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Entry tags:
Fic: Hear it in the Silence - Hardison/Parker/Spencer
*waves hello* I somehow missed that there was a Dreamwidth Leverage comm, so I come - bearing fic! - in search of other people to flail about the show with! :)
Hear it in the Silence (7391 words) by Glinda
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Leverage
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Alec Hardison/Parker/Eliot Spencer
Characters: Alec Hardison, Parker (Leverage), Eliot Spencer, Sophie Devereaux (Leverage), Colin "Chaos" Mason
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Soulmates, Soul Bond, Telepathic Bond, Getting Together, Polyamory Negotiations, OT3, Friends to Lovers, Friends With Benefits
Summary:
The thing about soul bonds is that they’re quite rare. Maybe 10-15% of the population. Common enough that most people know at least one couple who are soul bonded and for it to be reliable fodder for romance novels and rom-coms, rare enough that most people have no real expectation that they’ll turn out to have a soul-mate.
When people talk about soul bonds, they talk about fate and destiny and telepathy, they make it sound magical and all conquering. In reality, there’s a lot more individual choice involved. In order for the bond to set, both parties have to choose to accept the bond. If they both accept the bond then: fireworks and glorious mutual understanding and happiness. If they don’t, then the bond withers and mostly fades, except that you’ll probably always know where your potential bond mate is no matter how far away from each other you stay.
One of the things about growing up in the system that people don’t talk about – prefer not to think about – is quite how many kids end up there as a result of soul bonding. Babies whose parents were potential bond mates but one or other parent bailed on the connection or were already married. Kids who were the products of pre-bond relationships. Teenagers whose parents disapproved of the race or gender or class or whatever of their soul mate and took drastic measures to try to prevent them bonding. (In some countries it’s illegal to intervene with a bonding like that – you can do a lot of psychological damage especially in minors.) People who swoon over the idea of pining away and dying of broken heart after your partner’s death rarely think what it must be like to lose one parent and watch the other fade away in front of your eyes when you’re still in Junior High.
Alec Hardison has never known which option landed him in foster care, all he knows for certain is that when the social worker wrote ‘result of soul-bond complications’ on his file all those years ago, they might as well have rubber stamped it ‘unadoptable’. No one wanted to keep a kid like that, however smart or cute or winning their smile. As though it was a taint that might rub off on them. It was a common enough issue that some states even screened potential foster-parents for bias on that front. So when he says he got lucky, he knows how true that is. It took him years to notice that pretty much every kid that got sent to Nana had the same status as him. It wasn’t until she got sick that he found out that she’d been soul-bonded herself, had lost her soul-mate young – a freak accident – and armed with the certainty that there would be no-one else for her, had dedicated her life to looking out for kids that had been screwed over by the fallout of other people’s soul bonds.
He’s got a list as long as his arm for why he hacked the Bank of Iceland for Nana, but mostly, what he remembers is her sad fierce eyes and that surfeit of love that she’d been left with. And the burning certainty that he didn’t want some fairy-tale love. He wanted an ordinary love, someone that he chose and that chose him in return not because of destiny or fate, but because of who they both were as people.
If that meant that for several years his choices of partners were somewhat…unsuitable, then, well he was young. He’d figure it out eventually. Alec was pretty certain that he didn’t develop a crush on Parker purely because there was a real chance of her doing him bodily harm if he tried to do anything about his crush on her. She was after all, beautiful, smart and funny, certainly knowing that she could kick his ass was a turn-on, but mostly she was his friend and clearly not in a good place to be having anything resembling a relationship with anyone. Probably no one else would have considered Eliot to be a safe target for a crush. Nonetheless, as two bisexual men with little to no interest in club culture and healthy levels of professional paranoia about going to bed with men they don’t know and trust, it evolves into a mutually beneficial arrangement. It doesn’t remotely surprise Alec that Eliot might have a deep seated desire to hold him down and fuck him – and damn, but he does that well – they’ve always had that kind of tension that he always suspected could tip over into good sex. It’s slightly more of a surprise that pretty much the only thing they do that Eliot seem to enjoy more than holding him down, is being held down and fucked by Alec in turn.
It should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone that Parker likes to watch. Sometimes hanging upside down from the ceiling, sometimes so close they can feel her breath on their skin. So close she can reach out and touch if she wants, and oh how she wants, and apparently when Parker says ‘please’ like that neither of them can say no to her.
(She’s never stabbed either of them with a fork, Eliot had taught her the traffic light system early on, but mostly, being friends and colleague first means they’re used to reading each others’ body language, so they’ve almost always stopped before anyone has to actually say the word out loud.)
She seems to have zero interest in watching them fuck other people. Alec isn’t generally into multi-person scenarios himself so he figures for her it’s about watching them rather than watching sex. Parker’s proved rather emphatically that she’s attracted to both of them, so its just as likely to be that she isn’t into girls like that. Alec’s cool with that, he’s got two gorgeous friends and colleagues, to con bad guys and have excellent and adventurous sex with. Eliot though, he has to keep pushing at it, like a loose tooth or a healing wound that doesn’t hurt unless you poke at it. Alec wishes he wouldn’t, nothing this good can last, so why jinx it?
There are few things more satisfying than those moments when the three of them are together and one of them needs to get out of their head. And Alec will look at Parker – because usually its Eliot that needs that, but Alec’s had those moments with Eliot, and seen them both look at him like that - and she’ll look at him and its like something just clicks in their brains. They don’t have to say a word, they just know exactly what to do, perfect teamwork, orgasms for everyone and the person who needs it most that day wrapped up and safe – for both the sex and the sleeping afterwards - in the middle.
~
It’s a truth universally acknowledged – at least by the team – that Parker doesn’t like other people touching Hardison or Hardison touching other people. Initially, Parker finds the notion ridiculous, if anyone other than Sophie had suggested it she would have dismissed it entirely. However, Sophie’s usually right when it comes to emotions so Parker reckons that she probably knows what she’s talking about.
It’s enough assurance to get her through bringing up feelings with Alec, and though her words fail her, he seems to understand anyway. He stops touching other people, at least he stops touching them with intent, keeps his touches friendly and professional – well professional for them, sometimes he has to flirt on the job, but now that she’s looking for it Parker can see the join. She can see the difference between the way he flirts on the con and the way he flirts with her. It’s oddly fascinating watching him assemble his performance and to see it fall away once he doesn’t need it anymore. Once she gets to grips with that she wonders how he flirts with Eliot, if that’s performative – in line with their whole ‘friends with bennies’ arrangement – or if its something honest and true. Which of course is when she comes back to something that has been bugging her for a while now. It’s never bothered her - well, not in a bad way, got her all hot and bothered certainly – when Alec and Eliot touch, and now that she thinks about it she realises that she hasn’t seen that in a while. They still sling their arms round each other – and her for that matter – and they still do their funny little secret handshakes but nothing more. Parker wonders if they’ve stopped or if they’re just hiding it from her; she’s not sure how she feels about that, which she’d prefer to be the case.
Because she never can resist poking at a tender place, she finagles the events after their next job so the three of them end up back at Alec’s watching movies and eating pizza. It’s been one of those jobs that makes Eliot want to cook afterwards, so it’s homemade pizza that they’re having. Parker comes back from the bathroom and lingers in the doorway watching them. (The pizza stone makes her smile, she remembers going with Alec to pick it out, a present for Eliot after a particularly tough job, that all three of them pretended wasn’t a present. They’re all of them better at showing rather than telling their affections.) Eliot’s carefully arranging the toppings to accommodate their varied preferences and Alec is trying to sneakily steal bits of topping to snack on. There’s nothing fake about their flirting – not even Eliot’s and that’s something even rarer she realises, putting the thought away for later – and equally nothing about it that makes her remotely unhappy. It feels familiar and comforting, the only thing it stirs up in her is a pleasant anticipation, she recognises that they’re going to kiss in a minute and looks forward to it – the best test of her response to their flirting possible.
And then they don’t kiss.
She sees the moment when they realise they’re about to kiss, and then physically pull away from it. She expects to feel relieved but she doesn’t, instead she’s disappointed and sad. She’s broken something more fragile than that beer bottle and she hasn’t a clue how to fix it.
So naturally, that’s the moment when Eliot looks up and sees her and her expression. Parker doesn’t know what her face is doing as a result of the contradictory revelations she’s experiencing, but judging by the way guilt and unhappiness briefly wash over his face before he ducks down to put the pizza in the oven, nothing good. Alec just mutters something about the bathroom and ducks round her with an apologetic look.
