other body guards, they talked about him with some kind of awe in the bar after hours.
And it wasn't just that he didn't exist as far as they system was concerned, that was easy enough to do, it was that there was no trace of him *anywhere* that Eliot could find. That either made him very new or very dangerous. And he didn't look new.
Wary of the unknown, Eliot's plan was to target the man when he was home, John Johnson was off doing whatever it was he did when he wasn't working and the nightshift guards were lazing around downstairs. There was an easy route in through an upstairs window with only a little bit of climbing to reach it, and once he was in through that it was only a couple of steps across the room, make the guy dead and leave with his body.
Getting in the window had been as easy as he'd expected, he was getting pretty good at scrambling up the sides of buildings these days, but it took a little bit more effort than he'd anticipated walking passed the obsessively pressed Army uniform handing on the front of the closet door, the next day's power suit hanging on the other door.
Perhaps it was that unexpected pause that meant he wasn't aware of the third person in the room until he turned to approach the bed. It was sloppy really, could have gotten him killed five times over, but all it got him was a broad too-white smile and a drawled: "Well look what piece of pretty just dragged itself in the window."
From there, things went the direction of the knife in the gut he'd been expecting first, not that 'John' didn't get anything for his troubles, but he had the nightguards on his side and the mark screaming bloody murder while trying not to look like he's been in bed with one of his bodyguards.
Eliot still didn't know where John had pulled the knife from, standing there in his all-togethers, bleeding from half a dozen cuts and completely blase about it. So he was kneeling between two guards, shoulders still in place only by benefit of him being quite supple, bleeding from the knife wound in his gut and waiting for the one that ended it all when the guy, John, turns around and says "I've been waiting for you for weeks. I'm fucking bored so stiff I'm leaning towards letting these boys here take you apart. It took you long enough."
And Eliot entered the twilight zone.
-
"So you saved his life?" the doctor interrupted abruptly.
"Well that was the mission. One of the morons from accounts was joyriding on his wife's wrist strap - dirty bastard." John grinned. "And his affair with the attorney's wife meant the kid that would have stopped the guy killing his target never got born, so I had to go in and fix things."
"But you could have just let him die?" she pressed, a little frown creasing her brow cutely.
"Important things in the lad's future apparently." John shrugged absently. "They both needed to make it through the night. It was bad enough going through and fixing everything the baby would have affected in the couple of months it would have been alive. Don't know how many Agents it woulda taken to fix the timeline losing either one of those guys. Heavy hitters the both."
"So you respected them both? For the worth of their life?"
"That's a leading question," John shot back, scowling.
"I'm not judging you, John," she soothed, echoing his mother again. "This is about working out why this problem exists and working to rectify it."
John crossed his arms and leant back in the chair. "Respect for the worth of their lives is... it's the first line of the handbook," he replied grudgingly. "I *like* my job."
"What was the assassin's name?" she asked.
"He never told me his name. He was an assassin. Secretive, like."
-
"I'm Eliot Spencer."
The stranger - ever more strange - had Eliot's blood all over his hands from where he was patching him up, Eliot figured giving him a name was the least he could do. Hell, if the guy had been waiting for him he probably already knew his name, though he didn't know how that could be.
"What?" he replied blandly.
"Eliot Spencer," Eliot repeated. "It's my name."
"Right. Right." The guy shook his head, then offered his bloody hand. "Rob Nottingham."
Eliot resisted the urge to roll his eyes. Yeah, like that was a real name.
Twenty minutes later, Eliot really didn't care that it wasn't a real name.
-
"Does violence heighten the enjoyment of sex for you, John?"
John scowled as his very detailed description was interrupted. "Look, you know all this. You're a visualisation of my own consciousness, with additional training to act as a shrink. Why don't you know the answer to these questions?"
"Does it bother you that I know so much about you?" she asked, with a smile that terrified John.
"I haven't been outside my own head, or this calendar date for nearly a month. How is talking about this stuff with myself going to get me out of here?" John demanded, standing to kick the wall viciously.
