Wishlist Day 9 . reasons to play the game . Leverage . E/P/H . One-shot .
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author: pprfaith
title: reasons to play the game
summary: In which Parker, Eliot and Hardison are monster killers. E/P/H
warnings: End of the world. Threesome. Stuff.
length: 3.2k
disclaimer: As always, I own nothing.
prompt: jedibuttercup asked for, Leverage in the Pacific Rim verse, preferably inside a Jaeger.
- Hope you like!
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reasons to play the game
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They call it K-Day.
It’s a misnomer, Eliot decides on the third day, as they sit like rabbits in front of Hardison’s perversely large TV, watching Tresspasser smash its way into the continental US.
It’s not a day. Not one, specific point in time where everything goes to hell. It’s an entire week and tens of thousands of lives.
Parker is curled into the space between Alec and Eliot and they all stare at the screen with red-rimmed eyes. If they were anyone but who they are, they might be praying.
And then, on day seven, when the monster finally dies, Hardison throws up his hands and whoops in glee. “It’s over!”
Eliot tugs absently on one of Parker’s blonde curls, thinks of the way that thing started to target tanks and fighter jets after the first few days and answers, “Not so sure about that.”
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And then the second one comes.
And then the third.
And then Hardison calls to them from the living room, telling them to get their asses in here, pronto.
There is a recruitment… show, drive, something on and their hacker is in love with the giant robots they’re showing. Eliot is more interested in what the hell they mean to do with those things and Parker watches with her head cocked, careful and patient.
The voiceover narrating the Jaeger Program talks about things like drift compatibility and shared thoughts, of the perfect meld between mind and machine. It talks about how two people have to be perfectly in sync to pilot a jaeger.
Hardison already has a tablet in hand, flicking his fingers across the screen, babbling on. Eliot looks past him toward Parker, who sits with her legs tucked under and stares back evenly.
How many times have they communicated a change in plans, a course of action, a whole book full of information in a single glance? How many times didn’t they need even that much, just jumping to their feet and running in opposite directions, doing exactly what needed doing?
How many times has Alec complained about them being mind reading pod-persons with destructive tendencies?
Maybe he wasn’t wrong.
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Sometimes, their clients ask them why they do it. Why risk their lives for strangers? Why risk jail for a lost painting of only sentimental value when they could be robbing the Louvre blind?
Eliot always mimes the stoic when the question comes. Parker giggles. Hardison doffs an invisible hat and answers, “Because it’s fun.”
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The guy at the recruitment office takes them seriously right until Parker introduces Hardison as her husband.
They’re not married, mind you, but one or two of their more stable aliases are, and somehow Parker decided that means the same as the real thing. Eliot would have felt excluded, if a) he had feelings and b) they hadn’t spent their ‘honeymoon’ trying to fuck him stupid.
“Look,” the guy says, “I appreciate you coming here and wanting to do right by your country, but the compatibility of people who aren’t either blood-related or romantically involved is negligible. Testing you is probably a waste of time.”
“Probably,” Parker points out, pouting.
She holds up a hand behind his back.
“Four,” Eliot says without looking.
That gets them an unimpressed look. “Cute trick.”
Eliot considers hitting him when Alec takes over, leaning in smoothly and asking in his most gravelly voice, “And what are you going to do, son, if it turns out there are compatible and you turned them away? Do you want to be responsible for the end of the world? Do you?”
Hardison’s over-selling the part again, but it’s not like an overworked office drone is much of a mark, so it works.
“Do you want to sit on your sofa, watching the world burn, and know that it’s your fault?”
He doesn’t.
With a poisonous glare, he picks up a stack of papers, slaps it down in front of them.
“Let’s see if you’re drift compatible.”
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They are.
Twenty-four hours later, Hardison has two doctorates and all the recommendations necessary to get his hands on jaeger tech, because, honestly, “If you think I’m sitting the damn cactus while you’re out there being crazy, I will smack you. Smack you!”
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“So, how exactly does this work?” one of the techies asks, looking from Parker to Eliot to Hardison and back.
