Chapter Text
When she was fifteen, Parker died for a little while.
She’s never been good at dying though. It didn’t stick for long.
It was her first winter in New York, and the building she had been sneaking into at night abruptly upped their security system, her fault probably, stealing a few too many packages from the lobby. There was a deadbolt and a padlock and a bar across the door on the inside and she wasn’t good enough to get through all of it. Yet.
It wouldn’t be the first night she spent outside though, and the roof itself seemed safer and cleaner than some other places she could try to sleep, so she pulled her hoodie up and tucked her hands into the sleeves of her heavy coat and curled up for the night, grinding her teeth down hard so they wouldn’t chatter.
The rest of it seems like a dream in retrospect. Waking up sometime in the middle of the night, but not truly waking up, like half a dream. Feeling like she was sliding through the city, lighter than she’d ever been, looser, without any grasp or presence in the world as she breezes over and down to ground level, forward and west towards Central Park. She moves silently and motionlessly past clumps of trees and baseball diamonds until she’s in front of a pile of rocks protruding from the earth.
There’s an opening, carefully hidden by the distraction of chaotic rock edges. Parker is good at recognizing hidden entryways and things no one else pays attention to. She slips a little further, in through the cave and down beneath the earth.
And down and down and down.
The cavern she finds eventually is mind shatteringly large, the kind of space that makes you realize there’s a limit to how far you can see, that makes you feel small and insignificant. It’s grey. And it’s filled with people, standing clumped across flat rock, pushing forward inch by inch in a line that goes on forever and ever into the dark.
She slips down and starts to feel her toes again just as they brush the ground, feels a sudden dull ache spread up through her body, feels an emptiness and a tiredness and a great loss of something electric within her as she’s shuffled along into the line.
It’s bad. She swallows hard and uses more strength than she should need to, all of the little strength she currently feels like she had, to bend her knees and draw her toes away from the ground.
She peeks around the room, searching the way she always does for the closest exit, the closest thing that can be considered an exit, any place she can squirm through and out because she knows this place is bad bad news. She looks up and sure enough, in the rocks far above, there’s a thin little crack, the faintest little sliver of the night sky all the way beyond. She pushes towards it, on the very tips of her toes, squirming past all the other bodies until she reaches the nearest wall and grabs hold of the slight edges and heaves herself up.
Climbing is easy. It always is. She does it fast and quiet, as easy as any building in the city, if not easier for all the natural divots and foot holds in the rock. She reaches the top and wiggles her way out and catches her first glimpse of the park.
And then she wakes up, on the roof in the same place and position she was before. Her body burns with the cold, her shivers violent and jarring. She pulls her threadbare coat a little tighter around herself. It doesn’t get colder, but she’s too cold to fall back asleep so she curls tight and counts the minutes until morning.
Time moves on.
She thinks about it sometimes but like most events from before the team, it’s just a thing that happened, something she didn’t feel either way about. She tried to tell Archie about it once and he called it a dream. She tells Sophie about it, over the phone one night right after she left, after she faked her death because in conversations you’re supposed to offer relevant anecdotes and it feels like a relevant anecdote. Sophie doesn’t really believe her, she can tell, but she listens intently and hums curiously and tells her gently, “Well, I’m very glad you were only dead for a little while, Parker. And I’d rather you don’t do it again.” Which is funny. She laughs. Sophie does too, at the same time and Parker hugged the phone to her chest.
She never tells Eliot or Hardison. Not for any reason it just hasn’t come up yet. But she thinks she will someday.
—
It’s rare that she’s the first one awake. She really likes sleeping, especially when there’s a bed, especially when the bed is this big and the sheets are this soft, and especially with Hardison and Eliot close and warm and safe. It makes her feel like this old picture book she stole from a bookstore when she was thirteen, the frayed cover with a hand drawn picture of kittens sleeping in a little row. Her and Eliot and Hardison in their little row, bundled up in a line together, warm and wiggly like kittens. She hasn’t told them about that yet either, and she definitely will because Eliot will make a Face at being compared to a kitten and Hardison will get all curious and track down the exact book title that she’s long forgotten and probably have a copy for her by the end of the week.
With feelings that great, sleeping is easy.
But Eliot likes waking up early and going for runs and cooking and making use of the quiet hours of the morning where there are less people. Hardison doesn’t care as much about having an edge, but his brain is always buzzy and sometimes he wakes up in the middle of the night with an idea and has to go do something.
