The Justice League Job

by Eatsscissors

The granddaughter of a famous comics author comes to the Leverage team for help in recovering one of her grandfather's last creations. HardisonXParker.

TITLE: The Justice League Job

AUTHOR: Mari

RATING: PG-13 to light R

FANDOM: Leverage

SPOILERS: General series, really, but we'll say that the cut-off point is "The Underground Job"

PAIRING: Hardison/Parker

SUMMARY: The granddaughter of a famous comics author and illustrator comes to the team for help in recovering the rights to one of her grandfather's last creations.

KISS BINGO PROMPT: Upside down/Spiderman.

DISCLAIMERS: Ain't my sandbox.

CONTAINS: Language, violence, mild sexual content. Contact me if you need or want to know more.

AUTHOR'S NOTES: Special thanks go out to Aud, who let her inner geek run freely through the daisies with mine as necessary and was always available to chide me when I started privileging DC over Marvel.

Part One

His house smelled like casseroles and flowers on the verge of wilt. Carolina hated the smell, had associated it with death for years since she had attended her first wake as a child, for the grandmother of a friend. She didn't think that she would be able to eat for as long as that smell lingered.

Carolina paused for a long moment just inside the front door with her purse in one hand and the fingers of her other resting lightly against the lights before she came the rest of the way in. She closed and locked the front door behind her before deciding to leave it dark for now rather than letting the neighbors know that she was back. They would be over within minutes to keep her company; her grandfather had been a well-liked man even among people who hadn't known his profession. She toed her high-heeled shoes off in the entryway and padded across the carpet in her stocking feet, threw her purse down into one of the living room chairs. Even though Carolina had lived in the house for months and could have navigated every inch of it without the silvery light that slipped in through the windows, it still didn't feel enough like hers to keep her shoes on. She had been on her feet for most of the day, and the plush felt good against her soles.

Carolina climbed slowly up the stairs and then headed towards her bathroom, pausing to open a window along the way and let a fresh breeze start carrying away the mingled reeks of roses, chicken lasagna, and a lingering air of sickness. She very carefully did not enter the last room on the left, not yet. In her own bathroom, Carolina stripped her stockings off with a brisk efficiency, clipped her hair back from her face, and then washed off what little traces of mascara and shadow had made it through the day. She left the funeral dress on for now; it was comfortable enough.

"Okay, sweetheart," she whispered to herself in the mirror, trying to imitate Granddad's gruffness. "What are you going to do now, you going to sit and cry or are you going to pick yourself up and cry?" Her reflection was hollow-eyed and unimpressed. Carolina sighed. "Maybe you can pick yourself up tomorrow." She turned away from the mirror, intending to go downstairs and make herself a cup of tea that she could nurse until she was too tired to stay awake any longer.

Down the hall, from the room on the left that Carolina had walked past without entering, there was a distinct thumping sound. Carolina froze with one hand on the handle of the bathroom door. She had left her cell phone in her purse, and the nearest landline was three rooms down the hall. After several seconds of standing still and scarcely daring to do more than breathe, Carolina knelt down to scoop her stockings off of the floor and then fill them with the tray of scented soaps that she had brought with her upon moving in. She hesitated scarcely a beat before she followed the soaps with their decorative porcelain bowl as well, twisting the stockings rapidly until she had about the closest thing to a weapon that she thought she was going to be able to manage, and then she slipped out into the hall.

She should have turned on more lights. Carolina balanced for a moment on the balls of her bare feet, uncertain, before she crept up to the closed bedroom door, knob a faint gleam in the shadow. Three rooms wasn't that far away, and she would have a phone in her hands. She could use it, or she could just scream while she was standing right here, the neighbors were only a house away. Or she could get out of here before she did something deeply and irreparably stupid that was going to end with a tragic bulletin about her murder on tomorrow night's news-Carolina steeled herself before her imagination could get too far away from her and grabbed for the doorknob. Bravado had a longer legs and a louder voice than stealth; Carolina hurled the door open so hard that it made a dent in the plaster of the opposite wall and came back at her so fast that she barely avoided being clipped in the face. The widest part of the door's arc revealed a black-clad figure, and Carolina screamed, saw a light flick on in the house next door. Carolina stumbled back and started to swing her makeshift weapon above her head, but the man grabbed her by the wrist and dragged her the rest of the way into the room so roughly that her feet left the floor. He hurled her down against the bed while she kicked out against his midsection and hoped to hit something used to being treated nicely. In her bare feet, his abdomen was like kicking a wall. Carolina paused only long enough for another good shriek before she rolled off of the far edge of the bed, caught herself, and then sprinted as fast as she was able around the intruder and back towards the bedroom door. Stupid, stupid, stupid, she told herself. She should have marched right back down the stairs and called 911 from the porch as soon as she had realized that she was not alone in the house, there was nothing in here worth dying for-

The man in black, she finally noticed, was holding a red file folder in his hands.

Carolina abruptly forgot that she was within leaping distance of safety and spun back around. She intended to rip the folder from the man's hands, but he caught her instead right at the weakest point of her balance, right at the top of the stairs. It took one hard push, and then Carolina found herself windmilling for a molasses second before her brain caught up to what the rest of her body was doing before she was tumbling down in a flurry of ankles and wrists that she mercifully never heard crack. She twisted as she was flying from the last step, struck her temple hard against the corner of the wall, and went still.

Carolina Guerrera paused so that she could take a breath, obviously trying to keep her emotions under control. She had ordered a scotch and soda upon sitting down but hadn't touched it, explaining that she mostly just wanted the smell of it. While Hardison and Nate watched, she lifted the glass to her mouth and took a gulp. Her hands were trembling; upon setting the glass back down on the table, she set her mouth, closed her eyes, and very determinedly shook out her fingers until she had them under her control again before she took a second drink.

"I woke up three days later in Intensive Care with a massive concussion and four cracked ribs," Carolina said flatly. She lifted her dark brunette hair back from her eye so that Nate and Hardison could see a ragged pink scar stretching down from her hairline and ending scarcely an inch from the corner of her eye. Once it had faded, she would be able to push her hair back again and have people refer to her as "striking" in response. While it was still raw and new, Hardison couldn't stop himself from wincing before she noticed.

That didn't mean that it escaped Nate's attention. He gave Hardison an ugly look and said, "It's not as bad as you think."

Carolina held up her hand before he could get too far. "I wasn't planning on a modeling career," she said. "Don't meet the height requirement." While Carolina paired long, lustrous dark hair with olive skin and green eyes just a hair away from being too large for her face, she barely came up to Hardison's shoulder. "I woke up in a hospital to find out that the screen had been slit on the window I opened coming in, so I got to have the lovely experience of three different police officers all but telling me I'm too stupid to live, and my grandfather's homeowner's insurance wants to cite negligence so that they can refuse to pay the claim." She had introduced herself as Carolina Guerrera, wait a minute there. Hardison frowned, but the thought flitted away before he could pin it down just yet.

"They can be unfair like that," Nate said calmly. Because Hardison still wasn't sure why Carolina's last name sounded so familiar to him, and because he was still having to damn near make all of Nate's aliases wanted for tax evasion before he could take Sophie's place in meeting with new clients, he decided to let the understatement go.

Carolina waved her hand and took another sip of her drink. "I don't even care," she said. "They took electronics, some petty cash. My grandfather had-" She paused and shook the ice in her glass for a few seconds as if she meant to punish it. "He didn't die suddenly, he had time to give away everything that mattered to people in the family." She tilted her hand so that they could see an antique pearl cocktail ring resting on one hand. "My grandmother's. He bought it for her as a present after he got his first big check."

Nate was frowning, and Hardison already knew that it was because Carolina kept playing with her scotch instead of actually drinking it and Nate's coffee was untouched by the finer points of grain alcohol for once. "I'm sorry, Ms. Guerrera," he said to her gently. "But if you don't have any idea who broke into your grandfather's house, and you don't believe that the insurance company is actually corrupt-" Nate paused with an expression very close to physical pain.

"You had to take a breather for that one, didn't you?" Hardison asked, and Nate made a see-sawing gesture before he continued.

"I'm just not quite certain how you want us to help you," Nate finished, and did a very good job of checking the clock without giving himself away. They already had a single dad whose bank was taking advantage of his adjustable rate mortgage so that the bank president could buy himself a new boat coming in shortly, and possibly a case involving a puppy mill. Hardison had not been surprised to learn that Parker and Eliot both had very strong feelings on puppies, even when they were those little Chinese ones that looked as if they had been flipped inside out.

Carolina looked confused for a moment, and then she shook her head. "Believe me, Mr. Ford, I am not trying to hire you to get back a couple grand in electronics. That's not why there was a strange man in my house, that was just his cover story." Carolina paused to take in each of their blank expressions, then fished a pen out of her purse and pulled one of the cocktail napkins towards her. "This will be faster." She drew one line, and then another and another, until a few moments later Hardison was looking down at a sketch of a woman wearing tights and a mask, and standing in a pose that he recognized immediately from most of his reading material from the ages of seven to (no way in hell Eliot was ever going to find out about this) twenty-two. "My grandfather was working on a new character right before he died, and I was helping him with the art once his hands started getting weak. All of the materials were in his house, the sketches, the notes, everything. That's what was taken."

It clicked. Hardison couldn't believe that it had taken him this long, the message boards had been blowing up. "You're grandfather was Steve Guerrera," Hardison blurted out.

Carolina nodded, putting all of her attention onto Hardison and ignoring Nate for the first time since she had sat down. "You were a fan of his work?"

"'Were'? Try am." Hardison spun towards Nate and forgot for the moment that this might mean having no other choice but to bury Eliot in a shallow grave, or at least hack his Pay-Per-View and have Parker break into his house and hang all of the art upside down or something. "Do you know who this girl's grandfather was?" he demanded.

Wearing a bemused expression, Nate took a long pull of his coffee and answered mildly, "I think that you maybe you're about to cover that for me."

"Steve Guerrera." Nate continued to look blank. The tiniest beginnings of a smile were twitching at the corners of Carolina's mouth, the first that she had worn since stepping through the door. "Helped jump-start the Silver Age of comics? The creative brain behind such legends as the Siren, Mutual Assured Destruction, and The Brethren?" Nate took another drink of coffee. Hardison made a disgusted noise from the back of his throat and turned towards Carolina again. "Your grandfather's death crashed Twitter for six hours. It broke Chat Cache for eight. If Stan Lee himself did not give the eulogy at his funeral, I think that I just lost a little of my faith in the humanity."

Still clinging to the last vestiges of her smile, though it was becoming more hollow by the second, Carolina answered, "He called, and sent a really nice flower arrangement. They had a bit of a professional rivalry."

Hardison held up his hand before Nate could deliver the very gentle, very bullshit rejection that he could already feel coming and leaned across the table to Carolina. He took her hands in his and said, "Why don't you tell us what we can do for you."

Carolina was agitated enough to forget about her scar; she pulled her hands away from Hardison's and swiped her hair behind her ears as she stared down into the remains of her drink. "My grandfather was with the same agent and the same publishing house for twenty years, right up until six months after he got sick. Medical bills were piling up, he nearly bankrupted himself when my grandmother was diagnosed with her own cancer, and he just...he needed more money." She looked faintly ashamed for a moment, as if wishing that she could throw a shield over the dead. "So he fired the people who had been with him for twenty years and would have taken care of him, and he and signed with this new company. They told him that they could get him an advance big enough to take care of all of his medical expenses for the next two years, just like that. All that my grandfather had to do was keep quiet about his newest project and get all of the materials to this one agent in particular, Thomas Regan."

"And conveniently, all those materials were the ones that turned up stolen," Nate finished.

"Exactly." Carolina leaned forward across the table. "I called Regan as soon as I was out of the hospital and told him that I could get him duplicates of the stolen work if he would just give me a few days, but he just said that that wasn't the deal and has been ducking my calls every since. Then a few days ago, I see this." She pulled a flyer out from her purse and unfolded it on the table. Hardison craned his neck and discovered himself looking at a nearly exact replica of the woman that Carolina had sketched out for them on the cocktail napkin, but now with the color filled in: deep skin, dark blonde hair, a black mask poised over her eyes and a don't-fuck-with-me expression on the parts of her face that remained visible. "Willpower" was emblazoned in jagged white letters at the bottom of a purple-and-blue backdrop that looked as if it was supposed to be New York City viewed through a funhouse mirror.

"Premiering at the Eastern Seaboard Comics Convention in three days," Carolina finished grimly, leaning back in her seat and folding her arms over her chest. "Written by authors and illustrators that no one has ever heard of before and who couldn't command nearly the royalties that my grandfather's name would have gotten." She shook her head. "And before you ask why I'm not going through the courts, I'm telling you: the burglar took everything, all of the hand sketches, all of the scripts that I had on my computer-" Hardison tilted his head to one side and ignored Nate making note of the gesture. "Even if my grandfather's estate had the money to fight this after paying all of his hospital bills, I don't have any hard proof, and once it's in the court of public opinion it's going to be that much harder to call back." Carolina finished off her drink and glared at her fingers when she noticed that they had gone back to trembling.

Hardison turned the flier around so that he could get a better look at it. On the woman's left hand was a pearl ring. He said before Nate could, "Ms. Guerrara, by the time we're done, this dude's going to wish he had never laid eyes on a comic book in his life."