She needs a plan, she ought to take advice and do her research and then act accordingly, but all her instincts tell her that it will only get more broken with time. If she doesn’t act now she’ll lose them both and that’s so far from acceptable that she can’t even contemplate it for long. So she throws herself in headfirst and trusts that they’ll catch her.
She swings herself up on the counter, perfectly positioned to intercept Eliot whichever way he moves when he stands up again. But he doesn’t try to avoid her, just indicates the timer beside her, catches and sets it when she throws it to him.
“I didn’t…” she begins, but words fail her, “you don’t…”
“Parker, it’s alright,” Eliot assures her, “just old habits dying hard.”
“It’s not though,” she tells him, “I didn’t mean to break anything, but clearly I have and I don’t know how to fix it. Help me fix it?”
“Nothing to fix darling, we had some fun together, him and me, then all three of us, but its not like I couldn’t see the pair of you were having feelings about each other.” He admits. “Honestly I’m kinda proud of you, time was I didn’t think you’d ever be able to acknowledge that, but look at you, long road ahead of you but you’ll get there.”
She can see the logic of the process they must have gone through. She appreciates that Alec swearing off everyone else is his way of showing her that he has feelings too, without having to say things that might freak her out. It just never occurred that that would mean this too.
“He was yours first though,” she blurts out, “I’m not…stealing him away.”
Eliot shakes his head, mouth quirking sadly, “no he wasn’t, not like you mean. What you two are dancing around? That was never something he and I wanted from each other, nor something I could have offered him if he did either.”
“I’ve still stolen something from you,” Parker insists. She doesn’t have the words to describe it, but she’s completely certain that she’s right. It was never about convenience, that was only an excuse, a safety net of obfuscation so none of them accidentally scared off the others. The thought arrives suddenly – fully-formed, without context, as though someone had dropped it straight into her head – ‘he deserves better’ and she shoves hard at the thought rejecting it and pushing it back ‘so do you’. Eliot flinches physically as though the exchange had taken place out loud and for a moment Parker wonders if it did, but then Alec interrupts their standoff from the kitchen doorway.
“It never occurred to either of you that I might be quite happy to be shared,” Alec asks derailing all other thoughts. “We seem to manage to negotiate our sex lives to accommodate all three of our varying sexual needs and wants, no reason we can’t do the same with feelings or whatever it is that Eliot needs.”
“We’re really good at puzzles,” Parker agrees, beginning to turn the problem around in her brain, feeling cautiously for the sharp edges, trying to establish the shape of it, under all the obfuscations.
“I don’t need anything,” Eliot objects.
“Yeah, that’s why you keep coming back to us, again and again. Whatever it is that you get from us, you can’t get other places or you wouldn’t keep falling into bed with us. Just because you need something different than what Parker needs, or something different from what I need, doesn’t mean what you need isn’t valid.” Alec contests.
Eliot looks like he wants to argue, but he also looks slightly winded, like someone punched him in the chest – more like, punched him in the feelings – so Parker decides its time to distract him before he freaks out. Telegraphing her movements so he knows its coming, Parker launches her self from her perch and Eliot steps forward, arms instinctively coming up to catch her. She wraps herself around him like an affectionate octopus, as she slides down his body, and he submits to being kissed thoroughly. Once she has his full attention, she throws out one arm to Alec and is relieved to discovered that he’s already on board with the programme, already close enough to grab her hand and be pulled in.
“We’ll figure something out,” she assures them both between kisses, “something that works for all of us.”
“If you say so,” Eliot allows, “you guys are the brains of this operation.”
This is the key, Parker is certain. Figure out how Eliot fits and everything else will click into place. Alec on the other hand just rolls his eyes and pulls Eliot into an utterly filthy kiss and Parker gets completely distracted.
(She remembers suddenly, the first time she walked in on them kissing, Eliot’s irritated ‘get in or get out’ comment – she wonders now if Tara had caught them too – and that moment when she’d known she was on a tipping point, that whatever option she chose would change her relationship with them both forever. She remembers the rush of adrenaline and the burning desire to see more, the wave of giddiness that had pushed her into action, to lock the door behind them and hop up on a cabinet that gave her an excellent view. The frisson of excitement that bounced between them, that ‘I dare you’ look the boys had shared before they proceeded to give her a show. She hadn’t taken an active part in that afternoon’s activities but it nonetheless was the first time she’d really understood why people got so excited about sex.)
She loves to watch them kiss, it doesn’t make her jealous, it makes her want to join in. Her beautiful boys, that no-one else gets to see like this, there’s nothing here to make her jealous. The kiss slows and Alec turns to her holding out a hand to pull her in, which she gladly takes, fiercely glad when Eliot winds his arm back around her. They carefully manage to leave her arms free to touch – effortlessly walking the line between making her feel safe and secure while never making her feel trapped. She’s hyper aware of Eliot right now – perhaps she and Alec both are – comparing the way she’s seen him with other lovers, both on the job and off it, and the way he is with them. For reasons she can’t quite put her finger on she suddenly knows that he doesn’t have to pretend with them, that that’s something precious and rare for him and it warms her to her core.
Who needs soul-bonded telepathy when you can just know each so well, she thinks? Maybe they aren’t quite there yet but Parker is suddenly utterly certain that she wouldn’t change this for some mythical fated love. However things work out with her and Alec and these terrible confusing feelings of hers, she’s vividly aware of not wanting to take this away from Eliot. If they stop sleeping with him, they’re going to have to find something else to bind him to them, to keep him close like he needs to be, for his sake and theirs.
“So,” Eliot says against her ear, “if we’re having sex first, I’m going to turn off the oven, or do we want to eat the pizza first.”
Alec looks appalled at the thought of stopping their shenanigans for something as prosaic as food, but Parker’s stomach chooses that moment to grumble loudly answering the question for them. Helpless laughter engulfs her and quickly pulls the other two in after her. Eliot untangles himself from them enough to go check on the pizza and Parker lets Alec gather her closer, and sees her own relief reflected back on his face. However up in the air what’s going between the two of them remains, the thing between the three of them - friends, teammates, lovers, family – still stands strong.
Nothing is ruined.
~
Sophie has always been the most romantic of them all, but she’d be the first to admit that what she considers to be truly romantic doesn’t necessarily fit with what other people consider romantic. She is also, fundamentally a pragmatist, perhaps it’s a product of being a grafter, or perhaps she learned that first, long before she ran her first con. She knows, for example that you cannot ‘save’ someone from themselves by loving them ‘enough’; you can only help them save themselves. (Whether that means sticking by them or walking away.) Sophie also knows that pretty much every grifter has run a ‘soul-bond’ con at least once. She knows exactly how to fake it and how easy it is to make the mark fool themselves. She’s only ever run that con herself once before, when she was young and foolish, and if she’s very lucky, she may one day forgive herself for the fallout from that.
She’s been wondering for a while about Parker and Hardison, their relationship in general and potential for soul bonding. Hardison keeps surprising her with his maturity and patience when it comes to this fragile thing between him and Parker. Lately she’s begun to suspect that the two of them will pretty much flow straight from dating into being soul-bonded. That half of why they’re moving so carefully is because they know what they have is rare and special.
But after today’s adventures, Sophie is a whole lot more certain, and she has a whole lot of new suspicions. She’d suspected in the graveyard, but she hadn’t been certain until she’d got hold of the phone, had gently pried it out of Parker’s hands and seen the truth in its call logs and Parker’s scared eyes.
(“I’m not ready for that,” Parker tells her, without Sophie having to ask.
“That’s alright,” Sophie assures her, “there’s no rush.”
It’s the most grifter to grifter conversation she’s ever had with Parker, plausible deniability coming out their ears, but true nonetheless.)
There is, however, definitely something else going on, and it lingers in the back of Sophie’s head and her awareness. She worries at it while Hardison drops the full force of his vengeance on their erstwhile enemies, turning events round and round in her head until she finds what’s out of kilter. She watches Eliot drift around the office and the bar, never far from either Parker or Hardison but never coming too close either. He doesn’t meet Sophie’s eyes either and that’s when it clicks, it was meeting his eyes back in the graveyard that had confirmed her suspicions in the first place. For a moment she’s back there, watching the way Hardison and Eliot had clung to each other, the relief in Eliot’s eyes when he’d opened them hadn’t been a surprise but the sadness had been. She’d been distracted at the time with her own relief and the moment of shared realisation that they’d shared just afterwards when Parker and Hardison had been staring at each other – that they were both seeing the same thing. With a little distance she has a whole new set of suspicions, that revolve around why someone so deeply invested in Hardison and Parker’s relationship, in their individual happiness, should be saddened to realise he was right that they were bonding.
