This little thing was inspired by "The Future Job" in season 2, obviously. I was surprised that Eliot, who is haunted by his past, would be so willing to kill Rand. This is my shippy take on the conversation they might have had post-episode.

Update 8/19: Apparently, this fic wasn't over until I wrote two more parts. But now that chapters two and three are up, it's definitely finished.

I don't own Leverage.

Eliot

He finds her - well, he doesn't find her, he simply comes upon her - curled up in the cupboard, which seems odd until he remembers that this is Parker. She spends her free time crawling through air ducts. It figures that she would feel most at home in a small, dark space.

He imagines her in a crate under the ground and asks, "What are you doing?"

"I'm imagining," she says. She doesn't look at him. "I'm imagining that we did the job the way I wanted. I like the way the tendons in his neck severed."

And he's imagining it too, suddenly. There's a bright castoff pattern on his shirt and his foot squelches in a nice red puddle, and Parker's there, smiling, the kind of smile she reserves for violence and chocolate, she's holding a sword and they're sharing a look-

-snaps out of it, appraises her. How is it that she can speak of this so frankly, so dispassionately? "He really was a bad guy, wasn't he?"

It's so inadequate. He'd like to ask if she's okay. He'd like to ask what she sees in her head. But there are no words. He can be eloquent, except when it comes to important things. There are no words at all. But Parker just shakes her head and replies, "We're bad guys. We're good guys, but we're bad guys, too. Rand wasn't bad. He was worse."

He's not a good guy. He's about to tell her this when she adds, "Would you really have done it?"

"Oh, there's no question," he replies. And there isn't. He doesn't make offers he can't make good on, and maybe he usually has a no-kill policy, but this is different. This is Parker. Rand hurt Parker in a way that truly is unforgivable, and for her, he'd do anything. Even that. "Did you really want me to?"

Somehow he's slid down. He's sitting with his left shoulder against the row of cabinets, facing Parker, who's still in the cupboard. She reaches out, surprising him - she's not the most tactile of people - and touches her fingertips to his, a quiet little nudge that inexplicably makes him feel fifteen years younger. Just for a moment. "Yes. No. I don't know. I wanted him dead - want him dead - but I don't know if I wanted you to do it. You don't kill people anymore."

There are lots of things he doesn't do anymore. He thinks it might be nice to be like her, breaking down all of life into the simplest little bits and putting them back together in readable patterns, but he lives in a perpetual state of grey. He can't separate the details from the larger picture. Where Parker sees cause and effect, a logical sequence with a beginning, an end, and a goal, he sees a badly-wound ball of twine. He doesn't know what to say, so he covers her fingers with his own and watches her work out her own query.

She sighs. "No. I want to do it. Is that bad?"

Want. Not wanted, but want. He can relate. It's easy to not kill people; it's hard to stop fantasizing. You don't become a hitter because you want world peace. "Nah, it's not bad. I'd have been right there with you, if you'd have gone and ripped his head off."

"But Nate wouldn't have liked it."

"No, he wouldn't have."

"Neither would Hardison."

"No." And that's true, despite Hardison's assertion that Rand ought to be shot. The fact is that Hardison sees the world in code, all of it, so even inanimate objects have feelings. Everything is useful, everything is significant. Even in his 'bad guy' days, Hardison saw the value in preserving human life. "No, he wouldn't have either."

Parker finally looks at him then, looks into his eyes and through him. He can't look away. She's naked, and so is he, and he wrenches himself back into reality in time to hear her say, "Hardison likes me a lot. I think probably more than I like him. But I don't want to let him down like that; he thinks I'm better than I am, and sometimes that's the person I want to be."

"You can be anything you want to be, Parker. That's the best part of being like us."

"Because we can be the good guys and still do bad things. I can still do the things I'm good at, and so can you, and people thank us for it because we help them. Helping people is the right thing to do. I know it is. But I still want him dead, Eliot. That's why I'm sitting here imagining. It's the only way I'll get what I want. Do you ever imagine?"

"Oh, I imagine a lot of things," he replies, and he has to look away. He imagines plenty. Sometimes he even imagines Parker, but it's probably not a good idea to tell her-

"Now I'm imagining you," she tells him, leaning forward, catching his gaze again. His stomach goes somewhere else, either too high or too low or maybe just twisting itself into knots. Her matter-of-fact statement is sexier than it has any right to be, and he can't tell whether or not that is by design. "I'm imagining being on top of you, right here in the kitchen. You're leaning back, and I'm in your lap, and..."

Well, hell. It's not so much an invitation as it is a warning; he knows when their lips meet that she wasn't planning to keep that sort of fantasy in her head, and he's not going to say no. Parker is indelicate and inexperienced, forceful. She squeezes his biceps hard enough that he'll have bruises later, and he'll want to keep them - nail marks and all - because they came from her, from this. She truly is remarkable. Even as he reciprocates, he can feel her changing, analyzing, refining her technique; he half-expects her to pull away and rattle off critique, but she doesn't. She moves, and he has to break it off himself before they get into something that really doesn't belong on the kitchen floor.

"Parker." She leans in for another kiss and he's this close to throwing caution to the wind, so he pushes her away very lightly and repeats, "Parker."

"What?"

"This isn't the time or the place."

She frowns. "It's never the time or place. I once heard that these things just happen. They're natural. We make them, don't we? We make them happen. I want it. Don't you?"

"Yes." With anyone but Parker, the vehemence might be embarrassing, but she doesn't look for or care about tone. "Just...not here on the kitchen floor."

"I can imagine kissing you anywhere. In here, on a bed, in an elevator shaft...hanging off of a building in harnesses..."

And she's off in another fantasy. He can almost see it too, the way she seems to be able to see it. It's almost as clear as the times he tore the limbs off of his big dirty secret, Damien Moreau, the times he ripped out the hearts of everyone who ever hurt Parker. Almost as clear as cutting off Rand's head with her. And they're running together, the scenarios are bleeding into each other, and suddenly he and Parker are kissing over Rand's dismembered body, and her bloody hands are working up underneath his shirt, and-

-he really should stop this before it goes any further, but he hears himself say, "Let's move this to..."

To where, exactly? It's not as though they live here, and Nate would not be pleased if they continued this in his bedroom.

"I have a secret place near here, but by the time we get there it won't be the same, will it?"

"No," he says reluctantly.

She places one more kiss on his lips, softly, and says, "Thank you, Eliot."

"What for?"

"For being bad guys with me." She stands, runs her fingers through her hair, and adds, "Nobody really gets it. Nobody but you."

He doesn't know if they'll ever continue this. It can't come to anything, not really, but that's okay; relationships are a pain in the ass. He's not looking for that with her. It's not about sex, but about the only kind of intimacy he can offer. The only kind of intimacy Parker would be able to understand. He imagines that she's not the kind of woman who'd appreciate a gentle touch, and it brings a small smile to his face. "Yeah. I get it."

And he does. And all she needs to do is say the word. For her, he would do anything.