Nate impressed Hardison and made it to three steps away from the condo door before he started in; maybe their had been something more than coffee in that cup, after all. "You don't, ah, think that maybe you're jumping the gun just a bit there, Hardison?" He tried the door and made a face at discovering that it was already unlocked.

"Hey." Hardison spread his hands. "Girl needs help. The Man needs his ass kicked. Unless I'm very much mistaken, that puts this right up our alley."

"You don't get final say on the jobs," Nate reminded him. "When you're running this crew, then you get final say on the jobs, but until then-"

"You're gonna hypnotize me again to make sure I behave?" Hardison asked sourly as he followed Nate inside. Nate had the good grace to not look surprised when he discovered that the reason for his unlocked door was the three people who had been making themselves at home in his absence.

"As I recall, you hardly have final say on the jobs any longer, either," Sophie remarked from the sofa, where she was watching Eliot watching a football game and explaining the finer points to Parker. Nate's face was going to freeze like that one of these days, if he kept contorting it without stretching first.

"Are we going to stop the puppy mill?" Parker asked, turning away from where Eliot was trying to explain the defense's strategy by using pretzels as stand-ins for the players. Nate turned to Hardison, eyebrows slightly raised. He was keep thinking that, right up until the moment when Hardison learned enough hypnosis to make him cluck like a chicken or finally just ask Sophie out or something else equally out of character.

"Gonna have to put the puppy mill on the back burner for a week or so," Hardison said, shooting Nate a little bit of a glare. It was more than fair, given the looks that Eliot and Parker were now turning on him. Hardison held his hands up in a defensive gesture. "Hey, hey. You know that I would not leave the poor little puppies defenseless if there wasn't a person out there who needed us even more." All the while thinking that he was going to need some hand-wavey Force magic to convince the two people watching him dubiously that primary colors needed to take a bigger priority than squishy canine faces for even a short period of time. Nate was leaning back against the couch with a smug look on his face and his arms folded over his chest. Sophie had stopped watching Hardison and was now instead looking at Nate as if she could just hear him switching gears over into the mode where he was kind of a son of a bitch. "The client is Steve Guerrera's granddaughter, and she kind of...needs for us to prove that his former publishers are a bunch of lying SOBs who stole a new comic book character from him right before he died." Those were not faces boiling over with enthusiasm, right there. "It's Steve Guerrera, y'all, come on."

"Yeah, I actually go on dates with girls, that doesn't mean anything to me," Eliot said sourly. Something on the television made him swear under his breath, and Hardison wanted to point out that the man didn't exactly have room to talk about brightly colored obsessions to anyone.

Parker ate one of her defensive linemen and said, "I've never understood what was so special about comic books. I hang off of buildings all the time, it's not that special." She furrowed her brow at Hardison in the way that was even cuter because she had no clue how cute it was. "They're not puppies." And if Nate got any more smug, Hardison was just going to have to ask Sophie to smack him. He was pretty sure that she would go along with it.

"Oh, come on, Eliot, I've seen your Netflix, there ain't a hero-sociopath that you've let pass you by." Hardison snatched the remote away from Eliot and turned off the game, ignoring the way that Eliot growled at him. "That right there, that's what I'm saying. The nineties were not a good decade for you, were they?" Parker was tapping one of her pretzel people against Nate's coffee table hard enough to leave a path of crumbs. To her, Hardison said, "We will go back for the puppies." Her response was to break one of her linemen in half and then quarters in a shower of salt, ignoring the noise of protest that Nate made. Sophie was curving her hand over her mouth to hide a smile, though Hardison wasn't about to ask what she was actually smiling at. "Look. Y'all might be complete philistines who don't understand legendary storytelling-"

"I'm picturing you saying all of this with fake ears glued on, just so you know," Eliot interrupted. Hardison thought about chucking the remote at him, but all of the skills that Eliot had taught him over the past couple of years still didn't mean that he could best the man himself, and there was no telling which one of them Parker would help while she still had her lower lip jutting out like that. Hardison took another look at her and steeled himself before he could be swayed back onto Team Puppy Mill.

"But Steve Guerrera," he finally went on as if he hadn't been interrupted, "just so happens to be one of my childhood heroes. He's one of the main people who took comics into the Silver Age, right up there with Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. He took the old heroes and made them actual people with flaws and tempers and demons, and he did all of that without losing any of the things that made them super. That's some Gilgamesh and Enkidu stuff going down right there, and every last page of it-" Hardison paused to point at Eliot. "In glorious primary colors, baby. His granddaughter is trying to keep the last page of his legacy intact." Damn, he was glad that he had listened to the pointers that Sophie had given him on selling these speeches. "And, anyway, what the hell is it that we do? We step in where the law doesn't, we make some voodoo happen that no one else can, and we right a wrong. One step away from wearing capes and leaping tall buildings in a single bound, baby."

Parker sucked her lip back into its rightful position, leaving Hardison vaguely disappointed, and began cleaning up her dismembered football team before they could roll down to the floor. She still looked dubious, though, and Hardison expected that he would find a lot of puppy mill literature stapled over the walls of his apartment without any sign of how she had gotten in. Eliot snatched the remote out of Hardison's hand and muttered, "You're just lucky I don't have money on this game."

Looking inexplicably pleased even though from where Hardison was standing, he hadn't done a damned bit of the work, Nate clapped his hands together and said, "Okay, then. Looks like we're going to steal ourselves a superhero."

"Well, the problem," Sophie said. She was looking at the flier for the con that Hardison had blown up and put onto the screen. The handful of pretzel-people who had survived Parker's onslaught of a few hours before were now being nibbled upon. "The problem is that we're dealing with intellectual property here. That's hardly something that you can nick off of a display case or from someone's pocket and then stroll out the door."

"I think that that girl's wearing a bikini," Parker said, pointing.

"You're going to see a lot of that," Eliot told her, though he hardly looked as if he was having a problem with the concept. He grinned as he took a pull off of his beer. "The Dazzler. Cool."

"Tell me how many people who haven't read a comic book or two even know who Dazzler is," Hardison muttered, just loud enough for Eliot to hear and ignoring the narrowed eyes that would up turned his way. "All right." He brought up surveillance video from the previous year so that the rest of the group could get a feel for the surroundings. The vast majority weren't wearing costumes, and the footage was too grainy for Hardison to tell how many anime or science fiction tee shirts were circling through the crowd. His people. "All right, the company that Guerrera switched to shortly before his death is called Lodestone Publications, and the man who made it all come together is Thomas Regan." Two more clicks brought the man himself up on the screen, a white dude with gray just starting to come in at his temples and an expression as if he were posing for the cover of Forbes in his head. He was even doing that douchey hand-under-chin pose. Sophie, Nate, and Eliot made simultaneous disgusted noises.

"Exactly." Hardison clicked rapidly through a high school yearbook photo, then a college newsletter, then-Good Lord, the man had played water polo. This was why Hardison had foreseen the digital age coming from his first viewing of WarGames onward and had made sure that all of his most embarrassing moments had been kept far, far away from the eye of a camera. "Regan's from an old money and old literary family-rumor has it that his mother is actually a Hemingway cousin. Now, he was supposed to go into the family business, but-"

"He blew," Eliot guessed.

"Like a hurricane. Family name and a new library wing could get the literary magazine at Yale to look kindly on him, but as soon as he got into the real world it was all over. He was accepted into two regional magazines before the reviews were so bad that no one would touch him again." Hardison grinned a little as he brought up one of the reviews in question. You could find anything online if you dug hard enough. "He could have toughed it out on what was left of his trust fund, you know, done the ramen and garret thing-"

"Except that he wanted money, and tuberculosis stopped being a romantic draw a few decades ago," Nate interrupted. He was perched on the edge of the couch, but leaning forward slightly, eyes narrowed. That was Nate's son-of-a-bitch look coming out, right there, and Hardison was for one glad that it wasn't pointed at him.

"But if there's one thing he's got to be still craving, it's acclaim," Sophie added. She was leaning back to counterpoint Nate. It looked as if she was coming very close to nibbling on the tip of a nail as she considered the possibilities. "And he'll be absolutely terrified of losing what reputation he's managed to cobble together in spite of himself."

"I can step aside if y'all got all of this figured out without me," Hardison said. Nate waved a hand at him to continue. "Thank you. Since you've messed my rhythm all up, I'm just going to have to cut to the chase. He hooked up with Lodestone and started publishing comics writers and illustrators with a specific eye towards securing movie rights, kinda as a way to pull in buckets of cash and spit in the eye of the literary establishment at the same time when those movies took off."

"Like it's that hard to make something explode in symphony," Eliot muttered.

"It really is, actually," Parker interjected. She was sitting on the floor in front of Nate's couch, looking bored with her arms hooked around her knees for most of Hardison's presentation. Hardison had seen her lips moving a few times as she watched the screen and had been hopeful that she had at least been following along, only to discover that she had been counting the number of security cameras visible on the feed from last year.

"In symphony." Parker just looked at him. Eliot tilted his head. "Something is never going to be quite right about you girl." It was close enough to a flirting tone to make Hardison's eyes narrow before he could quite manage to stop himself.

"So that's our boy, and I can tell that you all just love him already," Hardison went on. "Now, I was all over his home computer inside of ten minutes-and let me tell you, from his cable bill and browser history, the man is nasty-but the office computer is kicking my ass. Servers located in the sub-sub basement and guarded by actual guards who specialize in actual asskicking, if Lodestone's employment records are anything to go by, automatic system sweeps every five minutes, daily password changes, and enough levels of encryption to make Brainiac cry. The president would be happy to have this kind of security on his Blackberry."

"So you're saying that you can't hack it," Nate said, not quite a question.

"There is nothing that I can't hack," Hardison shot back. "I'm saying-comic books and superheroes are a bigger machine making more money right now than they have been in decades, and when you have property that valuable, you protect it better than you do a Da Vinci sketch. I can break it, I just need to get inside the property to sweet-talk it a little bit first."

Nate didn't respond and stared at the surveillance from last year's convention instead. "Our best way of approaching Regan is through the convention itself," Nate said finally. "He'll be distracted, he'll be accustomed to strange people walking up to him to show him their art-"

"Art?" Eliot asked, and Hardison was about to kick him and damn the consequences until he realized that Eliot was asking what art they were possibly going to show, not denigrating comics themselves. American folklore, man, he was going to get someone to realize this before the job was over.

"Yes," Nate said with great finality. "These things aren't just for fans. Aspiring artists and authors come to them, too, hoping to find a publisher."

"Wait," Hardison said suspiciously. "How do you know so much about comic conventions?"

Nate waved his hand dismissively and went on without answering directly, "Hardison, you're going to be our artist, and you're going to give him what he thought he was going to run away from by taking Carolina out of the equation: someone willing to blow the whistle."

Hardison wanted to snatch Nate's coffee cup away from him to see if it was really still free of certain Nate-relaxing substances. "Me?" he asked. "Wait, no. Not happening."

"What's wrong, Hardison?" Eliot asked, openly grinning. Oh, just wait until he got a gander of some of the things that Hardison was going to put on his hard drive. "You worried that some of those nice folks will make you?"

"Parker's a better artist than I am," Hardison went on, ignoring Eliot for the time being. Sophie opened her mouth and then closed it, clearly on the verge of pointing out that Parker was Parker before she thought better of it. "And comics artists are expected to be weird, no one will blink an eye. No offense, Parker."

"None taken," she said easily, leaning back into the couch and scrutinizing the people in the footage. "That's not very practical," she said, and Hardison thought that he was going to have to break Parker into a hard truth about a lot of the female costumes she was going to see until he realized that she was referring to Captain America.

"We might be able to just get one person into Lodestone's buildings if we can rattle Regan hard enough," Nate said. "And our only chance of cracking the system once we're in there is you. Unless you have a better idea?"

Hardison swore under his breath. "When I run this crew, you're handling the coffee requests," he told Nate bitterly.

Nate shrugged off the "when" with barely more attention than he would pay a fly. "Sophie, you'll be Hardison's agent, Parker and Eliot, you'll run interference on the convention floor." Nate rocked onto the balls of his feet and then back again, way too happy for his own good.

Hardison was very glad that he was not the only one noticing that as Sophie asked suspiciously, "And what are you going to be doing?"

"I," Nate said with a grand air of mystery, "will be Plan B."

Hardison made a disgusted noise from the back of his throat and went to the refrigerator. He didn't realize that Parker had gotten up to follow him until he turned around, but he didn't jump; he had long since gotten used to the idea of Parker as something halfway between cat and force of nature, showing up and then disappearing again according to a logic all her own.

She took the soda can from Hardison's hand and whispered, "Does it ever freak you out when Nate does that?"

Hardison took the can back, watched a furrow appearing between Parker's eyes, and popped the top for her before handing it back and grabbing another for himself. "Parker, there's so much about that man that freaks me out, you don't even want to know."

His people, man. His people. There were dudes in Gundam Wing tee shirts-better yet, there were ladies in Gundam Wing tee shirts-there were heroes and villains that even Eliot ought to be able to recognize and several that would make him a hell of a lot cooler, so far as Hardison was concerned, if he already knew who they were without introduction. A boy in a Green Lantern costume walked by, linked via one hand to a Robin who had her hair pulled back into a long blonde ponytail and via the other to an adult who was deftly leading the two of them away from the comics tables that, ah, weren't entirely appropriate for the Saturday morning cartoons crowd. There was popcorn and the faint remnants of soda that was going to give the cleaning crew fits later that night under Hardison's feet, he had just taken an accidental elbow to the kidneys by a boy wearing a Lando Calrissian tee shirt, and, all right, maybe every now and again there was a touch of someone who could stand to duck under a shower spray. Didn't matter. This was his home.

