Basically, this is an excuse for me to put Eliot and a baby in the same room and for Eliot to be a huge sap about it. :) You can expect a couple more chapters. Thanks for reading!
Sophie handed the baby to Eliot first.
After greetings and hugs had been exchanged between Nate and Sophie and the crew they'd taken their leave from more than a year ago, all eyes were glued on the tiny bundle as Sophie lifted the baby from the car seat and pulled back the blanket to reveal her round face. Then she passed the infant to Eliot.
He took her gently, fearfully, and stared into her sleeping face. He was lost.
She was only three weeks old, had been in this world just twenty-one days. She was innocent, untainted by the ugliness and difficulties of life, and his hands, the hands that had created, and torn down, and been elbow deep in that ugliness, were cradling her now. It was more than he'd ever thought he deserved. And he was going to do everything in his power to make sure that ugliness never touched this beautiful little soul.
"What's her name?" His voice barely constituted a whisper.
"Leonora," Sophie replied just as Nate said "Amelia."
Eliot glanced up, just for a second, to raise his eyebrows at them.
Sophie frowned. "We haven't quite settled on that yet."
Parker and Hardison immediately chimed in with name suggestions, but Eliot's attention was back on the little one in his arms. He watched her chest rise and fall with little huffs of breath and imagined how small and delicate her lungs must be. He brought her in close to his chest, holding her with one arm so he could touch her fingers, hair, ears with his free hand. He discovered that people weren't kidding when they talked about how good newborns smell.
He realized that Hardison and Parker had crowded in at his elbows just as fascinated by the little girl in his arms as he was.
"You know," Nate was saying. "This is the longest she's gone without crying since she was born."
"That's not true," Sophie protested. "But she is being surprisingly well-behaved."
Eliot could practically feel Parker's grin as she said, "Maybe she feels at home."
Eliot felt a smile tugging at his own lips and fought it down. It was bad enough that he couldn't take his eyes off the baby, he didn't need to be grinning like an idiot too.
"You gonna let her meet the rest of the family?" Hardison asked, and Eliot realized he'd been holding Leonora/Amelia for a while.
"Watch her head," he grunted, begrudgingly transferring her to Hardison.
"Hey, baby girl," the hacker crooned, his voice going up an octave. "You an' me, we gonna have so much fun when you get big. Hackin', and watchin' all the classics with me an' Parker, and –"
"If you talk like that to 'er, how's she gonna learn to talk like a normal human being?" Eliot said, slightly abhorred.
"Why you always gotta be hatin'?" Hardison said, his voice back to normal. "I wouldn't expect you to know, but babies hear higher frequencies better than low ones. She probably can't even hear your deep, grumbly voice!"
Eliot frowned, deeply disturbed. That couldn't be right, could it? Hardison didn't know anything about freaking babies.
"She can hear you, Eliot," Sophie said gently.
"But he's not wrong," Nate chimed in. "Babies respond more readily to higher pitches."
Damn know-it-all.
"My turn!" Parker exclaimed, practically snatching the baby from Hardison. There was a collective wince. Parker's motor skills were so far advanced from normal people that it seemed sometimes like her movements were reckless but Eliot had learned that everything she did was purposeful and she never dropped or fumbled anything. But it was still a bit disconcerting to see her waltzing around on her toes with the baby perched seemingly precarious in the crook of her elbow.
"What's she going to be like?" she wondered aloud. "She be anything. She could be like a little evil mastermind like Nate or she could be a baby grifter or I can teach her to be a thief, or even something normal like a doctor or mail-person. She can be anything. She's so…"
"Lucky?" Hardison finished for her.
Parker smiled up at him, her eyes glinting suspiciously. "Yeah." She stopped moving and stared at the baby. "You are so, so lucky, tiny human."
Eliot wanted to kick himself. He felt like his heart was being pulled straight out of his chest and it was somehow involving his tear ducts.
"I knew this would happen," Nate grumbled half under his breath. "They're claiming her and now she'll never grow up normal."
Sophie patted his cheek. "What on earth did you expect?"
Eliot sniffed - in a manly way - and held out his hands again. "My turn," he said gruffly. Nate was exactly right. They had claimed her as part of the family. She was theirs and they were her's.