I had to pretty much totally make up back-stories here, which is, like, my favorite thing to do, but if I've violated any canon tidbits we've been given, then…oops.

Oh, and mentions of child abuse- nothing graphic- but if just a mention is going to bother you, then make note.

A First Time for Everything

Eliot

When he was eleven, Eliot didn't have much use for girls. He loved his Mama, of course, and he looked out for his little sister, because his Daddy told him that's what a man should do, but other than that he didn't think much about girls. Then, near the end of fifth grade, Emma-Claire Greer moved to town. She had long blond hair and big cornflower blue eyes and pretty little dimples in her cheeks when she smiled. Suddenly, Emma-Claire was all he could think about.

Being an eleven-year-old boy, he wasn't quite sure what to do about the situation, and so he mostly just stared- if she'd actually spoken to him, he probably would have embarrassed himself with stammering idiocy. He was certainly not the only boy in his grade so affected, if the gazes directed at her during class were any indication, but most of the boys took the same tactic as he did. Some, in the usual way of eleven year old boys, chose to express their affection by making her life miserable. They teased her and hid her books and one memorable occasion put a mouse in her desk (which failed to make her scream; she thought it was cute.) Those few boys succeeded in getting her attention, but not quite in the way they wanted, which seemed to perplex them.

Then one afternoon he came out of school to find her cornered by a few sixth grade boys, making fun of the way she talked- she'd moved from New England, and didn't talk like anyone in their hometown. She was biting her lip, trying not to cry but looking like she wouldn't hold on very long, and something inside Eliot snapped, and he threw himself at the nearest boy.

It turned out to be a bad plan, since they were not only older and bigger, but there were three of them to one of him. He got his ass handed to him pretty soundly, and ended up having to walk home nursing a split lip and a rapidly swelling black eye, only to face his Mama's wrath.

"I do not want you fighting, Eliot Spencer!" she said, applying an ice pack to his eye somewhat less gently then she could have. "If someone is picking on you, you walk away and find a teacher!"

His Daddy, who was always a man of few words, just looked at him thoughtfully. Then after dinner, his Daddy took him out to the barn. Extra chores were the chosen form of punishment in their house, and he wondered if he was going to have to clean it. But his Daddy took off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves, and faced him.

"Now don't tell your Mama about this, and I don't ever want to hear about you starting fights, but I suppose you should know how to finish one. There's no honor in being a bully, but fighting is the right thing to do sometimes. I expect you to know the difference."

"Yes, Sir."

His Daddy taught him not only how to throw a punch- any idiot could do that- but how to watch his opponent to guess what he would do next, and how to use smaller size to his advantage.

But he'd listened to what his Dad told him, he wasn't going to pick a fight, so it was a few weeks before he found an opportunity to put the new knowledge to use. He arrived at school to find two of the sixth grade boys tossing Emma-Claire's pink backpack between them, both of them too tall for her to grab it back. Eliot hesitated, watching. They were making fun of her, mimicking her accent when she asked them to leave her alone. Other students noticed, a few smirking and a few looking sympathetic, but none of them daring to interfere. Instead of jumping in like he had the last time, Eliot gauged the scene. There were only the two boys, no one else would jump to their defense. He could take them, he was sure…

His world narrowed and he felt a sense of calm clarity.

Less than a minute later, he picked up her backpack, dusted it off, and handed it back to her. She beamed at him, and said shyly, "Thanks Eliot."

He felt a grin spread over his face even as a blush crept up his neck. She knew his name!

And he decided then his Dad had been telling the truth- sometimes fighting was the right thing to do.

Sophie

They were walking home from school when she saw the sign. They passed the dance studio on their way home every day, and she had never paid it much attention before. She sometimes saw other little girls going in their ballet outfits, but they didn't look at all like ballerinas she imagined. There were no fancy sparkly dresses and glittering crowns, so she wasn't interested. But that day, she noticed the sign, just a handwritten sheet taped to the window.

Acting classes- now enrolling.