"Ah," Sophie said from beside Hardison, in the voice that she normally used whenever Parker had just done something that not only wasn't generally seen or accepted within human society, but which would probably get her stares if she did it in any society, ever. Hardison thought that maybe she had gotten a touch of the nearest dude who really needed to discover a bar of soap, stop thinking that The Simpsons was a how-to manual, and stop giving the rest of them a bad name, but she covered well. "Oh, my." Hardison looked at her. "The crowd didn't look quite so dense on the surveillance tape."

"Right." A head-to-toe Spiderman who nonetheless had a very feminine shape edged past them and worked her way deeper into the crowd. Hardison would know that silhouette anywhere, and there was also the slight matter of the wisps of blonde hair that were sticking out from beneath her mask. "This is all for fans, the professional side will be further back."

"I was paying attention during the reconnaissance meeting, Hardison," Sophie chided in the way that she had, the one that made it impossible to be irritated with her. Hardison watched Spider-Parker disappear into the crowd with a few fellow geeks who didn't stand a chance watching her go, and then a few more who-damn it, okay, Hardison had to admit that maybe that one was pretty good-looking, if you liked them tall, dark, and handsome with a side of shady. Hardison felt himself start to frown as the dude stopped Parker by touching her lightly on the arm, smiled, and leaned down to say something to her. With the mask on, it was impossible for Hardison to see her expression, either. You want to stab him, I promise, I'll make things cool with Nate.

"Hardison, relax," Sophie murmured to him, and Hardison nearly jumped guiltily before he could catch himself.

"I'm fine," Hardison said, a little too quickly to escape attention from someone with Sophie's powers of observation. "I mean, it's cool, she can flirt with or not-stab anyone that she wants, it's not like we have a thing." Or even a formal dating record beyond the casual sharing of beer with the rest of the crew after a case well-done and one really awkward pretzel incident, but a dude still liked to think that the exchange snacks and a certain tendency to make out in the middle of jobs meant something. He and Sophie or he and Eliot didn't make out with each other to protect their covers.

"I meant," Sophie said slowly, doing him the great courtesy of not glancing off in the direction where Parker was finally peeling away from the fellow geek who was way too socially well-adjusted for his own good, and said geek was looking after her like he thought that he might be in love, "that you can relax, because no one is going to judge you because you know your way around a comics convention."

"I'm going to judge you, Hardison," Eliot came over the comm. Hardison craned his neck to see above the crowd, but Eliot was off doing something that involved lurking. Probably still sulking because they hadn't been able to get him in as a member of security without jeopardizing his job at the other place, so he actually had to pretend like he belonged here. "I'm going to judge you hard."

"Yo, Nate?" Hardison asked sweetly of the last member of their little band, who was too busy cackling over his metaphorical chessboard to make his presence known just yet. "I think that our next job should be at a tractor pull. I want to see Eliot wrestle a pig."

Eliot only gave Hardison a half-hearted version of his customary growl before he added, "I'm not sure about Parker wandering around in that costume, perverts are all looking at her."

"I'm certain that Parker can take care of herself," Sophie started, even though Hardison took one look at her face and knew where her thoughts were going. You only had to do it once-

"I'm not going to stab anybody!" Parker hissed across the line. Hardison looked around for her, but she had managed to disappear without a trace in a way that shapely females wearing skintight costumes-well, they were Hardison's people, and he loved them, but Parker not only ought to be having trouble disappearing, she ought to be getting marriage proposals.

"We know, Parker," Sophie said in a soothing voice. "We're heading towards Regan, just be ready for us."

Hardison didn't care that he had been about to stomp over himself a few minutes before if Mr. Way Too Chiseled To Be Here hadn't peeled away, he said over the comm to Eliot, "And what the hell are you doing worrying about Parker, anyway? How many chicks in Emma Frost costumes have had to clean up your drool for you?"

Sounding incurably smug, Eliot came back, "I got the Black Canary's phone number."

"You-Dinah is a nice girl, she doesn't need you getting your nasty all over her." Hardison stomped back towards the target, forgetting for the moment that he was supposed to be stomping emin character/em, thank you, Sophie. He muttered under his breath, "Can't just pout like a normal person, he has to debauch my whole damned childhood before we get out of here."

"Gentlemen," Nate finally said, though Hardison still could not see where he was. "Try to focus."

Regan was technically standing at the Lodestone booth as Hardison and Sophie walked up to him, but could not have looked less approachable than if he had been surrounded by armed guards with tasers. The tasers wouldn't need to be anything other than a method of last resort, anyway, because Hardison could think of very few ways for the man to look more out of place if he tried. Not only was he wearing an expression as if he smelled something bad and couldn't quite place where it was-and they had left the dude who needed to let his favorite shirt die a noble death, or at least go into the laundry hamper behind them at the entrance-and talking into a cell phone without the slightest hint of giving a damn about the writers coming up to deliver their scripts at the booth, but the man was wearing a damned three-piece suit that looked as if had cost more than most of the convention-goers' entire wardrobes, and that included vintage concert tee shirts. Hardison made a disgusted noise from the back of his throat and very nearly got a kick to the ankle via a very expensive Fendi heel from Sophie for his trouble, but at least she was supposed to look as if she didn't belong there. She was striding up to Regan and extending her hand before Hardison even had time to glare, and by then they were on the radar and he had a job to do. It wasn't hard to put a certain swagger into his step, even easier to make his lip look as if he were fighting not to curl it.

"Mr. Regan," Sophie said warmly, adjusting the nerd-chic glasses that rounded out her skirt and jacket with her free hand while Regan paused in his telephone conversation and stared at the other that she was still leaving held out in the air. "Amelia Waterbury, very pleased to meet you," while Hardison hung back for the moment and let her do all the talking, holding a bright red portfolio and waiting for his chance. Tell him that he always grifted too over the top, he was going to be so subtle that he made Tennant look like the Hoff.

"Ah, pleased to meet you, too, Miss," Regan said, already turning away and back to his phone conversation. Sophie's eyebrow ticked up just slightly as she turned and gestured for Hardison to come nearer.

"I'm an agent," Sophie continued as if Regan hadn't dismissed her, coming up with one of the business cards that Hardison had rigged up ten minutes before crunch time from her pocket as smoothly as any lift. "A literary agent, though few would believe it."

"An agent," Regan said, looking Sophie up and down and barely pausing to take in Hardison at all until he noticed the red folder that Hardison was holding as if it was his own child. "Really. We, ah, don't get many writers coming through here with representation already."

"Ryan Wilson," Hardison pushed past Sophie, catching the not-entirely-feigned look that she shot him over the top of her glasses. He took Regan's free hand without waiting for it to be offered to him, shook it hard. "Ms. Waterbury here isn't properly selling what I have to offer you in this folder here." Hardison leaned forward. "Just between you and me, she's still looking to represent a Pulitzer winner, I'm thinking that she's a little disgruntled by kicking it with the Superman crowd, even if I am going to make her filthy stinking rich." He was so damned lucky that he was out of easy range of the shoe. Didn't matter, either, 'cause Regan was leaning back from Hardison and glancing over at Sophie as if he was seeing an actual person there, if not precisely a kindred spirit. Yet. He closed his phone and slipped it into his pocket as a woman in red and blue slipped around behind him.

Sophie smiled a thin smile, offered Regan a hand that he was this time willing to take. "Yes, well," she said, adjusting her glasses and smoothing an imaginary wrinkle from the front of her skirt. "Serialized graphic storytelling is a hot commodity right now, and even a modest success can lead to a film franchise and very large success for all." She took the folder from Hardison, slipped it into Regan's hand, smiled the smile that could hack a person almost as fast as Hardison could hack Norton. "It is, after all, the age of the geek."

Regan visibly softened, even crooked the corners of his lips up into the very slightest of smiles. "I can't fault you for your ambition," he said. "However, I'm afraid that I do have a great deal to do today, and you've interrupted a phone call-" He started to reach back into his pocket just as Parker was making her return sweep. Sophie grabbed quickly for Regan's hand.

"How unprofessional of me," she murmured.

Hardison turned away and coughed into his hand. "Oh, okay, now she wants to talk about professional."

"You'll find that my card is inside the folder," Sophie continued, giving Regan the eyes that went with the smile after a quick glance Hardison's way and then back again. "I cannot wait to hear from you."

"Yes, ah." Regan nearly flipped the folder open then and there before he glanced towards his phone again. "I'll see that I do that. Ma'am." A look towards Hardison. "Sir."

That was a cue if he had ever seen one. Hardison had barely turned to go before Sophie was murmuring to him, "And here I thought that we chose you over Parker because you were embetter/em with people."

"Not only did being a leaping asshole emnot/em stop Frank Miller, but it might even have helped." Hardison looked back over his shoulder. Regan hadn't set the file to the side yet. "Okay, Nate, he has the file and Sophie has him on the line, how we gonna make sure he opens it without pushing it off on an assistant or something?"

"Wait," Parker said. "Shouldn't he want to open it? Doesn't Sophie make people want things that they didn't know they wanted?"

"Let's just say that Hardison made a bit of a stronger impression than we had anticipated," Sophie said.

"Hey." Hardison held up his finger even though there was no one there other than Sophie to see it, and, seriously, how had they gone this long without any of the marks realizing that they tended to talk to themselves in public a lot? Something worth considering. "I'll say again: y'all try to get Frank Miller's autograph sometime, see how pleasant he is. I'm telling you, the ego is a part of the package. Regan would think that there was something wrong with me if I wasn't a jackass."

"Handled." Hardison had to wonder if he was this creepy when he was working in the van, dropping in and out of conversations when no one could actually see where he was. "Eliot, you're up, Sophie and Hardison, get out of there."

"Hardison, I'm gonna kick your ass." Even though Hardison couldn't see Eliot, he could still picture the expression on his face just fine.

"You needed to blend in," Hardison protested.

"I'll show you blending in," Eliot muttered in his ear while Sophie grabbed at his arm and started to tug him away, like he hadn't earned watching this show. Hardison started to protest, only to glance over and see a short, familiar figure stomping through the crowd and headed directly Regan's way. A short, familiar, angry figure who had been explicitly told to let them handle this and to stay away from the convention so that she wouldn't go complicating things by attempting to claw Regan's face off with her bare hands or something. Carolina was wearing an expression which definitely suggested that some clawing was about to go down.

"Crap." As much as Hardison would have loved to stay and watch the show about to go down, it looked like he had some other work to do. He barreled towards Carolina while Sophie melted away into the crowd and Eliot intercepted Regan. A feminine shape in a blue and red costume moved to help him, each of them taking Carolina by an arm and turning her around smartly just seconds before Regan would have twisted and recognized her.

"Not here, are you crazy?" Parker hissed at Carolina.

Carolina took being questioned on her sanity by a woman wearing a full-body Spiderman costume remarkably well for someone who hadn't even formally met Parker yet. She only hesitated for a second before she dropped her eyes to approximately where Parker's mouth would be and said, "He's just walking around like he didn't do anything wrong at all, how can he stand to do that?"

Hardison tried every door within reach off of the main floor and hoped like hell that security wouldn't catch him at it before he finally found one that was unlocked and shoved Carolina inside, Parker following along closely behind. "Because he's the bad guy, that's why he can stand to do it," he said. Amidst boxes of movie posters and tee shirts that hadn't been carried out to their respective merchandise booths yet, Carolina's eyes welled up with tears, and she put her hands over her face. Parker pulled her mask back in order to see better within the room's dim light and made an awkward job of patting her hands up and down on Carolina's shoulders. She shrugged and pulled a face at Hardison over Carolina's head in response to the one that he pulled at her.

"Carolina, look, it's going to be all right," Hardison said, going to Carolina and pulling her hands down. Parker was still patting at her, but if Carolina wasn't exactly used to that brand of comfort, then at the very least it wasn't freaking her out. She took several deep breaths and made a visible effort to pull herself back together again.

"I just keep thinking, everything that he had in this world is going to be eaten up by his medical bills," Carolina said. "The only thing that he has left is his legacy, and that son of a bitch just takes it."

In Hardison's ear, there was the sound of two bodies slamming into one another hard, papers falling down to the floor. "Oh, man, I am so sorry, I didn't even see you there," Eliot said jovially.

"Yes, because I am so difficult to miss when I am in plain sight-" Regan clipped off what he had been planning to say that Hardison could have sworn that he actually heard the man's teeth clicking together through his earpiece.

"Hey, who's that? She's pretty." Eliot would be kneeling now, helping Regan to pick up the loose sketches from a folder that he damned sure wasn't going to be tossing at an assistant to then deposit straight into the trash now, while Regan made ineffective apologetic noises and tried to get them all hidden away again before someone else saw them. "I like chicks in comics, you know, because I can't get dates-"

"I am in a dark room with two beautiful women, and only one of them is crying," Hardison shot back. Parker stopped patting at Carolina long enough to smile sweetly at Hardison, while Carolina snuffled and actually looked a bit disappointed until said patting resumed again. "And Eliot? Hate to break it to you, but Dinah's just trying to make someone else jealous." He ignored the sounds of Eliot wrapping things up and turned his focus back onto Carolina.

