inspiration: "seven nation army" – white stripes
a/n: teamfic entry for one of the heist 9 challenges at leverageland on livejournal. nate/sophie and parker/hardison alluded to.
a/n2: i hate formatting on this site. haaaate. there are ugly line breaks. sorry i can't do anything about them.

disclaimer: leverage isn't mine. no copyright infringement is intended nor any financial profit gained from this fanwork.

And I'm talkin' to myself at night / Because I can't forget
Nate

He does this to himself, he knows.
Years now and he still finds himself staring at a bottle and counting his losses, Sam an ever present memory. Sometimes he catches flashes of him in the brush of sunlight in Parker's hair, Hardison's gleeful enthusiasm over his latest discovery, even in Eliot's single-minded focus. And Sophie, well some days she just makes everything hurt less, and he simultaneously adores that she can and hates himself for letting anyone blunt the ever present agony. He wonders if it's leftover Catholic guilt or just the simple fact that in the end he couldn't do anything to save Sam's life.

But he lives with it because his son will never have the chance to live with anything, and doing what they do does help. Sometimes it's almost enough, and if they can get through this job without falling apart then maybe he'll tell them as much.
They couldn't save anybody this time (twelve more marks on an invisible scorecard that no one's keeping track of), and that hurt.

It degenerated from there into raised voices and angry words. Now looking at it with the distance of time (several hours in separate corners of their safe house to cool down) he sees it: they're looking right in the face something much bigger and darker than usual. He doesn't usually put such a fine point on it, but good and evil do exist, and seeing something so deliberately and needlessly evil is enough to set them all off balance.

So here's what's going to happen: they'll do what they can to shut this thing down. They'll con like they've never conned before, and when it's over they'll hope those twelve kids are at peace somewhere. It'll have to be enough, because the alternative doesn't bear thinking about.

He flips the still empty glass over and slides it back into the corner. They've got work to do.

Don't wanna hear about it / Every single one's got a story to tell
Eliot

They've started wars before, only the stakes are higher with each job, and they really can't afford to lose. Every con they run, he knows the odds tip a little more towards the day when one of them doesn't make it back. They've had a string of good luck maybe, but luck is fickle.
He's in the kitchen, watching over them as much as he can for the moment. Hardison's agitated, fiddling with something on the big screen while Sophie sits curled in an overstuffed chair going over a play and Parker tries to solve a Rubik's cube with her eyes closed- (frighteningly enough she's almost done it). Nate's off planning somewhere, which could mean he's drinking or could mean he's thinking. Eliot hopes it helps.

This job has hit them all harder than normal. It's a little too close to home. They all have pasts, but he's pretty sure none of them have as much red in their ledgers as he does. He'll never forget the dozen young faces in the folder handed over by a distraught janitor a few days ago; they're reminders of what this world can do to innocents. Of what he's done to innocents before and what he spends every day trying to move past.

This time it was kids. Terminally ill orphans kidnapped by a pharmaceutical company with ties to international trafficking and organized crime, men with few scruples and even fewer actual doctors on staff, only to be discarded when it appeared their unsupervised human testing was about to be discovered and shut down.

Twelve of them, and the oldest was seven, the youngest not even three. He told the team once that when Toby taught him to cook he kept him from falling someplace he couldn't climb out of. That he never would've known how to use a knife for anything but destruction. Except right now the destruction's just about all he can see.

It was senseless. He chopped another carrot, a series of harsh movements that belied his utter frustration- normally he was far more gentle when cooking, but at the moment- well, the carrot was a fine alternative until he could get his hands on the men responsible.

And that ain't what you want to hear / But that's what I'll do
Parker

She hates this- the waiting. She can do it of course- you don't get to be a world class thief without knowing how to wait, but at the moment she just feels like there's something they should be doing.

Her fingers fly over the small cube, and she kind of wants to kill those guys. Because they killed a bunch of kids and there's nothing they can do about it.

