Summary: He looks down at the slip of paper in his hand, and thinks that God just has to be messing with him because this? This is impossible. Written for comment-fic at LJ. Prompt: any, DNA doesn't lie; they're related.
AN: This was an idea that I had floating around in my head when I was writing my "Twenty-Three Chromosomes" birthday mega-collection, but I got sidetracked by new 'verses (if you've read that story, then you know what I'm talking about – not to say that you have to read it to understand this because that's not what I mean at all), so I never got around to writing it. I saw this prompt a couple of weeks ago and cogitated on it for a while, and then I got really stressed and had to write this (there is a definite correlation, by the way: Poesie gets stressed, she writes more fic. It's weird. You'd think that fic-writing would eat up the time necessary for the writing of papers and whatnot, and it totally does, but fic happens and it's totally crazy).
Medical knowledge disclaimer: I know that this is probably completely wrong when you look at the medical facts, but whatever. I always seem to mess up on the medical stuff. I'm not trying to be that kind of a doctor (inside joke). That's not the point of the story, anyway. I'm all about The Uncovering of Secrets.
DNA Doesn't Lie
DNA doesn't lie; they're related.
He looks down at the slip of paper in his hand, and thinks that God just has to be messing with him because this? This is impossible. This is improbable. This is crazy. This is…well, this is what it is because the paper says that Nathan Ford IS NOT EXCLUDED (which basically means "tests positive") as the father of one Eliot Spencer, with a probability of 99.26%.
That's…pretty darn probable.
So he stumbles his way back to the hospital room where the rest of the team is waiting anxiously for him, and the doctor's there, and yes, yes, of course the unconscious man in the hospital bed can have his kidney – they're a goddamn match, aren't they? Soon, he's being prepped and rolled into an operating room, and then there's a prick in his arm and the world goes black…
And then something's poking his arm and then he opens his eyes to see a blob of white and pink and black and gold floating in his vision, and when he blinks again, the image turns into Parker – of course – and she's poking at his arm and there's a dull throb in his abdomen, and the colors in the room are swirling all together, and then there's another poke, and Parker says something that sounds vaguely like, "Mwawawawawa," and then he goes back to sleep again.
The next time he wakes is a little clearer in his mind.
A flurry of gold pops into his line of sight again.
"Hey, Parker," he mumbles.
"Hey, Nate!" she chirps back at him. Oh yeah, his name is Nate. "Hey, did you know that Eliot already knew the thing that you didn't know before?" she asks.
What?
"Parker dear," Sophie says, smoothly displacing the thief from her perch on his hospital bed, "don't crowd him. He's not fully awake just yet."
"But I wanna know who Eliot's mom is," Parker pouts.
"Nate obviously doesn't know," Hardison points out. "He didn't know until the test results, remember?"
"Guys," says a gravelly voice from the hospital bed next to him, "You mind?"
"Oh," Sophie says, "Of course. Come on," she says as she herds the other two out of the room, "Let's give them a bit of privacy, hmm?"
"Hardison," Eliot growls, "take your damn bug with you."
Nate doesn't miss the disappointed look on Sophie's face as she goes out the door after the younger two thieves.
"You knew?" he asks.
"Thanks for the kidney. The others filled me in," he gets in reply, instead of an answer to his question.
"Eliot."
Eliot closes his eyes and swallows. His face is pale and crisscrossed with cuts and bruises that extend further down into the blankets covering the rest of his body. "Her name was Emily." He watches Nate out of the corner of his eye. "She was young. So were you, I guess. Her parents took her away as soon as they found out she was pregnant."
Emily. Nate processes this information without, he hopes, showing anything of what he's thinking. "Emily from seventh grade?"
"There was more than one?" It's more of a tease and less of a reproach or accusation.
Speaking of accusations, "You knew?"
Eliot sighs. "Yes."
"Yes what?"
"Yes, sir?" Blue eyes roll under swollen eyelids. "What else do you want me to say? We might share DNA, but that's about it. You were never in my life, and I was never in yours until the team. This doesn't change anything."
"Why didn't you tell me?" Nate asks, holy shit, I have a son, another son finally kicking in.
Eliot scoffs. "When? When would I have told you?" He starts to shake his head and grimaces at the pain the movement causes. "There never seemed to be a good time, and then we were all like family anyway, and it didn't matter." His words seem to be thrown out offhand, but the tightening of his face under the mottled bruises and lacerations show them to be a lie.
Afraid. Afraid of being rejected, even now, as he said, even now that they're a family anyway.
"It matters," Nate says softly. "You should have told me."
"When?" Eliot asks again, and Nate knows that he's right; when would have been a good time?
That first job together? "You're not my friend," Nate had said when Eliot had expressed his sympathy over Sam's death (Sam, Sam, who had been Eliot's baby brother without anyone but the hitter even knowing). "No, I'm your son," Eliot could have said, but no, that wasn't the right time for that. "I ain't your daddy," Eliot had shouted when Nate had worked a job drunk. "I'm your son!" wouldn't have been received well by anyone at that point.