"Yes, thank you, sir. You have a nice day, and I am so, so sorry about your shoes," Eliot said. To Hardison, "Screw you, I am Batman."

Hardison decided to be the bigger man and addressed Carolina instead. "Why did your grandfather like comics so much?" he asked her. "Don't tell me it was the most lucrative career that he could have chosen." In his ear, Eliot finished, "Okay, Regan's on his way out now and he doesn't look happy."

Carolina smothered a watery laugh against the back of her hand and closed her eyes for several seconds. "I'm good," she finally said to Parker, and Parker stopped patting at her like she suspected Carolina of hiding a gun somewhere in the vicinity of her shoulder blades. "Not so much, no, especially not at the beginning and the end. He said that he did it because he wanted to make worlds where you could tell good from evil, and the good guys always won."

"Okay." Hardison started to take Carolina's hands again, only to be stopped by her vigorously scrubbing them across her face in an effort to wipe the tears away. "Regan's the bad guy, we're the good guys, and we always win. You're just going to have to trust us on that. He is not getting out of this weekend without paying for what he's done."

"Always?" Carolina asked. She tried to smile as she said it, but her tone was still dubious.

"It helps when you get to bypass all of the tidy little, um...laws. Just think of us as some of your grandfather's characters. No matter what, we are going to make sure that the right thing gets done and justice gets served." He probably would have felt a lot more ridiculous saying something like that in such a portentous voice if he hadn't been surrounded by posters of bright colors and stern expressions. Hardison peeked out the door, saw that the way was relatively clear and that Regan was out of sight. "You gonna be able to sneak out of here without showing Regan your kung-fu grip?"

"I think that I can manage." Carolina did her little eyes-closed thing and murmured firmly, "I am a professional, goddamnit," before she slipped out. Hardison watched her long enough to make certain that she was heading for the exit and not anything that was going to make security get involved before he shut the door and turned to face Parker again. She still had her mask off, and the wild way that it had made her hair stick out all over her head was almost as distracting as the fact that her suit was making it extremely, fetchingly clear where she had curves and where she didn't.

"That was sweet," Parker said, giving him the smile that wasn't even the one that Sophie had taught her was appropriate for social situations. "It was almost like you believed it."

"How many times I got to keep telling you this, Parker?" Hardison asked. "I meant every word of it. Now, unless you think we're going to need to make out in here to protect our covers-" She beamed at him sunnily. "Damn. All right, then, back to work, some of us are on deadlines." Parker pulled her mask back on, but there were tufts of blonde hair sticking out from under the neck. "Here, turn around and I'll help you." Hardison thought that she hesitated a moment before she obliged, but without being able to see her face he had no way to tell, and if felt wrong to attempt to read her body language too closely when she was nearly naked as it was. Hardison helped her tuck her hair back into place under the mask, making note of the fact that the skin of her throat was very warm and very soft as he did so, and was wishing more than anything in the world that their cover could be blown, already. Woman was going to kill him before she decided what she wanted to do with those damned pretzels.

"All right," he finally said quietly, and Parker turned. "You're good to go." In spite of the fact that her face was covered again, or maybe because of it, Parker raised herself onto her toes and pressed the side of her mask against his face. Hardison blinked.

"Was that your mouth?" he asked. "'Cause it's not fair if I can't tell whether that was a kiss or an attempt at a wet Willy. Doesn't count." He also couldn't tell whether or not Parker was smiling at him.

"On a deadline," she said as she slipped out the door. The skipping also didn't count; he was fairly certain that she would have done that, anyway.

Hardison's count to fifty only had a little to do with making sure that Parker and Carolina were both safely away before he left the room, and maybe the way that he leapt into the air a little bit when he nearly collided face-first with Nate wasn't the most dignified thing that he had done all day.

"Easy there, Hardison," Nate said mildly. He was dressed the way that he always dressed, which meant that he was sticking out like a sore thumb, and Hardison couldn't stop himself from looking around to see how many people were observing them. "You would think that you were doing something wrong in there."

"Ha-ha," Hardison said sourly. "You don't even know how right a something it was." Nate blinked at him. Hardison wondered if he had noticed Parker slipping out and back into the crowd a few moments before Hardison or not. "Carolina? Client about to blow the whole job with an ill-advised and richly-deserved beat-down?" The answer to "how many people had noticed them" was "too many", so Hardison added, "You sure you're not stepping on stage too early?"

"I have my eye on everything," Nate said with that chess master look that he got sometimes, and then really did not tell him often enough how creepy that was. He gestured for Hardison to follow him. "Come on. Time for the next step."

"Sleep with one eye open, Hardison," Eliot muttered in Hardison's direction as they reentered Nate's condo, ignoring the reproving look that Sophie shot in his direction. "What? You're all-" He made a vague gesture up and down her body and then also ignored the reproving look that emNate/em shot in his direction as he went on. "Normal. I'm wearing this." Eliot picked at the front of his shirt.

"What?" Hardison asked with the very best innocent expression that had managed to fool all but two-point-five of the people in the world thus far, and the fact that one of them was Nana meant that she didn't count. "You know how hard I had to work to find a Ninja Turtles shirt in your size? Don't tell me you're not a Michaelangelo man, I had you so figured."

"Right," Eliot said, giving Hardison the look that generally made Hardison glad that he already knew all of Eliot's bank account numbers and could hold them as leverage if necessary as he went to Nate's fridge to get a beer. "And after all of that work, you couldn't find a way to get me on security detail or something else not completely humiliating."

Two-point-five people, and Eliot only thought that he was one of them. The point-five was settling down on the couch and pulling towards her the recreated sketches that Carolina had made for them so that she could continue duplicating them if another folder should be necessary; she looked up through hair that was still sticking out around her head like duck fuzz and grinned at him. Hardison couldn't stop himself from grinning back as he fired up his laptop and started working on Regan's phone. Scattered throughout the sketches, he noticed that Carolina had dropped off a few copies of her grandfather's older works so that Parker could get a feel for more some of his favored poses. Parker made a few nonchalant lines on her tablet, then picked up one of the comics and started flipping through it without only slightly more interest than Eliot would have shown to PC World.

"I still don't see what's so special," Parker muttered, pausing at a panel wherein a woman dressed all in a white one-piece with cleavage to spare, opaque tights, and a long blonde ponytail was leaping down from the top of a building and onto a pair of unsuspecting muggers. No safety harness, either, but when she held it up beside her face so that Hardison could see what she was looking at, he still cleared his throat and returned rapidly to what he had been doing. "That? She would have broken both her ankles doing that. Probably a femur. You do not want a broken femur."

"That's the Siren," Hardison explained to her, taking the comic away and flipping a few pages ahead to where the same blonde woman was now facing down a man three times her size who appeared to have been carved entirely and inexpertly out of rubies. "Shipping heiress by day, kicker of ass in possession of a pretty good ass herself by night."

"Can she fly?" Parker asked, scrutinizing a panel in which Siren appeared to be doing very near that as she shot foot-first towards the ruby man's face.

"Naw, her power's in her voice. She can break a window at six blocks when she lets that thing loose."

Parker lifted her head from the comic, tapped her finger against a panel wherein Siren now appeared to be leaping from a factory catwalk, and said firmly, "Femur."

"You're missing it," Hardison pressed, taking the comic book away from Parker. He glanced from it to the recreated sketches that Carolina had provided them, frowning for a second before he went on. "It ain't about what she could really do if she were a person in the world. Hell, if she were a real person in the world, there's no way that LAPD wouldn't have been all over her ass inside of two days, she doesn't even wear a mask."

"That was going to be my second point!" Parker exclaimed.

"But she's not real," Hardison went on, before Parker could get too deep into deconstructing all of the ways that the woman who shot sonic waves out of her mouth was completely unrealistic as a working vigilante. "So she gets to be an ideal. Good and evil, right and wrong, in a perfect world where the bad guys are always stopped and the good guys are always good." Hardison flipped through a few more pages before he handed the comic back to Parker. "I was a teenager before Nana took me in, and every foster family that I stayed with before that, they were all right-" Parker's face tightened subtly. For both of their sakes, Hardison pretended that he didn't see it. "But I always knew that I wasn't going to stay, and I had heard enough horror stories from other kids passing through that I didn't know if the next place was going to be so nice." Hardison tapped at the cover of the comic book in Parker's hands, where the pose that the Siren was striking was not quite the same as the one that Carolina had sketched out for them in the bar a few days before. "Even if the rest of the world could use some work, I knew that I could count on good and evil to be two different things in here."

"And yet, you grew up to be a criminal, anyway," Nate said without any particular rancor as he settled down on the other end of the couch with a glass in his hand, and Sophie in the armchair a few feet away. Hardison could feel Eliot glaring at the back of his neck, like Hardison hadn't become immune to that within three weeks of meeting the man. "How are you doing this, again?"

"There's more than one way of being one of the good guys," Hardison said. He leaned forward and tapped at a few keys on his laptop. One half of the screen flickered onto the convention's security feeds-current by the minute, thank you very much-while the other half showed nothing more than a horizontal green line. For now, anyway. "And I'll lie like a fool and say it was all your idea if we get caught at this, but before you ask: let's just say that I'm hitching a ride with the Patriot Act right about now."

The green line started to jump. A few seconds later, Regan's voice came through Nate's speakers. "No, I don't know. The drawings are almost exactly alike, the scripts might have different dialogue but they're virtually the same right down to the origin story."

"Bingo," Nate said, and leaned forward.

An unfamiliar voice made a shushing noise to Regan the way that one would a small child and asked, "Can they back it up with anything digital?"

"Not so far, not that I can see," Regan answered. "He's actually still using pen and ink drawings by hand." Parker straightened and frowned.

"Then he has nothing," the unidentified voice said. "We launch in two days. Anything after that is his word against ours, and you know how the courts of public opinion are. It'll be that damned Simmons kid all over again."

Sophie made a disgusted noise from the back of her throat and said, "But they're still being too vague, we can't get anywhere by putting this over the loudspeakers. It'll just look as if they caught a plagiarist in Hardison."

"We need to rattle 'em more," Eliot said.

Parker flipped open the comic book again, made a tchting noise as she reviewed the Siren's apparently terribly sloppy building-climbing, and said, "I can break in and steal their evidence."

"Not if it's on a computer," Nate said. "And if their network is as tightly guarded as Hardison says-"

"Then the physical building is only going to be worse," Hardison finished. "I'm not getting shot while I'm dangling outside a window, thank you very much."

"So then how are we going to-"

"Just find a way to stall him," the unidentified voice said to Regan, and hung up without waiting to hear what Regan had to say in response. The green line went still, then abruptly began jumping again as Sophie's phone began to buzz in her pocket. She made a startled sound and then waved at Hardison to shut down his equipment, though his fingers were already working across the keys. The last echo of Regan's line ringing through had just died away as Sophie hit her answer key and brought the phone up to her ear.

"Amelia Waterbury speaking," she said easily, holding her hand up at all of them to stay quiet even though no one was speaking a word. "Mr. Regan, how delighted I am to hear from you so soon! I take it that you like what you saw?" She paused, made a face that Hardison had trouble interpreting as a good sign or a bad one. "Yes, of course we'd love to meet with you to show you more. How does tomorrow afternoon sound?" All right, now that was definitely not a good face, though it didn't show in Sophie's voice as she answered, "So far out? I was hoping that we could speak again sooner-the 29th is the best that you can do. Yes, of course, I understand how difficult it is to schedule these things. Thank you very much, I look forward to discussing the future with you." Sophie hung up. "Damn."

"The 29th is three weeks out," Parker said.

"Yeah, and by that time they'll have already launched and will have public opinion on their side and plenty of time to hide their tracks," Eliot said. He flicked at Hardison's shoulder. "And you're sure that you can't hack their computers from the outside?"

"Eliot, I've hacked the networks of certain European countries that had fewer cyber guard dogs patrolling the gates," Hardison answered. "You get me inside, and I'll carry the damned hard drives out one piece at a time and smuggled in my shoes if I have to, but from here I'll be butting my head against a cement wall right up until the point where they back-hack me and call the police."

"And we definitely don't want that," Nate said, but his tone suggested that he was only half-listening, and he was staring hard at the half of the screen which still showed the surveillance for the convention, crowd now thinning out for the day so that cleaning crews could take its place. Lodestone's staff was packing up their booth. "Hardison." Nate pointed at him. "Steal us a publishing company." He turned and left the room without another word.

"So creepy when he does that," Parker muttered.

If he had pulled this one off, then they owed him both a pony and a bushel of apples to feed it. Hardison held his breath as he and Sophie entered the convention hall together, sliding their way past the same thick-packed collection of people in geek-couture as they headed for Lodestone's corner of the action. He didn't let it out again until he saw, several yards away from Lodestone, past even the freelance artists' booths and almost crammed into a literal corner like an embarrassing afterthought, a supposed publishing booth that was really more like a table with delusions of grandeur. The backdrop and skirt both proclaimed to the world that it was the home of Bard Publications, and Hardison saw more than a few people tilting their heads to study it with puzzled expressions as they walked past. That might have to do with the fact that Eliot, rather than manning said booth, was alternating between directing a handful of confused-looking event staff who were likely wondering whether it was even worth mentioning their job descriptions in a gig this temporary and muttering into his earpiece. No, really, Hardison had no idea how none of them had gotten seriously busted on that whole talking to themselves in public thing that they did years ago.

