[Fic] Gaze In Your Mirror (Leverage/Once Upon a Time) for whiskyinmind
Title: Gaze In Your Mirror (and see yourself)
Author: mizzy2k
Written for: whiskyinmind for the 2011 Leverage Secret Santa
Rating: T
Characters: Eliot Spencer/Emma Swan
Crossover fandom: Once Upon a Time
Spoilers: Vague reference to "The Experimental Job".
Warnings: Dead body.
Disclaimer: Nothing is mine.
Summary: Eliot gets a call out of the blue from an ex-flame, bounty hunter Emma Swan.
Notes: LOVE YOU BB. <3
________________________________________
Gaze in your Mirror (and see yourself)
A Leverage/Once Upon a Time crossover for whiskyinmind
Eliot's life isn't a book.
Sometimes he thinks that someone should be able to pick him up and read the lies of his life across the surface of his skin; each line, each frown, each scar holds a greater clarity of his sins than any block of text ever could.
Nate's the closest to managing it, but he deciphers Eliot from his pauses and his silences; the spaces that Eliot leaves in his life speak more to the mastermind than words. It's a relief that Eliot doesn't have to hide who he is from these people.
He hates having to show people he gives a damn about that his heart is a dark place.
Eliot has sins in his past more indelible than ink in a book. Unlike a book-where sins stay locked in the past on an earlier page-his mistakes reoccur. Eliot always learns his lessons, but learning a lesson doesn't always stop the consequences following him like a smell that won't ever wash clean from his fingertips.
Even though she's a bundle of consequences, he could never think of Emma Swan as a sin.
Eliot should have known they were a bad combination from the start. She was cocky and a loner, too smart for her own good, sassy when it counted and straightforward the rest of the time. Eliot could have fallen in love if he could still remember how, but Aimee was a page long past, one Eliot could never open again.
When he first encountered Emma Swan, he was fresh from the field, raw and open from the things he had done; forgetting the world was high on Eliot's priority list.
He should have stayed away from Emma Swan in the process.
She was an orphan with a chip on her shoulder from being shuttled around foster homes, and she compensated for the constant misperception of weakness from the men in her field with butch jackets and a pair of killer heels.
When he first met Emma Swan, she was bright and shiny and like oxygen to his guilt-ridden brain. Her touch made him forget the world. Her pink mouth grazed the stubble on his jaw as she whispered dirty promises, promises that sounded like a dare, dares that were a lifeline to a man drowning in himself. She was moments of oblivion in a too-noisy skull, a gift of memory for Eliot to linger over later, a favorite time to mentally revisit when the voices of his victims were too loud.
He left her.
Of course he did. If he stayed too long he would have destroyed all that was good in her, piece by piece. He left her in a tangle of bed sheets after a whirlwind month and he didn't look back.
He's not surprised that Emma is the one to find him now, years later. It's her job to find people who don't want to be found.
He takes the call when it comes in on his cell even though the number is hidden, because sometimes those kind of calls save his life, even if they just give him a ten-second head start on someone who wants his head on a stick.
Eliot thinks he should have remembered Emma's office was based in Boston. Even back when he knew her, she spent so much of her time across country on some midnight run or other that it was difficult to remember she had roots in the world and wasn't a creation of Eliot's mind. If he could come up with a dream woman, he's always thought it might be someone like Emma.
Maybe his brain would have preferred her less broken, but then, Eliot's not met a single whole person in his life. They're mythical, fairytale creatures and fairy tales aren't real.
When he hits the connect key, he knows who it is even though Emma's voice is a little huskier than he remembers. Her voice is a trigger for a slew of memories. One hits like a bullet to the gut: He quit smoking for her. It was a filthy habit picked up after Rwanda that intensified in Kosovo. Surviving then hadn't felt like an option. Living had seemed incomprehensible. But Emma had a distaste of the smell of smoke, and Eliot had given up far more for a woman before.
Sometimes when he wanders past someone with lung cancer, he mentally thanks Emma for that push. A lot of Eliot's life has the subtext There But For The Grace of God Go I. He can't escape running into the same old faces, the same old crimes; he's too enmeshed in the unsavoury networks of the world to ever truly escape.