Because they're the ones who do something while the rest of the world goes on oblivious, or worse yet while they talk about how sad it is and then move on with their lives. Looking at those kids was worse than even that job in Serbia, because at least there'd been something they could do back then. This was just… twelve little caskets and revenge.

She knows that's what it is, because they're not necessarily good people but they are the good guys, and sometimes justice isn't quite enough. This is one of those things that even money can't fix, and no matter what they do it was too late before they even started.

That doesn't mean they walk away, but maybe there's a way to reconcile it- as much as they can- without turning into those monsters. Because as much as she wants to ruin them, she hates the idea of turning into them even more. She and Sophie talked about that, small comfort in the fact that the idea terrified both of them.

The last piece slides into place with a click.

Parker opens her eyes and stares down at the small cube in her palm, solid blocks of colors aligned. There are always other options, she's learned.
"Hardison, do you still have that virus you wrote?"

I'm gonna work the straw / Make the sweat drip out of every pore
Hardison

He looks up from where he's been fidgeting with the television. It's not really like he needs to see the view from the international space station on the big screen, but it's something to do and right now he truly needs something to do, before he goes back to thinking about the fact that they just made funeral arrangements for a bunch of kids. Kids who thought they were being taken to get treated and then meet their new families.

It's all a little too raw at the moment, and he grabs the lifeline he doesn't think Parker even realizes she's thrown him.
"Which one?"

The assessing look she gives him says maybe she knows exactly. The vicious little smirk that comes after tells him that Biopharmik Corporation is going to die a very painful, public death, dirty secrets exposed and the men responsible wrecked, but alive to see it.
"The big one?" She guesses. "All of them? I'm feeling…" She trails off. Angry is not big enough, and vindictive doesn't cover it by half.

Hardison nods- he doesn't have a word for it either. "I hear you, mama. I think I got a little somethin'."

She leans against his shoulder, just for a moment. "Good."

All the words are gonna bleed from me / And I will think no more
Sophie

She knows what the plan was originally: swift, brutal, and deadly, even as she knows it won't help anything if they get any more stains on their own hands. But yes, it would feel bloody good. She's more than self-aware enough to admit that.

The battered copy of Hamlet is left on the table, and she spares a glance for Parker and Hardison, engrossed in tweaking one of Hardison's computer viruses into something so nasty it could cripple the country if let out uncontained. She knows their target is a much finer point, but she still sends him a cautionary glance. They've all been burned by overconfidence before.

Eliot is in the kitchen, chopping with a barely contained violence that makes it look like he has a personal vendetta against the cutting board. Or the carrot. His usual finesse has degenerated into angry, jerky movements that do little more than obliterate the vegetable; a smattering of fine orange bits litters his workspace.

Sophie shakes her head at him, wants to still his hands but values her fingers far too much to attempt that particular maneuver, even if she knows he'd give up one of his own before the knife ever touched hers. She'd rather he didn't. Everyone can keep their own fingers attached to their own limbs, thank you very much.

"I want to destroy them all just as much," she offers, a quiet ferocity in her tone that perhaps she usually hides better. "And that's exactly why we have to do this the right way."

Because if they turn the death of those kids into an excuse for a bloodbath then they'll all lose in the end.

Eliot doesn't look up at her, not right away, but his frantic chopping eventually slows enough for her to risk squeezing his arm lightly. He nods once but holds his silence.

Nate opens the door behind them, peers out from the dark hallway and smiles faintly as he steps into the warm light of the living room. He's listening now, in a way that he wasn't ready to earlier, blinded by a toxic blend of pain, bad memories, and anger.

"She's right. We need a new plan."

Parker and Hardison look up from where they've been sitting, crouched over a laptop in the living room, and Eliot wipes the knife off and puts it in the sink, and Nate meets her gaze with clear eyes.

Alright then. Their family is alright, and more than that- they can do this.