"Hardison, this looks like you did it in ten minutes with PhotoShop," Eliot said into Hardison's ear. Okay, that one Hardison had to admit was actually pretty good; when Eliot was doing that jaw-clenching thing of his, you really couldn't see his mouth move. An event employee close enough to hear him still startled hard and then slid way as quickly as she was able.

"Twenty minutes," Hardison corrected. "And I'm the one who spent all night putting together the damned company in the first place, I don't see any bags under your eyes-oh, my dear sweet lord." Spoken because he had just caught sight of a certain blonde out of the corner of his eye, and said blonde happened to be Parker, and if he had thought that she was distracting the previous day in a skintight Spiderman get-up, then today as the Siren, she was-okay, this was how fetishes were born, that's all that there was to it.

"What is so-damn it." Eliot took one look at Parker than then immediately turned around again to face the wall, finally behaving oddly enough that the last of the staffers who had been tolerating him to that point decided that this was too much to handle when they weren't even getting health insurance and scattered. "You could have warned me."

"I didn't know that she was going to be dressed like that," Hardison hissed back. Parker had stayed over at Nate's pretty late while Hardison had been working to make sure that their Hail Mary pass would be able to stand more than a casual Google scrutiny, and she had been flipping through several of the old editions that Hardison had there with him and offering a pattering commentary on Siren's technique and everything that she would have done differently if she had been the one in the tights. She damn sure hadn't mentioned that she was thinking of changing things up a little.

"What, Eliot, does this mean that you're not going to be asking Jean Grey out for drinks later?" Sophie cooed to Eliot with the faintest hint of a smile playing at the edges of her mouth as she strolled up to Hardison. Hardison was abruptly aware of two things, the first being where Parker had gotten the idea to alter her costume, and the second being that Sophie was pure, unmitigated evil.

"It's like looking at my sister in a bikini, why would you let her-" Even though Eliot was still turned away and staring at the wall, Hardison could emfeel/em the clenched jaw. "There are perverts here."

"As I recall from yesterday, you bear a passing resemblance to them," Sophie answered smoothly.

"What?" Parker asked, coming within normal earshot of them, though she still hung back far enough so that a casual observer would not be able to tell that they were a matched set. "I know how to break fingers. Sophie told me that I could even break the stabbing rule if I had to."

Hardison raised his eyebrows at Sophie, and she raised her eyebrows right back. "Of course I did, do you see how she's dressed? Not everyone here is the gentleman that you are, Hardison."

"Don't knock my people," Hardison answered automatically, even though it was making his face warm to look in the direction of Parker and her fishnets for too long. "Do you see Regan anywhere?"

"Not yet," Sophie answered, scanning the crowd. She made an uncertain noise from the back of her throat. "If he doesn't show-"

"He'll show," Nate said through their earpieces. "There's too much of Lodestone's finances and his own ego tied up in tomorrow going off perfectly, he's not going to leave anything to chance." While they couldn't see Nate, he had apparently found a position where he could see them, because Hardison could interpret the little emah/em-ing noise that he made as he noticed Parker perfectly: and if you were my daughter, there is no way that you would see daylight again. "You look very nice, Parker."

Hardison sidled over to Parker and pulled his earpiece out, motioning to Parker to do the same. "'Nice' is a word for a cute prom dress," he told her. "Parker, you are smoking."

"I couldn't hide anything in the costume I had on yesterday, and I never knew what time it was," she said, glancing down at herself, while Hardison tried very hard to keep his eyes on her face and away from the places where she could very, emvery/em ably hide something if she wanted to put her mind to it.

"Yeah, being able to hide things is important," Hardison said. "We, uh, we definitely want to keep our minds on the job."

Parker grinned at him. "And Sophie told me that no one was going to remember my face in this one, anyway."

Evil. Wholly and unrepentantly evil. That had to be while she and Nate got along so well when Nate was in one of his creepy moods. Hardison huffed out a breath and took Parker by her upper arms, which seemed to be the safest expanse of bare flesh that he could touch unless he wanted to cup her face...it was the safest expanse of skin that he could touch.

"Parker, you are the prettiest thing that I've ever seen when you're in a tee shirt and jeans," he told her.

Parker smiled at him, a little uncertainly and as if she was having some trouble finding the appropriate template for this situation, and looked down again. Every time that she did that, she made Hardison want to look down with her in order to find her gaze again, and that just led to a bad place. A bad, and very cleavage-filled place.

"Seriously, though, I could never cross a rooftop in these tights," she said, plucking at them. Doing so involved leaning over, which involved showing half the convention hall the very interesting shadows that rested in the keyhole of her top; Hardison cleared his throat and stepped quickly in front of her to block the views. "And I would still break a femur."

"Breaking a femur, bad. Got it." Hardison took Parker by her upper arms and straightened her again. "Just keep in mind that Sophie is absolutely right, and you can stab just about anyone that you want."

"Don't give that to her without qualifiers, Hardison," Nate said, while Sophie answered in the other ear, "I see Regan."

"Duty calls." Hardison headed off, telling Eliot, "Keep an eye on her." Not for her sake, but it would damned sure blow their covers if they had to extract her from breaking someone's arm.

"How the hell am I supposed to-everyone's keeping an eye on her, man."

Regan was standing off to the side of the Lodestone booth, paying very close attention to something on a laptop angled away so that they could not see. Hardison started to reach for his phone automatically in order to find what was so very interesting, but Sophie touched his arm just as Regan looked up and noticed that the two of them were there. His expression immediately turned into that of someone who had just taken an unexpected swallow of buttermilk, and Hardison wondered why he hadn't been shunted into behind the scenes work years before, with a poker face like that.

"Miss Waterbury, Mr. Wilson," he said, dipping his chin very slightly to the both of them. "I believe that we have an appointment to discuss Mr. Wilson's future already."

"Yes, well," Sophie did that flip/fluff thing with her hair that always made Nate, and more often than not Eliot, forget what they were doing for a few seconds. She adjusted her glasses on her nose and leaned in. "I was hoping that we could speed things up just a bit. There's a bit of, ah, delicacy surrounding Mr. Wilson's work, and I'd like to get things in ink just as soon as possible."

Regan shut the screen of his laptop, expression chillier than ever. "I'm very sorry to disappoint," he said, "but my schedule is completely full until the date of our scheduled meeting. Perhaps Mr. Wilson should learn to handle his delicate situations himself."

"Man, there is a reason you work on commission and not by the hour," Hardison told Sophie, taking her by the elbow and physically moving her aside so that he had Regan's personal space all to himself. She flashed him another one of her looks over the top of her glasses, but until he started the whores, whores, whores chorus, she didn't know anything about how bad imitating some authors could actually get. "Look, what the trust fund baby here wants to dance around and dress in pigtails is this: I talked to another company before I figured, hell, what I got is a hell of a lot bigger than a half-dozen web subscribers per month, all right? I ain't living off of ramen and for the rest of my life. So maybe I talked to this other dude, and maybe some things were implied, and I think that we would really just feel much better if we got this thing locked up before it became a situation." Parker crossed close behind him, and Hardison turned. "Hey, there, sweet thing, aren't you just as pretty as if you had walked off the page." With Hardison's body blocking her, Regan didn't see that her fingers dipped quickly into the pocket of his jacket.

Regan smiled, thinly and without showing his teeth. "That sounds a bit too much like an explanation that you would give your attorney for me, thank you."

"There he is, that son of a bitch!" Hardison, Sophie, and Regan turned as one to see-Hardison coughed quickly into his hand to cover his reaction. To see Nate stomping across the convention floor at them in an ill-fitting tweed jacket, blue chambray shirt, and pants that might have once been fashionable khakis sometime in the eighties when people were expected to wear their pants up to their navels and also taking into account that the original owner of said pants had been working with a lot more navel that he needed to keep corralled than was Nate himself. He had also combed his hair down over his forehead in a way that just wasn't ever going to be flattering on anyone, ever, and even in kindergarten they had known that and divvied up the juice boxes and slugs to the arm accordingly. Hardison didn't think all that much of it-it wasn't as if he hadn't watched with hand over mouth as Nate had leapt into much, much more embarrassing covers than this in the name of protecting a con-until the other man got close enough for Hardison to be damn near knocked over by the reek of booze.

"Oh, bugger," Sophie said under her breath, loudly enough for Regan to hear and, Hardison was pretty certain, not thinking about her cover in the slightest. Regan's eyebrows went up, and he did a half-turn to face Nate with the expression of a lion who had just watched the drunken antelope face-plant directly at his feet and start singing Irish folk songs

Son of a bitch sounded stone fucking sober all morning over the comms, too. Hardison put his hand against Nate's chest to push him back as Nate got all up in his personal space, and by proxy Sophie's and Regan's, too. Regan took a small step back, nose automatically wrinkling in distaste, but held up his hand to dissuade security when they began heading that way.

"This man," Nate said to Regan, stabbing his finger against Hardison's chest hard enough to hurt, "this man is a liar and a thief, and if you're smart you'll check your wallet before you let him walk away from you."

Regan's hand went automatically towards his suit jacket, and Hardison hoped like hell that Parker had not taken the opportunity to do a little recreational fishing, before Regan slowly dropped his hand and asked, "And who might you be?"

"Samuel Leonard, President and CEO of Bard Publications," Nate declared, throwing his arm out in the direction of the hastily thrown-together booth and nearly catching a young woman in pigtails directly in the eye. She gave him an ugly look as she sidled away.

"Look, man, this guy doesn't know what he's talking about, he's obviously plastered," Hardison said. He grabbed for Nate's wrist when Nate made to poke him in the chest again, acting as if to lead him off with Sophie coming around from the other side. Nate yanked his wrist out of Hardison's grasp.

"'Bard Publications'," Regan quoted softly, staring at the obviously slap-dash booth, which Eliot was working to sidle away from without giving Regan his eye-thing. (Slap-dash by design, thank you very much, as if Hardison couldn't put something better than that together even when he emwas/em working on approximately an hour and a half of sleep and his third Red Bull with an Orange Crush chaser.) He still hadn't lost the lion look. "I'm sorry, Mr. Leonard, but I don't believe that I've heard of your company before."

"It's a start-up," Nate said, sticking out his chest, which caused a very unfortunate chain reaction that made Hardison hold his breath and not let it out in relief until those truly hideous pants managed to stay on and spare all of them a show that they didn't need to see. "I thought I had a good start going, too, until this-" Nate jabbed his finger hard into Hardison's chest again; Hardison wasn't entirely playing his role when he grabbed it and glared. "Son of a bitch right here screwed me over and completely wrecked our deal."

"Deal?" Hardison said, leaning forward and up into Nate's space while Sophie implored, "Gentlemen," and flashed Regan a look of perfect embarrassment. They were drawing a crowd. "You call what you wanted to give me a deal? I can make more money than that off of Google ads on Blogspot."

Regan sidled away from the two of them a bit further, saying, "Yes, well, Mr. Wilson, it seems as if you have some prior business arrangements that you need to attend to."

"Damn right, he does," Nate said. "Just because we didn't ink it all up yet doesn't mean we didn't have an understanding. I've got sketches going back for months-"

Regan froze. "Months?" he inquired softly, turning back towards Nate.

"It was a gentleman's agreement," Nate said, waving Regan off as if he missed entirely the new way that Regan was looking at him. "We had a thing, and then he decides that he wants to blow it by seeing how much more he can get at the next place willing to give him the time of day. You know, when I first got into this business, a person's word actually meant something-"

"It's a start-up," Sophie interrupted, arching her brow.

"Things move fast in the internet age, honey," Nate said. He jabbed his finger at Hardison again, and Hardison swore to God, they were going to have themselves a moment here if Nate actually connected. "We had an agreement and the both of you knew it."

"Ah." Regan looked around at the crowd of people who were now looking on curiously and listening to every word. Hardison and Nate got any more into it, and the cellular phones were going to start coming out. "As it turns out, Lodestone is quite interested in what Mr. Wilson here has to offer-"

"Really?" Sophie perked. "How outstanding, I had gotten the impression that you weren't terribly impressed."

"I'm unfortunately running on a very tight schedule this weekend," Regan said, taking up Sophie's hand the same way that she had taken his the day before. He ran his thumb across the backs of her knuckles; Nate's eyes narrowed. "But I think that this is a situation that needs to be resolved as quickly and delicately as possible. Would the three of you like to come to my office in order to discuss it further?"

"Now we're finally getting somewhere," Hardison announced, shooting Nate an ugly look. "That wasn't so damned hard, was it?"

"Listen, kid-"

"Gentlemen," Regan interrupted the two of them in a tone nearly identical to the one that Sophie had used before. "Please. If we could discuss this in a more private venue-" He held out his arm to usher them towards the exit ahead of him, saying over his shoulder to a harried-looking young man with a clipboard, "Billy, if you can manage not to screw things up too terribly while I'm gone?"

Billy's twitch could have meant a half-dozen different things before he got it under control again, but Hardison sincerely doubted that he was calling Regan Boss of the Year. "Yes, sir," he answered. He swiveled his head to follow Parker as she made another pass of the room. Eliot muttered something impolite across the comm.

Regan put his hand into the small of Sophie's back as he guided them, while Nate and Hardison walked on opposite sides of the pair and did a damned good job of keeping their cover of wanting to kick each other's asses, if Hardison did say so himself. Though he didn't see Sophie's mouth move, he still heard her mutter loud and clear over the earpiece, "Nate, tell me that you are not actually trying to do this drunk."