All the running in the world can't stop him from running into the consequences of his actions, and Emma's a consequence so he doesn't hang up. He owes her more than not slamming the disconnect key, but Eliot always pays his debts and it's a step in the right direction.
She doesn't say much on the phone. Her name, a cursory attempts at phatics which Eliot shoots down (his aim is always good), and a careful phrase which is superb manipulation on her part. She knows his weaknesses, and knows what he does to people that abuse them, so if she's pushing one of them then it has to be a dire situation.
"I need you," she says, quiet and strong. Monotone and forced like she knows it's a low blow. Three words Eliot can never resist.
She texts him a location.
Hardison and Nate both like to rib Eliot at his somewhat complicated relationship with technology, which is ridiculous. Complicated is how Eliot's life rolls, apart from his relationship with his fists, which is straightforward and pure - righteous fury and instant satisfaction. They're wrong. Eliot's very good with certain types of technology.
Eliot's technological skills are easily explainable: do you use that technology out in the field, where your brothers in arms are dying around you? Yes means he can handle it with ease, no means probably not.
He thinks, it's a nice life where you don't have to consider that sort of origin, and then feels bad. Because he would never in a million years want Hardison or Nate to ever have even a hint of that kind of life. If Eliot has to raise hell on earth to manage that, then that's what he'll do.
The location Emma texts him is a pair of co-ordinates, and that's Eliot's language. He's there in fifteen minutes, and does a perimeter sweep of the building to check if Emma's alone. There are two security cameras along the edges, one with a decent look of the inside of the building; Eliot takes the time to take the picture of the rear of the camera with the 14x magnification digital camera Hardison insists he carry, double checks his aim is steady enough to read the serial numbers, uploads the pictures to the cloud and then he calls Hardison.
Hardison does his usual flail, declaiming Eliot for waking him up from his beauty sleep, but Eliot can hear the tinny, distinctive sound of a WOW raid in the background, and cuts off Hardison's tirade mid-stride.
"I'm not your IT monkey, man," Hardison says, when Eliot reads him the numbers of the camera and asks him to take the footage and wipe the source data. "I'm a human being, I got feelings, real feelings. A fellow like me's got needs, you know, I'm not just here to-"
"There's three crates of that orange gunk you like in it for you," Eliot says.
"Next time, lead with that. I-"
Eliot cuts him off after curtly asking for the footage to be burned onto DVD. "Three crates, mind," Hardison squeaks through the receiver, knowing Eliot enough to know the disconnect is coming.
Satisfied that the perimeter's secure and the camera's nothing to worry about, Eliot makes sure he's ready for any sort of action and pushes through the side door.
Emma's in the centre of the room, her back against a pillar - a defensible position. She relaxes on seeing him. She looks good, blonde now; peroxide must be her new level of defense against the idiots who continue to underestimate her. Even though she's just as hot as he remembers, he's not distracted enough not to clock the dead body on the floor.
He's protective enough of his own sanity to deny that he saw the tilt of the dead man's chin before the soft curve of her cheek. Denial is a weapon in his arsenal that he only likes to use sparingly; sometimes there are lines he skates exceedingly close to in life that require a buffer - like denial - to make sure he doesn't push straight through them.
Eliot's gone over enough lines for one lifetime, after all.
"You look good," he says, stepping out into the centre of the room. It's some kind of abandoned house that's fallen into disrepair. He can already see signs of what has happened. There's been some sort of a struggle. He can trace the pattern of footsteps through the dirt. There's a smear of blood against the pillar Emma's leaning against, and he really hopes it's not hers.
"For a killer," Emma says, and although she's meeting his eyes there's a hiccup in her voice, an echo of self-loathing that Eliot empathises with so sharply that he silently swallows it back.
"What happened?" His tone is as kind as he can make it. He wonders if it's for his own sake, because there's a sheen on Emma's forehead, and the pulse in her neck is visible; if her stress deepens she'll go into shock.
"He tried to kill me."
"Okay."
