Chapter Text
Alec is nervous.
Nervous isn’t quite right. Maybe… excited? Vibrating out of his skin with anticipation? Actively dedicating 12% of his background processing power to maintaining control over his knee that wants nothing more than to bounce on the bar stool he’s perched on? There’s a whole bunch of emotions resting on tonight and they’re all trying to make themselves known before he can even put the plan into motion, which isn’t helping him maintain his cool in the slightest. He’s drawing on everything Sophie’s ever taught him to hold it together, because tonight is the single most important job he and Parker have ever attempted.
Tonight, they’re going to kiss Eliot.
At midnight. Fireworks, champagne, all the trimmings.
If they can get him to agree to it, of course.
The fine control over his knee is absolutely vital to the success of the mission, because Alec’s currently got his leg pressed gently against Eliot’s, who hasn’t said anything either because he hasn’t noticed (unlikely) or because he doesn’t want it to stop (Alec’s rooting for this option). Parker definitely has noticed, and she’s leaning into Eliot’s space from his other side in that quiet way the two of them have of attaching their shoulders at the seams. Alec and Parker had spent a solid chunk of their plan-making time discussing this, the blanket of stillness that needs to settle to keep Eliot from realising the time and spooking before the clock strikes midnight, but their luck seems to be holding so far.
It seems fitting, to have stumbled out of the whirlwind that was facilitating Sophie and Nate’s retirement last week, only to plunge straight into their first New Year’s without them. It’s a night to welcome new beginnings, yes, but it’s also a day of reflection, of thinking back on the year and remembering the good times along with the bad. Now on the cusp of 2013, there’s not one, but five years of memories making themselves relevant again. He thinks the other two are feeling it, too: he can see it in Eliot’s one-night-only foray into the whiskey from the dusty top shelf behind the bar, the messy special-occasion paint on Parker’s fingernails.
It’s 11:56PM.
A sudden crisis: Eliot is draining his beer (he’d finally finished his first glass of whiskey an hour ago with a relieved grimace), and he’s shifting on his stool as though he’s thinking about standing up. Alec makes panicked eye contact with Parker, who shoots him a wild-eyed glance that turns into a determined little frown and promptly drapes her legs across Eliot’s lap. A quick thinker, his Parker.
“Woah there,” Eliot chuckles, which is something that Alec can only assume Eliot has at one point said to a favourite horse, made even funnier by the way his accent is more pronounced when he’s happy or relaxed. In this case, seemingly both are true.
God, he loves this man.
“You’re comfy,” Parker says by way of justification. She grabs a bowl from the counter and holds it out. “Pretzels?”
Eliot helps himself to a handful and Parker’s face lights up in a way that means Alec is going to have to explain the distinction between pretzels and Pretzels later on if this goes south.
“I’ll get the champagne,” he says, both to give himself something to do and to stop Eliot from doing it. There’s probably something he doesn’t know about the art of the pour, or how to pop the cork to make the bubbles taste good, but neither of those things are critical to mission success tonight and besides, Eliot’s not allowed to get up.
Alec returns with the bottle and three glasses and makes a performance out of distributing the champagne between the three of them as Eliot valiantly holds his tongue about his technique, immobilised by Parker’s legs, and Parker herself just laughs at them both. They’re all settled, glasses in hand and ready for the countdown, with twenty seconds remaining in the year.
“Be assertive,” Eliot had said, that night nearly two years ago when Hardison had been panicking about losing Parker to a photo of some dude in a tux. Assertion had worked back then, so Hardison’s drawing on that courage again now, hoping that Eliot had been speaking from personal preference and not just his uncanny sense for what Parker wanted. A firework goes off outside, a fraction premature, and Eliot stiffens slightly, the distraction offering Alec the opening he needs to lean in towards him.
“We want to kiss you,” he whispers in Eliot’s ear.
Eliot bluescreens for a second, entirely still, fingers paused where they were fidgeting with the seams of Parker’s jeans. Then he turns his head, and only his head, to stare at Alec out of the corner of one eye. Alec tells himself to stay calm, reminds himself that this could already have gone much worse, that their planning sessions had included the possibility of the guy just straight up absconding and only resurfacing in March or so, when he overthrows a dictatorship as a coping mechanism.
“You– what,” Eliot says. His eyes dart between Alec’s, flicking back and forth as he looks for the catch and softening into something– hopeful? when he comes up empty.
Alec can see Parker sneaking up from behind, menace in her eyes, while he’s processing, which is just unfair to the guy.