Parker laughs, flings a spanner at Eliot, who cusses, and then shrugs.
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As pilots, they get the dubious honour of naming the giant robot they will probably die in.
Alec, grease smeared almost invisibly on one side of his face, keeps trying to fit Leverage in there, while Parker pointlessly thumbs through a pocket dictionary she stole from one of the Asian members of their crew.
Hardison finally degenerates to tacking weather conditions onto their former firm name, “Leverage Hurricane? Leverage Storm? Can we work with this? Leverage Thunder? Thunder Leverage? I can switch them, no problem. What you thinkin’, babe?”
Parker, stuck in the E-section, suggests, “Endorphins?”
“Thief,” Eliot says, if only to end his own suffering.
Hardison stops rambling. Parker puts down her book. “Leverage Thief? But that’s wrong. We don’t steal leverage, we provide it. It says so in the slogan.”
She points at an empty wall, pantomimes a sign. “I miss old Nate.”
Real Nate and Sophie spent the summer of 2013 running small time scams for fun. In L.A.
Alec pats her hand because she doesn’t always like being hugged when she’s sad.
“Red,” she suddenly announces, leaning forward and around their hacker, reaching toward Eliot. He’s been letting his hair grow and last week, he put in a few braids, interwoven with red string he found somewhere. She grabs one of the tight knots, tugs on it.
“Red Thief.”
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They’re not in it for justice, or vengeance, or some noble cause. They do it for the same reasons they lie and steal and cheat, for the same reasons they kick and punch and never stop, even though their bank accounts are filled and their debt to society - if there ever was such a thing - long since paid.
They do it because they’re good at it.
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Parker wants blades in her side of the jaeger.
Parker wants darts in her side of the jaeger.
Parker wants exploding darts in her side of the jaeger.
It’s how she fights, quick and smooth and slick and Hardison mutters and curses at her and manages to make every single one of her outrageous demands reality.
And then, after the first few test runs, Parker pulls the hacker aside and describes something in big gestures that she must have picked straight out of Eliot’s skull.
“Like brass knuckles?” Hardison asks.
She nods because that’s how Eliot fights, ugly and straight up and not smooth at all.
Three weeks later, Eliot’s hand has spiked knuckles. With barbs.
“It looks…” one member of the PR team - they have one of those now - says when he sees the finished product for the first time.
“Vicious,” a woman to his left finishes, lips pursed unhappily. “This will be impossible to sell. It’s too ugly.”
She’s not wrong. All their additions have ruined their jaeger’s balance, leaving it lopsided and mean looking, razors and sawblades up the right arm, spiked barbs on the left hand. The visor is black, with red streaks like war paint under it.
The other jaegers, Gipsy Danger, Lucky Sevin, Striker Eureka, they are built to save the world. This one?
This one is built to kill kaiju.
Eliot smirks behind the gaggle of overdressed PR drones and thinks, good.
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All their tests run smoothly, from the first to the last.
After half a decade of working off each other, of knowing each other’s ugliest bits, there’s no RABIT worth chasing and no secrets left to find. They work as they always have, a well-oiled machine with Hardison chattering away in their ear.
Thief raises both arms slowly, brings its hands together in a showy clap and then crouches, ready to attack.
Parker’s euphoria floods the drift and Eliot... Eliot might be grinning.
Just a little.
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They do it because it’s as close to being gods as a trior of thieves with too much ego will ever get.
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Of course it doesn’t last, because these things never do.
After tests and tests and tests, they are finally cleared for duty and when their first drop happens, they almost fall out of alignment badly enough to end up dead.
They land in a storm of water and screaming engines, right in front of the kaiju that’s not yet named Hammer, isn’t yet dead and left to rot. It’s alive and it’s angry. They land and Eliot plots a course, forward and right through the fucker, slam it down, twist, break, finish it, fast and neat.
They go in low, hit high and take a return punch that jars them both to the bone. They crouch, Thief aims for another attack and suddenly Parker balks.
Eliot tries to pull her forward, but she stops, blocks, locks herself into place, intractable and scared.