While Eliot may not be entirely certain how much Sophie knows, she has no doubt that he knows that she knows too much for comfort, because he is quite clearly avoiding her. Technically, as the job is finished, his time’s his own, but normally after such a close brush with death, they’d all be reluctant to let each other out of their sight. She’s seen Eliot put off medical treatment to have a quiet drink with the team to let them assure themselves that he’s fine. Normally he’d be suggesting food or have just straight-up started cooking for them all, or have disappeared with Parker and Hardison for one of their movie-nights. But tonight he’s gone as soon as he reasonably could be. Which tells Sophie not only that something is wrong, but also that Eliot not only knows that; he knows what’s wrong.
Hence why he’s sitting in a quiet bar – not their bar - getting quietly trashed. She doesn’t think anyone else has noticed. They’re all feeling too fragile in general to find his behaviour particularly odd. But it’s her job to notice these things, to look after their emotional welfare. So when he’d disappeared, she’d quietly made her own escape and tracked him down.
Sophie slides into the seat beside him at the bar, he looks up at her briefly, accepting her presence but not actively welcoming it. At first she doesn’t say anything, just orders her whiskey and alternately sips and nurses it, holding her peace. Eliot waits her out, waiting to see how much she’s figured out, whether their conclusions line up, yet unwilling to break the impasse and admit what he knows first.
“Funny thing about those phones,” she observes, “burner phone like that, no GPS so we couldn’t trace it, but those guys, they didn’t know enough about technology to know what Hardison could or couldn’t do with a phone. So if they wanted to mess with him, they’d do it the old fashioned way.”
“Doesn’t get much more old fashioned than burying someone alive,” Eliot mutters.
“Right, so, the phone was really just a fancy torch to them. The whole point was to give him hope and then snatch it away from him. They wanted him to despair, they wanted him to panic.”
“We were meant to get close and then fail, it was about making us suffer,” Eliot agrees.
“So why would they give him a fully charged phone, we got to him just in time and Parker was talking to him right up to the end when he was running out of air. His phone was dead when we got him out. Do you really think they bothered to figure out how long his oxygen would last and clever enough to work out how much battery life to give him so we’d hear him die?” She asks.
“Not something they could predict. They couldn’t know how much he’d stay on the phone, how much he’d use it as a torch or if he’d be preserving the battery as much as possible.” Eliot confirms reluctantly.
“Pretty lucky, huh?” She suggests.
Eliot snorts derisively muttering, “Luck nothing.”
“And if it wasn’t luck…well there have been a few times lately where it’s almost seemed like they could read each other’s minds…”
“They’re bonding alright?” Eliot bursts out, “you know it, Nate knows it, I know it, and after today I bet they know it too, they’re just freaking out about it too much to admit it. They’re bonding so hard, the bond is leaking out all over the place, I can practically hear them projecting at each other.”
The sound of his teeth clicking shut on whatever else he was going to say, is the sound of the penny dropping for Sophie, he isn’t jealous, he’s scared. Not of losing them as she’d suspected, but of something at once more wonderful and more terrifying than she would have suspected. Because she’s been around a few bonding couples over the years and she’s seen all kinds of weird emotional and psychological fall out from the process. The headaches she’s been getting lately when Alec and Parker have been in tense situations had been her clue that her suspicions were correct. Headaches and waves of emotion not your own were typical of bonding leakage. Actually hearing what they were trying to project at each other was something else. She pushes a little further, because she needs to be sure as much as he does.
“The thing is,” she tells him pausing to finish her drink, “when we were running the sirens for Hardison, the phone was dead. I was relying on Parker, because I couldn’t hear him anymore, but Nate, he didn’t have Parker, but he did have you and you…”
“I could hear what he was hearing, like he was on the comms with us,” Eliot admits.
“Yes, you could,” Sophie agrees, as though she’d known all along, rather than just suspected.
“There’s…no such thing as…not between three people…they don’t even happen in films or books,” he eventually forces out. Sophie refrains from telling him that he’s clearly not been reading the right kind of books, instead stores away the knowledge that this clearly isn’t the first incident. That Eliot’s had enough suspicions before this that he’s done some research. Clearly she needs to do some research of her own before she pushes this further.
“And yet…” she offers. He doesn’t say anything else, so she carefully sets her glass down and leaves him to contemplate that information.
Choice is funny thing. It’s something that all of the team value highly. Nate still thinks of choice in clear black and white terms, justice versus order, it’s how he lives with breaking the law. He considers that to be the primary difference between himself and the rest of the team, they chose to be criminals, he was conned into it and now he’s stuck. She supposes that fundamentally, Eliot, Hardison and Parker think in fundamentally black and white terms about the job, choosing to use their skills to help people. That old chestnut about the choice between what’s right and what’s easy, a shared abiding desire to know for certain what’s right.
(When they can reliably tell for themselves what that is, they won’t need her and Nate any more, and she both looks forward to and dreads that day coming.)
On the other hand, the thing that they all have in common is a bone deep desire to be chosen. It’s closer to the surface in some of them than in others, but it’s the one insecurity that they all share. They’ve all made themselves the best at what they do, so that no one who has the resources to pick them would consider passing them over for someone else. Each of their internal children bouncing up and down on the inside, calling out ‘pick me, pick me’, and the corresponding nasty little voice that says that no-one who had any other choice would ever pick them. There’s a reason that the most romantic thing Nate’s ever said to her was ‘I chose you’, because he understands that’s what she needs to hear because he needs to hear it too. That’s why he keeps coming back to the team, more than the control thing, more than helping people or sticking it his old bosses. But because they chose him, and keep choosing him.
The truth remains, that it wasn’t Nate that chose the rest of the team. As Dubenich so eloquently and brutally put it, he chose the original team. They may have turned on him and beaten him, become something more than he could ever have imagined but the truth of it clearly rankles.
Parker and Hardison seem to be slowly working their way towards choosing each other and understanding how profound and rare a bond they have. She worries about Eliot though – she always worries about Eliot – because it’s always so hard to figure out what he actually needs. For someone whose whole identity appears to be built on being straightforward, he really embraces being contradictory. The greatest con Eliot has ever pulled is the one he is always running on himself, that he doesn’t care and that he doesn’t need anyone. At least its one that Parker and Hardison have never seemed to have a problem seeing through, but Sophie’s not remotely certain that it will be enough to fix this particular complexity.
Sophie is a romantic, she holds out hope that the three of them will come to accept and treasure that the universe has chosen them for each other. However Sophie is a pragmatist and she is determined to help them see that they have chosen each other, in full knowledge of who each other is, for good and ill.
~
The thing is, that this is not Eliot Spencer’s first rodeo. He’s seen a soul-bond develop at close quarters before, he’s absolutely certain about what he’s seeing. He’s suspected for a while that Parker and Hardison were developing a soul bond but after today any doubts he had are crumbling away. He’s not sure what happened, if it was some significant change on their latest job that happened between them when he wasn’t there or if it’s just some tiny little thing slotting into place and leaving the truth of the matter obvious to all the three of them. The real problem, however, is that Parker and Hardison are not only in denial about it, they seem to be actively hostile to the notion.
On a rational, logical basis, Eliot actually thinks that there are no two people he knows that deserve to be soul bonded more. For two people who had such disrupted childhoods, the stability and security – a fated, perfect, fairy-tale love – is arguably something the universe owes them. On an instinctive, visceral level, that he doesn’t want to acknowledge in the slightest, even to himself, he is miserably jealous of them. Something he’s never allowed himself to want, even before he learned that he definitely did not deserve that. Fundamentally he can’t quite get his head around why they’re still fighting the bond. They love each other, that’s not up for debate however rarely they might say the words.
On their best days, it feels like the three of them are perfectly in sync, a well-oiled three-part machine. On bad days, however, it sometimes feels as is they’re having three different conversations, in different languages, on only tangentially related topics. (On those days he really misses Sophie, they all do, ‘what would Sophie say’ is definitely not a phrase any of them use to defuse arguments.) This is not one of the good days. Which is why, Eliot is currently sitting in the middle of their sizeable couch attempting to mediate between the two of them while they each sit as far away from him and each other as possible, while still occupying the same piece of furniture.
