The first one she finds on the floor of Nate's apartment, where they've all moved in and made it their headquarters and also their regular hangout, much to his chagrin. It skitters lightly across the floor in that weightless way, and the movement draws her eyes to it naturally.
"Feather," Parker observes, reaching down to pluck it off the floor, twirling it between her fingertips. It's longer than her hand, dark indigo in colour, spattered with dark brown flecks that appear and disappear depending on how she turns it. When she tilts it towards the light, the topside of the feather gleams.
"How lovely," Sophie remarks. "Must've blown in through the window."
"Don't put that in your mouth, Parker," Eliot warns from where he's chopping carrots for stew. He's taken over Nate's kitchen entirely, and Nate looks like he wants to argue about it but is too hungry to bother.
She wasn't going to do that. Maybe. Either way, now that he's said something, she won't. But it is pretty, so she tucks it in her pocket.
She loses it when that pair goes through the wash.
Eliot looks like he wants to kill Sophie when he finds out about the Michelangelo. Parker kind of wants to kill her, too. She finds one more feather on the floor after they finish the con; it's several inches long and the colour of blueberries, with brown spots all over the end of it. She doesn't find another for six months.
Nate is creepy when he's sober, and apparently, he can give people nosebleeds with the power of his mind.
She doesn't see a lot of Hardison and Eliot, they're keeping the Marshals away, but she hears about the kid, the one with the broken arm that fell off his skateboard. If she'd had a fork handy, she'd stabbed his father with it, right in the eye.
Eliot takes care of it, though, and she knew that he would. That's what Eliot does, protects the good people from the bad ones, even if that does mean breaking bones or tipping people over stairwell railings. Parker thinks that she likes that most about Eliot; he gets that sometimes they have to do bad things to make good things happen.
She finds a feather stuck in the lining of his fake guard jacket. It's bent in the middle, ruffled and rumpled, but it's still pretty, Prussian blue with two bands of dark black-brown running across it instead of little flecks.
This one she keeps and hides in the seam of one of her favourite air vents.
Sometimes, she finds them stuck on her clothes. Sometimes, she sees them on Hardison, too, or under his chair, or in Lucille. She never sees them around Nate or Sophie, though.
They're crouched on the rooftop of a building across from the mark, waiting for Nate's signal to move. Parker itches to be off, but she knows that this mark has to be handled very carefully; he has OCD, and it has to be timed right or the whole thing will be blown. Eliot's with her, because this mark is obsessive-compulsive and also paranoid. Once Nate gives the green-light, she'll zip line across to the other building and get in through the lift shaft on the roof; Eliot will go down the fire escape and meet her at the door on ground level.
She shivers when the wind picks up again. "I hope he hurries up, I'm cold," she mutters.
"Put your jacket back on if you're cold, Parker," Eliot replies, slouching next to her, looking entirely relaxed, but she knows he's aware of everything going on.
"Can't," she replies. "It's almost time, and I won't be able to get it off again fast enough." She has on her black jumpsuit, the one that's made of special soft fabric that makes essentially no noise at all, no external buttons or zippers, elastic enough that she can move however she needs to. The only downside is that the material is very lightweight and thin, not made for outdoor thievery, especially in cold weather. Her jacket is heavy and noisy, and she has to jump on her line the moment Nate calls the signal. Eliot only grunts.
The wind dies for a moment, then gusts again sharply, and she shivers all over. Eliot rolls his shoulders, even though he's still wearing his jacket and his hat. Another shiver spreads over her skin as she feels something brush past her, and then she's not so cold anymore. The ends of Eliot's hair are still ruffling in the wind, and she can feel her line trembling with the stronger gusts, but she doesn't feel it against her skin anymore, only a soft warmth pressed around her.
Nate calls the signal, and it startles her into jumping with a little more force than she meant to, sluicing neatly across the empty air to the other rooftop.
When she changes out of her jumpsuit later, she finds a short, Oxford-blue feather sticking to the back of it, caught in the folds of the hood. She's not sure what happens to it, but she never finds it again.
Parker sees another on the back of Hardison's shirt after he tries to hug Eliot. It's clinging on with the help of static, and she plucks it off without him noticing, hiding it between her fingers. Hardison doesn't notice, but she thinks Eliot might have.
She hates psychics. She hates them.
Parker doesn't want to cry in front of everyone, she hates crying, and she digs her fingertips against the floor so hard her nails break and she scratches little divots on the floor.
Tara rewinds the video and explains to her that it was just a cold read, it was just a con, he's a fake, but that doesn't make Parker feel any better. She still remembers now after she's tried so hard to forget, and everything hurts inside, and she wants him to hurt too. She wants that man to hurt a lot. "I want to kill him. Can we make that happen?" she asks, looking up at Nate.
Nate only stares at her, and then Eliot rumbles, "Yeah, I could..." He's not sitting close enough to her to touch, which is nice because she doesn't want to touch anyone right now, she just wants to choke that stupid fake psychic until he's purple. Eliot only hurts people when he has to, and he doesn't like killing anyone; she's never heard him just up and offer like that before. It makes her feel a little better because she knows he'd do it.
But Nate refuses, and Parker's a little disappointed. Eliot looks like he might be, too. She doesn't get up off the floor yet even though it's cold; she feels warm instead, like there's a blanket lying over her.
When she finally does get up, a midnight blue feather falls off her shoulder; she tucks it in her pocket and doesn't lose it.
