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It was on the plane home from San Lorenzo, after putting his old boss behind bars, that Eliot began to crash.
Usually it took longer, until he was safe in his apartment where no one could see. The walls would come tumbling down, and he would find himself curled up on the couch with an old Western playing in the background, too exhausted to get to his bed or cook something to eat or even breathe without pain. How much of it was actual injuries from the jobs and how much of it was in his head, he didn’t know. It didn’t happen very often, but when it did, it was bad.
It wasn’t that he couldn’t handle it; he knew he could. Like he’d told Sophie, he could take the punishment. He was usually fine, or could at least pretend well enough to be. But sometimes, after a particularly challenging job or con, Eliot couldn’t even fool himself into thinking everything was okay. He had no choice but to feel it. Even the best soldiers fall apart sometimes. That was what his old general had told him, when Eliot caught him smoking outside their tent in Afghanistan, holding too tight to his weapon and looking for all the world like he was about to turn it on himself. Eliot liked to think that’s what happened to him – that he was a good soldier that had to shake apart under the weight of his world sometimes in order to survive – and it wasn’t just a result of getting soft, or old, or weak as time went on.
After Damien Moreau, after everything, the warehouse and the Italian and the newfound blood on his hands, Eliot couldn’t stop shaking.
Moreau’s men were far from the first Eliot had killed, and they were far from the most innocent, either. It didn’t make his actions, after years of swearing off guns and violence in the name of someone else, any easier to bear. Nate wasn’t anything like Damien, but the similarities in Eliot’s own loyalty to both of them left a bad taste like acid in his mouth, and he wanted to throw up.
Someone always had to be holding his leash, didn’t they? Eliot wondered, briefly, clenching his hands into fists in his lap, if he had ever been his own person. He joined the military right out of high school, killing in the name of God and country and a million other things he didn’t believe in now and never would again. They’d held his leash then, sending him everywhere and nowhere at the same time to kill and torture until he was far past being damned to hell. Maybe that was it. Maybe Eliot was just born to kill, born to follow orders and be someone else’s deadly lapdog. Some people were just born monsters, after all.
“Eliot?”
At the sound of his name, Eliot startled, looking up to see Parker dangling from the overhead storage compartment, watching him with a worried expression. Though she was upside down, Eliot could still make out the frown lines on her face, and he sighed, running an anxious hand through his hair. If even Parker was noticing something off with him, he was doing a godawful job at hiding how shitty he felt.
“Yeah, darlin’?”
“Are you okay?” It was a simple, inquisitive yes-or-no question that caught Eliot off guard momentarily. The minute lapse in his poker face elicited a full-body tremble, and the game was up.
Parker jumped down from the storage compartment, landing light and graceful as a cat on the seat next to Eliot. Without a word, she dropped her head onto his shoulder and curled into his side like she used to do back at the apartment when she didn’t want to sit in her own chair. The motion was so familiar and reminiscent of simpler times that for a second, Eliot felt himself tear up.
“Do you want me to go get Sophie?” Parker asked, and Eliot realised belatedly that his trembling had grown even more violent in the two seconds it had taken Parker to get comfortable. He expected to hear some panic in her voice, not knowing how to handle a situation that was emotional in nature, but to his surprise, all that was there was compassion and an aching empathy he hadn’t felt from anyone in a long time.
“No,” he answered her, trying to keep his voice low so as not to alert the others. “I’m fine.”
“You’re not,” Parker observed, immediate in her answer but less brash than usual in her tone. She hesitated, then: “I know what happened in the warehouse, Eliot. It’s okay.”
Eliot felt like someone had reached their hand into his chest and squeezed until his lungs and trachea were crushed; of course, she knew. He shouldn’t be surprised. She and Hardison were smart, way more than people gave them credit for, and Hardison had access to the Internet. They spent so much time around him and each other that, as much as it terrified him sometimes, they could read him like a book. And he knew that if one of them knew, the other must, too.
Eliot struggled to take a deep breath, trying to hide how much fear he was experiencing. If Parker and Hardison knew, that meant everyone on the team did. Eliot wasn’t naive enough to think Nate was going to keep what had happened from Sophie. She was on another level than the team, for Nate, and they all knew it. Eliot was okay with it from the start. Of all of them, Sophie was the one he was least afraid of. She was a grifter; it may have been in different ways, with different methods than his own, but he knew she had killed people, too.
Parker, on the other hand, was lithe and fast because she was so young, not even 24 yet, and Eliot knew that, in more ways than not, she was just a little girl who’d been forced to grow up too fast. She shouldn’t trust him as much as she did. She shouldn’t love him the way she did. It never failed to tear Eliot apart, the amount of trust she had in him. Now she knew that, after all she’d given him, he had let her down.
