A/N: I have a shameful confession to make: Instead of working on one of my (too many) ongoing, unfinished projects over winter break, I decided to get obsessed with the TV show Leverage and spend way too many hours getting to know that fandom. Also, I may be a little bit in love with Parker.

2 AM Conversations

After 03x15 (The Big Bang Job)

"The rest of the team don't need to know what I did," he had said, and Nate had, possibly for the first time ever, tacitly agreed to support Eliot, rather than the other way around. He hadn't said anything when the others joined them, moments later, or in the car on the way back to the offices, or, as far as Eliot knew, at all. Which was good. He didn't think he could bear to see Sophie's pity or Hardison's revulsion when they realized what he'd had to do, or deal with Parker's callous teasing. Nate had an unfortunate tendency to take Eliot's actions and survival for granted, treating him more like a weapon than a soldier (never mind a planner and commander in his own right), but if any of the team had to know, Eliot was glad it was him. He might judge the hitter's actions silently, ever the Catholic priest at heart, despite his own shortcomings, but he would let Eliot deal with the consequences in his own time and his own way.

At the moment, that meant meditating. Sleep was out of the question, tonight – too much adrenaline, too many deaths playing out again and again when he closed his eyes, too many memories brought back by the guns and the killing and seeing fucking Damien Moreau again. A trip to his gym was likewise out of the question – losing himself in the physicality of punching a heavy bag or mindless running or even performing endless katas was the last thing he needed on a night already so full of violence, when the man he used to be was already so close to the surface.

He had showered quickly and disposed of his smoke and gunshot-scented clothes, and had been sitting cross-legged in the middle of his bedroom floor for well over an hour when the window opened. A surprisingly cool breeze wafted in, just for a moment, before Parker silently closed the pane. Eliot didn't have to open his eyes to know it was her – no one else could enter so quietly through a third-story window, and the scent of the shampoo she used when not on the job was very distinctive.

"What do you want, Parker?" he growled, eyes still closed. If he had told her once, he had told her at least half a dozen times not to invade his apartment. There was a slight rustle that could have been a shrug.

"I got to blow up a train today!" she said brightly from about two feet away. She must have sat down as well. "Well, Hardison did, mostly, but I helped. And now I'm too wired to sleep, so I thought I'd come see why you smelled like fire in the car."

Eliot nearly groaned. He forgot, sometimes, how damn perceptive the crazy little thief could be, weirdly observant about the most random things. "Damn it, Parker, go bother Hardison. Isn't he freaking out about blowing up a train?" Go away and stop completely derailing my night.

"Nah, he's asleep. Too much excitement, I guess. So what did you blow up?"

The evidence, he thinks, but says, "The warehouse," instead.

"Why?"

Eliot finally opened his eyes, to see Parker's, smiling and curious, not far from his own. "Think about if you really wanna know the answer to that, Parker," he advised her, in a tone not unlike the one he used when he warned her that he would tell her what he did for Moreau, if she asked.

He watches her turn his answer over, logically deconstructing it and putting together all the little pieces. She doesn't do it intuitively, like Sophie or Nate, but she doesn't stop before the unpleasant conclusion like the others would, so she gets there in the end. The hacker prefers ignorance in some matters, and the grifter would shy away from drawing conclusions about what she would consider a painful topic for him. Even Nate might hesitate, if he hadn't been there and didn't already know, feeling some responsibility for Eliot's actions under his leadership. Parker doesn't.

Eliot sees the moment when she realizes the only reason he had to be setting things on fire was if there was no other way out, which meant he must have been cornered, outnumbered and outgunned with Nate and the Italian there as hangers-on, slowing him down. He sees the moment when she realizes that if the fire, the explosion, was just a distraction, he wouldn't mind telling her, that the only thing he's reluctant to talk about is killing (and his past, but they're mostly the same thing, and she knows that). He sees her eyes flash in the low light as she makes a decision, rising smoothly to her feet. It's like flipping a switch – playful, bubbly Parker is gone, replaced by some altogether more serious person – not quite working Parker, but perhaps the Parker who learned to survive on her own too early and had no time for games.

"Come on," she said, grabbing his hand and trying to haul him up as well. She was, as he well knew, much stronger than she looked, but if he didn't want to be moved, he wouldn't be. He let her struggle for a moment before allowing her to lead him through his own darkened apartment, out the door and up the stairs to the roof, not thinking too hard about his reluctance to tell her to just get lost.

It was a cool night, and Eliot wasn't really dressed for it, but the light breeze felt good on his exposed arms. Something about it hinted at rain to come, maybe the lights of the city reflecting off low-hanging clouds or the humidity in the wind.