Eliot looks around. There's a rotten sofa in the corner, still half hidden with a dust cover. He heads over to it, yanks it off and ignores the small, dark shape that scurries away that makes the skin on his neck crawl. He might be conditioned to work in small spaces where anything might lurk, but it doesn't mean he has to like it.
Once upon a time, in a darker place than even this, that small dark shape might have been his dinner.
He spreads the mouldy dust sheet out like it's a tablecloth. It flutters down, settling over the debris like this is a really messed up picnic. "Help me get him loaded."
Emma swallows visibly but moves automatically to the guy's feet. She's always been brave.
"ETD?"
"Two hours ago."
"So we've got time before rigor sets in. Great." Eliot pulls out his wallet, extracts a twenty dollar bill, and curls it as quickly as he can into a flower shape before bending down and opening the man's mouth. He pushes it in. "On three," he says, moving his hands below the guy's shoulders. Emma meets his gaze over the body and won't let him take an unfair share of the weight. As the guy's body hits the sheet, Emma pulls her hands back, like she's burnt herself.
"Do I want to know what the money is for?" Emma asks, absently brushing her hands against her jeans. She'll burn them, Eliot knows. Just like he burned everything he wore the first time he killed someone outside the army. He hates that she has to go through anything that he's ever gone through. She's much too good for that.
"It's a calling card. A low-time loan shark from the Belfast Doyles - he'll be dealt with soon enough, I'd imagine. He's footing enough corruption locally for the moment that one more corrupt stiff will pass unnoticed. Is that your car outside?"
"I parked it near a CCTV camera."
"Already dealt with."
Emma looks at him, her expression unreadable. "Eliot, I-" she starts.
Eliot doesn't want to hear it. Not til this is sorted. When she's safe, then he can cope with her telling him how much he let her down leaving him.
"Let's get this done before rigor sets in."
She hesitates, and then nods.
________________________________________
He takes her for a drink after they've lain the body out under a bridge that's in Doyle territory. He doesn't take her to McRory's; Tara will be there, and she's an unknown factor still. Eliot doesn't like unknown factors. Besides, it's not alcohol that Emma needs.
She looks at him askance when he ushers her into the booth of a tiny, too-bright café, and even more skeptical when the hot chocolate cream is sprinkled with cinnamon. "I can't believe you remembered," she says, looking at him.
"I have trouble forgetting things." She looks at him much too astutely at that; he buries his nose in his cup of black coffee, because surely he's still a book and she can read the guilt in the lines on his face.
"Aren't you going to ask me if he deserved it?"
When Eliot looks up, she's looking directly at him, hands folded on the dirty table, and she's not flinching. Emma always takes things head on.
"I presumed if you felt like he didn't, you'd be in a jail cell right now." Eliot puts the coffee down. He was hiding behind it, and she doesn't deserve that. "No one ever deserves it. Doesn't mean that stops things from happening like they do."
"I appreciate you not lying to me."
"I presumed that's why you called me out of all your local contacts."
"I don't have many local contacts," she tells him, wrinkling her nose. "And the ones I have, let's just say they have trouble lifting a bag of flour. Two hundred pounds of dead guy's a different matter."
"You, making friends with girly girls?"
"I appreciate you continuing after the first three words of that sentence." She smiles. It's got less humor in it than Eliot's a hundred per cent happy with, but life's a Rolling Stone song and you don't always get what you want. "It's recon. There's a guy cheating on his wife."
"Isn't there always in your line of work?"
"It's the age old song. Killing someone, though..." Her fingers tremble against the handle of her mug. Emma stares at them like they're betraying her. "That's new."
Her voice pitches down a few tones at the last couple of words, and Eliot feels bad then, because this is what she wanted to talk about earlier. Not the subject of them, which Eliot's always felt a shade of guilt about. Leaving her without a goodbye... It's getting to be a pattern of his, and Eliot hates being predictable.
"You've killed people before." Emma breaks right through his silence, and doesn't bother couching it in general terms. "How do you live with it? How-" She ducks her head, looks out into the street, even though it's too dark to see through the grime on the window. She inhales brokenly, and then looks back at him. "How am I supposed to be brave now?"
The last question would be a whisper from anyone else, but Emma Swan is brave and in another life, oh, Eliot would be the biggest idiot in the world for walking away.