“This is the part where you say yes,” she whispers, and she might honestly think she's being helpful. Maybe it's the push Eliot needed, because he blinks and starts breathing again and squeezes her calf and lets himself slowly tilt towards Alec, making contact just as the real fireworks start in earnest.
Kissing Eliot is a revelation. There’s really no two ways about it. It’s electric and safe in all the right places, urgent and solid, and it feels like coming home, like something unquantifiable locks into place between them that had been missing until now. Alec pulls away as soon as he can summon the will to, receiving a whine of protest for his efforts, but he was raised right and he knows how to share so he grabs at Eliot’s torso to turn him towards Parker and settles into his role as a backrest for those powerful shoulders while she swings her legs down and moves in for her own taste. From the noises the two of them are making, this permutation is an equally transcendent experience. Alec, for his part, feels something buzzing in his chest as they reconcile the two halves of his heart into one warm and very attractive tangle of limbs.
“Okay,” Eliot says after a moment, breaking away from Parker to twist back for a better view of them both and gripping the bar with one hand. “Give me– heh– give me one second.”
“Only one?” Alec smirks, feigning affront. “You out here doing us a disservice, man.”
Eliot chokes out a laugh and leans into Alec’s hand where it’s still resting on his shoulder. Parker’s got her hand wrapped around his opposite wrist and seems to have no intention of letting go.
“What do you want this to mean?” Eliot asks the fridge behind the bar, and Alec thinks he detects a nervous undercurrent, which just won’t do. Maybe - and they’d planned for this possibility, he and Parker, when they were drawing up plans F through J - maybe he thinks they’re just after some spice, a one-night thrill to make this New Year’s something to remember. It’s not exactly off the table, but it’s not their ideal mission objective, either.
“It can mean whatever you want it to mean, man,” Alec says, because they’d sketched up all the options ahead of time, all the ways they could conceive of adding Eliot to their system, and couldn’t think of a single thing they would turn down if granted. This doesn’t seem to reassure Eliot, however, who looks slightly overwhelmed at the scope of choice being offered.
“It means you belong with us,” Parker says firmly, the absolute divine being that she is. “In whatever way you want.”
“What–” Eliot cuts himself off, swallows and tries again, sharp but quiet, dragging fingernails over the stem of his champagne glass. “What if I don’t– do I at least get a hint?”
And– yeah, okay, Eliot hadn’t been invited to the planning session, hasn’t had the chance to think through every possible iteration of what they could be together. They’ve kind of dumped a lot on him all at once, but this reaction at least sits squarely under Plan C: interested enough to want more details. The three of them can work with this, if they do it together.
“The belonging part’s non-negotiable,” Alec says. “But if you’re interested in anything else…” He wiggles his eyebrows for effect, because the atmosphere is a lot more tense than it was a minute ago and he wants to go back to that, to how easy it was to kiss Eliot and watch him kiss Parker in turn like they’ve always, all three, been this inseparable unit.
Eliot pauses, snorts, and relaxes by a fraction. “We’re not having drunken New Year’s sex, Hardison,” he says. “But belonging sounds… I can work with it.” Which– Alec had really been trying to imply something a bit longer-term with the eyebrows, where admittedly maybe words would have been more effective, but there’ll be time to clarify that later. At least Eliot seems a bit less off-kilter now.
Parker, however, peers at Eliot suspiciously, releasing his wrist to fold her arms across her chest. Eliot shoots her a concerned glance and sits up slightly, shaking Alec’s hand off his shoulder, bracing for something. Alec’s braced as well, because isn’t this as good as they were reasonably expecting this to go? What’s Parker seeing, with her eerily effortless ability to read Eliot, that he isn’t?
“What do you mean, you can work with it?” she says.
“I mean– I wasn’t planning on going anywhere, I don’t need you to–”
“He doesn’t get it,” Parker tells Alec, and, yeah, that’s becoming pretty clear, because what does he mean, ‘not going anywhere’–
“He is sitting right here–”
“What do you mean, ‘not going anywhere’?” Alec asks. He didn’t think that needed saying, not after ‘til my dying day’ and ‘we change together’, but maybe it’s not as much of an immutable truth as he thought? Parker goes quiet, stops moving and just stares warily between the two of them, so he knows he’s getting no help from her.
“Look,” Eliot says, “I know you guys must be pretty torn up over Nate and Sophie ditching–”
Something curdles in Alec’s stomach. “I’m sorry, which is relevant how?”