The thief sat down, dragging Eliot with her, then laid back, one hand behind her head, staring blankly at the clouds as they shifted above, apparently satisfied with their new location and perfectly comfortable with the silence between them. When it became clear that she was determined to wait patiently for whatever it was she expected to happen next, he had to ask: "Parker, why are we on the roof?"

She sat up to stare at him as though this were a stupid question, and not, as he felt, a perfectly relevant one. "Because there's something you need to talk about." He raised an eyebrow, and she elaborated. "Some secrets, some stories, the ones you want to keep," she explained quietly, "you tell them in quiet, closed spaces, keep them safe. And other stories, the secrets that eat at you, that you don't want anyone to know because you don't want to know them yourself, those are the ones that you have to tell in the open, where the wind can wash them away. And you always tell secrets in the dark, because you can't tell the truth where anyone might see." Her tone suggested that this should be the most obvious thing in the world, and for perhaps the six-hundredth time, Eliot wondered exactly what was wrong with this girl. It was one of the less disturbing things she had come out with over the years, though, so he didn't say it aloud. She seemed to take his silence as acceptance of her reasoning, because she laid back down, then. The wind died for half a second, and he heard her say, so softly he might have imagined it (though he was certain he didn't), "Tell me what happened in the warehouse."

And perhaps because of the dark or the night air or the fact that she was, for once, recognizing the seriousness a situation warranted, in her own way, or perhaps because some part of him wanted to shock her and drive her away, or perhaps because another part of him suspected that there was absolutely nothing he could do to do that, he did.

He narrated the scene that played out behind his eyes, from the decision to get Nate and the woman out, to the decision to pick up the gun, to the non-decisions to kill them all, cover his tracks, put down Chapman like the fucking dog that he was. She listened, uncharacteristically supportive in her silence, through his pauses and rambling, as he told her exactly what he had been thinking – protect Nate, get out alive, kill them all to save himself, stop Moreau. Her face was impassive all the while, staring at the clouds like some sort of statue. It was infuriating, in a way. Pity, he would have understood, or condemnation, no matter how he would have hated and rejected either reaction. He understood Nate's understated gratitude for having fulfilled his expectations yet again, and his silent weighing of Eliot's character. Blank acceptance, as though his actions could not touch the image of him in her mind, as though the words washing over her and the deaths behind them meant nothing – that, he could not understand.

Irritated (and now definitely trying to get some sort of rise out of the woman) he described how the men had died, how the bullets struck and their blood splattered and how they fell, the looks on their faces as they realized he was going to kill them, and then as he did. He detailed that moment when they could all have taken their shots, but were too afraid to do so. He told her about the smell of human flesh burning, about Chapman's utter disbelief and the coldness with which Eliot executed him.

There was the barest trace of a smile on her lips and he realized as cold discomfort washed over him that that had been the wrong tactic. He immediately found that he needed to make his sadistic team mate understand that what he had done was wrong, why he had stopped killing even men as awful as Chapman, why he would regret even the deaths of Moreau's foot soldiers.

He told her how good it felt, taking a life, how powerful, like the most addictive drug in the world, sickening himself with his own words. He ranted about how difficult it was to stop, to think of other people as living, thinking beings, once-children and potential parents, with families and hopes and dreams, lost boys trying to make the best of their situation and broken men who didn't know how to stop, how hard it was to not reflexively kill anyone who threatened him and his, or even caught him unawares. He explained, graphically, clinically, exactly how close he could have come to killing her out of sheer reflex if she had snuck up on him tonight, how dangerous it was for a man like him to be around people at all.

None of it, even his cold assessment of how easy it would be to break her neck in an instant, seemed to make any impression on the thief's expression.

He poured out his fears that he would become that man again, the one who killed on Moreau's orders, for money or for his country, the one who didn't think about why he did anything, who lived one day, one mission at a time in blissful thoughtlessness, just following orders, and had no room in his life for drunk psychopaths who tried to convince themselves they were still good people by playing Robin Hood, or meddling, manipulative grifters with eternal identity crises, or geeky hacker kids trying too hard to be cool, or thieves with so many issues he didn't even know where to start.

The little smile turned into a full-on smirk at that, though it vanished when he told her, unasked, that he didn't want to be the kind of person who saw himself as a murderer and threw himself ever-deeper into the darkness, thinking he was already damned. He didn't want to be the kind of person who would torture a child to punish his father or kill every person in a village above the age of ten, leaving a whole town of wailing orphans in his wake, simply because those were his orders.