He definitely woke up at some point after they all fell asleep last night because he was in the middle but now she is and his arm is half outstretched towards his phone on the nightstand.
But they’re both asleep now, and it’s just her, with her eyes open, watching them in the blueish early morning light. She feels the pull to go back to sleep. They have the Job today, the big one, so she won’t get much longer, every minute counts. But she wants to stay awake.
She likes them like this. Hardison’s mouth is half open against the pillow, his nose brushing lightly against her temple. She can hear him breathing, as it scrapes at the inside of his throat. His breath is warm, but his fingers against her hip are cool.
Eliot’s hand is brushing his there, on her bare skin where her shirt (Eliot’s, she thinks because of how much space there is around her shoulders) has ridden up. She can’t wrap her mind around the sight and can’t tear her eyes away from it, their hands half intertwined in their sleep and against her skin.
Hers. Somehow. She wakes up in bed with them like this. Often, now that Eliot is getting more comfortable with cohabitation instead of his weird slow and proper courtship rituals.
It’s a little hard sometimes for her to see how she fits. They’re both wonderful. They do so much for her, listening and waiting and protecting and understanding. And then they do the same thing for each other, care and protect. Hardison with his words and his gadgets. Eliot with his food and his body between them and danger.
She doesn’t really know what she does, what she offers, what she gives them that’s comparable to what they’ve given her. Because she doesn’t give. She steals.
But they don’t seem to mind. They let her steal and then they give her more, like they’ll never run out, like they need nothing in return.
She places her hand carefully on top of theirs, her thumb against the edge Eliot’s hand, pinkie against Hardison’s. It’s easier to not question it. Just like it’s easier to not wake them up, to just watch them, bask in how beautiful they look like this, asleep, and all hers.
The alarm will go off eventually. Hardison’s. And Eliot will wake up perfectly on time five minutes before like he always does, specifically so he can gripe to Hardison about how the alarm is stupid and unnecessary. And then they’ll get up and get ready and head into positions for the job and that’ll be the day.
After, she’ll wish she woke them up as soon as she did, so she could tell them finally how much she loved them, tell them all the stories she was holding onto to share about her past, finally ask them what she was bringing to the table, why they loved her. After she’ll wish she curved more fully into Hardison’s side, wrap her arms tight around him and held on. After she’ll wish she spent those five minutes kissing Eliot over and over again, feeling his tender touch against her back until he forgot about pushing Hardison’s buttons. After she’ll wish she didn’t hop out of bed once Hardison was fully awake to go brush her teeth and get dressed for the day.
After she wishes she had stayed in bed with them all day and never left for anything, because what else did she need. She could sustain herself on them alone. They were always enough.
But their biggest job is waiting, and she believes all so foolishly that there’s nothing they can’t pull off together. So she gets out of bed and they followed her after a couple moments, and off they go to disaster.
—
The first night. Their First Night. When they put their cards on the table and one by one showed their hands like it wasn’t the most nerve wracking thing in the world, like it wasn’t scarier than any jump she’s ever made, like it wasn’t harder than any con they’ve ever run, when they realize that they’re not playing against each other, that together they were holding a winning hand, all their hearts in that jackpot, pulsing and beating hard and oh so delicate but together, a prize they all got to claim. That night, she wakes up hours before dawn is even a concept, and finds Eliot sitting up against the headboard. His legs are crossed and his hands are flat against his knees and he’s staring down at them with Expressions on his face that she can’t fully make out in the pitch black of the room.
Hardison is still fast asleep, cradled in her arms, his fingers loosely weaved through hers. She clings to him, hugs him tight to her chest like she can pin and keep him there. She can’t remember which side of them Eliot was on when they fell asleep, but he’s on her side now, at their backs. (Always, a nice good voice whispers in her head. He’s always gonna be there.)
She keeps her grip carefully around Hardison’s waist as she rolls onto her back to better face him.
“Eliot,” she says. It comes out as a whisper and she realizes just how much she likes his name, the way it feels in her mouth, the way she can say it in a whisper and know he’ll hear her calling for him and turn right to her.
He startles just a little, blinking down at her like coming out of a trance.
“Hey,” he says, also whispering, rough around the edges. “Hey, angel, go back to sleep.”
He reaches out, ghosting the back of his fingers along her shoulder and she feels a tingle like a purr build in her chest.
She shifts up gently, smoothing her hand down the back of Hardison’s neck to soothe him, and exchanges her pillow for Eliot’s thigh. His boxers are soft against her cheek, and she presses her nose into the crease of his hip, closing her eyes.