“How can you even be certain that that’s what it is? A soul bond. It’s like something out of a fairy-tale,” Parker protests, “what if we’re just a tiny bit psychic, all three of us? Cos sometimes, in really high stress situations I swear I can hear Eliot too.”
“There’s no verified reports of telepathy outside of soul bonds,” Hardison replies quietly, “I checked, anyone who claims otherwise has been either running a con or trying to get funding for creepy, creepy medical experiments.”
“She’s got a point though, not about the soul bond thing, I’m pretty sure that is what’s going on with you both,” argues Eliot, “But there’s definitely something else going on. I could have written it off as a side-effect of the pair of you fighting the bond, that it was, I don’t know, leaking out in odd places, if it was just like a wave of emotion here or a random word or image there but its not.”
And just like that he has both of their full attention focussed on him.
“You can hear us too?” Parker asks, and there’s something almost hopeful in the way she asks that takes him by surprise.
A dark little suspicion dawns on him, have they haven’t been fighting their bond because they didn’t want to shut him out, they wouldn’t be that dense, would they?
“How long have you…suspected?” Hardison asks, something odd about his voice too, and Eliot knows that there’s no point in obfuscation now. Especially not if his suspicions are correct.
“Since the job with the crooked funeral directors. When we pulled you out…I could hear you calling out to Parker when you weren’t saying a word out loud. Then afterwards, I had a conversation with Sophie that made me realise that what Parker and I were hearing when we were trying to find you, wasn’t the same as what she and Nate were hearing.” He admits.
“What were you hearing?” Hardison presses, voice tense.
“My phone died, Alec,” Parker interrupts, which both is and isn’t an answer to his question. “Sometime after I called you back, I knew it was running low but I could still hear you and Eliot was still responding like he was hearing you over my comm. But you weren’t, were you? You were hearing him,” she reaches forward and taps Eliot gently on the temple, “here too.”
Eliot nods, but when he replies he doesn’t say it out loud, just projects a short burst of mixed emotions – affection, annoyance, and acceptance – at them both. He doesn’t look at either of them, not wanting to see their reaction to his unfiltered response to them.
“You didn’t say anything,” Hardison is unsurprisingly the first to find his words after that, “but you’re not scared of this?”
“No. I mean, I was, when I first figured it out, I was scared witless. For a start, the inside of my head is not the kind of place I want to inflict on anybody, let alone anyone I like. Never mind the classified stuff. And then there’s the whole likelihood that I would mess stuff up between you two, in case you missed it, I’m a tiny bit invested in your relationship working out!” He takes a breath to calm himself as the truth of what he’s about to say settles upon him, “But no, I’m not scared, not any more. If I have to be bound to someone…”
“That what you meant when you said to Nate about what you’d been searching for?” Hardison asks.
“It’s more than that but, I chose you both a long time ago,” he mutters with a shrug.
“How long ago,” Parker asks. He can’t tell if he just knows her voice so well by now or if he’s getting a boost from the connection, but he can feel her unspoken longing, and its that more than anything that makes him push through his own reticence to give her the truth she needs to hear.
“When Nate went to prison, if Sophie hadn’t stayed, if she’d still needed more time on her own…I’d have stayed with you two. I’d have made some excuse, about the work or keeping you two out of trouble or hell, even just the really good sex. But, I was always going to stay, even if I couldn’t admit it yet,” he confesses.
“I would like to point out that it was your idea that we stop sleeping with you,” Hardison notes absently, as though that’s remotely the salient point here. As though he hasn’t used it as cover to shuffle closer to Eliot, as though Eliot doesn’t know that the way Hardison has picked up his left hand and is examining his scars and callouses is a substitute for holding his hand. As though Eliot wouldn’t cling back if Hardison did hold his hand. So Eliot indulges him and allows himself to be drawn in.
“I was right though, you two needed to figure out what you were to each other first.” Eliot insists stubbornly.
“I hate Dubenich and I’m not sorry he’s dead,” Parker says abruptly, “but he was right about one thing. As brilliant as we were in our own rights, we make a better team.”
“You know what I remember, about the end of that first job?” Hardison asks, “I remember Nate walking away, and I remember Sophie walking away, and I remember looking at both of you and thinking that this was too good a chance to throw away. Being utterly certain that you were both thinking the same thing. We didn’t say anything; we just fell into step and got to work on convincing Nate. And yeah consciously we were choosing Nate, because we needed him and Sophie, but we were also choosing each other. We keep choosing each other.”
“Always,” Eliot agrees, hearing Parker echo the sentiment both out loud and inside his head.
It isn’t a big dramatic moment for Eliot, he just feels the certainty and contentment he often feels when the three of them are doing something in sync, feels it settle in his bones. As though he now utterly believes what he’s logically known for ages, that he belongs here, with these people. It’s more like a pressure, which he'd been resisting for so long he’d forgotten it was there, has suddenly been removed. He happens to be looking at Parker when it hits so he gets to see her rather more dramatic reaction, to watch the fear drain away to be replaced with certainty. He can’t see Hardison but he feels the shudder that runs through him before his forehead thunks down onto Eliot’s shoulder, so he knows it hits Hardison just as hard.
Eliot feels the grin spread across his face; this is what he’d wanted for them, this certainty, this security, and this comfort. He just hadn’t been able to imagine himself as part of that loop before, but now it feels as impossible to imagine it not. He also feels like he knows where every last nerve in his body is, because they’re all tingling. It is suddenly not anywhere near enough content to be just holding hands. He tries to clamp down on how much contact he really wants right now, to give them space to settle into the connection, he’d merely been in denial, they’d actively been fighting it. But thankfully Parker is ahead of him. He can feel the shape of her thoughts, not the detail, just the barest outline, a tease in fact. And the small smile that quirks her lips tells him all kinds of things without any need for telepathy, just memories, and good ones at that.
“Eliot?” She asks a question she is already confident in the answer to.
“Yeah,” he agrees, “we’re going to need a bed for this.”
Because as fun as sofas can be, he both wants to do this properly and doesn’t want to have to move afterwards.
“Like, right now,” Hardison agrees, and suddenly the three of them are in motion.
~
They don’t often use their special skill on jobs. They never even really have to have the discussion, it’s just a mutual unspoken agreement that it’s something that work never gets to touch or taint. They certainly use it to check-in with each other and offer support or reassurance when they can’t speak aloud, but mostly, they like talking on comms, its good practice for when they need to work with other people and its also familiar and comforting in its own way.
But sometimes, it can be really fun to use it on a job. Some people are just asking to be messed with.
“Chaos,” they say in sync, with various levels of frustration and annoyance, as they all independently reach the same conclusion about just who has been leading them a merry dance on this job.
All too familiar laughter drifts over their comms, as Chaos steps out of the shadows to taunt them.
They retreat into their inner space while he graces them with a monologue – Alec’s recording it just in case he lets anything useful slip – to vent their frustrations in private.
“On the other hand,” Parker offers, “who says we have to play by his rules? We know how he works and he thinks he knows how we work…”
“He doesn’t know you’re the mastermind now…” Alec replies, and she can feel the curve of his smile, the faint echo of his delighted laughter.
“And even if he did, he’ll expect you to be nicer than Nate…” Eliot continues, and Parker can almost feel that slightly feral grin curling his lips, the same way her own does. That smile they share when someone has utterly underestimated either of them and is about to get vengeance dropped on their heads.
“I have,” she projects to them both, with something that other people might consider unholy glee, “a cunning plan.”
Out loud she interrupts Chaos’ monologue – much to his squawking chagrin – with her best Alyson Hannigan impression, “bored now.”
He tries to get back into the swing of his monologue, but she doesn’t bother leaving him time to build up a head of steam.
“Uhuhuh,” she scolds him, calling on her memory of every wide-eyed amoral innocent character Sophie had put together for her on a grift, sounding cheerful, innocent and incidentally mad as a box of frogs, “this is my game not yours, and we’ll be playing by my rules. We’re going to have SO much fun! Aren’t we boys?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Alec and Eliot respond, with just the right level of seriousness and devotion to be convincing.
While Chaos splutters and whines, appalled that they’ve let Parker be in charge, Parker mentally sketches out the plan and Alec and Eliot throw in suggestions and flesh out their various roles into something that will dump all Chaos’ hubris right on his own head.