"That's the worst thing I ever did, Parker! Ever!" he hissed, relishing the tiny frown-lines between her eyes. "My hands are never gonna be clean, but at least I can say, could say, before tonight, that I was done with all that!"

He stopped to catch his breath, and realized that, somewhere in his tirade, he had taken to pacing around the girl, watching her non-reactions, half-lost in thought and memory. Finally, finally, she spoke, honest curiosity shining in her wide eyes, still staring at the sky. "Why did you stop?"

That was a long story. He collapsed to the roof, lying next to her at long last, as he tried to put it into words.

It started with Delmont, a fresh-faced kid, by the standards of Moreau's men. He reminded Eliot a lot of himself, back before his command in Special Ops was disbanded and he fell out of the military, into PMC, mercenary limbo, before he met Toby and struck out on his own, before Moreau hired him and he found himself getting in too deep, yet again. Delmont was a good kid, by their standards, meaning he still had some sense of morality left – he wasn't a hardened killer, not by a long shot. Eliot never knew how he got involved in the first place, but he fucked up one too many jobs, refused to follow an order, and was condemned by Moreau himself. Eliot drew the short straw to execute him, and Delmont, brave, foolish kid that he was, insisted on looking him in the eye as he did it.

It was like killing the person he once was, taking that shot, like shooting the kid who once looked back at him from the mirror every morning. He did it, of course, but after that, the nightmares started. They all began the same, with Eliot staring down the barrel of a gun at Delmont and squeezing the trigger, then moving in to confirm the kill, only to be confronted with other faces – civilians killed on Moreau's orders or accidentally – civilian casualties of US military operations – then men killed in battle, enemy soldiers fighting for their country or ideals, just as he once had. The full horror of what he had done over the past decade began to set in, slowly, but inexorably.

He stopped using guns, telling himself that if he stopped shooting in real life, it would help him stop shooting in his dreams, but he was still involved, still directing other soldiers, still on the front lines himself, killing with knives and bare hands, even closer to his victims. The nightmares grew worse, not just shooting victims, but every kill, every tortured face, coming back to haunt him in vivid, painful detail. When his contract expired, he told Moreau he was out, that he would be indefinitely unavailable for any more jobs. He stopped taking killing missions at all, and began working as a courier, then specializing in retrievals, helping people get back the goods (and occasionally loved ones) that were rightfully theirs. He still refused to use guns, and avoided deaths whenever possible. He started trying to come to terms with his past and taking responsibility for it, reading philosophy and psychology and novels exploring the human condition.

The nightmares never went away, but at the very least, he managed not to add many more faces to the endless slideshow of horror, and time and repetition dulled their impact, even though he could never – would never – forget. Working retrievals, first solo and then with the Leverage team, helped, giving him a sense of putting things to rights, restoring some small amount of order or fairness or justice to the universe. He learned to control the violence, learned to live with himself and the memories, but he still hated the person he used to be and the part of him that still wanted to kill, the little voice in the back of his mind that still thought of it as the most efficient solution to so many problems. Most of all, he hated the idea of falling into that role again, even to save himself, Nate, the Team, even to rid the world of even worse, unrepentant killers – monsters like Chapman and Moreau. It would be easy, so easy, to become that man again, and that scared him more than anything.

Eventually his voice grew hoarse, and he let the story trail off, somewhat embarrassed by his oversharing, but comforted by the fact that even now, Parker wasn't looking at him, wasn't watching him bare his soul, but just listening silently. She might not even be paying attention. Long minutes passed. How many, he couldn't have said. After what seemed like a very long time, the thief spoke again, almost as softly as she had the first time, when she told him to tell her what had happened.

"I wish you could see yourself like I see you."

He turned to raise a questioning eyebrow at her, and saw that she still wasn't looking at him at all.

"You told me once, that I was like a Marquise-cut diamond, do you remember? Rarer, and maybe more fragile around the edges than a Brilliant, but every bit as perfect."*

"Yeah," he said gruffly, uncertain where she was going with this, but more than willing to let her meander off on a tangent at the moment. "And you said that in certain settings, the points of a Marquise can be sharp and dangerous, and I told you that wasn't the point."*

"You were wrong. I mean, I get what you were trying to say, but I'm not a diamond."

"No?"