"Did you see him again after that?" the doctor asked, still smiling in that absent way that suggested she was thinking about something much worse.
"Yes, alright?" John growled back. "I saw him six different times, and we fought and fucked every time."
"What about later in his lifetime?" she pressed. "Did you know he had undergone some rehabilitation himself? The computer provides quite a large amount of data on his recovery."
"Poor schmuck." John commiserated.
"I think we should take a day trip and visit him," she decided, giving him a speculative look. "You complained about being locked in, perhaps this will help?"
"Do I have a choice?"
"Don't try so hard to sound like you don't like the idea, John." Her smile was all-knowing, and made John's skin crawl. "I can see the interest all over you."
"If the only thing you had to look at was an aspect of your consciousness, you'd be ready to fuck anything that moved too," John growled back.
"Hmm..." she frowned. "Perhaps it is too soon to be..."
"Alright, I'm interested!" John shouted. "Fine!"
"Good. I do think this will be good for you, John."
-
Eliot was still waiting for Parker to haul her acquired gold through the terminal building when he spotted John standing by the baggage reclaim, looking not a day older than when he'd seen him last - the bastard - and leering at him with clear intent.
Eliot quickly checked the position of each member of his team and headed over, a little wary. However much fun he'd had in John's company, that was from a lifetime ago when casual violence had still been his aphrodisiac of choice. He didn't want one of those games to flow over to one of the team, especially not since Moreau's dethronement was going to lead to a serious power vacuum in high dark places and John was just psycho enough to try and fill that space by killing the five of them.
"Hi," Eliot greeted when he was close enough, not stepping into reach. He still wasn't convinced he'd ever heard the man's real name, and calling him John in his head was just habit. It wasn't like John ever used his name in return.
"Been a while, sweet-cheeks." John grinned, looking Eliot up and down with something dirty in his eyes. "There's a rumour going around that you've been rehabilitated."
"Old news, asshole," Eliot shot back. "Not killed anyone in at least..." he stumbled to a stop. "Twenty-four hours," he finished with a sick grin, uncomfortable with the pride the memory of that carnage filled him with.
"Eliot?" Sophie's voice behind him made his stomach do an uncomfortable twist, two different lives crossing paths and making him feel worse for the comparisons his mind was providing between what had gone on in that warehouse and the raid John had joined him on a while back.
John's eyes widened a little as Sophie draped herself over Eliot's shoulder casually, and Eliot's hands itched for a weapon. "Well hello gorgeous," John smarmed. "We need to get to know each other better."
"Problem, Eliot?" Sophie whispered in his ear.
"Not yet," he replied tersely. "This guy helped me get out from under Moreau, back when."
"You went back to the big bad?" John asked, something vaguely like real concern in his eyes.
"No," Eliot answered bluntly. Until he was sure what John wanted, and whose side he was on, he wasn't going to tell him what they'd just done to 'the big bad'.
"Well... good." John replied, forcefully uncaring, as if he'd just realised he'd shown his hand.
"You still sleeping with anything that moves?" Eliot asked, feeling the need to continue the conversation, or at least not willing to turn his back on John just yet.
"Well, that depends how resistant your lovely friend here is to the idea." John took a step forwards and Eliot cringed when Nate stepped up from his other side with a sharp:
"I think not."
"Well then," John grinned and Eliot relaxed a touch. "How about it, Eliot?"
Eliot wavered for a moment. "I'll be in Boston," he replied, almost despite himself. "Look me up."
-
"Oh John!" the doc was almost buzzing with something. "You have no idea how impressive that was! Given the setting and your record I expected to have to use the shock collar a lot more than that. And you remembered his name!"
"The other one said it," John frowned at her enthusiasm.
"But you *remembered* it, John." She grinned. "You retained and recalled. That's important."
"If you say so."
"Now," the doctor took a seat and gestured to the other. "Let's get to the bottom of this Captain Jack Harkness situation."
- - - -
Nearly two years later, John wished he could have had a chance to tell his mental shrink that jealousy was a far better for motivator for remembering a name than any kind of respect. Ianto Jones was going to stick in his mind for a very long time.