In that other life, he wouldn't have so much blood to his name.
He lays his hands flat on the table, because otherwise he might do some damage to himself' he can't give her back the grace of a proper goodbye back when, but he can give her this. "You live. You wake up in the morning and you shower and you brush your teeth. You get dressed and you eat breakfast and you go out there and live. And you remember them. You spend time every day remembering them, because you don't know who else they had in their life to remember them, so you honor their life by remembering them and by living your life because they can't live theirs. And you do your job."
Her mouth presses together. "Okay."
"And as for being brave?" He looks at her unflinchingly. "The sole definition of bravery isn't signing up to war and shooting guns. Sometimes bravery is waking up every morning and not putting a bullet in your brain. Sometimes bravery is just doing your job. Let this stop you, and you dishonor the ones you've killed in order to keep living."
She looks thoughtful, and an ordinary person would know what to say next to make her feel better. Eliot's never learned how. The only thing he knows is how to tell the truth.
She means enough for him to try to fake it. "I'm," Eliot says, because he's supposed to, "Before. Us. You and me. Me leaving you. I'm sorry about-"
"No, you're not." Emma looks at him much too perceptively. Eliot is sorry; it doesn't change that he'd do the same thing again to her in a heart beat. "Eliot, I'm an adult. You don't have to wrap my heart in cotton wool. I knew what I was getting into when we had sex. For starters, if I'd been looking for a long-term partner, I wouldn't have jumped into bed repeatedly with a cabbage-hat."
Eliot shoots her a look, and Emma's grin turns a little feral. "How did you-"
"You guys have a very distinctive stance," Emma says.
Eliot stares in disbelief, and regrets ever teaching her that phrase. "A distinctive stance," he repeats, raising his eyebrows and folding his arms.
"Well," Emma corrects, "very distinctive night terrors."
The sass is enough of a sign for him to know that she's not okay right now, but... she'll be okay. Maybe. Someday.
It's a better story ending than Eliot will ever get. Eliot isn't a book, after all, and if it turns out later he is, well, he can be a work-in-progress.
Happy endings are for people done with their life, and Eliot's nowhere near finished with his.
Author: mizzy2k
Written for: whiskyinmind for the 2011 Leverage Secret Santa
Rating: T
Characters: Eliot Spencer/Emma Swan
Crossover fandom: Once Upon a Time
Spoilers: Vague reference to "The Experimental Job".
Warnings: Dead body.
Disclaimer: Nothing is mine.
Summary: Eliot gets a call out of the blue from an ex-flame, bounty hunter Emma Swan.
Notes: LOVE YOU BB. <3
________________________________________
Gaze in your Mirror (and see yourself)
A Leverage/Once Upon a Time crossover for whiskyinmind
Eliot's life isn't a book.
Sometimes he thinks that someone should be able to pick him up and read the lies of his life across the surface of his skin; each line, each frown, each scar holds a greater clarity of his sins than any block of text ever could.
Nate's the closest to managing it, but he deciphers Eliot from his pauses and his silences; the spaces that Eliot leaves in his life speak more to the mastermind than words. It's a relief that Eliot doesn't have to hide who he is from these people.
He hates having to show people he gives a damn about that his heart is a dark place.
Eliot has sins in his past more indelible than ink in a book. Unlike a book-where sins stay locked in the past on an earlier page-his mistakes reoccur. Eliot always learns his lessons, but learning a lesson doesn't always stop the consequences following him like a smell that won't ever wash clean from his fingertips.
Even though she's a bundle of consequences, he could never think of Emma Swan as a sin.
Eliot should have known they were a bad combination from the start. She was cocky and a loner, too smart for her own good, sassy when it counted and straightforward the rest of the time. Eliot could have fallen in love if he could still remember how, but Aimee was a page long past, one Eliot could never open again.
When he first encountered Emma Swan, he was fresh from the field, raw and open from the things he had done; forgetting the world was high on Eliot's priority list.
He should have stayed away from Emma Swan in the process.
She was an orphan with a chip on her shoulder from being shuttled around foster homes, and she compensated for the constant misperception of weakness from the men in her field with butch jackets and a pair of killer heels.