“I’m just saying that I’m fine with this not being– you don’t need to worry about me feeling left out of your whole deal–” Eliot waves a hand between the two of them, wincing slightly.
Alec looks at Parker and back to Eliot, feels the conversation slipping out of control. “We’re not– I don’t offer to sleep with people just to make them stick around, Eliot, what–”
“He can’t see the whole menu. He thinks the only bar snacks we’re willing to offer are those gross lentil puffs and that drink that’s actually two drinks and tastes of 2AM and regret,” Parker interjects, seriously. He could write an algorithm to use Eliot’s current expression as some kind of early warning system for an incoming culinary rant, but everything suddenly makes a lot more sense.
“Are you seriously talking about Jägerbombs right now–”
“Ohh,” Alec says, grabbing the life ring that Parker’s thrown and holding on for dear life. “No, wait, Eliot, we sell pretzels too, or, like, those fancy spring roll things you love–”
“There’s those fried mushrooms he likes,” Parker adds, “Those feel different, they’re juicier, so there’s options for whatever someone’s feeling.”
Eliot stares blankly at them, jaw twitching, and Alec just has time to register that their Parker-speak autopilot might have gone too far before Eliot gets up and pushes away from the bar, pacing halfway towards the front door before wheeling around to face them again, expression thunderous. Alec should do something, he knows, probably anything would be better than sitting on this barstool with a slack jaw that he can’t seem to close, but all their meticulous preparation has fled his mind and he can’t think fast enough to stop the car crash unfolding in slow motion before him.
So this is how Plan M goes, he thinks, distantly.
“You–” Eliot raises one hand to form and release a clenched fist as he tries to string the right words into a sentence, then visibly steels himself, shoulders stiff. “You let me know when you’ve worked out what you’re asking, yeah?”
And then he walks out the door.
“We blew it,” Parker announces miserably from where she’s sprawled upside down over the sofa cushions. They’ve retreated into the den, seeking reassurance from the more comfortable change of scene. Alec can’t help but agree with her, because none of their plans had ended like this, not with Eliot looking quite so tragically conflicted and then just… leaving before they could do anything to fix it.
“We didn’t blow it,” he says anyway, for morale. Mainly his own morale, because he needs to believe that they haven’t shattered their fledgling family before it ever had a chance to stretch its wings. Parker pushes her head down further to narrow her eyes at him, neck craned in a contortion that makes Alec wince.
“Well, I don’t think we succeeded,” she says. “Or I would be getting a lot more kisses right now.”
“You want some sad kisses, babe?” he asks. He knows how to take a hint. Parker doesn’t seem inclined to move from her spot, but she makes grabby hands at him so he goes to join the party on her sofa and makes good on her request, bending in half to reach from his place at her side.
After a minute, she makes a satisfied noise, then pushes him off and wipes her mouth on her sleeve, which is something he’s learned not to take offence at by now.
“Okay, let’s debrief,” she says, spinning around to perch on the arm of the sofa, Mastermind Face firmly in place. “Where did we go wrong?”
Alec’s been catastrophising over this for the last twenty minutes, so he’s well-equipped to get the ball rolling here. He clears his throat, shakes out his wrists. Rolls his shoulders, which have cramped slightly from how tense he feels.
“Okay. So first, we gotta remember that we knew this could go badly, for any number of reasons, but mainly the ones written on the whiteboard over there,” he says, nodding to the corner of the room where they’d spent the day scheming. “One: Eliot isn’t into us. Two: Eliot thinks he’d be bad for us. Three: Eliot doesn’t believe he deserves nice things, and we are sure as hell a nice thing. Four: Eliot misunderstands what we’re asking for.”
Unbeknownst to Parker, Hardison has already discarded options five: Eliot isn’t into guys, and six: Eliot’s weirded out that there’s three of them, through his own six-month-long reconnaissance mission. Parker had, apropos of absolutely nothing, offhandedly mentioned Eliot’s name one time during sex, and it had been the exact opposite of the boner-killer that Hardison might have expected. He hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it for a week afterwards, but Parker had just frowned at him when he’d explained his concerns, and he hadn’t been able to get her to grasp either of the potential issues with trying to seduce an apparently-straight, white, southern cowboy into a threesome with them.
So Hardison had gone away and done some subtle independent testing of the waters, the standard pre-job information gathering that he prides himself on, trying not to let on to Eliot that his sudden pursuit of conversational queer theory was anything less than hypothetical. Eliot had been strangely resistant to calling things what they were, and point blank refused to engage with using labels to describe any previous relationships, but Hardison had at least ruled out the possibility of red flags in either issue.