The answer to his unasked question comes slamming in, images, ideas, Parker hiding, attacking from the back, low and dirty, hidden and secret. Parker, jumping in headfirst, the pain from a well placed punch, an angry slap, a man so much bigger than her.
Frontal attack is bad.
Frontal attacks hurt.
Frontal attacks get you caught, get you hurt, get you broken. She wants to go around and above, below and beside, twist and weave and never be within reach because that’s how she survives, that’s what’s hardwired into her and this one is bigger, bigger than on TV and strong, so strong and she’s just a girl, just one girl, and she can’t fight the monster, she can’t.
“You’re not alone, sweetheart,” he urges, but she doesn’t hear.
Their trial runs were ever only that, but this is real and animal fear follows no logic.
This is real and you can’t evade a kaiju, can’t hide when you’re wearing 200 feet of metal armour. Eliot thinks of Bunny, back in their bunk, safely tucked between two pillows so he doesn’t fall on his rubbed-smooth nose and wishes he could take the time to fix this properly, to let Parker figure it out.
But there’s no time. The only way right now is Eliot’s way, at it and through it, no skill, no finesse, no time to do anything but jump and hope to fly. Just beat it until it stops moving.
Parker understands that. She does. She’s killed before, humans, yes, but humans that came for her and what she loved, but never straight up, never looking in their eyes, bare-knuckled and without tricks.
But there is a monster as big as the world in front of them and it will hurt them and sometimes she still freezes.
Then there’s shouting in their comms and Alec, breathless and too close to the mike, asking, “What the hell you two doin’?”
“Parker’s locked up,” Eliot provides, trying to figure out if he can steamroll her, just take over and fight alone, because if they don’t move, they’re dead. She’ll hate him for it, but she’ll be alive to do so.
“What? Why?”
“Wrong kind of fight,” he provides, listens to someone trying to make Hardison back off. There’s more yelling.
And then, “Oh, shit. Okay, okay, okay, listen. Parker, babe, you hear me?”
“She hears you.”
“What’s the secret of a con, huh? Remember that? How does a con work?”
She rouses a little. “I… confidence. You need… confidence.”
“Exactly, babe. So imagine this is a con, it’s a game, we’re playing, and this sucker is the mark. It’s a con and you fake confidence, get right in its fugly face and don’t back down. Can you do that? You just get in its face until it doesn’t know up from down and gives you what you want, right?”
The analogy is weak, but Eliot gets the sentiment. Fake it till you make it. Don’t let them smell your fear.
“Who am I?” Parker asks, eventually, because even after all these years, identity is still a problem for her and Eliot answers before Alec can. Because she’s asking for an alias to slip into and Eliot knows exactly who she needs to be today.
“You’re me. Today, you’re me.”
And she giggles, growls and finally relaxes her shoulders. “I’m you,” she says and it should probably be terrifying how Parker thinks being Eliot means being a killing machine, but it saves their lives, so.
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After that, she puts on Eliot’s scowl and growl before every drop and they never get lost in her nightmares again.
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“What made you decide to become pilots?” the reporter asks, perched as the edge of her chair, leaning too far forward, her cleavage an invitation as plain as ink on paper.
Eliot looks because he can, gets an elbow in the ribs from Parker and answers, “Someone has to do it.”
The reporter gives him her number and later that night, Parker steals it from his pocket and makes Alec burn it. Then they pile on top of him, strip him naked and remind him where he belongs.
“Someone has to do it,” they tell him. He doesn’t say a word.
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They are in Manila both times it gets attacked, but the second time so are Gypsy and Striker.
The Yancy brothers come on like a hurricane after the battle, demanding drinks and stories. The Hansens hang back a little, but they have the same manic energy about them, the thrill that comes from a good battle and leaves you unable to crash the way your body wants to.
Thief’s crew have been living on that high for most of their lives, but the two pairs of brothers haven’t. “Alright.”
Nobody comments on the tech tagging along, but then Alec’s wrapped himself around Parker like a large octopus. Her ribs are cracked and Eliot has explained the concept of physical comfort enough for her to let Alec cling.