When he first met Emma Swan, she was bright and shiny and like oxygen to his guilt-ridden brain. Her touch made him forget the world. Her pink mouth grazed the stubble on his jaw as she whispered dirty promises, promises that sounded like a dare, dares that were a lifeline to a man drowning in himself. She was moments of oblivion in a too-noisy skull, a gift of memory for Eliot to linger over later, a favorite time to mentally revisit when the voices of his victims were too loud.
He left her.
Of course he did. If he stayed too long he would have destroyed all that was good in her, piece by piece. He left her in a tangle of bed sheets after a whirlwind month and he didn't look back.
He's not surprised that Emma is the one to find him now, years later. It's her job to find people who don't want to be found.
He takes the call when it comes in on his cell even though the number is hidden, because sometimes those kind of calls save his life, even if they just give him a ten-second head start on someone who wants his head on a stick.
Eliot thinks he should have remembered Emma's office was based in Boston. Even back when he knew her, she spent so much of her time across country on some midnight run or other that it was difficult to remember she had roots in the world and wasn't a creation of Eliot's mind. If he could come up with a dream woman, he's always thought it might be someone like Emma.
Maybe his brain would have preferred her less broken, but then, Eliot's not met a single whole person in his life. They're mythical, fairytale creatures and fairy tales aren't real.
When he hits the connect key, he knows who it is even though Emma's voice is a little huskier than he remembers. Her voice is a trigger for a slew of memories. One hits like a bullet to the gut: He quit smoking for her. It was a filthy habit picked up after Rwanda that intensified in Kosovo. Surviving then hadn't felt like an option. Living had seemed incomprehensible. But Emma had a distaste of the smell of smoke, and Eliot had given up far more for a woman before.
Sometimes when he wanders past someone with lung cancer, he mentally thanks Emma for that push. A lot of Eliot's life has the subtext There But For The Grace of God Go I. He can't escape running into the same old faces, the same old crimes; he's too enmeshed in the unsavoury networks of the world to ever truly escape.
All the running in the world can't stop him from running into the consequences of his actions, and Emma's a consequence so he doesn't hang up. He owes her more than not slamming the disconnect key, but Eliot always pays his debts and it's a step in the right direction.
She doesn't say much on the phone. Her name, a cursory attempts at phatics which Eliot shoots down (his aim is always good), and a careful phrase which is superb manipulation on her part. She knows his weaknesses, and knows what he does to people that abuse them, so if she's pushing one of them then it has to be a dire situation.
"I need you," she says, quiet and strong. Monotone and forced like she knows it's a low blow. Three words Eliot can never resist.
She texts him a location.
Hardison and Nate both like to rib Eliot at his somewhat complicated relationship with technology, which is ridiculous. Complicated is how Eliot's life rolls, apart from his relationship with his fists, which is straightforward and pure - righteous fury and instant satisfaction. They're wrong. Eliot's very good with certain types of technology.
Eliot's technological skills are easily explainable: do you use that technology out in the field, where your brothers in arms are dying around you? Yes means he can handle it with ease, no means probably not.
He thinks, it's a nice life where you don't have to consider that sort of origin, and then feels bad. Because he would never in a million years want Hardison or Nate to ever have even a hint of that kind of life. If Eliot has to raise hell on earth to manage that, then that's what he'll do.
The location Emma texts him is a pair of co-ordinates, and that's Eliot's language. He's there in fifteen minutes, and does a perimeter sweep of the building to check if Emma's alone. There are two security cameras along the edges, one with a decent look of the inside of the building; Eliot takes the time to take the picture of the rear of the camera with the 14x magnification digital camera Hardison insists he carry, double checks his aim is steady enough to read the serial numbers, uploads the pictures to the cloud and then he calls Hardison.
Hardison does his usual flail, declaiming Eliot for waking him up from his beauty sleep, but Eliot can hear the tinny, distinctive sound of a WOW raid in the background, and cuts off Hardison's tirade mid-stride.