She stopped, staring at the sign as the idea sank in. Acting classes. She knew, knew with all her heart, she was meant to be an actress. When she was supposed to be paying attention at school, she was caught up in dreams of the stage, the silver screen. Mum was always telling her not to be so dramatic, that not everything was a great tragedy or triumph. She tried to be sensible, but it was so much more fun to throw herself into her emotions.

And she was finished practicing in her bedroom, pacing in front of the mirror trying voices and roles and costumes. She was eight, she was ready to be an actress!

"Come on," whined her brother, having noticed half a block on she had stopped. He marched back to where she stood and seized her arm. "You're so slow."

Mum said her brothers had to walk her home from school, and they always complained she was too slow, because they'd rather be playing football with their friends. She hurried to catch up, but in her mind she wasn't on a dingy, gray, main street of a nondescript London suburb, she was striding onto a stage into blinding floodlights before a rapt audience, or maybe stepping out of a limo onto the red carpet in front of flashing cameras…

That night, she asked Mum if she could have acting classes, and Mum gave her that look that she knew prefaced a "no."

"I don't think you need acting lessons. You're quite dramatic enough as it is."

"But-"

"You'd be better off focusing on your school work."

She scowled. She had the best marks in her year. Her teachers loved her, even when she got scolded for daydreaming or didn't finish her homework she could always convince them to give her another chance or an extra day.

"But I need acting classes!" she insisted.

"Nonsense," Mum said briskly. "Acting classes will be expensive," she added, with a stern look that said that was the end of the conversation.

The next day, she told her brothers she was going home with Jenny after school. She secretly thought Jenny was boring, but Mum liked her and said she was "a good influence" so she knew it would be allowed. Once the boys had gone, she made her way to the dance studio.

A little bell jingled as she opened the door, and there were two people just inside, a man and a woman. The woman she had seen sometimes through the window, teaching the ballet girls. The man smiled at her.

"What can I do for you, little Miss?"

She steeled herself. "I want to enroll in acting class," she said, pointing to the sign.

He smiled at her in that benign way adults did when they're dismissing you. "You'll have to come back with your Mum or Dad, sweetheart."

And then it happened. She burst into tears, and suddenly she was choking out a tragic story, about an absent dad and a sick mum and the crushing poverty that kept them from affording the one thing she wanted more than anything in the world…

It was all a huge lie, and even as she was saying it she knew it was wrong to lie, but big, fat crocodile tears slipped down her cheeks and she could see by their sympathetic faces, by the glance they exchanged, that they actually believed her. She almost believed herself. The woman was rubbing her shoulder gently, saying not to cry and it would be okay…

Twenty minutes later she left, and had to force herself to walk slowly, until she was out of sight, before she gave a little skip, danced around in a circle. She was enrolled in acting classes starting the next week. For free.

Hardison

By the time Alec was thirteen, he'd been in the system long enough to know how lucky he was. He heard stories from other kids, about foster parents who only did it for the money, who kept the checks from the county while their foster kids wore old dirty clothes and slept on filthy mattresses on the floor. And even about foster parents who took kids for reasons far worse than money. He was lucky to be with Nana.

She was strict, she said she raised him right and he'd better act like it, but she was fair. She never treated them like they were "just foster kids" and made sure no one else did either. It wasn't easy to raise them, and she worked hard. Sure, the subsidies helped, but they weren't nearly enough, especially when he got to be a teenager- it seemed like he was growing so fast he needed new shoes every other week and he ate constantly. But even with the other kids, Nana managed to hold things together, and for his thirteenth birthday she got him the one thing he wanted more than anything else in the world- his own computer. Sure, it was bought used and made a noise like a vacuum cleaner starting up, but he could finally start doing things he couldn't on the computer the other kids used. As long as he got good grades and ate dinner with the family every night, Nana didn't mind if he spent all his time in his room on the computer- she said someday he just might turn it into a real job.

