A/N: Hi there! I know, I know... I am supposed to be spending my days writing for and finishing my on going stories, but this little or should I say not so little plot bunny just wouldn't leave me alone.

This one is going to be a mostly fluffy multi chap fic featuring the Leverage gang, our main characters being Eliot and Parker... hope you enjoy and don't forget to review :)

Chapter 01

Their roles in the con were done and they had just patiently been waiting for Hardison to give them the cue to get out of the building. Okay... maybe not patiently. We were talking about Eliot Spencer and Parker here. The hitter and thief were holed up in an out of the way closet with only their ear buds for communication with the rest of the team.

Neither of them was aware that something had gone wrong and that their comms were not working till the closet door opened abruptly and the duo were faced by half a dozen heavily armed guards who looked like they could crush Parker with their bare hands. With not even a second's notice, Eliot placed himself in such a way that his body completely shielded Parker's from any and all of the dozen odd guns that seemed to be pointed at them.

Parker had, at Eliot's request, undergone extensive training exercises and planning sessions with Eliot and Nate in the past few months. Nate had resolved to pair up the hitter and the thief on a regular basis, which had resulted in Eliot asking Parker and Nate for special sessions with the two of them. At first, Parker hadn't thought that all this was necessary, but as the sessions progressed and the understanding between the two of them went up to previously uncharted levels, Parker relented and gave in to the fact that Eliot almost always knew what he was talking about.

Nowadays, Parker and Eliot could almost read each other's minds when it came to work. Out of work, Eliot still thought that Parker was, in his own words, 'twenty pounds of crazy in a five pound bag'... he could never reconcile himself to someone who preferred to jump from the rooftops of tall buildings. He was a man who liked having his feet firmly on the ground thank you very much.

And Parker still found Eliot Spencer a great mystery. Even with her severely limited social skills and understanding of human interactions, she could feel that there was something not quite right with him. Maybe, in that way, they were the same, the two of them.

But at work, the success rate or should we say, retrieval rate of the pair had sky rocketed after their training sessions. Parker and Eliot could read each other's minute signals and body language as clearly as if each were speaking to the other. Once the two of them got in sync, it was almost impossible for them to go wrong. And it was thus, that Parker found herself reacting with almost no thought to the silent signal that she'd received from her partner. The two of them launched into a flurry of kicks and punches, managing to incapacitate most of the guards within the span of about thirty seconds.

Two of the guards had been especially difficult to handle, getting in their own punches, kicks and the occasional bullet into the pair of thieves. A blow from Eliot managed to disarm the both of them without leaving any lasting physical damage, but this gave Eliot the opening he needed to get the two of them away. Another silent signal later, Eliot and Parker found themselves sprinting away from the pair of super guards as fast as possible, running down a maze of corridors till they made it through a emergency stairwell, climbing up to the roof and using Parker's emergency zipline that she'd set up the previous day.

The hitch in that plan had been the fact that Parker had calculated only one person's weight while attaching the zip cord for her line. Now, as the situation called for additional weight and didn't give them any time to think over the problem, the two of them came to the unspoken decision of risking it and dealing with the consequences later.

A not-so-controlled descent, which bumped them quite hard into ledges and the side of the building a couple of times, the two of them were accosted by their team mates in Lucille 2.0 nearby and got in with just a minute to spare. The front of the building had filled with security guards and armed personnel the second Hardison peeled out of the lot, pushing Lucille 2.0 to the limit till they reached the loft.

Neither Eliot not Parker had even had time to give their physical conditions a second thought while outrunning the security guards inside the building... Just the mind numbing need to outrun anything and anyone that could cause them any damage. Now, as they heard Hardison's rambling apologies about some changing frequencies inside the building knocking out their comm systems and hearing Sophie's involuntary breath of shock, they turned to assess the damage on each other.

What they saw and finally allowed themselves to feel, had them cringing... both in physical pain and in defeat at being unable to protect their partner. In Eliot's case the pain of not protecting his thief properly was a lot sharper than the pain radiating from his shoulder because of a bullet wound. Parker too was feeling guilty about not having had Eliot's back... something quite unusual for her, even a couple of months before now.