There are so many variables to consider, so many potentials that things could go wrong – Chaos is a worthy adversary, they’d respect him if he weren’t so damn annoying – but one thing is for certain. They are going to have so much fun, together.
Hear it in the Silence (7391 words) by Glinda
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Leverage
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Alec Hardison/Parker/Eliot Spencer
Characters: Alec Hardison, Parker (Leverage), Eliot Spencer, Sophie Devereaux (Leverage), Colin "Chaos" Mason
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Soulmates, Soul Bond, Telepathic Bond, Getting Together, Polyamory Negotiations, OT3, Friends to Lovers, Friends With Benefits
Summary:
The thing about soul bonds is that they’re quite rare. Maybe 10-15% of the population. Common enough that most people know at least one couple who are soul bonded and for it to be reliable fodder for romance novels and rom-coms, rare enough that most people have no real expectation that they’ll turn out to have a soul-mate.
When people talk about soul bonds, they talk about fate and destiny and telepathy, they make it sound magical and all conquering. In reality, there’s a lot more individual choice involved. In order for the bond to set, both parties have to choose to accept the bond. If they both accept the bond then: fireworks and glorious mutual understanding and happiness. If they don’t, then the bond withers and mostly fades, except that you’ll probably always know where your potential bond mate is no matter how far away from each other you stay.
One of the things about growing up in the system that people don’t talk about – prefer not to think about – is quite how many kids end up there as a result of soul bonding. Babies whose parents were potential bond mates but one or other parent bailed on the connection or were already married. Kids who were the products of pre-bond relationships. Teenagers whose parents disapproved of the race or gender or class or whatever of their soul mate and took drastic measures to try to prevent them bonding. (In some countries it’s illegal to intervene with a bonding like that – you can do a lot of psychological damage especially in minors.) People who swoon over the idea of pining away and dying of broken heart after your partner’s death rarely think what it must be like to lose one parent and watch the other fade away in front of your eyes when you’re still in Junior High.
Alec Hardison has never known which option landed him in foster care, all he knows for certain is that when the social worker wrote ‘result of soul-bond complications’ on his file all those years ago, they might as well have rubber stamped it ‘unadoptable’. No one wanted to keep a kid like that, however smart or cute or winning their smile. As though it was a taint that might rub off on them. It was a common enough issue that some states even screened potential foster-parents for bias on that front. So when he says he got lucky, he knows how true that is. It took him years to notice that pretty much every kid that got sent to Nana had the same status as him. It wasn’t until she got sick that he found out that she’d been soul-bonded herself, had lost her soul-mate young – a freak accident – and armed with the certainty that there would be no-one else for her, had dedicated her life to looking out for kids that had been screwed over by the fallout of other people’s soul bonds.
He’s got a list as long as his arm for why he hacked the Bank of Iceland for Nana, but mostly, what he remembers is her sad fierce eyes and that surfeit of love that she’d been left with. And the burning certainty that he didn’t want some fairy-tale love. He wanted an ordinary love, someone that he chose and that chose him in return not because of destiny or fate, but because of who they both were as people.
If that meant that for several years his choices of partners were somewhat…unsuitable, then, well he was young. He’d figure it out eventually. Alec was pretty certain that he didn’t develop a crush on Parker purely because there was a real chance of her doing him bodily harm if he tried to do anything about his crush on her. She was after all, beautiful, smart and funny, certainly knowing that she could kick his ass was a turn-on, but mostly she was his friend and clearly not in a good place to be having anything resembling a relationship with anyone. Probably no one else would have considered Eliot to be a safe target for a crush. Nonetheless, as two bisexual men with little to no interest in club culture and healthy levels of professional paranoia about going to bed with men they don’t know and trust, it evolves into a mutually beneficial arrangement. It doesn’t remotely surprise Alec that Eliot might have a deep seated desire to hold him down and fuck him – and damn, but he does that well – they’ve always had that kind of tension that he always suspected could tip over into good sex. It’s slightly more of a surprise that pretty much the only thing they do that Eliot seem to enjoy more than holding him down, is being held down and fucked by Alec in turn.
It should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone that Parker likes to watch. Sometimes hanging upside down from the ceiling, sometimes so close they can feel her breath on their skin. So close she can reach out and touch if she wants, and oh how she wants, and apparently when Parker says ‘please’ like that neither of them can say no to her.
(She’s never stabbed either of them with a fork, Eliot had taught her the traffic light system early on, but mostly, being friends and colleague first means they’re used to reading each others’ body language, so they’ve almost always stopped before anyone has to actually say the word out loud.)
She seems to have zero interest in watching them fuck other people. Alec isn’t generally into multi-person scenarios himself so he figures for her it’s about watching them rather than watching sex. Parker’s proved rather emphatically that she’s attracted to both of them, so its just as likely to be that she isn’t into girls like that. Alec’s cool with that, he’s got two gorgeous friends and colleagues, to con bad guys and have excellent and adventurous sex with. Eliot though, he has to keep pushing at it, like a loose tooth or a healing wound that doesn’t hurt unless you poke at it. Alec wishes he wouldn’t, nothing this good can last, so why jinx it?
There are few things more satisfying than those moments when the three of them are together and one of them needs to get out of their head. And Alec will look at Parker – because usually its Eliot that needs that, but Alec’s had those moments with Eliot, and seen them both look at him like that - and she’ll look at him and its like something just clicks in their brains. They don’t have to say a word, they just know exactly what to do, perfect teamwork, orgasms for everyone and the person who needs it most that day wrapped up and safe – for both the sex and the sleeping afterwards - in the middle.
~
It’s a truth universally acknowledged – at least by the team – that Parker doesn’t like other people touching Hardison or Hardison touching other people. Initially, Parker finds the notion ridiculous, if anyone other than Sophie had suggested it she would have dismissed it entirely. However, Sophie’s usually right when it comes to emotions so Parker reckons that she probably knows what she’s talking about.
It’s enough assurance to get her through bringing up feelings with Alec, and though her words fail her, he seems to understand anyway. He stops touching other people, at least he stops touching them with intent, keeps his touches friendly and professional – well professional for them, sometimes he has to flirt on the job, but now that she’s looking for it Parker can see the join. She can see the difference between the way he flirts on the con and the way he flirts with her. It’s oddly fascinating watching him assemble his performance and to see it fall away once he doesn’t need it anymore. Once she gets to grips with that she wonders how he flirts with Eliot, if that’s performative – in line with their whole ‘friends with bennies’ arrangement – or if its something honest and true. Which of course is when she comes back to something that has been bugging her for a while now. It’s never bothered her - well, not in a bad way, got her all hot and bothered certainly – when Alec and Eliot touch, and now that she thinks about it she realises that she hasn’t seen that in a while. They still sling their arms round each other – and her for that matter – and they still do their funny little secret handshakes but nothing more. Parker wonders if they’ve stopped or if they’re just hiding it from her; she’s not sure how she feels about that, which she’d prefer to be the case.
Because she never can resist poking at a tender place, she finagles the events after their next job so the three of them end up back at Alec’s watching movies and eating pizza. It’s been one of those jobs that makes Eliot want to cook afterwards, so it’s homemade pizza that they’re having. Parker comes back from the bathroom and lingers in the doorway watching them. (The pizza stone makes her smile, she remembers going with Alec to pick it out, a present for Eliot after a particularly tough job, that all three of them pretended wasn’t a present. They’re all of them better at showing rather than telling their affections.) Eliot’s carefully arranging the toppings to accommodate their varied preferences and Alec is trying to sneakily steal bits of topping to snack on. There’s nothing fake about their flirting – not even Eliot’s and that’s something even rarer she realises, putting the thought away for later – and equally nothing about it that makes her remotely unhappy. It feels familiar and comforting, the only thing it stirs up in her is a pleasant anticipation, she recognises that they’re going to kiss in a minute and looks forward to it – the best test of her response to their flirting possible.
And then they don’t kiss.
She sees the moment when they realise they’re about to kiss, and then physically pull away from it. She expects to feel relieved but she doesn’t, instead she’s disappointed and sad. She’s broken something more fragile than that beer bottle and she hasn’t a clue how to fix it.
So naturally, that’s the moment when Eliot looks up and sees her and her expression. Parker doesn’t know what her face is doing as a result of the contradictory revelations she’s experiencing, but judging by the way guilt and unhappiness briefly wash over his face before he ducks down to put the pizza in the oven, nothing good. Alec just mutters something about the bathroom and ducks round her with an apologetic look.