It was only a coincidence that he overheard that phone call. He was going downstairs to get an orange soda (Nana said that stuff was going to rot his teeth, but she bought it for him anyway, saying he was so skinny he probably needed the sugar to keep going.) Nana was on the phone in the darkened living room, and he could hear her from the kitchen where he hovered in front of the open fridge, considering whether he wanted something to eat in addition to the orange soda.

"I don't know how I'm going to cover the mortgage next month," Nana was saying in a low, confidential voice. "These boys are growing so fast, and you know the subsidies barely make a dent in what it costs to raise them. None of them are going to be going home to their parents."

Alec had known that already. Sure, DCFS always said their first choice was to "reunite" kids with their parents, but they didn't even know where his bio mom was, didn't even know if she was still alive. Probably not, with all the drugs.

"I don't want to have to send any of them away, they're doing so well," Nana went on, real anguish in her voice, when she usually sounded so tough. "Jamie got straight A's last semester, Liam just made the basketball team…and Alec is such a good boy, so smart. But I just don't know how I'm going to make ends meet."

He closed the fridge softly, so she wouldn't hear him, and snuck silently back up to his room. She'd be horrified if she knew he'd heard- she always tried to keep them safe, to soften the ugly reality of their bio families, or the fact that they were at the mercy of a seriously flawed system.

He sat down at his computer, thinking about it, wondering if he could do it. If he had something to trace to the DCFS, something like…the social worker's email address! He snuck back downstairs and found Nana's address book in the drawer it always stayed in. She didn't use email, preferring an old-fashioned phone call, but she had the social worker's email address written down just in case.

Hardison copied it down, and then went back up to his room. He turned on his computer, opened his orange soda, pulled out the emergency bag of gummy frogs he kept hidden for just such an occasion, and got to work.

The next month, when the subsidy checks came from the state, they had tripled.

Nana was an honest woman, and she thought there must be some mistake. She called the DCFS office to find out what was going on, and the social worker told her that that's what the computer said, and what the computer said must be right.

Parker

Parker was six when the police came, and then she spent three weeks at state-run child crisis shelter. She liked it there, there weren't very many children, so the staff took an interest in her. They were nice to her, and they had lots of food every single day and she had a bed where the sheets smelled like clean. When she hid they never dragged her out and hit her or burned her with cigarettes, they just sat near her hiding place and talked gently until she wanted to come out. And one of the women at the shelter gave her a present, a stuffed bunny, so that when she got scared at night, she would have something to hug. Parker had never been given a present before, but the woman said it was hers, forever, to keep. She'd never had something that was hers, forever, to keep.

Then, after three weeks, they said they'd found her a foster home. They all acted like it was a wonderful thing, saying how she'd be with a family. That first foster home wasn't one of the bad ones. It wasn't one of the best, but it wasn't one of the really bad ones. That first foster family had already had a foster daughter, who Parker had to share a room with. The other girl was ten and had been in thirteen different foster homes, she said, like it was a badge of honor.

Parker didn't like the other girl, she was mean and called Parker weird when she didn't want to talk and would pinch her and push her, but other than that it wasn't so bad there. They had food every day, and she didn't mind if the foster parents ignored her, she had learned being noticed by grownups was dangerous.

Then, the other girl took her bunny. She said "it's mine now" and she was bigger and taller and knocked Parker down when she tried to take bunny back, and then she had nothing to hug at night when she got scared. She always got scared at night. Even though bad things didn't happen at night in this new home, they always had before, and it was only hugging bunny that made her stop thinking about them. She tried telling the foster parents that the other girl took her bunny, but they didn't really listen to her and just mumbled something about how she should share her toys, as though bunny was just another toy. Even though every instinct Parker had told her to avoid the notice of adults, she tried again, insisting she didn't care about toys, but bunny was hers, forever, to keep. They didn't seem to understand how important it was.

The foster dad finally got annoyed with her, and said that if they were going to fight over it, then no one would get bunny- he took him away and locked him in the closet, and told her to get lost and stop bothering him.

The other girl didn't really care, but Parker couldn't stand bunny locked in the closet, alone and scared, and so while the foster dad watched football and the foster mom was doing laundry, she snuck into their room and studied the closet door. Only the foster dad had the key, and she would never be able to sneak it away from him, but maybe if she used some wire and jiggled it in the lock, it would come open.

