Disclaimer over entire work- not mine, just playing with them. If I owned these guys, we'd still be seeing new episodes and the official relationship would absolutely be Parker/Eliot :) Reviews are the love of my life and make my muses giggle maniacally (really, you should hear these wenches!). Enjoy!
They had been an official team for three years now and Eliot only just figured it out. He would have called himself all kinds of stupid for not noticing, but it was Parker, and no one noticed a pattern of hers if she didn't want them to. Even their most trained observer of human nature, Sophie, didn't notice that Parker disappeared twice a year. He didn't mean just going out of town on a trip disappearing, but the kind where she left every tracking and communication device behind and disappeared without even a whisper of her whereabouts in the underground community.
This year, though, Eliot prepared for it. He couldn't track her, but he would be ready to check and see if she'd returned tomorrow and raise hell itself if she wasn't back safe and sound. He stayed at Nate's under the guise of wanting to try altering recipe in his well-appointed kitchen, and soothed his nerves with the repetitive motion of chopping vegetables. It was ten o'clock and Nate had already retired (passed out) for the night upstairs, so the entire apartment was peacefully silent as he worked. He didn't have a particular recipe in mind and ended up making more a pile of finely diced produce than anything recognizable as food.
A honed sixth sense and faint scent of jasmine had him looking first, before he let instinct react, to find Parker perched on the back of the sofa. Her eyes were red and she was hunched over miserably. Eliot quickly dropped the knife he hadn't remembered reaching for and hurried over, already looking for blood from whatever kind of injury was responsible for her appearance.
"Parker, sweetheart, are you okay?" He knew that the question sounded a little stupid, but he just couldn't help asking. After her disappearances, once Eliot knew what to search his memory for, she'd always appeared subdued and quiet, but they'd always written it off as 'being Parker'. Now he understood that they'd done her a grave injustice- she may be Parker, but she had feelings just like the rest of them and deserved to be looked after just the same, not written off and pushed aside.
Parker remained sitting and allowed his handling of her person, passively letting him check that she didn't have any hidden injuries. "Tonight…" she started, and then had to swallow past a tight throat. "Today is the day my brother died. He loved Superman and how he could fly over the rooftops, so I always climb the tallest building I can find in whatever city I'm in and watch the rooftops. This year I did, but it just wasn't right, there was something missing," Parker leaned her head against Eliot's chest and let his shirt absorb the tears that leaked out. He'd pulled her into a hug once he realized that her pain was emotional, not physical.
"Why wasn't it right?" Eliot's asked, and she pressed her ear against his chest to hear the words rumble. It was soaking in that this is what she'd needed, not the solitary comfort of the wind skirling around a sky scraper's rooftop.
Parker wrapped her arms around his waist and gently squeezed her thanks as more tears slipped free, "I have a family now and don't have to grieve alone," she explained, and to Eliot it truly did explain everything.