“It’s not option one,” Parker says.
“Damn straight, that was not the kiss of a man who does not want to be kissed,” Alec says, and gets up to draw an emphatic line through option one. It’s a relief, because the other options are at least solvable if they put enough thought into it. Except– “You don’t think he’s been thinking of leaving?”
Alec swears he sees a flash of doubt cross Parker’s face, but in an instant it’s gone. Instead she’s just staring at him in vague concern.
“Eliot’s not going to leave,” she says confidently. Alec can’t tell if she’s feigning it. “He promised Sophie.”
“You sure? I’m just saying, nobody said anything about leaving until he did–”
“Hardison. I’m sure.” She watches him closely, and after a moment she nods towards the board, lips pursed and eyebrows raised in an uncanny impersonation of one Nate Ford.
He swallows and tries to ignore the acidic shard of doubt that’s settled behind his ribcage.
“Okay, okay. So, uh, we have new evidence: Eliot asked for clarification on what we wanted.”
“Option four,” Parker says. “He misunderstood.” It’s a pretty clinical way of describing Eliot’s impromptu exit, sure, but they’ve got to be clear about this if they ever stand a chance of making it right.
“Right.” He circles it, taps the pen on the board for emphasis. “And, hey, maybe we could have been more specific, but we decided we’re kinda down for anything, so short of bringing him in here to see the planning chart, I don’t know–”
“We can’t show him the chart,” Parker says, urgently. “You don’t con your own team.”
And– yeah, Alec can argue about how this isn’t a con all he likes, has been carefully referring to it as a ‘job’ in his own head, because they’re not trying to deceive Eliot, they just care about the outcome so much that they need to make sure it goes smoothly, the only way they know how. But Parker’s right: if Eliot gets one look at this whiteboard with the way things are right now, they’re only going to make it worse. They’d been careful, today, made sure Eliot was occupied with his run and a market trip, even got a very willing Shelley to call him out of the blue when they needed just a smidge extra time at the end, but this has to be the end of the road for the Charlie Day chart. There’s just too much risk involved with keeping it around in the brewpub, even tucked away in the upstairs den.
Even if it seems like Eliot might have plans to not be around as much in the immediate future.
“Okay,” Alec says, losing steam a bit. “We can’t show him the chart.”
“His face went funny when he turned down the sex,” Parker says, because she may not be the best at knowing what expressions mean, but that’s the type of thing that she’s hotly attuned to. “He turned it down, but he stopped panicking as much when he knew it was on offer. And then he said he wasn’t planning on going anywhere.”
“He thought he’d worked out what we wanted,” Alec says into the fist that he’s propped his jaw on. “He thought we were– what, trying to sleep with him so he wouldn’t leave the crew? That’s the only reason he could think of to explain why we’d be interested?”
“Option three,” Parker says. “Ugh, that’s the worst one. That’d be gross, anyway, we’d never do that. And it wouldn’t even work; sex is a dumb reason not to leave, and Eliot actively leaves people he’s had sex with.”
Alec winces. “I don’t think it’s active, babe, I’m pretty sure it’s usually mutual–”
“We have to be super clear that we want him to be a full member of the pretzels club, or he’s going to keep assuming we haven’t thought this through,” she concludes firmly, folding her arms.
“Maaaybe we jumped the gun on not waiting long enough after Nate and Sophie left,” Alec says. “That’s on us. So we give it a while, let things stabilise a bit, and try again once we’ve worked out who we are as the new team, first.”
That’s the crux of it, isn’t it? The bond between the three of them is already stronger than Alec imagines most romantic relationships are, certainly stronger than anything he’s seen Eliot pursue in the last few years. It’s only the second family Alec’s ever been part of, as far as he’s concerned, the same way that Portland is the fourth home he’s ever found. They’re a team, professionally, but the job they do hasn’t ever been professional, has always spread its tendrils into their hearts and tethered them to each other, immutably, ‘til death do they part. Taking things to the next level would be nothing short of mindblowing, in Alec’s opinion, but he can see why Eliot might be afraid of messing with the current dynamic if it’s serving his purposes for the moment.
“Right. New objective,” Alec says, attempting to recapture some of the optimistic purpose with which they’d started the day, last year, 16 hours ago. “Let’s go steal…”
“Eliot’s self-worth?” Parker supplies.
Alec snaps his fingers and points at her, then feels himself deflate.
“Hardest damn job we’ve ever run.”