She used a coat hanger from her closet, untwisted, and it took her almost an hour, but she felt a thrill of pure joy when she felt a click and the doorknob turned under her hand. She caught up bunny, hugging him tight, and walked out of the closet straight into the foster dad.

He took bunny away again, but then he gave Parker a challenge- to become a better thief.

So she did.

Nate

"What about you?"

Nate looked up from his whiskey. "Hm? What? Me?"

"Yeah, we all told," Parker insisted. "It's your turn! What was your first job?"

He looked around the table, and they were all looking at him expectantly, if a little blurrily- the post-job celebratory dinner that was becoming a tradition had turned into one hell of a long cocktail hour.

"Well, you guys already know," he said, gesturing vaguely with his glass. "You were there, the first job we did- the Nigerians and Dubenich."

"You're lying! You stole that Degas from me in Paris!" Sophie accused. Her accent was jumping all over the map, which was usually a pretty good indication she was more drunk than her put-together appearance let on.

"Recovered, Sophie. I didn't steal it. I took it back, to return to the Musee D'Orsay. There's a difference."

"That was you?" Parker asked. "I thought it was Archie!"

"No, it was me. It went perfectly until Nate stole it from my hotel room!"

"Kinda your own fault, leaving it in your hotel room," Eliot pointed out.

"Thank you El-" Nate began, then, "Wait, no, it wasn't stealing anyway. I was just doing my job."

"So was I," muttered Sophie.

"Hey, yeah, you stole the Erzherzogtum Diamond from that vault in Berlin!" Parker accused, and it took Nate a moment to remember what she was talking about.

"No Parker, I moved it, because we had intel that you were going to go after it. Which was apparently correct."

"And the Dagger of Aqu'abi," Hardison slurred. Out of the five of them, he was the least able to hold his liquor. "You stole that from all of us," he said, with a sense of offended dignity, before passing out with his head on the table. Parker patted his cheek tentatively, and then shrugged when he didn't stir.

"C'mon Nate, fair's fair. You gotta tell us about your real first job," Eliot insisted. Eliot could hold his liquor, there was no chance he was going to pass out, so Nate sighed.

"Okay, so when I was twelve there was this girl, Emily."

"Was she blond? I bet she was blond," mumbled Sophie, accent landing somewhere between Australia and the Deep South. Eliot smirked.

"Yes, she was blond. And as it turned out, she was totally indifferent to my existence. There was this other kid, Mickey Finnegan, he was fourteen, real little punk, who she was crazy about. This was a Catholic school, now, complete with ruler-wielding nuns, so the easiest way to have a clear path to Emily was to get rid of Finnegan. So I stole a bunch of…er…well…publications of a pornographic nature picked the lock on his locker-" at this point Parker held out her hand for a fist bump, and he obliged, "and planted them in there. Then I told one of the nuns that I thought I might have seen something suspicious in Mickey Finnegan's locker, and while I know it was wrong to tell, I was worried about his soul. They searched his locker, and the next week his parents sent him off to some kind of boarding school. And that was my first job."

"Just for a bunch of girly magazines?" Parker asked. "Wow."

Nate steepled his fingers, looking every inch the mastermind. "I said they were pornographic. I didn't say they featured girls."

Eliot gave a low whistle. "Ruthless, man…"

"So did it work? Did you get Emily?" Sophie demanded.

He gave a grin of long-ago satisfaction at the memory of his thirteen-year-old self. "Actually, yes. She was my first kiss. We didn't last though, turned out she was really high-maintenance."

"Some things never change," Eliot muttered, eyes sliding sideways to Sophie, who met him with a glare that would have been much more effective if she could actually focus.

Parker rested her chin on fisted hands. "We all started early. We were all…" she paused to search for a word.

"Messed-up?" Eliot suggested.

"Precocious?" Sophie countered.

Parker smiled. "…meant to be a team. Duh."