"It was a mister," Nate muttered back. "Selling the role, remember?"

"Right," Sophie answered back sourly, while within the convention hall behind them a male voice yelped.

Hardison briefly closed his eyes without breaking stride, not bothering to look around, and muttered to Sophie, "Don't take the safety off of that gun unless you intend for Parker to use it, man."

The Lodestone offices were located in a granite building on the opposite side of Boston, complete with spacious glass skylights and a fountain surrounded by a lush flower bed in the center of the lobby. Everyone, from the neat receptionist sitting behind her marble desk and the executives clicking back and forth across the floor (even the men, which kinda made Hardison want to examine their shoes), was immaculately groomed and wearing an expression of focused benignity: the next big hit was out there, they were going to find it, and they were going to represent the agency like champions and make everyone shopping carts full of money once they did. Hardison regarded them with a slightly raised eyebrow and wondered where in the hell were the coffee-soaked editors, the artists with the wild-eyed look of living at the office to deal with a deadline, the...well, damn, anything that could have convinced him that actual art was made here and not sleek product.

Sophie made an appreciative noise and said, "My, how lovely," as Regan guided the three of them to a set of stainless steel elevator doors that would probably sound an alarm if they were ever besmirched by something as common as a set of fingerprints. Nate wore a sour expression as they entered and began traveling upwards, saying, "If you want style over substance, sure, it's great."

Regan's smile was brittle and spoke volumes while the elevator dinged open and admitted them onto the floor of his office. "I prefer both, actually." He had soon led them past a secretary who had broken the unspoken code of the building by wearing an actual harried expression and attempted several times to get Regan's attention about a minor crisis taking place back at the convention, only for Regan to ultimately brush her off with a brusque, "Billy will handle it or find himself another job." The smile was back into place, for Sophie in particular, as he led them into an office that seemed to be made entirely of glass, its floor-length windows showing the skyline of Boston for miles on end. The walls were decorated with book prints and the occasional award of merit; nothing in any color more exciting than taupe. Hardison ran his eyes over the decor and thought that he could have been in the office of a successful bankruptcy lawyer.

"Now, this is more like it," Hardison said, whistling in appreciation as he looked around. "This is more what I'm talking about." He jerked his thumb over his shoulder at Nate. "Do you know what this man had to offer when I was in his digs trying to work something out? Fake creamer in the coffee and a broken Atari shoved into one corner of his office. How the hell are you going to talk about the money we're going to make when you can't even pull yourself past the feathered hair days?"

Nate bristled. "That was an antique," he said.

"Take it to the road show and see what you can get," Hardison snapped back before he walked over to the windows. "Damn," he said, leaning against one of them to look down at the street stories upon stories below their feet. The cars looked like toys, and Hardison could only handle it for a few seconds before he felt himself starting to get queasy; the only way they would have been able to get Parker out of there would be to let her find a way to open said window and then do what came naturally to her. "You could pitch someone right out of here and they wouldn't be anything but a greasy stain by the time that they made it down to the pavement."

Regan's face twitched, but he still said, "Why do you think that I chose this office? I've never been turned down from here." He waited just a beat too long for someone to laugh until Sophie gave a charming little titter and did the hair thing again before he said, "A joke, of course." He gestured for the three of them to have a seat before his desk.

"I would prefer to stand, actually," Sophie said. She jabbed her finger against Nate's chest in exactly the same way that Nate had done to Hardison back at the convention hall, and Hardison was gratified to see that Nate winced a little as she rocked him back. Yeah, it ain't so fun when you have to stay in character, is it? "I was trying to avoid a scene, but this man is a crook. We promised him absolutely nothing, and now he's trying to strong-arm my client into taking a lesser deal-"

"I'm a crook!" Nate pulled a folder from his jacket (as much spare room as their was in those pants, Hardison was deeply grateful and mildly surprised that it came from the jacket) and tossed it down amidst the many that littered Regan's desk, hard enough that the smacking sound made them all jump. The desktop was the only point of Regan's office which hinted at the fact that he did actual work in there rather than simply putting up a pretty showpiece; he nudged Nate's folder to the side with scarcely more than a glance. "Those are the sketches that Ry-Ry here did for me, I've had 'em for months, and we had a deal that he was going to publish with my house."

"Your house?" Sophie asked. She went back to the jabbing thing, and Nate seemed torn for a moment between grabbing at her hand and simply moving out of the way. Regan watched the two of them with his head tilted slightly to the side. Hardison started edging for the door. "You mean that broken-down corner of your basement with a color printer? I could go to a college freshman and see more professional sense-" She flipped her hair over her shoulder again and sidled a little closer to Regan's side of the desk, making it clear whose side she was on. Hardison slipped out into the hallway.

The poor secretary was speaking rapidly into her earpiece, barely glancing up even when Nate's and Sophie's voices in the office started to rise towards yells. "I know, he said that it's your responsibility or your ass," she said, and then blinked a little she saw that Hardison was standing there. "Hang on, I'll call you back," she said. "Can I help you?"

"Yeah, uh, I'm just going to make a trip to the little boy's room," Hardison said, sketching out a quick salute before he jabbed his finger back over his shoulder. Sophie shrieked out something unflattering. "I think my agent has things handled in there."

"Okay, it's the third left," the secretary said, hardly batting an eye. Hardison wondered how many other times per week yelling could be heard floating out from the office. He saluted again and took off.

Hardison followed the secretary's directions only until he was out of sight before he began trying office doors, looking for the ones that wouldn't open beneath his hand rather than the ones that would. He didn't want to go scrounging through the computers of the people who didn't have anything to protect. Hardison finally located an office that looked from the outside as if it was located on an even larger and more impressive space that Regan's own, and wouldn't you know it, the door just happened to be locked up tight. He paused a moment to check in on Nate and Sophie over the comms, still vigorously going at it and now with the sounds of Regan attempting half-heartedly to restore order, and winced.

"Oh, now that's just low, you don't go pulling anyone's mama into it," Hardison scolded them both as he pulled a set of lock picks from his pocket and got to work on the door. For a place that kept its electronic records better than Fort Knox kept its gold, the door locks were a joke; Hardison was inside in under twenty seconds and making a mental note to let Parker know that that little twist she had recommended to him had worked like a dream. "Now let's go see what the dragon's doing with its jewels," Hardison murmured to himself, shutting the door quietly behind him and crossing a rug that looked almost too expensive for human feet before reaching the desk and computer. The voices in his ear paused. "Hey, it's a metaphor, don't go turning it into something nasty. Worse than Eliot sometimes." Hardison started tapping out keys in a rhythm so fast that it was almost like music, and wouldn't you know it, the security system that was such a cranky bitch from the outside wasn't nearly so mean once he got up close to her. They were all like that, just needed you to learn how to talk to them first. "There we go," Hardison murmured as he gained access to the hard drive, faster even than he had guessed that he would be able to learn how the lady liked her sweet nothings, and started bringing up screen after screen of internal emails, cost-benefit analyses, and undeniable proof that the pretty lady with the fuck-you look making her big debut the next day hadn't been drawn up by the hack that Regan was paying to keep quiet and take his fame as it was given to him. It took about five minutes with a USB drive to completely fuck over everything Lodestone ever thought that they were going to do again in the comics industry, not to mention completely screwing Regan's chances at respectability and maybe even sending his stuck-up ass to jail to boot. And didn't that just always happen to the nicest people.

Hardison finished downloading everything that he needed, murmuring, "Hard copies on the desk." He took his sweet time closing up all of the holes in the system again, too, because he had always been taught to put his toys away when he was done. Sophie and Nate were hashing things out in his ear, even though the argument was creeping a little too close to real for them to hide it from Regan for too much longer-unless of course Regan believed that drunken publishers visited Tuscany regularly enough to have opinions on its hotels-and the hallway was clear when Hardison stuck his head out the door again. A lithesome blonde in professional dress walked by him as he made his way down the hallway; they barely glanced at one another in passing.

"Smooth and easy like baby shampoo," Hardison whispered to himself as he started back the way that he had come, the USB resting easily in the pocket of his jacket. He was feeling good enough that his jump when he turned the corner and nearly ran face-first into two security personnel was not feigned. Their jackets were cut stylishly enough to indicate that they were paid well for their services.

"Sir, what are you doing on this floor?" the first of them asked. He looked Hardison up and down, taking in the notable lack of comparable suit, and Hardison could already see conclusions being drawn in his mind.

"Ah," Hardison said, because in times of stress he was the height of wit like that, before he pulled himself up and said, "Ryan Wilson, man, I am so sorry. I must've gotten lost on the way to the bathroom or something, can you show me the right way?"

"The bathroom is nowhere near here," the second of the hired...fists said in a grim voice, and Hardison knew then that he was in some trouble.

"There are like fifteen different offices down there," he said, throwing his hand back to indicate the way that he had come, "and you're telling me that there's not one single bathroom? Then no wonder I got lost, y'all need to fire your architect-"

There were any number of things that could have stopped two men who were obviously paid very well to bulk up and then lurk as a career choice, and there was very little doubt in the universe that Eliot knew all of them. Hardison stepped back quickly to avoid thug the first falling on him as Eliot drove the water jug that he had ostensibly been about to replace directly into the back of the man's skull, followed it up with one of his echoing punches when the man twisted to come back at him. Goon the second got in a blow to Eliot's ribs that made Hardison wince just upon the hearing of it before Eliot was able to turn, kick the guy into the wall, and then second verse same as the first to put him down, too.

"Thanks so much for the help there, Hardison," Eliot growled at him as he straightened, still holding his side. The water deliverer's shirt that he was wearing had obviously been snagged from someone on the fly, as its fit was far, far worse than the suits of the unconscious men on the floor. Eliot could bitch all that he wanted, but at least Hardison put in the effort to find a Ninja Turtles tee shirt that fit. He had made the history that got Eliot hired into the building in the first place, the least that Eliot could do would be to not embarrass Hardison once he got there.

"You looked like you had it handled," Hardison said mildly, not reacting when Eliot answered with a finger that was not quite so mild. "What, wait a minute. Did you not say that you were Batman yesterday? Did I hear that wrong?" The finger again. "You know, Batman's kind of a tool, I'm just sayin'."

"Whatever." Eliot looked down at the two unconscious men at his feet, head tilted slightly to the side. Hardison foresaw a locked closet in their futures. "What the hell are you going to do if they remember you well enough to make you when they wake up?"

"Doesn't matter, we're good." And Sophie and Nate were running out of even emtheir/em greatest hits with which to keep Regan distracted, so he had an elsewhere to be. "I would really love to stay and help you out with these guys, too, but, uh..." Hardison sketched out a salute and spun on his heel, leaving Eliot growling out a few more ungentlemanly-like things behind him.

Regan was pinching at the bridge of his nose as Hardison slipped back into his office, but he still looked up sharply at the slightest snick at his door. "Where were you?" he demanded of Hardison.

"I'm terribly sorry if I don't take seriously offers from men who reek as if they bathed in bourbon," Sophie finished, leaning back from Nate and crossing her arms briefly over her chest. She turned back to Regan long enough to grab a file from his desk, near enough to the ones that she had brought in with her for government work. Regan, still looking at Hardison hard, didn't appear to notice.

"Had to go find a bathroom," Hardison said. "Conflict, you know, it just gives me this nervous stomach, no one needs to see that."

"I wouldn't have guessed it of you," Regan said. He turned his attention back to Sophie and gave her a smile showing why his future would have been behind the cameras rather than in front of them if they had not run across his path. "I'm very sorry, Miss Waterbury, but I believe this meeting was a mistake."

Sophie dropped Regan's hand as if he had smeared something filthy across her palm with it. "Excuse me?"

"Mr. Wilson might be very talented," Regan said, putting an insinuating stress upon the word "might" that made Hardison narrow his eyes even though the two women that Regan was really insulting weren't even in the room. Talented enough for you to steal it. "But I don't believe that he's what we're looking for at this time."

"Great, then he and I can, ah, resume our deal so that I don't have to go pissing in anybody else's flower beds, with the sketches that I have," Nate said in a cheery voice, while Hardison stormed ahead, "You have no idea the kind of deal you're screwing yourself out of here, man, this chick is going to have a theme song before it's all over. Little girls are going to be carrying around their Bratz dolls in her lunch box!"

"You've made it abundantly clear that you don't have a damn thing, but entertain yourself however you like," Regan said to Nate. He offered Hardison a thin and entirely insincere smile. "Please try to conclude your previous business arrangements before you attempt to open up new ones, Mr. Wilson."

"You're gonna regret this," Hardison said, snatching up the folder that they had brought with them from the desk and pointing at Regan with it. Nate gathered up his own things, and Sophie sputtered until they were all the way out the door and onto the street again, at which point she swished her hair over her shoulder and said, "If he called me 'Miss' one more time, I was going to have to put that folder somewhere." She handed Hardison the one that she had handily snatched up without notice before they had left.

"'Booze-soaked'?" Nate asked her. "Really, you had to go there?"

"I went a little method, I had to work with what I had," Sophie answered coolly.

While the mid-afternoon crowd swirled across the pavement around them, Hardison flipped open the folder and started to grin. "Oh, no, y'all are all wrong," he said. "I'm the one who's the damn Batman."