The bar Yancy finds them is a dive, but it’s vibrating with the energy of half of Manila celebrating the averted catastrophe. It’s a party that’ll last for days and they don’t pay for their drinks, find a booth miraculously emptied for them, and get far too many back slaps and thanks.
It makes Eliot itchy.
“Poor baby,” Parker teases, poking at the shiner on his face with one finger. He growls and tucks her under his arm, where she can’t get at any of his bruises. She chuckles and kicks him in the shin under the table.
Meanwhile, Alec gets dragged off to make a fool of himself on the dance floor, Scott and Raleigh make moon-eyes at each other and Yancy has found himself a gaggle of groupies to impress. They drink beer for a while, let the music around them flow until Alec comes back, sweaty and grinning and hyper like a three-year-old. Herc watches bemusedly as he pulls Parker away from Eliot, picks her up and sits down in her seat, planting her on his lap. She’s drowsing despite the noise and melts across both of them, muttering about money and robots in her sleep.
Alec tries to pull her back up, to contain her, but Eliot risks a look around, first at Yancy, who has a girl under each arm and in making to leave with both of them, at Raleigh and Scott eyefucking so hard their eyeballs must hurt, and at Herc, watching it all with laughter in his eyes.
“Give it up, Hardison,” he tells his partner. “No-one here gives a shit.”
Alec blinks, startled, looks around himself. Ten minutes later, he’s out like a light on Eliot’s shoulder, Parker having snaked herself around them like a vine, tying them together.
As usual, then.
Eventually, Herc says, “So that’s how that works. I’d wondered.”
Eliot simply nods, keeping watch.
“You’re military, aren’t you?” the older man asks, pointing with his bottle.
“We’re all military, technically,” he answers, because they are, except they are pilots, so no regs have ever applied to them, thank god.
Eliot tries to imagine Parker in boot camp and knows he’ll have nightmares about the possibility alone.
“Before that. Special forces? Seen the way you fight.”
Eliot doesn’t answer, which is answer enough.
“You think we gonna win this?”
“I think,” he says, mostly to himself, daring to voice the thought only this once, only in the middle of all the other noise for cover, “that I ain’t gonna be here to see the end either way.”
Herc nods grimly, toasting to that.
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He’s wrong. He does get to see the end.
It goes like this: Him and Parker in a battered Red Thief, a broken Raleigh with a little girl in Gipsy Danger, the battered Marshall and Herc’s angry son in Striker and the weight of the world on all their shoulders.
Hardison grabbed them both before the drop, pulled them aside into a random, empty office and kissed them hard enough to bruise, first Parker, then Eliot, and then sent them off with a grin and a joke.
He didn’t tell them not to die.
And now here they are, six people against the end of the world, two nukes between them and no hope to speak of.
Parker thinks of the last time they went to a beach and didn’t fear for the lives, back in 2012, holiday on Mallorca, they got Alec so, so drunk. She thinks of dark and tan hands on her skin, of cereal breakfast on Sunday, watching cartoons in bed, all of them tangled together, of the perfect heist, the most beautiful thing she ever stole and how it wasn’t an object, but a life for herself with the three of them in it.
It’s not exactly “I love you,” but it’s close enough. Too close, perhaps, for people like them, and Eliot gives her a blonde head and a black one next to each other on a pillow, the scent of fresh strawberry muffins and how they always make a mess of eating them, a perfect punch, a won fight, the feeling of flying down an elevator shaft with her arms around him.
They could turn back. There’s still time and they’re wearing the most powerful machine in existence. They could just turn away, run. No-one would ever find them, Alec would make sure of that. They could live, safe and sound.
For a while.
Until the world ends.
“Why are we doing this?” Parker asks, desperate for him to tell her there’s no reason, let’s go.
Because it’s fun. Because they’re good at it. Because they want to. Because it’s a kick.
All true, yes, all real and solid reasons.
But not this time.
They’ve been fighting this war for almost a decade, spent years before that atoning for old sins and now here they are and Eliot reaches out his right hand, meeting hers between their two stations, just close enough to brush the tips of their fingers together.
“Because it’s the right thing to do,” he tells her.
