Title: Solitary Confinement
Genre: hurt/comfort, friendship fic
Total Word Count: ~13,000
Rating: PG-13 (language)
Pairings: Eliot/Parker friendship
Warnings: None
Summary: A traumatic experience can change people. It can take away the things that make people who they are. Parker finds this out the hard way. Eliot's there to help her regain her bearings. Written for the hc_bingo prompt "claustrophobia."
Author's Note: A huge shout out to rusting_roses for her amazing beta job, as per the norm. Is there ever a time when you aren't amazing, my dear? This fic is completely written and will be updated every other day until all if it's posted.
-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-
Solitary Confinement – Part 1
"Parker, how's your progress coming with the safe?" Nate's voice chirped in her ear.
She stilled the dial she'd been turning and scowled. "It'd be going better if you didn't keep distracting me. I've had to restart twice already."
"Okay, okay. We'll be quiet."
"You do understand that being quiet requires you to not talk?" she shot back.
There was barely a moment of silence before Nate spoke again. "Eliot, you have the getaway car in place around the corner for when Parker gets out of there?"
Parker paused for a moment, rolling her eyes at Nate's inability to keep quiet.
Eliot's response followed next. "Working on it."
Parker shook her head, pulled the ear bud, and dropped it to the ground next to the safe. All she needed was two minutes of quiet and she'd have no problem cracking the safe. Now that things were finally quiet, she sighed in the comfort of blissful silence and went back to work.
As the door swung open she checked her watch. One minute, seventeen seconds. Not even two minutes. A grin spread across her face as she surveyed the inside of the vault. Safety deposit boxes lined each of the walls and she began looking for the one that Nate wanted her to pop open and raid the box of whatever she found inside.
"What do we have here?" a low voice spoke from behind her, disrupting the quiet.
She threw a glance over her shoulder, eyes wide as she saw the two guards that stood just feet away. She froze exactly where she was, heart racing. How had they managed to sneak up on her?
"Well, let's do the math. Black clothing, breaking into our vault. I'd say we have ourselves a little thief."
"Nate, we're blown!" she shouted, knowing that Hardison's ear bud would pick up the words.
One of the figures stepped in and pushed her back roughly. She tripped over the step that led into the vault and went sprawling across the floor inside. The next sound sunk any hope she had for escape: the groaning sound of metal grinding against metal as the hinges rotated. The vault door swung shut and she heard the sound of the gears as they spun the dial.
"Nate, you guys have to get me out of here. I can't do anything from in here."
She waited a beat, but there was no response. Her face dipped into a frown as she felt for the comm unit. Her breath hitched as she felt the empty space where the ear bud should've been nestled in her ear. Her mind flashed back to her discarding the device to the ground to work. The device would still be sitting there, useless to her on the outside of the safe.
"Well crap."
-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-
The ominous sound of the vault door closing was the first sign that not all was right. "Parker! What's going on down there?" Nate shouted into his comm.
He exchanged a worried glance with Hardison across the room. "You have anything?"
"I'm pulling up the security feed for that corridor now." A moment passed in a flurry of typing and then a look of dread crossed Hardison's face. "They locked her in the safe, man. Parker's in the vault."
"Her comm unit should work through the steel, though, right? Why wouldn't she be answering?" Nate's mouth was tight, fear for Parker making him look wan. Eliot and Sophie were silent as well, waiting for Hardison to check the tape.
Hardison shook his head. "No, no." Everyone sighed in relief. "They didn't rough her up or anything. Let me take another look at the video." He rewound the tape and watched it again on his computer monitor. "What was that girl thinking? She took it out and just dropped it on the floor and kept working. It's still sitting there in the hallway; I can see it in the feed."
Nate ran his fingers through his hair. "Okay, so she's in the safe, without her communicator. Security knows she's there, so calling the cops is probably the next step. Eliot, can you cut the calls in and out of the building? We can't have that happening."
Hardison shook his head, "Wouldn't help. They could just trigger the silent alarm and that's something that would take me at least an hour to hack into and put a stop to."
Eliot spoke next. "Where do you want me?"
Hardison ignored the interruption for the moment. "Well that's odd. The guards aren't calling the cops. They're back in the security room but they are just watching the video feed. They haven't triggered any alarms and no calls have gone in or out," he reported.
"Why wouldn't they have called?" Nate queried the hacker.
Hardison shrugged, leaning back in his chair as he thought. "No idea. Count it as a blessing. That gives us at least a chance of getting Parker out of there before she's handed over to the authorities."
Nate was deep in thought when Hardison spoke, disrupting Nate's thought pattern. "Not good, so not good."
