Author's Notes:
1. I just started watching Leverage! I'm only half way through season two and trying not to rush my way through it. But boy am I hooked. So here's my obligatory "Aw, Eliot, honey." tag to the Tap-Out Job.
2. I wrote this in between cooking and eating vast amounts of American Thanksgiving dinner with my urban family of choice. So it might contain a discernible amount of syrup.
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Nate's kitchen was totally wasted on him. It was really too bad that serving up takeout onto plates was the closest he came to cooking in it. The light was great, and the counter space was generous considering the usual size of old Boston apartment kitchens. Typical of Nate to stumble on something beautiful and good right over a bar.
For all that Nate had been denying that he wanted to be back running the team, when he'd picked his apartment he couldn't have done better at making a new hub for the five of them. It was spacious and defensible. From where Eliot stood chopping onions (the kitchen was Nate's, the knives were Eliot's) he could see the front door, and keep an eye on the largest windows.
Prepping had a rhythm to it that was meditative, like moving through a kata. The thick bacon was already sliced into cubes, sizzling in a heavy cast iron dutch oven on the stove top. The chicken thighs were marinating in an oil and vinegar mix in the fridge. It wouldn't be the same as using wine. But Eliot wouldn't fuck with Nate like that.
Even if the rest of the team were pushing their luck with Eliot right now.
Lincoln, Nebraska didn't have an imaging facility that Sophie deemed good enough for Eliot. The team said that they got that this was what Eliot did, that putting his body on the line was how he made stuff work, made people safe. But they'd still kept looking at him with the big tragic eyes. It was pretty funny. He figured they'd get it one day. And they'd get how things were different for him now than they used to be.
Like how he'd never had anyone to manipulate him into going to the hospital before. Sophie sat beside him on the flight back to Boston and called him sweetie a lot. If his head hadn't felt like it was going to fall off, he'd totally have called her out on it. She used that voice like Nate had hauled her over the coals for using during the disastrous revenge job, the job that almost broke the team up. But it was sorta soothing, and it was kind of nice, too, to know she thought enough of him to con him into getting a CT scan.
Nate was the one who made sure MGH thought Eliot was a LEO and treated him without making a fuss or calling the cops in on suspicion of whatever the hell he could have been doing to get beat so bad.
Hardison, Alec, he'd cornered Eliot when Nate brought him back to the apartment.
"So, I hear you're supposed to be on bed rest the next couple of days."
Eliot'd shrugged and looked bland and blank. As bland and blank as he could with one eye swollen shut. He'd been learning from watching Sophie.
"Uh-uh, man, you can't fake me out." Alec shook his head. "Here's the deal: every one of your alternate identities, every one, and trust me, I tracked them all down, is currently subject to an APB as an escaped mental patient. You get out of here and try to do so much as hit an ATM and you'll have cops on your ass. You follow the doctor's orders, and poof, the flags on the names are gone."
Eliot had scowled, but he'd been too tired to argue. And besides, well, Alec might be some kind of genius hacker, but tracking down all of Eliot's aliases, and Eliot believed he'd done it, took some work. It was nice, yeah, in a twisted way.
Parker didn't say anything like that. She didn't warn Eliot, or threaten him. But when he got cabin fever the second day of sitting around doing nothing and tried to sneak out, she scared the shit out of him by dropping from the ceiling in the hallway outside Nate's apartment, standing in front of him with her arms crossed and a fierce glare on her face.
So yeah. He'd taken some hard hits in the ring. What else was he supposed to do? One con went south, the second one needed his face getting beat. He thought that at least Sophie was beginning to understand.
Eliot used the flat of the knife to sweep the onions from the cutting board into the hot bacon fat, hearing the sizzle as they hit. He turned the heat down and stirred the onions around, catching the aroma. Sautéing onions always did make a place smell more like somewhere worth coming back to. Next up on the chopping board were carrots and celery to complete the mirepoix. He trimmed a carrot to a neat rectangle before dicing it.
With a knife, he had control. With his body, he had control. If the control was holding back and letting someone swing at him, it was still his choice. He knew how much damage he could take. Just like he knew how much garlic to add to braised chicken thighs, or how to spot a tell, or whether someone was carrying, and what kind of gun they preferred.
The team was better than being alone. Eliot took the chicken from the fridge and lay the pieces skin down in the pan. The hot bacon fat spat up around the hearty meat and Eliot took a deep breath, enjoying the mingling smells. The skin on the chicken would turn a deep golden brown and be full of homely, satisfying flavor. Comforting. Like something from a story, the kind of children's story where family was where you went to feel safe. As the chicken sizzled and browned, he opened a box of organic chicken broth, wishing he'd had time to make it from scratch, and added enough to keep the dish from getting dry in the oven. The team were safer because he did his job.
Parker would notice how neat the dice of vegetables was, but probably wouldn't know why. Sophie'd notice that, and that he'd used a champagne vinegar in the marinade to complement the flavors of the mirepoix. Nate'd notice a hundred little things about the dish and the meticulously cleaned kitchen (clean as you go, attention to detail counts.) Hardison would notice how Eliot had used one of his accounts to buy groceries online. Alec had definitely earned that with his APB stunt.
It was better to have people to cook for. They were all second guessing Eliot's choices, right now, yeah. But he sort of thought- the dish needed the final touch of a chiffonade of French tarragon and a good grind of white pepper, then into the oven to meld from separate elements to perfection- he thought they second guessed him on this one for reasons other than that they doubted his judgement.
It was nice to think so, anyway. Eliot squinted at the clock. Nate was out digging up some sort of job, and the rest of the team should be by in a couple of hours. Plenty of time to make egg noodles. That was totally the same thing as bed rest, right?