Above them, the clamps release and the fall begins.
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author: pprfaith
title: reasons to play the game
summary: In which Parker, Eliot and Hardison are monster killers. E/P/H
warnings: End of the world. Threesome. Stuff.
length: 3.2k
disclaimer: As always, I own nothing.
prompt: jedibuttercup asked for, Leverage in the Pacific Rim verse, preferably inside a Jaeger.
- Hope you like!
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reasons to play the game
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They call it K-Day.
It’s a misnomer, Eliot decides on the third day, as they sit like rabbits in front of Hardison’s perversely large TV, watching Tresspasser smash its way into the continental US.
It’s not a day. Not one, specific point in time where everything goes to hell. It’s an entire week and tens of thousands of lives.
Parker is curled into the space between Alec and Eliot and they all stare at the screen with red-rimmed eyes. If they were anyone but who they are, they might be praying.
And then, on day seven, when the monster finally dies, Hardison throws up his hands and whoops in glee. “It’s over!”
Eliot tugs absently on one of Parker’s blonde curls, thinks of the way that thing started to target tanks and fighter jets after the first few days and answers, “Not so sure about that.”
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And then the second one comes.
And then the third.
And then Hardison calls to them from the living room, telling them to get their asses in here, pronto.
There is a recruitment… show, drive, something on and their hacker is in love with the giant robots they’re showing. Eliot is more interested in what the hell they mean to do with those things and Parker watches with her head cocked, careful and patient.
The voiceover narrating the Jaeger Program talks about things like drift compatibility and shared thoughts, of the perfect meld between mind and machine. It talks about how two people have to be perfectly in sync to pilot a jaeger.
Hardison already has a tablet in hand, flicking his fingers across the screen, babbling on. Eliot looks past him toward Parker, who sits with her legs tucked under and stares back evenly.
How many times have they communicated a change in plans, a course of action, a whole book full of information in a single glance? How many times didn’t they need even that much, just jumping to their feet and running in opposite directions, doing exactly what needed doing?
How many times has Alec complained about them being mind reading pod-persons with destructive tendencies?
Maybe he wasn’t wrong.
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Sometimes, their clients ask them why they do it. Why risk their lives for strangers? Why risk jail for a lost painting of only sentimental value when they could be robbing the Louvre blind?
Eliot always mimes the stoic when the question comes. Parker giggles. Hardison doffs an invisible hat and answers, “Because it’s fun.”
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The guy at the recruitment office takes them seriously right until Parker introduces Hardison as her husband.
They’re not married, mind you, but one or two of their more stable aliases are, and somehow Parker decided that means the same as the real thing. Eliot would have felt excluded, if a) he had feelings and b) they hadn’t spent their ‘honeymoon’ trying to fuck him stupid.
“Look,” the guy says, “I appreciate you coming here and wanting to do right by your country, but the compatibility of people who aren’t either blood-related or romantically involved is negligible. Testing you is probably a waste of time.”
“Probably,” Parker points out, pouting.
She holds up a hand behind his back.
“Four,” Eliot says without looking.
That gets them an unimpressed look. “Cute trick.”
Eliot considers hitting him when Alec takes over, leaning in smoothly and asking in his most gravelly voice, “And what are you going to do, son, if it turns out there are compatible and you turned them away? Do you want to be responsible for the end of the world? Do you?”
Hardison’s over-selling the part again, but it’s not like an overworked office drone is much of a mark, so it works.
“Do you want to sit on your sofa, watching the world burn, and know that it’s your fault?”
He doesn’t.
With a poisonous glare, he picks up a stack of papers, slaps it down in front of them.
“Let’s see if you’re drift compatible.”
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They are.
Twenty-four hours later, Hardison has two doctorates and all the recommendations necessary to get his hands on jaeger tech, because, honestly, “If you think I’m sitting the damn cactus while you’re out there being crazy, I will smack you. Smack you!”
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“So, how exactly does this work?” one of the techies asks, looking from Parker to Eliot to Hardison and back.
Parker laughs, flings a spanner at Eliot, who cusses, and then shrugs.