Parker had never felt guilty about letting someone else down ever, because she'd always worked alone. Now, as a part of the Leverage Associates team and as part of the newer, smaller two-person team with the retrieval specialist, Parker was feeling an annoying deep seated churning kinda stomach ache, which she'd found out from Sophie was guilt.

Guilt, at not being good enough to out run the guards, at not having thought about needing a stronger cord for the zipline and almost getting the two of them killed due to it. If it had only been her life at stake, curiously, Parker might not have worried so much. Eliot was now her partner and his well being was a part of her responsibility too now... just as hers was in his hands.

He'd explained that concept to her early into their professional relationship and she hadn't needed him to explain it again. She understood... He was the hitter, the protector of the team... the guy who protected her, all the time. Whether they were one a job or not, Parker knew without a doubt that Eliot would come for her if she ever got into a situation where she needed his help. He might grumble about her craziness in getting into the situation in the first place, but he would definitely come for her. That was the one constant in Parker's life now, that she completely believed in.

Sometimes, there were days when the paranoia of her old life made it difficult for her to trust anyone... even the team. But even then, she trusted Eliot and the fact that he would keep her safe. It was a trust, that she knew even without having to ask, that was reciprocated in full amount by the retrieval specialist.

Eliot was a thorough professional and would never agree to working with someone he didn't trust or couldn't have faith in. Parker knew that Eliot trusted her to have his back when they went on retrieval missions and the amount of happiness she felt due to the knowledge had her questioning her judgement and her developing feelings towards her partner.

With the kind of close relationship that the two of them had developed over the past few months, it was inevitable that one of them atleast would start to feel this way. Parker had learnt early in her life that trusting another person with either her self or her feelings was probably the worst idea she could've ever had. And Eliot had had his own share of people leaving him behind or abandoning him in times of need, to really believe in the need to have a stable relationship with another person. But fate, it seems, had a slightly different plan for the two of them.

After getting to the loft, Hardison was sent to wrap up the rest of the job using data that Eliot and Parker had just brought while Sophie and Nate stayed behind with the twosome to help them take stock of their injuries. Sophie busied herself in bringing hot water and a couple of Eliot's well stocked first aid kits that were stored at Nate's loft expressly for this purpose. While Sophie got the supplies together, Nate was involved in helping Eliot and Parker take off jackets and shirts, taking stock of what their injuries were and deciding which ones were the most serious and needed attention first.

Eliot had a bullet graze on his right shoulder, a couple of cracked ribs, heavily bruised left hip and knee while Parker had suffered a couple of broken ribs, a sprained ankle and a cracked wrist. Leaving Sophie to help Parker wrap her ribs and aircast her wrist, Nate set about helping Eliot clean the bullet graze, which fortunately was just a surface wound. Deciding that the shallow but clean path traversed by the bullet didn't need to be stitched up, Nate and Eliot just applied some ointment and wrapped it up, along with wrapping up Eliot's ribs and icing his hip and knee. The fifteen minutes it took for the four of them to attend to the injuries of the thief and the hitter were traversed silently except for a few hisses of pain and a couple of low curses.

Leaving the pair to rest in the comfy couches and knowing that they would both appreciate being left alone to deal with the pain and the injuries, Nate and Sophie made sure they were comfortable with water and food nearby and left them. After being debriefed by Hardison on the wrap up and telling him to go home and rest up till the meeting tomorrow, Nate and Sophie decided to crash in Nate's bedroom for the night. Hardison checked up on the injured duo to find them sleeping comfortably if not peacefully, before silently locking up Nate's loft behind him while leaving to go to his own apartment above.

While Eliot and Parker hadn't been able to communicate much by way of conversation in the last twenty minutes, they'd managed to convey a whole lot to each other just by non-verbal signals. They'd become experts in reading each other's body language and that came into use off the field now, when they both wanted to know how the other was faring but didn't have the energy to ask or check. Slowly, with the painkillers coursing through their systems, the hitter and the thief slipped into an exhausted slumber, knowing that their partner was as comfortable as could be for the time being.

A/N: So there it was. Please review your thoughts and ideas on how you liked the chapter and how you would like the story to go ahead... reviews are love:)

Lotsa luv and fortune cookies

Macybear