"I'm not your IT monkey, man," Hardison says, when Eliot reads him the numbers of the camera and asks him to take the footage and wipe the source data. "I'm a human being, I got feelings, real feelings. A fellow like me's got needs, you know, I'm not just here to-"
"There's three crates of that orange gunk you like in it for you," Eliot says.
"Next time, lead with that. I-"
Eliot cuts him off after curtly asking for the footage to be burned onto DVD. "Three crates, mind," Hardison squeaks through the receiver, knowing Eliot enough to know the disconnect is coming.
Satisfied that the perimeter's secure and the camera's nothing to worry about, Eliot makes sure he's ready for any sort of action and pushes through the side door.
Emma's in the centre of the room, her back against a pillar - a defensible position. She relaxes on seeing him. She looks good, blonde now; peroxide must be her new level of defense against the idiots who continue to underestimate her. Even though she's just as hot as he remembers, he's not distracted enough not to clock the dead body on the floor.
He's protective enough of his own sanity to deny that he saw the tilt of the dead man's chin before the soft curve of her cheek. Denial is a weapon in his arsenal that he only likes to use sparingly; sometimes there are lines he skates exceedingly close to in life that require a buffer - like denial - to make sure he doesn't push straight through them.
Eliot's gone over enough lines for one lifetime, after all.
"You look good," he says, stepping out into the centre of the room. It's some kind of abandoned house that's fallen into disrepair. He can already see signs of what has happened. There's been some sort of a struggle. He can trace the pattern of footsteps through the dirt. There's a smear of blood against the pillar Emma's leaning against, and he really hopes it's not hers.
"For a killer," Emma says, and although she's meeting his eyes there's a hiccup in her voice, an echo of self-loathing that Eliot empathises with so sharply that he silently swallows it back.
"What happened?" His tone is as kind as he can make it. He wonders if it's for his own sake, because there's a sheen on Emma's forehead, and the pulse in her neck is visible; if her stress deepens she'll go into shock.
"He tried to kill me."
"Okay."
Eliot looks around. There's a rotten sofa in the corner, still half hidden with a dust cover. He heads over to it, yanks it off and ignores the small, dark shape that scurries away that makes the skin on his neck crawl. He might be conditioned to work in small spaces where anything might lurk, but it doesn't mean he has to like it.
Once upon a time, in a darker place than even this, that small dark shape might have been his dinner.
He spreads the mouldy dust sheet out like it's a tablecloth. It flutters down, settling over the debris like this is a really messed up picnic. "Help me get him loaded."
Emma swallows visibly but moves automatically to the guy's feet. She's always been brave.
"ETD?"
"Two hours ago."
"So we've got time before rigor sets in. Great." Eliot pulls out his wallet, extracts a twenty dollar bill, and curls it as quickly as he can into a flower shape before bending down and opening the man's mouth. He pushes it in. "On three," he says, moving his hands below the guy's shoulders. Emma meets his gaze over the body and won't let him take an unfair share of the weight. As the guy's body hits the sheet, Emma pulls her hands back, like she's burnt herself.
"Do I want to know what the money is for?" Emma asks, absently brushing her hands against her jeans. She'll burn them, Eliot knows. Just like he burned everything he wore the first time he killed someone outside the army. He hates that she has to go through anything that he's ever gone through. She's much too good for that.
"It's a calling card. A low-time loan shark from the Belfast Doyles - he'll be dealt with soon enough, I'd imagine. He's footing enough corruption locally for the moment that one more corrupt stiff will pass unnoticed. Is that your car outside?"
"I parked it near a CCTV camera."
"Already dealt with."
Emma looks at him, her expression unreadable. "Eliot, I-" she starts.
Eliot doesn't want to hear it. Not til this is sorted. When she's safe, then he can cope with her telling him how much he let her down leaving him.
"Let's get this done before rigor sets in."
She hesitates, and then nods.
________________________________________
He takes her for a drink after they've lain the body out under a bridge that's in Doyle territory. He doesn't take her to McRory's; Tara will be there, and she's an unknown factor still. Eliot doesn't like unknown factors. Besides, it's not alcohol that Emma needs.
She looks at him askance when he ushers her into the booth of a tiny, too-bright café, and even more skeptical when the hot chocolate cream is sprinkled with cinnamon. "I can't believe you remembered," she says, looking at him.