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As pilots, they get the dubious honour of naming the giant robot they will probably die in.
Alec, grease smeared almost invisibly on one side of his face, keeps trying to fit Leverage in there, while Parker pointlessly thumbs through a pocket dictionary she stole from one of the Asian members of their crew.
Hardison finally degenerates to tacking weather conditions onto their former firm name, “Leverage Hurricane? Leverage Storm? Can we work with this? Leverage Thunder? Thunder Leverage? I can switch them, no problem. What you thinkin’, babe?”
Parker, stuck in the E-section, suggests, “Endorphins?”
“Thief,” Eliot says, if only to end his own suffering.
Hardison stops rambling. Parker puts down her book. “Leverage Thief? But that’s wrong. We don’t steal leverage, we provide it. It says so in the slogan.”
She points at an empty wall, pantomimes a sign. “I miss old Nate.”
Real Nate and Sophie spent the summer of 2013 running small time scams for fun. In L.A.
Alec pats her hand because she doesn’t always like being hugged when she’s sad.
“Red,” she suddenly announces, leaning forward and around their hacker, reaching toward Eliot. He’s been letting his hair grow and last week, he put in a few braids, interwoven with red string he found somewhere. She grabs one of the tight knots, tugs on it.
“Red Thief.”
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They’re not in it for justice, or vengeance, or some noble cause. They do it for the same reasons they lie and steal and cheat, for the same reasons they kick and punch and never stop, even though their bank accounts are filled and their debt to society - if there ever was such a thing - long since paid.
They do it because they’re good at it.
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Parker wants blades in her side of the jaeger.
Parker wants darts in her side of the jaeger.
Parker wants exploding darts in her side of the jaeger.
It’s how she fights, quick and smooth and slick and Hardison mutters and curses at her and manages to make every single one of her outrageous demands reality.
And then, after the first few test runs, Parker pulls the hacker aside and describes something in big gestures that she must have picked straight out of Eliot’s skull.
“Like brass knuckles?” Hardison asks.
She nods because that’s how Eliot fights, ugly and straight up and not smooth at all.
Three weeks later, Eliot’s hand has spiked knuckles. With barbs.
“It looks…” one member of the PR team - they have one of those now - says when he sees the finished product for the first time.
“Vicious,” a woman to his left finishes, lips pursed unhappily. “This will be impossible to sell. It’s too ugly.”
She’s not wrong. All their additions have ruined their jaeger’s balance, leaving it lopsided and mean looking, razors and sawblades up the right arm, spiked barbs on the left hand. The visor is black, with red streaks like war paint under it.
The other jaegers, Gipsy Danger, Lucky Sevin, Striker Eureka, they are built to save the world. This one?
This one is built to kill kaiju.
Eliot smirks behind the gaggle of overdressed PR drones and thinks, good.
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All their tests run smoothly, from the first to the last.
After half a decade of working off each other, of knowing each other’s ugliest bits, there’s no RABIT worth chasing and no secrets left to find. They work as they always have, a well-oiled machine with Hardison chattering away in their ear.
Thief raises both arms slowly, brings its hands together in a showy clap and then crouches, ready to attack.
Parker’s euphoria floods the drift and Eliot... Eliot might be grinning.
Just a little.
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They do it because it’s as close to being gods as a trior of thieves with too much ego will ever get.
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Of course it doesn’t last, because these things never do.
After tests and tests and tests, they are finally cleared for duty and when their first drop happens, they almost fall out of alignment badly enough to end up dead.
They land in a storm of water and screaming engines, right in front of the kaiju that’s not yet named Hammer, isn’t yet dead and left to rot. It’s alive and it’s angry. They land and Eliot plots a course, forward and right through the fucker, slam it down, twist, break, finish it, fast and neat.
They go in low, hit high and take a return punch that jars them both to the bone. They crouch, Thief aims for another attack and suddenly Parker balks.
Eliot tries to pull her forward, but she stops, blocks, locks herself into place, intractable and scared.