“It’s okay,” Parker repeated, snapping Eliot back into reality, and suddenly there was a hand on his waist, poking him over and over until he relented and turned to meet her gaze. “The men in the warehouse, they would have killed Nate, right?” Parker asked, and Eliot nodded without a moment’s hesitation.
“Yeah. If they got a chance, you guys too.”
“So there,” Parker said, as if it was that simple, as if anything was that simple, “You did it to protect us.”
“That don’t change what I did,” Eliot mumbled. He wasn’t ready to forgive himself for the warehouse. He didn’t know if he ever would. There was no way Parker could understand that.
“Yes, it does,” Parker argued, her brows furrowed in confusion. “You killed them to protect us. Because you love us. That makes it…not okay, but better. You didn’t want to kill them.”
“Of course I wanted to kill them,” Eliot snapped, his eyes blazing, and turned to face her. “They’re Moreau’s men, Parker! Those were the men that used to obey me. I - ” He broke off, his voice cracking on the last syllable. “I was Moreau’s right hand man, Parker. His head of security. A hit like that, in the warehouse? A few years ago, I would have been the one to order it.” He shook his head. “Of course I wanted them all dead. They’re a reminder of who I was, who I could still be…sometimes it feels like being like them, doing what they do, is all I’ll ever be good at. I wanted to kill them…” Eliot trailed off, leaving the words in place of myself unspoken but implied.
Without warning, Parker moved and wrapped him in a tight hug, so crushing that it was almost hard to breathe. The bruises on his ribs protested painfully, but he ignored it in favor of holding her. He felt a small patch of his t-shirt getting wet, and his heart broke a little at the knowledge that he had made Parker cry. He reached a hand up and stroked her hair, trying to provide some semblance of comfort. It was the least he could do. He was broken, and wrong, and it wasn’t the first time his sharp edges had cut someone he loved who got too close.
“Don’t say that,” Parker told him, quiet and sad, from her place in his arms, and Eliot realised with a start that he had muttered “Sorry” under his breath without even meaning to. “You don’t have to be sorry. I just - I don’t want that to happen to you. Okay? Don’t ever say that, Eliot. Don’t even think it. You’re not going anywhere. You need to protect us. We’d probably die without you.” She said it like it was a fact, and Eliot supposed it was, but he couldn’t hide his surprise; he had always thought that, when he died, the team would find another hitter to replace him.
“You keep us safe,” Parker said, her voice muffled from having her face pressed into Eliot’s shirt. “And we need to be there for you. We’re a – We’re a family, you know. So you can’t go. We need you here.” And then, broken and somehow the smallest Parker had ever sounded, “I need you.”
“I know,” Eliot replied, guilt settling heavy in his heart. “I’m here, Parker. Not going anywhere. I promise.”
“Good.” She sniffled, wiping her eyes, and settled against Eliot’s chest, her head over his heart. “‘Cause if you did, I would be really, really sad.”
Eliot couldn’t help the small half-smile that her words elicited, ruffling her hair as gently as he could. No matter what, he could never deny her anything.
A few minutes passed like that, in comfortable silence as Parker tugged on the ends of his hair, amusing herself with attempts to braid it while dodging Eliot’s efforts to swat her hand away. Before long, however, Hardison appeared next to them, too, carrying a Nintendo Switch and a large bucket of popcorn he’d gotten from god knows where.
“Alright, El?” he asked, sitting down on Eliot’s other side without waiting for an invitation. He handed the popcorn to Eliot, grinning in response to the hitter’s scowl, and said, “Look, I’ve got this new Legend of Zelda game I think you might like.”
With that, Hardison was off on a ramble about something called Breath of the Wild and Eliot couldn’t help the warm feeling that rose in his chest, drowning out the worst of the pain and finally quieting his overactive mind. Sandwiched between the two of them, with Nate and Sophie watching from their seats a few rows across, Eliot felt the panic from the warehouse begin to recede.
Somehow, without even trying, his family had calmed the urge to self-destruct and the pain he was facing, at least for the moment. It was a reprieve he had never expected to be given by anyone, much less the team who was so much better, more clean, than he would ever be. Eliot looked around, at Parker half-asleep on his chest, at Hardison fighting some kind of goblin creature with a large horn and ugly black body on the screen of the Switch, at Sophie with her head on Nate’s shoulder, and finally, at Nate, who gave him a nod and a silent, earnest Thank you, Eliot.
His hands were still shaking, but the world was a little bit easier to bear with them in it, and Eliot knew without a doubt that if he fell again, they would be there to catch him before the crash left him unable to breathe. Even when they should – even when he deserved it – they would never leave, and for that, Eliot wasn’t going anywhere.
Promise you’ll keep them safe?
‘Til my dying day.