“What are you doing?” she asks, wrapping her free hand around his calf.
He sighs, and his hand runs through her hair. “Just taking in the view.”
She peeks one eye open and glances around the room. Still dark, but she can sort of make out the shape of the bookshelf on the far wall.
“I was talking about you two, gorgeous,” he says, with a little chuckle of an exhale.
She pokes at his knee. “You don’t need to flirt with me. We just said we were dating.”
“Parker,” he says. “If I’m not telling you how lucky I am to have you as much as I possibly can, then I’m doing something wrong here.”
She has to think about it for a second, but nods. “Okay.” It’s a little weird the things that Eliot has been saying all night, very different for Eliot, and very different from Hardison’s romantic words. It’s all very soft, not grumpy and prickly the way Eliot usually is when he’s saying that he loves them. It’s all the things that he doesn’t say with his mouth, but that she can read in his eyes sometimes. It’s just weird to hear it out loud in his voice.
But weird isn’t bad.
“I don’t know if I can do the words as well as you and Hardison,” she says. She hopes he’ll be okay with it like Hardison is. “Sorry.”
“Not a problem, darlin,” he says. His hand closes around hers. Hardison likes to slot their fingers together but Eliot’s hand just folds around hers. He tugs them up and leans down, pressing his mouth to the center of her palm and inching down to her wrist.
She can’t do the pet names either. She likes them, likes them from Hardison and from Eliot, because it feels like a secret language, like Alice, she can step into these other names, babe and baby girl and darling and sweetheart and angel, and be those things, even if it still is just her at the end. But she needs them to be Hardison and Eliot, and can’t think of anything better for them to be, anything more intimate to call them than their names because that’s what they are, that’s exactly how she loves them.
“Are you thinking?” she asks Eliot after another moment of contemplating words.
He sighs. “Yeah, Park. ‘Course I’m thinking.”
“Well, are you over-thinking?” she prods. “Because Hardison was worried that you’d think your way out of dating us.”
It took her a while to realize that her worries were different from his, that when he said dating, she heard loving. Because that’s what she was more worried about, that Eliot would think his way out of loving them. (That Hardison would too. More likely since, no offense, he was better at thinking than Eliot.)
She wonders which one Eliot hears. If he can read her fear underneath Hardison’s.
His fingers stroke along hers. She keeps her hand still for him even if it feels odd to. It’s the sort of thing she wants to understand now, these little things that Hardison and Eliot do with her that make them happy.
“Maybe I’m not the one who should be thinking,” he says after a moment.
Which is a more normal Eliot answer, but it makes her a little mad, along with what he’s saying. Because he knows that she wouldn’t, couldn’t be here if she hadn’t thought about it, if she hadn’t made sure. And he also knows that Hardison is better at thinking than both of them. And yet they’re still here. Tonight still happened. That should be enough.
She wants the weird Eliot answer, the overly romantic reassuring answer that’ll melt on her tongue like chocolate or snowflakes, sweet and smooth.
She pulls her hand back, pokes firmly at his chest to signify her displeasure.
Eliot sighs and catches her hand again as he slips down the bed to lay down again. That’s a good thing, she thinks, that he’s back down with them. Symbolic or something.
He’s warm. Warmer than Hardison. She has to close her eyes for a second because it feels almost too hot, having him so close, and having his eyes on her. He settles against the pillows and shrugs the blankets up, but he pauses before he reaches for her.
It starts a steady tingle in her chest. Because it’s the sort of thing Hardison does so easily, read her and wait and give her the reins. It’s the only reason she’s even here, that Hardison had done it enough times for her to trust that this wouldn’t spiral out of control, that she got to define the limits and set her boundaries.
She trusts Eliot, but different. She’s trusted him with outside stuff, with protecting her and catching her. She trusts his body, the way she trusts Hardison’s mind.
And she likes that he can do this too, pause, wait for her; without her having to dreg up words to tell him to stop, to tell him what’s wrong, to explain all these things that make sense in her head but feel weird and stupid when she says them outloud.
“Eliot,” she says, when she feels less hot, when all the tingles in her body settle.
And he gets that too, moves forward and drapes his arm around her waist, his hand settling on the dip of Hardison’s hip and slotting them all into place.
“You gonna go back to sleep now?” he asks.
“Maybe,” she says slowly. “Are you?” Because she probably won’t until he does.