There was a conspicuous hive of activity on the far side of the convention hall, complete with security in suits almost as good as the ones that Eliot had kicked the hell out of the day before, and the crowd of convention-goers were responding accordingly. A huge projection screen was being lowered from the ceiling; there was a raised platform on which a table and several chairs had been placed. Enormous graphics of Carolina's heroine were standing to either side of the projector and nearly as tall; she still had no name that Lodestone had given, other than the words Willpower emblazoned at her feet. Regan himself was standing off to one side, speaking rapidly into his cellular phone when he wasn't taking breaks to harangue any assistant who happened to be within hearing distance.

Hardison hung as far back as he possibly could and still be able to keep an eye on the action, tapping out a few final series of commands on his phone. "All right, you sure you got this?" he asked Eliot over his comm.

"Yes," Eliot hissed back, aggrieved; okay, so maybe Hardison had to admit that this was not the first time that he had asked Eliot that particular question. "I can program my own VCR, too. And the microwave."

"The fact that you still have a VCR doesn't exactly fill me with confidence, forgive me for wanting to dot all the i's and cross all the t's," Hardison answered, before he turned over to Parker. Nate and Sophie were conspicuously silent on the line. They were too close to the action to be seen speaking to themselves in public, and Nate had said without saying as of that morning: Hardison had chosen this show, now it was his to bring home. "How you doing, Parker?"

"I kinda miss the costumes," Parker answered back. "They were fun. Still doesn't make any sense to go running around in white when you're supposed to be hiding in the dark, though."

"We'll start slow," Hardison promised her. "Aquaman, the lesser X-Men. I won't work you up to the heavy hitters for awhile."

"No wonder women cry when they're in dark rooms with you," Eliot muttered.

So far as Hardison was concerned, Eliot was just still pissed that his fetish had gotten all ruined for him by becoming Parker-shaped, and was about to say so when a feminine voice at his elbow said, "God, watching him strut around just makes me sick."

Hardison spun on Carolina. "You emhave/em to stop being here," he told her, looking around. Security hadn't zeroed in on them, but there was a big fat 'yet' attached to that statement. "Especially right now."

"I know, I-wait, what?" Carolina shifted tactics, justifiably confused as Hardison grabbed her by the elbow and started pulling her away from the main floor as fast as they could possibly go without attracting attention to themselves. She had much shorter legs than he; it wasn't but a second before she was struggling to keep up. "Okay, yeah, it's dumb, but-where are we going?" She looked at the portfolio in Hardison's hands and asked, "Are those the sketches that Lodestone stole from me?"

"Is that Carolina?" Parker asked into his ear. "We didn't plan for Carolina!"

"Yeah, I know that," Hardison snapped back a little more tensely than he had intended. Nate was still silent, and Hardison was glad of it. This was his world and his show, and he was going to do this. He tugged Carolina into one of the hallways off of the main floor, primarily used by staff and unoccupied for the moment. It was empty most of the time, actually, unless the weather was bad enough that some of the convention hall employees were tempted to sneak their smoke breaks indoors; the surveillance footage that Hardison had been perusing over the past couple of days had given him access to the backstage workings of the building, too. "Eliot, I might need you." He tugged the portfolio out of Carolina's reach when she tried to grab for it.

"There's only so much that I can do at one time," Eliot answered, sounding distracted, and Hardison winced inwardly. He had known that he was giving Eliot too much to do that ought to have been his work, but when he was front and center rather than hacking puppet governments in the van-

And I don't want to hear one word out of Nate if this goes wrong, Hardison told himself. He should try the electronic equivalent of breaking into Fort Knox with a buzz-saw strongand/strong maintaining a cover, not just running around with fake voices and bad hair.

"Did I just screw everything up really badly?" Carolina asked, searching his face.

"Nah, everything's going to be fine," Hardison said, taking her by the hand. "We're going to put your work right back where it belongs." Carolina startled so hard that she nearly left the floor. "And then you can decide whether or not you want to keep lying about it."

It was a good thing that Carolina did her work on the page rather than in public, because she didn't even have to open her mouth for Hardison to know that he had her. "What are you talking about?" she asked, tugging her fingers free.

"I've been following Steve Guerrera since I was a kid," Hardison said. "I'd lay even money down that I know his work almost as well as you do." He leaned forward. "He had a minor stroke about ten years back. Mind was fine, but he never did his own art again. At least, not until he got sick and you say you started collaborating with him for one more chance at polishing his legacy."

Carolina had gone very pale; the scar at her temple was the brightest thing on her face. "I didn't-," she started, until Hardison lifted his eyebrow at her. "Being an artist was emall that he had, especially at the end, so I just thought-"

"You thought that you would bend the truth a little bit and help your family," Hardison finished for her. "I get it. I do. But you're the one who has to decide if you want to live your whole life for someone else's legacy."

"Yeah, but it's a lot less scary when someone that people actually respect and look up to is letting you use their name." Carolina took a deep breath and rubbed her hands over her eyes as a series of cheers started up back on the main floor; it was about to start. "Wait," she said suddenly. "Okay, so you might have been able to figure out that I was the one doing the art. How do you know that I was the one who came up with everything?"

"I collected every comic that your grandfather ever wrote or drew," Hardison said. "But he never wrote a chick as badass as the one that Lodestone is trying to steal from you." He paused. "Just, a personal favor for a friend of mine? Do some research into climbing equipment, so that she doesn't stroke out."

"Thank you!" Parker chirped into his ear. Hardison could hear the crowd noises in the background of her comm; someone, at least, had figured out that he could use a little help here.

"I'll...do that," Carolina said slowly, looking confused. She glanced over Hardison's shoulder, and her eyes widened. Hardison turned to follow her gaze and wasn't entirely surprised to see that their way out was now blocked by two big men in well-crafted suits. Regan was behind them, eyeing the way for witnesses.

"Eliot," Hardison started slowly.

"Hardison, I can't do this fucking thing if you keep distracting me." Hardison was really starting to doubt that Eliot had even programmed that damned VCR, rather than just glaring it into submission like Chuck Norris every time that he needed it.

"Hardison, I think that the one on the left was the one who was in my house," Carolina said. She was breathing faster, her voice turning higher and approaching a whine. Hardison looked over his shoulder and saw that she was backing away.

"It's going to be all right," he told her, before hissing into his comm, "If someone could get their asses down here-"

"I'm on my way," Parker said hurriedly. Hardison really hoped that she was coming equipped with a Kung-Fu grip of the not web-blocked variety.

"Miss Guerrera," Regan said to Carolina, dipping his head in a gesture that was very nearly gentlemanly.

"Oh, my God, it's 'Ms.', how hard is it not to be a dick!" Carolina exploded at him, even though she was hanging back against the wall and safely behind Hardison, like, he might have come a long damned way, but he was still Tony Stark without the suit, not the Incredible Hulk.

"You just became Sophie's best friend and you don't even know it," Hardison said to her before he turned back to Regan and his Armani Neanderthals. "So I know that you know and you know that I know, how about we just act civilized and-"

Neanderthal the first made a fist and drove it solidly into Hardison's stomach, doubling him over and pulling a sound out of him not unlike that of a very startled goose, or perhaps an accordion. Hardison couldn't imagine that the accordion was too happy, either, as he struggled to draw his breath back through lungs that were suddenly not working the way that they needed to. The portfolio flew out of his hands, skittered to the other side of the hall, didn't open. Hardison braced his hands against his knees and came back up swinging, but that unfortunately left his chin open, and, hello, more black spots in front of his eyes as he flew back against the wall. Carolina shrieked fit to pull any security in the area running and rushed to throw herself in front of him, but they were all out on the main floor, where everyone knew the real troublemakers were. Neanderthal the second grabbed her by her upper arm and tossed her back against the opposite wall; she caught herself on her shoulder, yelped, and then glared at him through watering eyes and around lips clenched tightly together, it looked like, so that she would not cry.

Regan picked up the portfolio, tucked it under his arm, and came Hardison's way. Swinging at him got Hardison another punch straight to the ribs and, joy, a feeling like that one might have gotten a kidney, while Hardison stayed stubbornly silent and refused to say a word into his earpiece. And he had wanted so badly to lay at least one punch on Regan, because he had only seen a few people in his life who needed it more. What would Batman do?

"Aw, hell with it," Hardison said, and swung for all that he was worth. Regan's head rocked back hard as Hardison felt the impact all the way down into his shoulder; there was a smear of red beneath Regan's nose when he took his hand away. Even if Neanderthal One and Neanderthal Two tattooed out a rock beat against Hardison's sides immediately afterwards until Hardison sagged back against the wall, unsure if he was going to be able to stand on his own, while Carolina yanked on their arms and questioned their lineages going back several generations. For a few seconds made Hardison afraid that she was actually going to go Tyson on an ear or two. This was why they needed to keep unknown variables to a minimum.

"Did you really think," Regan said into Hardison's face as the talent was winding down and Hardison was tasting what he had eaten for breakfast and what he really hoped was not blood at the back of his throat, "that we wouldn't notice that someone had been in our system and trace it back to you?"

"Well," Hardison said, leaning back against the wall and grinning a little because he knew that it wasn't pretty, "go big or go home, man. No sense in doing it halfway." Regan made a disgusted noise and then rifled through Hardison's pockets until he found the drive.

"You should have cut the flirting and just given it to her," he said, nodding towards Carolina.

"You hit girls," Hardison answered. "I don't see a whole lot of Casanova potential in you, so sorry."

"Hardison!" Parker had appeared at the mouth of the hallway, wearing her regular clothes and with her hair down around her shoulders. Her eyes widened as she saw him, and her mouth was a downward bow. She skittered in a wide berth around the Neanderthals before she brushed past Regan and settled against Hardison's side so that he could put her arm around her shoulders. Regan flicked her an up and down look as if he couldn't quite place where he had seen her before in the convention-Sophie must have been right that no one was going to be looking at Parker's face-before he finished with Hardison, "I don't know who the hell you are, but I would highly suggest that you limp out of here before the police arrive." He turned and left Hardison leaning up against the wall, Parker supporting him, and Carolina trembling by herself a few feet away.

Moments later, the sounds of the crowd told them that it was starting.

"It's okay," Carolina told Hardison in a quavering voice, sounding as if she was trying very hard to mean it. She was still helping him walk from one side while Parker was on the other. Hardison could feel Parker all but vibrating under his fingertips. He wondered if the fact that she was back in street clothes meant that the "no stabbing" rule had officially been put back into place, and if he could expect her to go rabbiting off at any second if it had not. "You guys tried really hard, and that means...that means so much to me. No one else was even willing to try to help me. I never would have gotten this close to seeing my grandfather's-" Hardison looked at her. "My work returned to me without your help."

"Don't mention it," Hardison said. It wasn't hard to sound pained and beaten, what with the way that he was pretty sure one good sneeze was going to leave him tasting his liver on the back of his own throat. Fuck Eliot and his tough-guy shit, man, from this point forward Hardison was going to be behind the scenes only. He liked the van. The van was a good place, and Parker already had her sleeping bag stashed in their for her and a spare bag of gummi frogs for him. All the comforts of the world that a man actually needed.

Out on the main floor, the excitement was almost electric, and they were able to hang far back of the crowd by sheer virtue of having to throw an elbow in order to get any further up as Regan strode to the front of the platform. Never trust a man who wore a suit to a freaking comics convention, Hardison seriously did not understand why more people in the crowd did not understand this rule. It was like they were new. When Regan gave his smarmiest smile yet, Parker made a disgusted noise from the back of her throat and very nearly dropped her half of Hardison as she started forward. Hardison grabbed for her arm and pulled her back quickly; he was supposed to completely battered all to hell, here. Not that he was exaggerating much.

"Eliot, you suck," he muttered into his earpiece. "Parker, no stabbing."

"There should be at least a little stabbing," Parker hissed back as she reclaimed her place. "I get it. He's totally why people jump off of buildings with completely inappropriate equipment."

"Actually, I'm pretty sure that this kid would have made Lex Luthor look like he was just misunderstood." Up on the podium, Regan noticed the three of them standing at the back of the crowd and, following his gaze, so did security. They belonged to the convention center and thus their suits were not nearly as nice, but that didn't mean that Hardison wanted to end a day in which he had already taken several gut-punches being pepper-sprayed and then having to talk his way out of a jail cell.

"No, no," Regan said, waving security down before they got too close. "This is an event. Everyone is welcome." He still looked over Parker with an expression of slightly suspicious curiosity, but it wasn't as if the side she was on was any big secret when Hardison looked as if he was going to fall right down to the industrial carpet the second that she left her post. Hardison looked around and found Sophie and Nate standing next to one another, dressed in character but wearing identical stricken expressions. Yeah, not hard to figure out their position on the goings-on, either. The only one of them who could still even remotely claim to have a cover was Eliot, and that was because he was busy fiddling with his phone and not stepping in to stop Hardison from being pummeled again or something. The woman from the first day with the pint-sized Robin was back again, Hardison noticed, which was just going to make this all kinds of awkward.

"It's okay," Carolina said again. She belied her words by squeezing at Hardison's side harder than he could take right at this point, and he grunted. "It's okay, it's okay, it's okay."

"Ladies and gentlemen," Regan said into the microphone. "I want to thank you all very much for staying and building the suspense with me across the past three days. We at Lodestone Publishing know that we wouldn't be doing anything but telling stories in our living rooms if it were not for the devoted efforts of our fans, and we thank you for taking that humble impulse and making it into something mighty."