Nate looked up from where he had been blankly staring at the desk. "What's up?"
"There is no ventilation system in or out of the vault. Air tight."
Nate was silent for a moment. "How long does Parker have in there?"
"Well, this might be one time where her small physique is going to play to our advantage. Taking into account her body weight, size of the room, the air in there is twenty-one percent oxygen-"
"Ok, we get it, lots of math," Eliot muttered over the comm unit, "Just give us the answer."
"A few hours at most, probably," Hardison responded, ignoring Eliot's jab.
Eliot growled over the comm. "That's assuming she stays calm. If she gets worked up in there that air is going to go a lot faster than that."
Nate had risen from his seat along the table in their conference room and had started pacing the length of the room. "Ok, we need a route of entry. Any thoughts, people?"
-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-
"So Bobby, what's the plan here?"
The two guards sat in front of the video feed that looked into the vault. The little blond felon was pacing the room, occasionally stopping to investigate something or run a hand along the wall.
"Calm down, Chase, she's not getting out of there."
"Protocol says we report this to the higher-ups immediately," Chase, the smaller of the two guards, said as he turned his chair to look at Bobby.
The larger one smirked and patted his friend on the back with a solid thud. "Look, how often do we get some excitement around here? Day in and day out it's the same thing, eight hours of absolute boredom. Let's just keep her in there a bit, and then we'll report it."
The second guard shook his head and sighed. "This doesn't sound like a good idea…"
"Look, if you don't want to stay here then go take a lunch break. I can manage here."
"Fine, fine. We'll do it your way. I'll stay."
The larger one snorted in approval. "Good. Then go ahead and kill the lights in there. No need for us to keep the little felon too comfortable. And that way, when we go to get her out and turn her over to the cops, she'll be treatin' us like we're her heroes, getting her out of the dark tiny vault and all. Hell, she'll be begging for us to come in there and get her."
"And how is that supposed to let us keep an eye on her in case she tries anything sneaky?"
Bobby waved a hand, wicked grin crossing his face. "Switch to the infrared cameras. That should let us see what's going on in there just fine. We wouldn't want to miss the entertainment we've been offered for the day, now would we?"
-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-
"Damn it," Hardison muttered under his breath.
"What's going on, Hardison?" Eliot's voice demanded over the comm.
"They just turned out the lights in the vault. I lost my video feed. Or rather, I can't see anything on my video feed- it's all the same at this point. It's pitch black in there."
Nate turned to Hardison. "Can you get anything? Anything at all?"
Hardison made a shushing gesture. "Hang on, I'm working on it." He hit a few keys. "There, got something at least. They have an infrared set-up I've hacked into."
"How's Parker doing?" Sophie asked, sounding worried.
Hardison looked to his second computer monitor where he'd set up the video feed. Parker was scrunched up in the far right corner of the vault. Her knees were drawn up to her chest and she had wrapped her arms around them. "I don't know man, she's just sitting there."
Eliot chimed in next. "Is she panicking? Can you tell if she's hyperventilating or anything of the like?"
"No. It's just like she's shut down. She's just sitting there not moving."
Nate furrowed his brow. "Why wouldn't she be looking for a way out? That doesn't sound like Parker. She has to know that there is a possibility that the authorities could show up any minute."
"This is Parker, we're talking about. Vault-cracking extraordinaire? She probably knows more about this vault set-up than we do. And that also means she knows there's no way out. She's probably counting on us," Eliot suggested. "What are we doing to try to get her out of there?"
Hardison returned to his frantic typing. "Working on it now. I'm going to take down the power on the bank's part of the block. That should allow us to send Eliot and Sophie in as repair personnel. That'll at least get us closer to the vault."
"And then what? Parker's our lock-pick. We're not going to be able to bust that lock to get her out," Eliot muttered skeptically.
"I've been playing around with plastic explosives in my spare time. I've designed a smaller charge that should be able to blow the lock right off the vault," Hardison volunteered, sounding pleased with himself.
"That's more like it," Eliot added. "What's our time frame for this rescue operation looking like right now?"
Hardison bobbed his head back and forth as he played out the estimate in his head. "Hacking the city mainframe to bring down that section of the power grid is going to take me at least an hour."
"That's too long, Hardison," Eliot complained over the comm. He sounded frustrated at the fact that he couldn't be of any use.
"We're talking the city mainframe. It's not a simpleton's task like hitting someone in the face and knocking them out might be. My work is-"
"Hard, we get it, Hardison. Now how about we stop wasting time bickering and start focusing on busting Parker out?" Nate suggested.
-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-