So many opportunities for telling him, but none of them the right moment.
"How is she? You mom?" Nate says instead.
Eliot relaxes, somehow sensing that Nate's anger has been…lessened. "She died when I was a kid. Stepdad raised me 'n' m'sister. Half-sister. It never really mattered, y'know? Not having the same dad as her. I mean, it was never even something I bothered about until I ran into you on a job once."
Nate remembers that day.
There had been rumors of a new player on the market, a good one. A young guy, probably started military. Anyway, Nate had followed the clues, and they had led him to the new guy, who took one quick look around at the guards cornering him, looked at Nate, then swiftly and silently knocked out – but didn't kill – all seven men. Nate, he simply disarmed. Then, he had thrown the insurance investigator another look and ran off into the night…with the stolen statue.
Looking back, there had been a moment, yes, there had been a moment in which Eliot had looked at Nate and had been surprised – not surprised that he had been caught, but the shock of recognition. Their eyes – both blue; Emily's had been blue, too, a pale blue, just like her son's - had met, and the younger man had bolted away in an uncharacteristic panic before Nate could say a word.
Nate had chased him – of course he had. The thief had taken the statue with him, so of course Nate had chased him. And he had learned. He had learned that Eliot Spencer was tough (everyone knew that), that he was smart (not as many people knew that one), and that he was damn good at hiding (everyone who had ever looked for Spencer knew that one).
"When I first chased you," Nate says, remembering, "you ran and hid."
"Yeah," Eliot says cautiously.
"Why did you keep 'bumping' into me after that?" All those times Nate had almost caught Eliot, those couldn't have been accidents. Eliot had been…
"I was curious, I guess. Can't blame me for wanting to know." He doesn't even deny that those meetings hadn't been accidents.
"No," Nate agrees, feeling the pull of the morphine drip tugging him back to sleep, "No, I guess I can't. But I still think you could have told me back then."
Eliot sighs. "I chickened out, alright?" he says after a long pause, "You had a wife and kid. I had no delusions that you'd welcome me with open arms. I mean, me, a criminal. A killer. You wouldn't have wanted me in the same state as your family, much less in your house."
Nate mulls that over for a while. "He would have liked you."
"Huh?" The drugs in Eliot's system are making him dizzy, and he must have missed something because what Nate just said doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
"Sam. Big brother like you, he would've thought you were…cool."
"Big brother," Nate had said. Big brother. Means Nate isn't going to outright reject him. And maybe, maybe he'll let Eliot stay on the team. That had always been his back-up plan. If Nate ever found out, he'd just leave, run and hide like he's so good at doing.
"Wish I could've met him. Wish I'd found out what he needed in time." He'd gone to the funeral, hair tucked neatly into a hat, and found a seat way in the back of the church. He'd paid his last respects to the younger brother who had never had a chance, the kid brother he'd never met.
"It wasn't your fault." It was mine.
Together, they drift in the hazy in-between of drugged sleep and wakefulness.
Then Eliot says suddenly, "For the record, I didn't know what Maggie looked like before that party at Blackpoole's."
Nate laughs, loud and sharp. The pain in his side is worth it. "Let's not tell her she asked my son out for coffee."
Eliot twitches a shy smile at him. "That would freak her out, yeah. Freaked me out a little when I found out she was your ex-wife."
"That does explain that look on your face that night." The horrified, backpedaling sort of look that said, "Holy shit, what did I do?"
Eliot chuckles softly. "Yeah." A beat. "The team knows. What are we gonna do about this? Things ain't gonna go back to normal."
Nate thinks. It's hard; the painkillers make the world around him dance and spin. "We'll figure it out. We always do."
Eliot sighs. "Yeah," he says, trusting Nate to fix things, "Yeah, I guess so."
They lie in their beds and breathe. Their heart monitors beep, filling the silence.
"Thanks for the kidney, Nate," Eliot says again.
"I would have given it to you even if that paternity test hadn't come back positive," Nate replies, "We are friends. And now we're family."
When Eliot doesn't reply, Nate looks over to see if the hitter has fallen asleep. Instead, he is surprised to discover tears running down the side of Eliot's face.
"Shut up," Eliot says, wiping at them, "Morphine makes me emotional."
Nate grins at him. "Should I have Hardison put that on the list on your medical record of medication not to give you?"
Eliot sniffs, composing himself. "Yeah."
"Okay."
"Don't tell him why. Dad or not, I will kill you." The threat is growled, but the emotion behind it says it's merely a ruse.
"Gotcha. Get some rest."
"You're the one who had a kidney yanked out today."
"You're the one who got hit by a bus."
"A school bus."
"A school bus being driven by Parker."
"I hate you."
"Sleep."