Carolina was the one to start forward this time. Damn it, if Hardison kept having to pull the both of them back, he was going to wind up toppling over; the line between faking it and making it was squeezed pretty thin. "No stabbing," he told her. "It ain't just a guideline for Parker."

"That son of a bitch," Carolina said in a low voice that didn't make Hardison entirely sure that she had heard him, but food in this place was more along the lines of popcorn, hot dogs, and the occasional can of Red Bull. There was nowhere about for her to get a fork even if she wanted one.

"This latest heroine is only one of the first of what I hope will be a long legacy of inspirational characters coming from Lodestone," Regan said, smiling just for Hardison. "So without further ado, first in comics and then hopefully, on the big screen, I give you Willpower." The screen behind him lit up-but not with Carolina's creation. It was an internal email, helpfully emblazoned with Regan's electronic signature bright as brass right there on the bottom. In font as large as a human head, there was no way that anyone could miss the admission of guilt, or: projected earnings into the millions with very little risk of serious exposure; I would recommend moving forward with the project and discrediting Guerrera in every way necessary. At the last name, a ripple of first recognition and then of anger began to move through the crowd, and they hadn't even gotten to the best part yet. On the outskirts, Eliot was still fiddling with his phone, lips moving in what Hardison was willing to lay down money were some pretty creative obscenities.

It took Regan several seconds to realize that these were not the crowd noises that he wanted; at the frantic gesturing of several of his aides, he finally turned and looked over his shoulder at what he had been expecting to be T and A roughly as tall as a house. The first camera phones came out just in time to catch his absolutely empriceless/em expression. Even though his mouth hurt, Hardison could not stop grinning. He brought his ribs back into the equation as Eliot finally figured out what he was doing on his phone and the PA system in the hall sprang to life with Regan's voice.

"I don't care that you harmed her, I care that you led to her calling the police," he said. "Now there are medical records-hope that she's the type to frighten, or it's on you." And that was just the tip of it; Regan was going to find as soon as he made it down to the police station on his magic carpet of self-righteousness that about four hours in all had been slipped to them anonymously, along with every incriminating internal email that Hardison had been able to get his hands on. Like he was going to stop monitoring calls just because he struck out once, please.

"Wait, no," Regan said, just as the sirens of the cops that he had so generously called for them could be heard outside. "It's these people who are the cause of this." He pointed with one hand at Nate and Sophie, at Hardison and Parker with the other. "They entered my building under false pretenses, they stole Lodestone property-I have it right here!" He gestured for one of his aides to bring him the portfolio that he had taken from Hardison, wrenched a page from it without bothering to look and held up-a thickly-lined stick figure doing something incredibly obscene. The woman carrying the hand of the pigtailed Robin made an outraged sound and turned her child away.

"Hey, man, I thought that you were a family company!" Hardison cupped his hands around his mouth so that he could yell up at the stage, grinning, just as the cops entered the building. And that would be right about the time for the good guys to find an elsewhere to be. He and Parker double-timed it towards the exit while Carolina trailed along behind, not realizing yet that she was missing her grand entrance.

"But-" she said, looking back over her shoulder at Regan accepting a pair of handcuffs as Parker and Hardison darted into the alley behind the building. She must have been in shock, because not even that was getting the gleeful response out of her that Hardison would have expected. "How?"

"I couldn't get into their system from the outside without triggering an alarm," Hardison said. "So it stood to reason that they were going to be tough as hell from the inside, too. What I needed was two alarms coming so fast on the heels of one another that no one would think that they were two different people. Like, someone who could run around a convention for two days in outfits guaranteeing that no one was looking at her hands while she stole cell phones, then switched clothes to become Lodestone's newest and most eager to learn intern while they were so busy watching me." Parker grinned." She loaded up a USB chock-full of ten-to-twenty criminal violations after I had left and switched it with Regan's own when she went past him. He was way too paranoid and controlling to let anyone else handle it, so we let him handle it for us while my sidekick in there rolled his phone calls over the PA system." Hardison already had his hand around Parker's shoulders, but it still felt good to tighten it. "And I needed this girl here. emShe's/em Batman. Double identity and everything."

"Billy was really nice," Parker said in a tone that bordered upon the wistful. "He bought me a pretzel and everything."

"Parker, you were hardly wearing any clothes yesterday," Hardison told her. "He would have bought you a diamond if you had asked for it. He might even have been crazy enough to help you steal a diamond."

"No," Parker said. "This was during our lunch hour at Lodestone. There was a cart outside." Fine. Billy needed to die, then.

Nate and Sophie moseyed their way around the corner then, Nate holding a folder in his hands. And this one wasn't going to be filled with stick-figure porno, either. "I believe that these belong to you," Nate told Carolina gently, putting the folder into her hands. She covered her mouth with her fingers when she flipped it open and saw the sketches and fully inked drawings inside, the scripts.

"You people," she said. "Did anyone ever tell you that you're amazing?"

"We do what we can," Sophie demurred, raising her hand even though she was smiling and her eyes were shining.

"They don't tell us nearly enough that we get tired of it, let's put it that way," Nate said. He cast Hardison and Parker a curious glance, particularly the part where Hardison still had his arm firmly about Parker's shoulders even though it was obviously now that they were outside that he was not injured nearly as badly as he had been allowing Regan to believe. Hardison raised his chin and didn't move it. Wasn't any rule saying that Nate and Sophie were the only ones allowed to mix jobs with a little extracurricular fun.

"But Regan still took a USB from you, I saw it," Carolina said.

Oh, Hardison did not need to be laughing right about now. "Now, that," he said, just picturing the way that Regan was going to yell later if his latest attempt to introduce "proof" went about as well as his first one. "That's the contents of his home hard drive, and that man is nasty. I would make certain to read the gossip papers tomorrow, they're going to be good." He put his free hand over Carolina's, where she was holding onto her portfolio as if it might disappear the second that she ever let it out of her sight again. "Look about what we talked about earlier, this is your big chance. You are never going to get publicity like this again, so: whose legacy is it going to be?"

Carolina looked down at the portfolio in her hands. "Oh, you guys are all getting cameos," she said, and turned to walk back into the building and greet the crowd.

"Ow!" Eliot claimed that he had worked as an army nurse a time or two, though he would never nail it down to which armies, when, and whether or not he was on any official record or had just been happening to ninja his way through the neighborhood at that particular time, and Hardison had looked. He could say for certain, however, that the man's bedside manner sucked. "Are you trying to give me a punctured lung?"

Eliot finished tightening the wrapping around Hardison's bruised ribs; he wasn't even attempting to hide his smirk as Hardison muttered obscenities at him. "Sidekick, huh?" he said to Hardison. "I wouldn't have gotten my ass handed to me by a couple of Police Academy flunk-outs."

"It was my job to look like I was getting my ass handed to me," Hardison shot back. Eliot's eyebrows went up as he finished up Hardison's ribs and stepped away to start packing up the first aid kit. "All right, it was my job that I did extraordinarily well, but I could have-I could have at least made them think about it a little bit." He pulled his shirt back down over his abdomen, wincing. His mouth hurt like hell, too; clearly, the only reason that Eliot did this on a job to job basis was because there was something in his head that was just wired wrong. "Like you would have been able to put those calls on the PA without my help."

"Pushing buttons ain't that hard to learn," Eliot said. "You just make it look like you're doing some kind of magic."

"Boys, you both did a good job," Nate called back over his shoulder at them. He and Sophie were seated on his couch; there was a high-ball glass in Nate's hand that he was still mostly just sipping at and the evening news playing across the screens. Surprise, surprise, Regan, Carolina, and Lodestone just happened to be the biggest news of the day. Three more artists who had been ripped off had already come forward, and Carolina was probably going to be looking at a movie deal for her creation before the year's end. Special bonus: someone in the Boston police department had also leaked the contents of Regan's hard drive to the press, news at eleven.

Sophie wrinkled her nose and looked back over her shoulder at Hardison. "Tell me that you did not plant that," she said.

"What? No, ew." Hardison crossed his arms over his chest even though it hurt and grinned a little. "Thought about it, though, if he hadn't gone and been a complete pervert for me first." Sophie rolled her eyes and muttered something under her breath about the male sense of humor as Nate and Eliot made identical sounds which strongly suggested that they were struggling not to giggle.

And speaking of the male sensibility as opposed to the female one, there was one figure who was noticeably not present for their traditional post-job "hang out and gloat about beating the bad guys" party. Parker had come back to Nate's just long enough for Eliot to announce that Hardison wasn't seriously injured and could stop whining about it at any time and had then hurried right back out again with a black bag in hand, before Hardison could even invite her over to his place for pizza and the Iron Man 2 DVD extras. He was trying not to take it personally; Parker did things according to her own mental math, and a lot of the time it was better to just realize that two and two made seven and occasionally stolen goods under that system and roll with it.

Hardison slapped at the back of Nate's couch just as a spokesperson from Lodestone announced that Regan had been suspended without pay pending an investigation into his alleged activities, and that of course the company would take all claims of misconduct against him extremely seriously. Poor woman was looking as if she already realized that she did not get paid nearly enough. "I'm gonna go," Hardison said.

Eliot was flipping away from the news in search of sports, but Nate looked back over his shoulder with eyebrows slightly raised. "You going to be all right?" he asked.

In other words, Hardison had done good. "I was pretending that they were beating the crap out of me," he insisted, even though the dudes pummeling his ribcage certainly hadn't been pretending with how hard they had been hitting him. Eliot made a soft snorting sound, and Hardison only restrained himself from flipping him off because Sophie was there.

There was a soft drizzle starting to fall as Hardison got into his car and drove back to his own place, not quite hard enough to justify using the windshield wipers, just hard enough to drive most of the foot traffic off of the sidewalks. It threw a chill into the air that made Hardison shiver and draw the collar of his jacket higher up on his neck as he walked the short path from building parking to the entrance. It was isolated, and a little creepy at night even though Hardison lived in a neighborhood where he was far more likely to run into an elderly neighbor looking for a runaway pet than a mugger. That meant that his startle backwards were especially dignified when a black-clad figure leapt down from the shadows above him and then dangled, swinging to and fro gently, without bothering to make the trip the rest of the way down to the ground. There was no recovering his dignity even though it only took a second or so beyond that to realizes that the black-clad figure had yellow hair hanging down in a long tail from where she had pulled it up before leaping.

Damn it, he had gotten used to Parker mysteriously appearing exactly where she had not been moments before when it came to standing on solid ground, not leaping at him from out of thin air. Hardison put one hand over his heart and the other against the sore ribs what were very displeased with the way that he had jostled them, while Parker swayed upside down just about the height of his head, grinning at him. He pointed at her.

"What were you saying about femurs?"

"Only if you do it with the wrong equipment," Parker said. She fiddled with her harness but did not appear interested in disengaging and following him to solid ground again, or even in flipping herself right side up.

"I was talking about mine," Hardison said. He pointed at a pale yellow streak that went tearing off down the pathway, heading for home. "I could have tripped over the Kims' cat." Parker was still smiling at him, but it looked a little bit forced, now. Hardison stepped closer up to her and played with the ends of her ponytail, not quite cradling the back of her head. The strands were damp; she must have been crouching up on the roof and waiting for him for awhile. "Why are you here, Parker?"

The smile slipped in the way that it did when Parker had just done something that she knew wasn't exactly how the normal range of people out and about in the world conducted their business, but still wasn't sure whether or not it was wrong or going to freak someone out. "I wanted to make sure that you were okay."

"Eliot gave me a clean bill of health back at Nate's," Hardison said, leaving out the fact that he was going to be sore as hell and probably not useful for much else other than sitting in the van and working that magic only required a working brain and fingertips for the next week or so.

"I still-wanted to be sure," Parker said. The frown line drawn down between her eyes was very interesting when she was upside down, and the unhappy bow to her mouth downright cute. "You could have been hurt on the way back, or someone is always getting mugged in those comics that you loaned me and people jumping down from rooftops doesn't really happen in the real world unless they're me-"

In other words, Hardison realized suddenly, she was ready for the damned pretzels. Hardison curved his hands around the back of her skull, tipped her forward slightly, and kissed her. Parker made a soft sound of surprise before she started to kiss him back, both of them swaying to and fro slightly with the movement of her line. Hardison pulled her hair loose from its elastic and filled his hands with that, silky and soft, stroked the lines of her throat. He couldn't kiss her eyelids unless he planned on doing a fairly undignified stoop, but he could touch his lips to her jaw, tasting the drops from a steadily deepening rain and feeling Parker shiver. He cradled her face when he was done, looked deep into her eyes, and said, "Parker, would you like to come upstairs and watch a movie with me?"

Parker's lips were swollen like they had been having to play deep cover for a really long time, and her cheeks were flushed for reasons that had absolutely nothing to do with how long she had been dangling upside down. "Okay," she said, just damned near shy. "Does that Siren person have a movie?"

"Not yet, anyway," Hardison said. "But I have the first three Superman movies and the best pizza place in the city on speed dial. What do you say?"

Parker started to fiddle with the clasps of her harness in the way that always made Hardison vaguely nervous and glad when she wasn't far enough off the ground to seriously bust her head and said, "I'll see you inside." She rocketed back up the side of the building again fast enough that Hardison almost had to take it back, certain that she was going to bust her head on someone's window. Hardison watched her go just as the rain started to fall in earnest, and couldn't explain to Mr. Kim why he was laughing when Mr. Kim came out to collect the ginger tabby that was now winding its way around his legs.

End