"I have trouble forgetting things." She looks at him much too astutely at that; he buries his nose in his cup of black coffee, because surely he's still a book and she can read the guilt in the lines on his face.
"Aren't you going to ask me if he deserved it?"
When Eliot looks up, she's looking directly at him, hands folded on the dirty table, and she's not flinching. Emma always takes things head on.
"I presumed if you felt like he didn't, you'd be in a jail cell right now." Eliot puts the coffee down. He was hiding behind it, and she doesn't deserve that. "No one ever deserves it. Doesn't mean that stops things from happening like they do."
"I appreciate you not lying to me."
"I presumed that's why you called me out of all your local contacts."
"I don't have many local contacts," she tells him, wrinkling her nose. "And the ones I have, let's just say they have trouble lifting a bag of flour. Two hundred pounds of dead guy's a different matter."
"You, making friends with girly girls?"
"I appreciate you continuing after the first three words of that sentence." She smiles. It's got less humor in it than Eliot's a hundred per cent happy with, but life's a Rolling Stone song and you don't always get what you want. "It's recon. There's a guy cheating on his wife."
"Isn't there always in your line of work?"
"It's the age old song. Killing someone, though..." Her fingers tremble against the handle of her mug. Emma stares at them like they're betraying her. "That's new."
Her voice pitches down a few tones at the last couple of words, and Eliot feels bad then, because this is what she wanted to talk about earlier. Not the subject of them, which Eliot's always felt a shade of guilt about. Leaving her without a goodbye... It's getting to be a pattern of his, and Eliot hates being predictable.
"You've killed people before." Emma breaks right through his silence, and doesn't bother couching it in general terms. "How do you live with it? How-" She ducks her head, looks out into the street, even though it's too dark to see through the grime on the window. She inhales brokenly, and then looks back at him. "How am I supposed to be brave now?"
The last question would be a whisper from anyone else, but Emma Swan is brave and in another life, oh, Eliot would be the biggest idiot in the world for walking away.
In that other life, he wouldn't have so much blood to his name.
He lays his hands flat on the table, because otherwise he might do some damage to himself' he can't give her back the grace of a proper goodbye back when, but he can give her this. "You live. You wake up in the morning and you shower and you brush your teeth. You get dressed and you eat breakfast and you go out there and live. And you remember them. You spend time every day remembering them, because you don't know who else they had in their life to remember them, so you honor their life by remembering them and by living your life because they can't live theirs. And you do your job."
Her mouth presses together. "Okay."
"And as for being brave?" He looks at her unflinchingly. "The sole definition of bravery isn't signing up to war and shooting guns. Sometimes bravery is waking up every morning and not putting a bullet in your brain. Sometimes bravery is just doing your job. Let this stop you, and you dishonor the ones you've killed in order to keep living."
She looks thoughtful, and an ordinary person would know what to say next to make her feel better. Eliot's never learned how. The only thing he knows is how to tell the truth.
She means enough for him to try to fake it. "I'm," Eliot says, because he's supposed to, "Before. Us. You and me. Me leaving you. I'm sorry about-"
"No, you're not." Emma looks at him much too perceptively. Eliot is sorry; it doesn't change that he'd do the same thing again to her in a heart beat. "Eliot, I'm an adult. You don't have to wrap my heart in cotton wool. I knew what I was getting into when we had sex. For starters, if I'd been looking for a long-term partner, I wouldn't have jumped into bed repeatedly with a cabbage-hat."
Eliot shoots her a look, and Emma's grin turns a little feral. "How did you-"
"You guys have a very distinctive stance," Emma says.
Eliot stares in disbelief, and regrets ever teaching her that phrase. "A distinctive stance," he repeats, raising his eyebrows and folding his arms.
"Well," Emma corrects, "very distinctive night terrors."
The sass is enough of a sign for him to know that she's not okay right now, but... she'll be okay. Maybe. Someday.
It's a better story ending than Eliot will ever get. Eliot isn't a book, after all, and if it turns out later he is, well, he can be a work-in-progress.
Happy endings are for people done with their life, and Eliot's nowhere near finished with his.