The answer to his unasked question comes slamming in, images, ideas, Parker hiding, attacking from the back, low and dirty, hidden and secret. Parker, jumping in headfirst, the pain from a well placed punch, an angry slap, a man so much bigger than her.
Frontal attack is bad.
Frontal attacks hurt.
Frontal attacks get you caught, get you hurt, get you broken. She wants to go around and above, below and beside, twist and weave and never be within reach because that’s how she survives, that’s what’s hardwired into her and this one is bigger, bigger than on TV and strong, so strong and she’s just a girl, just one girl, and she can’t fight the monster, she can’t.
“You’re not alone, sweetheart,” he urges, but she doesn’t hear.
Their trial runs were ever only that, but this is real and animal fear follows no logic.
This is real and you can’t evade a kaiju, can’t hide when you’re wearing 200 feet of metal armour. Eliot thinks of Bunny, back in their bunk, safely tucked between two pillows so he doesn’t fall on his rubbed-smooth nose and wishes he could take the time to fix this properly, to let Parker figure it out.
But there’s no time. The only way right now is Eliot’s way, at it and through it, no skill, no finesse, no time to do anything but jump and hope to fly. Just beat it until it stops moving.
Parker understands that. She does. She’s killed before, humans, yes, but humans that came for her and what she loved, but never straight up, never looking in their eyes, bare-knuckled and without tricks.
But there is a monster as big as the world in front of them and it will hurt them and sometimes she still freezes.
Then there’s shouting in their comms and Alec, breathless and too close to the mike, asking, “What the hell you two doin’?”
“Parker’s locked up,” Eliot provides, trying to figure out if he can steamroll her, just take over and fight alone, because if they don’t move, they’re dead. She’ll hate him for it, but she’ll be alive to do so.
“What? Why?”
“Wrong kind of fight,” he provides, listens to someone trying to make Hardison back off. There’s more yelling.
And then, “Oh, shit. Okay, okay, okay, listen. Parker, babe, you hear me?”
“She hears you.”
“What’s the secret of a con, huh? Remember that? How does a con work?”
She rouses a little. “I… confidence. You need… confidence.”
“Exactly, babe. So imagine this is a con, it’s a game, we’re playing, and this sucker is the mark. It’s a con and you fake confidence, get right in its fugly face and don’t back down. Can you do that? You just get in its face until it doesn’t know up from down and gives you what you want, right?”
The analogy is weak, but Eliot gets the sentiment. Fake it till you make it. Don’t let them smell your fear.
“Who am I?” Parker asks, eventually, because even after all these years, identity is still a problem for her and Eliot answers before Alec can. Because she’s asking for an alias to slip into and Eliot knows exactly who she needs to be today.
“You’re me. Today, you’re me.”
And she giggles, growls and finally relaxes her shoulders. “I’m you,” she says and it should probably be terrifying how Parker thinks being Eliot means being a killing machine, but it saves their lives, so.
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After that, she puts on Eliot’s scowl and growl before every drop and they never get lost in her nightmares again.
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“What made you decide to become pilots?” the reporter asks, perched as the edge of her chair, leaning too far forward, her cleavage an invitation as plain as ink on paper.
Eliot looks because he can, gets an elbow in the ribs from Parker and answers, “Someone has to do it.”
The reporter gives him her number and later that night, Parker steals it from his pocket and makes Alec burn it. Then they pile on top of him, strip him naked and remind him where he belongs.
“Someone has to do it,” they tell him. He doesn’t say a word.
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They are in Manila both times it gets attacked, but the second time so are Gypsy and Striker.
The Yancy brothers come on like a hurricane after the battle, demanding drinks and stories. The Hansens hang back a little, but they have the same manic energy about them, the thrill that comes from a good battle and leaves you unable to crash the way your body wants to.
Thief’s crew have been living on that high for most of their lives, but the two pairs of brothers haven’t. “Alright.”
Nobody comments on the tech tagging along, but then Alec’s wrapped himself around Parker like a large octopus. Her ribs are cracked and Eliot has explained the concept of physical comfort enough for her to let Alec cling.