She needs a plan, she ought to take advice and do her research and then act accordingly, but all her instincts tell her that it will only get more broken with time. If she doesn’t act now she’ll lose them both and that’s so far from acceptable that she can’t even contemplate it for long. So she throws herself in headfirst and trusts that they’ll catch her.
She swings herself up on the counter, perfectly positioned to intercept Eliot whichever way he moves when he stands up again. But he doesn’t try to avoid her, just indicates the timer beside her, catches and sets it when she throws it to him.
“I didn’t…” she begins, but words fail her, “you don’t…”
“Parker, it’s alright,” Eliot assures her, “just old habits dying hard.”
“It’s not though,” she tells him, “I didn’t mean to break anything, but clearly I have and I don’t know how to fix it. Help me fix it?”
“Nothing to fix darling, we had some fun together, him and me, then all three of us, but its not like I couldn’t see the pair of you were having feelings about each other.” He admits. “Honestly I’m kinda proud of you, time was I didn’t think you’d ever be able to acknowledge that, but look at you, long road ahead of you but you’ll get there.”
She can see the logic of the process they must have gone through. She appreciates that Alec swearing off everyone else is his way of showing her that he has feelings too, without having to say things that might freak her out. It just never occurred that that would mean this too.
“He was yours first though,” she blurts out, “I’m not…stealing him away.”
Eliot shakes his head, mouth quirking sadly, “no he wasn’t, not like you mean. What you two are dancing around? That was never something he and I wanted from each other, nor something I could have offered him if he did either.”
“I’ve still stolen something from you,” Parker insists. She doesn’t have the words to describe it, but she’s completely certain that she’s right. It was never about convenience, that was only an excuse, a safety net of obfuscation so none of them accidentally scared off the others. The thought arrives suddenly – fully-formed, without context, as though someone had dropped it straight into her head – ‘he deserves better’ and she shoves hard at the thought rejecting it and pushing it back ‘so do you’. Eliot flinches physically as though the exchange had taken place out loud and for a moment Parker wonders if it did, but then Alec interrupts their standoff from the kitchen doorway.
“It never occurred to either of you that I might be quite happy to be shared,” Alec asks derailing all other thoughts. “We seem to manage to negotiate our sex lives to accommodate all three of our varying sexual needs and wants, no reason we can’t do the same with feelings or whatever it is that Eliot needs.”
“We’re really good at puzzles,” Parker agrees, beginning to turn the problem around in her brain, feeling cautiously for the sharp edges, trying to establish the shape of it, under all the obfuscations.
“I don’t need anything,” Eliot objects.
“Yeah, that’s why you keep coming back to us, again and again. Whatever it is that you get from us, you can’t get other places or you wouldn’t keep falling into bed with us. Just because you need something different than what Parker needs, or something different from what I need, doesn’t mean what you need isn’t valid.” Alec contests.
Eliot looks like he wants to argue, but he also looks slightly winded, like someone punched him in the chest – more like, punched him in the feelings – so Parker decides its time to distract him before he freaks out. Telegraphing her movements so he knows its coming, Parker launches her self from her perch and Eliot steps forward, arms instinctively coming up to catch her. She wraps herself around him like an affectionate octopus, as she slides down his body, and he submits to being kissed thoroughly. Once she has his full attention, she throws out one arm to Alec and is relieved to discovered that he’s already on board with the programme, already close enough to grab her hand and be pulled in.
“We’ll figure something out,” she assures them both between kisses, “something that works for all of us.”
“If you say so,” Eliot allows, “you guys are the brains of this operation.”
This is the key, Parker is certain. Figure out how Eliot fits and everything else will click into place. Alec on the other hand just rolls his eyes and pulls Eliot into an utterly filthy kiss and Parker gets completely distracted.
(She remembers suddenly, the first time she walked in on them kissing, Eliot’s irritated ‘get in or get out’ comment – she wonders now if Tara had caught them too – and that moment when she’d known she was on a tipping point, that whatever option she chose would change her relationship with them both forever. She remembers the rush of adrenaline and the burning desire to see more, the wave of giddiness that had pushed her into action, to lock the door behind them and hop up on a cabinet that gave her an excellent view. The frisson of excitement that bounced between them, that ‘I dare you’ look the boys had shared before they proceeded to give her a show. She hadn’t taken an active part in that afternoon’s activities but it nonetheless was the first time she’d really understood why people got so excited about sex.)
She loves to watch them kiss, it doesn’t make her jealous, it makes her want to join in. Her beautiful boys, that no-one else gets to see like this, there’s nothing here to make her jealous. The kiss slows and Alec turns to her holding out a hand to pull her in, which she gladly takes, fiercely glad when Eliot winds his arm back around her. They carefully manage to leave her arms free to touch – effortlessly walking the line between making her feel safe and secure while never making her feel trapped. She’s hyper aware of Eliot right now – perhaps she and Alec both are – comparing the way she’s seen him with other lovers, both on the job and off it, and the way he is with them. For reasons she can’t quite put her finger on she suddenly knows that he doesn’t have to pretend with them, that that’s something precious and rare for him and it warms her to her core.
Who needs soul-bonded telepathy when you can just know each so well, she thinks? Maybe they aren’t quite there yet but Parker is suddenly utterly certain that she wouldn’t change this for some mythical fated love. However things work out with her and Alec and these terrible confusing feelings of hers, she’s vividly aware of not wanting to take this away from Eliot. If they stop sleeping with him, they’re going to have to find something else to bind him to them, to keep him close like he needs to be, for his sake and theirs.
“So,” Eliot says against her ear, “if we’re having sex first, I’m going to turn off the oven, or do we want to eat the pizza first.”
Alec looks appalled at the thought of stopping their shenanigans for something as prosaic as food, but Parker’s stomach chooses that moment to grumble loudly answering the question for them. Helpless laughter engulfs her and quickly pulls the other two in after her. Eliot untangles himself from them enough to go check on the pizza and Parker lets Alec gather her closer, and sees her own relief reflected back on his face. However up in the air what’s going between the two of them remains, the thing between the three of them - friends, teammates, lovers, family – still stands strong.
Nothing is ruined.
~
Sophie has always been the most romantic of them all, but she’d be the first to admit that what she considers to be truly romantic doesn’t necessarily fit with what other people consider romantic. She is also, fundamentally a pragmatist, perhaps it’s a product of being a grafter, or perhaps she learned that first, long before she ran her first con. She knows, for example that you cannot ‘save’ someone from themselves by loving them ‘enough’; you can only help them save themselves. (Whether that means sticking by them or walking away.) Sophie also knows that pretty much every grifter has run a ‘soul-bond’ con at least once. She knows exactly how to fake it and how easy it is to make the mark fool themselves. She’s only ever run that con herself once before, when she was young and foolish, and if she’s very lucky, she may one day forgive herself for the fallout from that.
She’s been wondering for a while about Parker and Hardison, their relationship in general and potential for soul bonding. Hardison keeps surprising her with his maturity and patience when it comes to this fragile thing between him and Parker. Lately she’s begun to suspect that the two of them will pretty much flow straight from dating into being soul-bonded. That half of why they’re moving so carefully is because they know what they have is rare and special.
But after today’s adventures, Sophie is a whole lot more certain, and she has a whole lot of new suspicions. She’d suspected in the graveyard, but she hadn’t been certain until she’d got hold of the phone, had gently pried it out of Parker’s hands and seen the truth in its call logs and Parker’s scared eyes.
(“I’m not ready for that,” Parker tells her, without Sophie having to ask.
“That’s alright,” Sophie assures her, “there’s no rush.”
It’s the most grifter to grifter conversation she’s ever had with Parker, plausible deniability coming out their ears, but true nonetheless.)
There is, however, definitely something else going on, and it lingers in the back of Sophie’s head and her awareness. She worries at it while Hardison drops the full force of his vengeance on their erstwhile enemies, turning events round and round in her head until she finds what’s out of kilter. She watches Eliot drift around the office and the bar, never far from either Parker or Hardison but never coming too close either. He doesn’t meet Sophie’s eyes either and that’s when it clicks, it was meeting his eyes back in the graveyard that had confirmed her suspicions in the first place. For a moment she’s back there, watching the way Hardison and Eliot had clung to each other, the relief in Eliot’s eyes when he’d opened them hadn’t been a surprise but the sadness had been. She’d been distracted at the time with her own relief and the moment of shared realisation that they’d shared just afterwards when Parker and Hardison had been staring at each other – that they were both seeing the same thing. With a little distance she has a whole new set of suspicions, that revolve around why someone so deeply invested in Hardison and Parker’s relationship, in their individual happiness, should be saddened to realise he was right that they were bonding.