He sighs, like he knows exactly that. “Sleep, Parker.”
“Will you be here when I wake up?” she asks quickly. The first time she and Hardison slept together, he woke up before her but didn’t leave the bed until she woke up too, and it had been so weird and so nice to know that he didn’t leave, to not wake up all alone, to see him before anything else, to kiss him before brushing teeth, to be all tucked up in him and in sheets warmed by their bodies. She wants that with Eliot, too, with both of them. She thinks she’ll still probably wake up last but that means they’ll have each other to talk to and make out with until she’s up. And that’ll be better than any sunrise, she thinks, to wake up to them.
Eliot’s lips press to her forehead hard, leaving her a space to burrow against his throat where she can feel his heartbeat and smell him, all sweat and day-old cologne.
“Alright, darling,” he says. She traces the feeling of the words on her skin.
“And, after that too?” she asks. If Hardison was awake she probably wouldn’t, he’d probably give her a reminding look to go easy on Eliot, to not scare him off. But he’s promised her to the morning now, he can’t just run away. “Tomorrow night? Will you stay?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, tomorrow, and the day after and the day after, you don’t gotta ask. I know…” She can feel his jaw work near her face as he thinks. “I know where I’m headin’, in the long term, I know that if there’s a hell, it’s waiting for me at the end of this thing.” She holds her breath and doesn’t say anything, doesn’t protest it the way Hardison would, because she wouldn’t know how to, because she thinks Eliot knows himself better than she does, because she never believed in things like hell and doesn’t know where she thinks she’d end up if she did. “So I’d have to be more than a fool to let go of any type of heaven I can touch.”
Oh, she thinks. It scares her, how much Eliot loves them. She doesn’t know how to be loved that much. But she can learn. She wants to learn.
“Okay,” she says, flinging her free arm around his waist, gripping his shirt tight between her fingers. “Then stay forever.”
He nods, his head bumping against hers. “As long as I can.”
It’s still conceptually flawed. If Eliot is going somewhere after all this, after they die, then they’ll need to find a place where they can all go together. Hell sounds bad no matter what though. Hardison definitely wouldn’t belong there, she wants to protect him from that.
But maybe they’ll find a way to live forever. Maybe they’ll invent some way to be together for longer, forever, until time itself stops. Until then though, Eliot’s not going anywhere, so she settles into the mattress and closes her eyes.
—
Time goes wrong when they’re in the van. Her shoulder burns and burns and burns, sharp mind-numbing pain that distorts her vision in sudden starry bursts.
The moment freezes. Time stops.
It’s the only explanation she can come up with because Hardison’s chest stops moving and Eliot won’t squeeze her hand back.
Her own breath is caught in her throat, won’t come in or out, just sits heavy right there.
If the car is moving, she can’t feel it. If the noise of the chase continues, she isn’t hearing it.
Everything in the world is concentrated down into the back of the van, to Hardison and Eliot. If they're frozen, if time has stopped for them then it’s stopped for her too, then she’s frozen too, then she won’t breathe either.
Together, together, together. It’s her favorite fucking word.
Whoever they are, wherever they go, it’s together. They wouldn’t leave her.
They haven’t ever left her.
So time is just stuck. Pain is just being tricky, slowing the world down around her, distorting her perception. It’ll pass.
She clings desperately, to Eliot’s hand, to the moment trapped, to the stubborn belief that everything will be okay. She can’t let go of it. She can’t let the moment slip and let them slip with it, she has to hold on as tight as she can.
If she doesn’t she’ll break, she’ll spiral, she’ll lose. They can’t leave without her.
Her mind rattles around all of the things she should have done, the dozens and dozens of missteps she’s made with them as they fumbled their way along in a real and proper relationship. There are so many things she should have done differently, so many moments she could redo to strap herself closer to them. Why did she want any space? Why did she ever want to be less close to them? Why take the chance that they could… slip away, that they could go without her? Why didn’t she… why didn’t she…?
Time starts again when the van hits the water.
Like the movie Hardison took her to see for their eighth ‘normal people’ date. A kick out of dreams. But she doesn’t wake up.
Something in her does, something vicious in her jolts up, and she can’t see, but her body moves, fighting and clawing and flailing up she’s out of the van, until her head breaks the surface of the water, until she’s bobbing in the river and gulping in air, the water stinging in her shoulder, all alone, always alone.
She’s never been good at dying. It never felt like a bad thing until right now.