After they find Hardison and Eliot again once they've gotten away from the militia, Parker keeps walking behind Hardison, looking him over closely and sees it, stuck on the back of his collar right next to his undershirt. When she snatches the feather off, he startles and turns to stare at her. "Saw a bug," Parker lies and enjoys the horrified noise that Hardison makes.
She finds nearly a dozen feathers over their stay in San Lorenzo. She doesn't have anyplace to hide them, so she tucks them carefully inside her pockets and jackets to keep them safe until they're back home. They smell like leather, she notices one night when she's smoothing out their ruffled edges and lining them up in her hand, like leather and vanilla and churned-up earth. It's a good smell, a familiar one.
She doesn't tell Hardison about the feathers, even though she doesn't feel knotted up inside around him anymore. Now she just feels tingly all over, and it's better than cracking her first safe. Hardison smells like cinnamon and apples.
Parker is almost certain that Eliot knows she's collecting the feathers, too. She's found a handful of tiny, fluffy, downy feathers under his bed. They're small and silky and a soft shade of cerulean, and she likes dragging them over her arms to watch the goosebumps appear. Eliot walks past her on the way to the shower without pausing, but she feels his eyes on her back.
"Don't put those in your mouth, Parker," he comments as he disappears into the bathroom, the door clicking shut behind him. A moment later the shower turns on.
She finds another feather, damp and bedraggled, in the towel Eliot used.
After they're back home, all in one piece and Moreau behind bars, she starts putting the feathers in a lock box. Hardison bought it for her; it's a puzzle box that opens in different ways. She keeps it where she hides her money so she knows that it's safe.
The night after Hardison is buried alive, Parker watches him the whole night. Once he's asleep, she climbs the side of his apartment building and watches him sleep, perched on the fire escape. She hates how she felt when she thought she might lose him, sick and hot and knotted up inside, but seeing him safe makes it go away. She could have just gone into the apartment, but she doesn't want to get too close just yet because that makes her feel all knotted up for a different reason.
She hears someone moving on the roof above her, and she immediately tenses, her hands tightening around the rail. Parker is just about to climb up when something drifts down through the air, passing just in front of her nose, and she holds out a hand to catch it.
It's a feather, a cobalt blue feather with dark brown flecks running down one side; when she tilts it, a prismatic sheen glimmers on the topside.
Parker tucks the feather into her pocket and settles back down. Hardison is the safest person on the block with Eliot on his roof.
After they've climbed up out of the crevasse and made their way back down the mountain to the widow, Parker finds a sapphire feather caught in the straps of her gear; even though the shaft is broken, she keeps it and puts it in the box with the other ones.
She only has one primary feather. When she started finding them, she had found out what the different feathers were called. The ones she already has, those are coverts and secondaries, and the little fluffy ones are axillaries. The primary feathers are the long flight feathers at the bottom of the wing, and the one she has is nearly longer than her forearm, elbow to fingertips, and it moves through different shades, bright azure at the bottom, then a lighter sky colour, and finally, a light, green-tinted turquoise at the very end, speckled with bright silver.
She finds it on the floor of the train car after she burns off the influenza, under a seat next to where Eliot was shot.
When they get home, she takes out all the other feathers she's collected and lays them out the way they're supposed to go, the coverts overlapping the secondaries. When she gets them lined up properly, they're beautiful. The different shades of blue run together with a faint prismatic sheen, and the brown bands line up to make a pattern across the mottled hues that shift from through the whole range, dark to light.
She finds another on the floor of the kitchen, right next to where Eliot is sitting on a chair beside the stove, keeping an eye on his soup since he doesn't trust Hardison not to burn it. Hardison hadn't even argued about it, but he did make Eliot at least sit down ("You have a bullet hole in your freaking leg, man!") instead of standing like he had been. This one isn't a flight feather. It's a scapular feather, one of the ones on the shoulder.
"What you got there, Parker?" Eliot asks, stirring the soup with his unhurt arm. He's changed his bandages and is resting his injured one in a sling for the time being. Another bit of Hardison's influence at work, though it'll be gone before tomorrow. Eliot heals fast.
She holds the feather up, spinning it between her fingertips. It's more brown than the other ones, only blue around the edges.
Eliot's mouth twitches up just a little bit. "Don't put that in your mouth, Parker."
She wouldn't have done that anyways. She'll put it in the box with all the other ones. She's almost got a complete set now.
The blue-tinted edges of the feather are a little sticky with blood, but that's alright.
Parker finds the feathers under their bed now, and Hardison doesn't say anything when he finds one in the sheets, only hands it over so she can put it in the box with the others. She thinks he knows about the feathers, too, because he'll stroke Eliot's back when he sleeps, right between his shoulder blades, and Eliot shivers when he does.
There's a few things that Parker knows as certainties. Getting paid is always nice, especially when the bills are non-sequential. Helping people can sometimes be better. Chocolate is the best. Psychics are evil. Sterling is an ass. Nate gets creepier when he's sober and definitely has powers. Stay out of the kitchen when Eliot is cooking or he won't make black noodles. Sophie is most definitely magic, even if she won't admit it. Hardison could rule the world from a laptop if he wanted to. The smell of cinnamon and leather always makes her feel safe. Sometimes bad guys make the best good guys. And Eliot apparently molts every so often.
And, of course, not to put the feathers in her mouth.