While Eliot may not be entirely certain how much Sophie knows, she has no doubt that he knows that she knows too much for comfort, because he is quite clearly avoiding her. Technically, as the job is finished, his time’s his own, but normally after such a close brush with death, they’d all be reluctant to let each other out of their sight. She’s seen Eliot put off medical treatment to have a quiet drink with the team to let them assure themselves that he’s fine. Normally he’d be suggesting food or have just straight-up started cooking for them all, or have disappeared with Parker and Hardison for one of their movie-nights. But tonight he’s gone as soon as he reasonably could be. Which tells Sophie not only that something is wrong, but also that Eliot not only knows that; he knows what’s wrong.
Hence why he’s sitting in a quiet bar – not their bar - getting quietly trashed. She doesn’t think anyone else has noticed. They’re all feeling too fragile in general to find his behaviour particularly odd. But it’s her job to notice these things, to look after their emotional welfare. So when he’d disappeared, she’d quietly made her own escape and tracked him down.
Sophie slides into the seat beside him at the bar, he looks up at her briefly, accepting her presence but not actively welcoming it. At first she doesn’t say anything, just orders her whiskey and alternately sips and nurses it, holding her peace. Eliot waits her out, waiting to see how much she’s figured out, whether their conclusions line up, yet unwilling to break the impasse and admit what he knows first.
“Funny thing about those phones,” she observes, “burner phone like that, no GPS so we couldn’t trace it, but those guys, they didn’t know enough about technology to know what Hardison could or couldn’t do with a phone. So if they wanted to mess with him, they’d do it the old fashioned way.”
“Doesn’t get much more old fashioned than burying someone alive,” Eliot mutters.
“Right, so, the phone was really just a fancy torch to them. The whole point was to give him hope and then snatch it away from him. They wanted him to despair, they wanted him to panic.”
“We were meant to get close and then fail, it was about making us suffer,” Eliot agrees.
“So why would they give him a fully charged phone, we got to him just in time and Parker was talking to him right up to the end when he was running out of air. His phone was dead when we got him out. Do you really think they bothered to figure out how long his oxygen would last and clever enough to work out how much battery life to give him so we’d hear him die?” She asks.
“Not something they could predict. They couldn’t know how much he’d stay on the phone, how much he’d use it as a torch or if he’d be preserving the battery as much as possible.” Eliot confirms reluctantly.
“Pretty lucky, huh?” She suggests.
Eliot snorts derisively muttering, “Luck nothing.”
“And if it wasn’t luck…well there have been a few times lately where it’s almost seemed like they could read each other’s minds…”
“They’re bonding alright?” Eliot bursts out, “you know it, Nate knows it, I know it, and after today I bet they know it too, they’re just freaking out about it too much to admit it. They’re bonding so hard, the bond is leaking out all over the place, I can practically hear them projecting at each other.”
The sound of his teeth clicking shut on whatever else he was going to say, is the sound of the penny dropping for Sophie, he isn’t jealous, he’s scared. Not of losing them as she’d suspected, but of something at once more wonderful and more terrifying than she would have suspected. Because she’s been around a few bonding couples over the years and she’s seen all kinds of weird emotional and psychological fall out from the process. The headaches she’s been getting lately when Alec and Parker have been in tense situations had been her clue that her suspicions were correct. Headaches and waves of emotion not your own were typical of bonding leakage. Actually hearing what they were trying to project at each other was something else. She pushes a little further, because she needs to be sure as much as he does.
“The thing is,” she tells him pausing to finish her drink, “when we were running the sirens for Hardison, the phone was dead. I was relying on Parker, because I couldn’t hear him anymore, but Nate, he didn’t have Parker, but he did have you and you…”
“I could hear what he was hearing, like he was on the comms with us,” Eliot admits.
“Yes, you could,” Sophie agrees, as though she’d known all along, rather than just suspected.
“There’s…no such thing as…not between three people…they don’t even happen in films or books,” he eventually forces out. Sophie refrains from telling him that he’s clearly not been reading the right kind of books, instead stores away the knowledge that this clearly isn’t the first incident. That Eliot’s had enough suspicions before this that he’s done some research. Clearly she needs to do some research of her own before she pushes this further.
“And yet…” she offers. He doesn’t say anything else, so she carefully sets her glass down and leaves him to contemplate that information.
Choice is funny thing. It’s something that all of the team value highly. Nate still thinks of choice in clear black and white terms, justice versus order, it’s how he lives with breaking the law. He considers that to be the primary difference between himself and the rest of the team, they chose to be criminals, he was conned into it and now he’s stuck. She supposes that fundamentally, Eliot, Hardison and Parker think in fundamentally black and white terms about the job, choosing to use their skills to help people. That old chestnut about the choice between what’s right and what’s easy, a shared abiding desire to know for certain what’s right.
(When they can reliably tell for themselves what that is, they won’t need her and Nate any more, and she both looks forward to and dreads that day coming.)
On the other hand, the thing that they all have in common is a bone deep desire to be chosen. It’s closer to the surface in some of them than in others, but it’s the one insecurity that they all share. They’ve all made themselves the best at what they do, so that no one who has the resources to pick them would consider passing them over for someone else. Each of their internal children bouncing up and down on the inside, calling out ‘pick me, pick me’, and the corresponding nasty little voice that says that no-one who had any other choice would ever pick them. There’s a reason that the most romantic thing Nate’s ever said to her was ‘I chose you’, because he understands that’s what she needs to hear because he needs to hear it too. That’s why he keeps coming back to the team, more than the control thing, more than helping people or sticking it his old bosses. But because they chose him, and keep choosing him.
The truth remains, that it wasn’t Nate that chose the rest of the team. As Dubenich so eloquently and brutally put it, he chose the original team. They may have turned on him and beaten him, become something more than he could ever have imagined but the truth of it clearly rankles.
Parker and Hardison seem to be slowly working their way towards choosing each other and understanding how profound and rare a bond they have. She worries about Eliot though – she always worries about Eliot – because it’s always so hard to figure out what he actually needs. For someone whose whole identity appears to be built on being straightforward, he really embraces being contradictory. The greatest con Eliot has ever pulled is the one he is always running on himself, that he doesn’t care and that he doesn’t need anyone. At least its one that Parker and Hardison have never seemed to have a problem seeing through, but Sophie’s not remotely certain that it will be enough to fix this particular complexity.
Sophie is a romantic, she holds out hope that the three of them will come to accept and treasure that the universe has chosen them for each other. However Sophie is a pragmatist and she is determined to help them see that they have chosen each other, in full knowledge of who each other is, for good and ill.
~
The thing is, that this is not Eliot Spencer’s first rodeo. He’s seen a soul-bond develop at close quarters before, he’s absolutely certain about what he’s seeing. He’s suspected for a while that Parker and Hardison were developing a soul bond but after today any doubts he had are crumbling away. He’s not sure what happened, if it was some significant change on their latest job that happened between them when he wasn’t there or if it’s just some tiny little thing slotting into place and leaving the truth of the matter obvious to all the three of them. The real problem, however, is that Parker and Hardison are not only in denial about it, they seem to be actively hostile to the notion.
On a rational, logical basis, Eliot actually thinks that there are no two people he knows that deserve to be soul bonded more. For two people who had such disrupted childhoods, the stability and security – a fated, perfect, fairy-tale love – is arguably something the universe owes them. On an instinctive, visceral level, that he doesn’t want to acknowledge in the slightest, even to himself, he is miserably jealous of them. Something he’s never allowed himself to want, even before he learned that he definitely did not deserve that. Fundamentally he can’t quite get his head around why they’re still fighting the bond. They love each other, that’s not up for debate however rarely they might say the words.
On their best days, it feels like the three of them are perfectly in sync, a well-oiled three-part machine. On bad days, however, it sometimes feels as is they’re having three different conversations, in different languages, on only tangentially related topics. (On those days he really misses Sophie, they all do, ‘what would Sophie say’ is definitely not a phrase any of them use to defuse arguments.) This is not one of the good days. Which is why, Eliot is currently sitting in the middle of their sizeable couch attempting to mediate between the two of them while they each sit as far away from him and each other as possible, while still occupying the same piece of furniture.