The bar Yancy finds them is a dive, but it’s vibrating with the energy of half of Manila celebrating the averted catastrophe. It’s a party that’ll last for days and they don’t pay for their drinks, find a booth miraculously emptied for them, and get far too many back slaps and thanks.
It makes Eliot itchy.
“Poor baby,” Parker teases, poking at the shiner on his face with one finger. He growls and tucks her under his arm, where she can’t get at any of his bruises. She chuckles and kicks him in the shin under the table.
Meanwhile, Alec gets dragged off to make a fool of himself on the dance floor, Scott and Raleigh make moon-eyes at each other and Yancy has found himself a gaggle of groupies to impress. They drink beer for a while, let the music around them flow until Alec comes back, sweaty and grinning and hyper like a three-year-old. Herc watches bemusedly as he pulls Parker away from Eliot, picks her up and sits down in her seat, planting her on his lap. She’s drowsing despite the noise and melts across both of them, muttering about money and robots in her sleep.
Alec tries to pull her back up, to contain her, but Eliot risks a look around, first at Yancy, who has a girl under each arm and in making to leave with both of them, at Raleigh and Scott eyefucking so hard their eyeballs must hurt, and at Herc, watching it all with laughter in his eyes.
“Give it up, Hardison,” he tells his partner. “No-one here gives a shit.”
Alec blinks, startled, looks around himself. Ten minutes later, he’s out like a light on Eliot’s shoulder, Parker having snaked herself around them like a vine, tying them together.
As usual, then.
Eventually, Herc says, “So that’s how that works. I’d wondered.”
Eliot simply nods, keeping watch.
“You’re military, aren’t you?” the older man asks, pointing with his bottle.
“We’re all military, technically,” he answers, because they are, except they are pilots, so no regs have ever applied to them, thank god.
Eliot tries to imagine Parker in boot camp and knows he’ll have nightmares about the possibility alone.
“Before that. Special forces? Seen the way you fight.”
Eliot doesn’t answer, which is answer enough.
“You think we gonna win this?”
“I think,” he says, mostly to himself, daring to voice the thought only this once, only in the middle of all the other noise for cover, “that I ain’t gonna be here to see the end either way.”
Herc nods grimly, toasting to that.
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He’s wrong. He does get to see the end.
It goes like this: Him and Parker in a battered Red Thief, a broken Raleigh with a little girl in Gipsy Danger, the battered Marshall and Herc’s angry son in Striker and the weight of the world on all their shoulders.
Hardison grabbed them both before the drop, pulled them aside into a random, empty office and kissed them hard enough to bruise, first Parker, then Eliot, and then sent them off with a grin and a joke.
He didn’t tell them not to die.
And now here they are, six people against the end of the world, two nukes between them and no hope to speak of.
Parker thinks of the last time they went to a beach and didn’t fear for the lives, back in 2012, holiday on Mallorca, they got Alec so, so drunk. She thinks of dark and tan hands on her skin, of cereal breakfast on Sunday, watching cartoons in bed, all of them tangled together, of the perfect heist, the most beautiful thing she ever stole and how it wasn’t an object, but a life for herself with the three of them in it.
It’s not exactly “I love you,” but it’s close enough. Too close, perhaps, for people like them, and Eliot gives her a blonde head and a black one next to each other on a pillow, the scent of fresh strawberry muffins and how they always make a mess of eating them, a perfect punch, a won fight, the feeling of flying down an elevator shaft with her arms around him.
They could turn back. There’s still time and they’re wearing the most powerful machine in existence. They could just turn away, run. No-one would ever find them, Alec would make sure of that. They could live, safe and sound.
For a while.
Until the world ends.
“Why are we doing this?” Parker asks, desperate for him to tell her there’s no reason, let’s go.
Because it’s fun. Because they’re good at it. Because they want to. Because it’s a kick.
All true, yes, all real and solid reasons.
But not this time.
They’ve been fighting this war for almost a decade, spent years before that atoning for old sins and now here they are and Eliot reaches out his right hand, meeting hers between their two stations, just close enough to brush the tips of their fingers together.
“Because it’s the right thing to do,” he tells her.
Above them, the clamps release and the fall begins.
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