"No. Nate's a diamond. Trillian-cut, with a flaw at its heart. Hard and sharp, honest, but broken and dark." Eliot almost smiled at the surprisingly apt description of their leader. "Sophie's an opal. A black opal, with little bits of flash surrounded by mystery. Soft but deceptive, and impossible to see all at once. Hardison… he's harder. Tanzanite, maybe. Rare, you know, and it has to be treated special to keep the old blood red out of the innocent blue. Soft enough that you should be careful with it, easy to see through, and if you break it, it fractures unevenly, unpredictably, like a person that's never been broken before." Aaand we've strayed into creepy territory again, Eliot thought. "It took a long time to figure you out, you know," she said with a small smile.

"Why's that?" He wasn't sure whether he wanted to know how she thought of him or not, but he wasn't so much of a coward as to not ask.

She rolled onto her side and propped herself up to look at him for the first time since he started talking about the warehouse, meeting his eye with a mischievous grin. "You're not a gemstone."

For some reason, Eliot found that slightly offensive. "What am I, then?"

"Quartzite."

"Quartzite?" What the hell is quartzite?

"Quartzite," she nodded. "Smoky quartzite, with bands of light and dark, cut and polished like marble or granite. It's pretty and opaque, like onyx or topaz, but stronger and harder, more resistant to damage. More useful. But that's not why it's you. Quartzite is the metamorphic version of sandstone, the little bits of cemented sand transformed and re-crystalized by heat and pressure until there's no separating them from each other. All the different parts of you, the farm boy, the soldier, the mercenary, the chef, the killer, the protector, they're broken down and melded together as one, indivisible Eliot. Life wore you down over and over, and you put yourself back together with all the weaknesses ground out. A… a survivor. And I… I admire you for that. For putting yourself back together and making something whole and good and useful with your life and your skills, despite your past. So you shouldn't worry about becoming Moreau's man again. He's still a part of you, but quartzite breaks across the grains, not between them. Even if you break into little pieces, they wouldn't be the same little pieces."

Eliot blinked at the thief for a moment, stunned into silence by the extensive comparison, and the fact that she apparently thought so highly of him. She had obviously put a bit of thought into it, and he couldn't for the life of him think of an appropriate response. She fidgeted awkwardly under his astonished gaze. "I think that might be the nicest thing you've ever said about me," he finally managed to say.

Parker flushed, red enough that he could see it, even on the mostly-darkened rooftop, and looked away, curling herself into a ball with her arms around her knees. "I, um… that is – don't get used to it!"

He had to smile at that. Parker trying to consciously express emotions was almost always funny. "So if I'm quartzite and Nate's diamond, Sophie's opal, and Hardison's… tanzanite?" She nodded. "Right. Tanzanite. What does that make you?"

"Oh! Um…" she hesitated.

"Come on, darlin'," he grinned. "Don't tell me you didn't choose one for yourself."

"Agate," she said abruptly, blushing again. "Banded agate, a cameo stone."

"Why?"

She shook her head, as though to refuse, but then explained, speaking to her knees. "Agate grows in hollow spaces, from the edges, in layers. Different colors have different impurities, but it's all the same mineral. The oldest part is on the outside, with new layers like masks over it, filling it in, and a hollow at the center. When you make a cameo, you break an unfinished agate to get a flattish piece, and carve away at the layers from the newest to the oldest, making a picture. It's easy to shape, but easy to ruin, and the edges are sharp where it's broken." She rested her head on her knees, clearly pretending that she wasn't baring her soul in her own convoluted, metaphorical way.

Eliot was once again speechless, torn between the urge to try to decipher her words of masks and impurities and shaping broken things, and amazement that she apparently trusted him enough to share not only a clue to the way she saw the world, but also herself. He was saved from having to think of a response by the sudden appearance of the rain that had been threatening since she had dragged him outside.

"Shit! Come on, get inside before we both catch a damn cold," he ordered, grateful for the distraction from the conversation which suddenly seemed much too heavy for a night like this.

"Nah, I'm gonna go," she said, shaking her head, already-wet hair sticking to her face. "See you in the morning." She went over the side of the roof before he could tell her to wait, stemming down the three-foot space between his building and the next faster than he thought possible. (He had tried it himself a few times, just to see whether his window could be used as a viable escape route if necessary, and knew for a fact it was much more difficult than she made it look.)

Shaking his head at his skittish teammate and her heretofore unseen capacity for introspection, the physically and emotionally exhausted hitter retired to his bed, her words, one, indivisible Eliot and a survivor. I admire you for that drowning out the echoes of gunshots in his mind. He didn't notice when he slipped into sleep, and if he still had nightmares, well, at least they weren't any worse than usual.

*This is a reference to a conversation in Valawenel's Texas Mountain Laurel series, though I can't for the life of me remember which story in particular.