“How can you even be certain that that’s what it is? A soul bond. It’s like something out of a fairy-tale,” Parker protests, “what if we’re just a tiny bit psychic, all three of us? Cos sometimes, in really high stress situations I swear I can hear Eliot too.”
“There’s no verified reports of telepathy outside of soul bonds,” Hardison replies quietly, “I checked, anyone who claims otherwise has been either running a con or trying to get funding for creepy, creepy medical experiments.”
“She’s got a point though, not about the soul bond thing, I’m pretty sure that is what’s going on with you both,” argues Eliot, “But there’s definitely something else going on. I could have written it off as a side-effect of the pair of you fighting the bond, that it was, I don’t know, leaking out in odd places, if it was just like a wave of emotion here or a random word or image there but its not.”
And just like that he has both of their full attention focussed on him.
“You can hear us too?” Parker asks, and there’s something almost hopeful in the way she asks that takes him by surprise.
A dark little suspicion dawns on him, have they haven’t been fighting their bond because they didn’t want to shut him out, they wouldn’t be that dense, would they?
“How long have you…suspected?” Hardison asks, something odd about his voice too, and Eliot knows that there’s no point in obfuscation now. Especially not if his suspicions are correct.
“Since the job with the crooked funeral directors. When we pulled you out…I could hear you calling out to Parker when you weren’t saying a word out loud. Then afterwards, I had a conversation with Sophie that made me realise that what Parker and I were hearing when we were trying to find you, wasn’t the same as what she and Nate were hearing.” He admits.
“What were you hearing?” Hardison presses, voice tense.
“My phone died, Alec,” Parker interrupts, which both is and isn’t an answer to his question. “Sometime after I called you back, I knew it was running low but I could still hear you and Eliot was still responding like he was hearing you over my comm. But you weren’t, were you? You were hearing him,” she reaches forward and taps Eliot gently on the temple, “here too.”
Eliot nods, but when he replies he doesn’t say it out loud, just projects a short burst of mixed emotions – affection, annoyance, and acceptance – at them both. He doesn’t look at either of them, not wanting to see their reaction to his unfiltered response to them.
“You didn’t say anything,” Hardison is unsurprisingly the first to find his words after that, “but you’re not scared of this?”
“No. I mean, I was, when I first figured it out, I was scared witless. For a start, the inside of my head is not the kind of place I want to inflict on anybody, let alone anyone I like. Never mind the classified stuff. And then there’s the whole likelihood that I would mess stuff up between you two, in case you missed it, I’m a tiny bit invested in your relationship working out!” He takes a breath to calm himself as the truth of what he’s about to say settles upon him, “But no, I’m not scared, not any more. If I have to be bound to someone…”
“That what you meant when you said to Nate about what you’d been searching for?” Hardison asks.
“It’s more than that but, I chose you both a long time ago,” he mutters with a shrug.
“How long ago,” Parker asks. He can’t tell if he just knows her voice so well by now or if he’s getting a boost from the connection, but he can feel her unspoken longing, and its that more than anything that makes him push through his own reticence to give her the truth she needs to hear.
“When Nate went to prison, if Sophie hadn’t stayed, if she’d still needed more time on her own…I’d have stayed with you two. I’d have made some excuse, about the work or keeping you two out of trouble or hell, even just the really good sex. But, I was always going to stay, even if I couldn’t admit it yet,” he confesses.
“I would like to point out that it was your idea that we stop sleeping with you,” Hardison notes absently, as though that’s remotely the salient point here. As though he hasn’t used it as cover to shuffle closer to Eliot, as though Eliot doesn’t know that the way Hardison has picked up his left hand and is examining his scars and callouses is a substitute for holding his hand. As though Eliot wouldn’t cling back if Hardison did hold his hand. So Eliot indulges him and allows himself to be drawn in.
“I was right though, you two needed to figure out what you were to each other first.” Eliot insists stubbornly.
“I hate Dubenich and I’m not sorry he’s dead,” Parker says abruptly, “but he was right about one thing. As brilliant as we were in our own rights, we make a better team.”
“You know what I remember, about the end of that first job?” Hardison asks, “I remember Nate walking away, and I remember Sophie walking away, and I remember looking at both of you and thinking that this was too good a chance to throw away. Being utterly certain that you were both thinking the same thing. We didn’t say anything; we just fell into step and got to work on convincing Nate. And yeah consciously we were choosing Nate, because we needed him and Sophie, but we were also choosing each other. We keep choosing each other.”
“Always,” Eliot agrees, hearing Parker echo the sentiment both out loud and inside his head.
It isn’t a big dramatic moment for Eliot, he just feels the certainty and contentment he often feels when the three of them are doing something in sync, feels it settle in his bones. As though he now utterly believes what he’s logically known for ages, that he belongs here, with these people. It’s more like a pressure, which he'd been resisting for so long he’d forgotten it was there, has suddenly been removed. He happens to be looking at Parker when it hits so he gets to see her rather more dramatic reaction, to watch the fear drain away to be replaced with certainty. He can’t see Hardison but he feels the shudder that runs through him before his forehead thunks down onto Eliot’s shoulder, so he knows it hits Hardison just as hard.
Eliot feels the grin spread across his face; this is what he’d wanted for them, this certainty, this security, and this comfort. He just hadn’t been able to imagine himself as part of that loop before, but now it feels as impossible to imagine it not. He also feels like he knows where every last nerve in his body is, because they’re all tingling. It is suddenly not anywhere near enough content to be just holding hands. He tries to clamp down on how much contact he really wants right now, to give them space to settle into the connection, he’d merely been in denial, they’d actively been fighting it. But thankfully Parker is ahead of him. He can feel the shape of her thoughts, not the detail, just the barest outline, a tease in fact. And the small smile that quirks her lips tells him all kinds of things without any need for telepathy, just memories, and good ones at that.
“Eliot?” She asks a question she is already confident in the answer to.
“Yeah,” he agrees, “we’re going to need a bed for this.”
Because as fun as sofas can be, he both wants to do this properly and doesn’t want to have to move afterwards.
“Like, right now,” Hardison agrees, and suddenly the three of them are in motion.
~
They don’t often use their special skill on jobs. They never even really have to have the discussion, it’s just a mutual unspoken agreement that it’s something that work never gets to touch or taint. They certainly use it to check-in with each other and offer support or reassurance when they can’t speak aloud, but mostly, they like talking on comms, its good practice for when they need to work with other people and its also familiar and comforting in its own way.
But sometimes, it can be really fun to use it on a job. Some people are just asking to be messed with.
“Chaos,” they say in sync, with various levels of frustration and annoyance, as they all independently reach the same conclusion about just who has been leading them a merry dance on this job.
All too familiar laughter drifts over their comms, as Chaos steps out of the shadows to taunt them.
They retreat into their inner space while he graces them with a monologue – Alec’s recording it just in case he lets anything useful slip – to vent their frustrations in private.
“On the other hand,” Parker offers, “who says we have to play by his rules? We know how he works and he thinks he knows how we work…”
“He doesn’t know you’re the mastermind now…” Alec replies, and she can feel the curve of his smile, the faint echo of his delighted laughter.
“And even if he did, he’ll expect you to be nicer than Nate…” Eliot continues, and Parker can almost feel that slightly feral grin curling his lips, the same way her own does. That smile they share when someone has utterly underestimated either of them and is about to get vengeance dropped on their heads.
“I have,” she projects to them both, with something that other people might consider unholy glee, “a cunning plan.”
Out loud she interrupts Chaos’ monologue – much to his squawking chagrin – with her best Alyson Hannigan impression, “bored now.”
He tries to get back into the swing of his monologue, but she doesn’t bother leaving him time to build up a head of steam.
“Uhuhuh,” she scolds him, calling on her memory of every wide-eyed amoral innocent character Sophie had put together for her on a grift, sounding cheerful, innocent and incidentally mad as a box of frogs, “this is my game not yours, and we’ll be playing by my rules. We’re going to have SO much fun! Aren’t we boys?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Alec and Eliot respond, with just the right level of seriousness and devotion to be convincing.
While Chaos splutters and whines, appalled that they’ve let Parker be in charge, Parker mentally sketches out the plan and Alec and Eliot throw in suggestions and flesh out their various roles into something that will dump all Chaos’ hubris right on his own head.
There are so many variables to consider, so many potentials that things could go wrong – Chaos is a worthy adversary, they’d respect him if he weren’t so damn annoying – but one thing is for certain. They are going to have so much fun, together.
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