She was pretty.

The thought jarred him. It was strange, not that he noticed, but that he noticed before he looked closer. Before he assessed her stance and found her anxious. Eliot relaxed. She was holding all that tension in her shoulders; she was nervous, but not about to attack.

She had finished her perusal of the team and was now staring intently at Parker, waiting for… something.

Finally it became clear that Parker wasn't going to be making introductions, and the girl sighed softly, a single breath laced with pain.

"Hey Parks," she murmured. "Long time, no see."


"You… you…" Parker stammered and spluttered, more flustered than Eliot or any of the rest of the team had ever seen her. Hardison stepped in close to her side, putting one hand lightly on her shoulder, but she shrugged him off sharply and moved away. For a second she stood there with her mouth open and silent, seemingly at a total loss, but it passed quickly. "How did you get in here?!" she demanded.

"Oh I picked the locks," the girl replied nonchalantly before her gaze sharpened and she smirked at their resident thief. "You should really look into that." Swinging her legs back over the couch, she dropped casually onto the cushions and resumed her hockey game as though nothing had happened, as though nothing were strange and she had always been there. Eliot raised his eyebrows in surprise. He was impressed. If anything, the girl had balls.

But he was still confused. His gaze darted back and forth between the two women, dumbfounded by Parker's adverse reaction to the newcomer. The tiny blonde's face had gone bright red, and her mouth opened and closed several times. Finally something snapped and she stamped her foot hard like a child.

"Dammit Lennie!" she shouted. Glaring down at the dog who had begun a low, rumbling snarl, she stomped her foot again. "Shut up Echo!" The dog laid its ears back flat against its skull, but surprisingly, it did quiet down.

"Oh come on Parks," the girl grumbled, blatantly lifting the remote as high as she could and turning up the volume on her hockey game. "You still pissed at me for stepping on your Tomagatchi? Told you I'd buy you a new one."

"You're a monster," Parker hissed. "Eliot," she whined, turning on him, "Hit her! Throw her out!"

Eliot frowned. "What?" he asked, taking an abrupt step back. "It doesn't work that way!" And it didn't. He didn't. He didn't hit on demand, didn't hit for no apparent reason. Especially not girls. Parker should know that. They all should know that. He wasn't just another dog to be commanded to bite…

"Take it easy Parker," Nate said, breaking Eliot out of his quick downward spiral. Normally so protective of the little thief, of all of them, he was shocked to find himself so quick to anger. It took a minute to unclench his fingers, to regulate his breathing and drop the scowl that none of them seemed to have noticed.

"I take it you two know each other…" Nate continued, leaving the end of the sentence open, trying to get someone to talk.

In one smooth, swinging motion that was very Parker-esque, the girl on the couch spun herself off the cushions and onto the back of the couch once again, crossing one knee over the other and jiggling her foot nervously. Eliot could hear the dog tags in her laces clicking. "Lennie," she said in a declarative tone, looking Nate dead on. "Parker's cousin. And you must be her team. The hacker, the grifter, the planner, and the hitter." Her eyes lingered on each of them as she named them off, and for some reason Eliot wasn't at all surprised that she knew who each of them were. "Adorable."

"What are you doing here?" Parker snarled.

Lennie frowned at her for a minute before reaching into her back pocket and whipping out a square, wrinkled envelope. Spinning it between two fingers in a way that reminded him of throwing knives, she held it out but Parker refused to come any closer. Rolling her eyes, she slit open the envelope and pulled out a pale blue piece of paper, snapping it open with a flick of her wrist and reading aloud.

"You're presence is cordially requested at the funeral of Leonard Task on this day the blah, blah, blah…" Lennie snapped her wrist again, flicking both the envelope and the letter through the air towards her cousin. They only made it halfway there before they floated carelessly to the floor. "Wake to follow."

There was a full beat of silence before Parker spoke again. "You tracked me down, and came all the way out here… to make sure I was invited to your dad's funeral? Why do you even care if I'm there?"

"Oh I don't," Lennie replied woodenly. "But he did."

Eliot took a step backwards. It was horribly obvious that he and the rest of the team were coming very close to intruding on something deeply personal and painful, something amongst family that wasn't meant to be on display. Even Parker looked embarrassed, something she didn't often show, but her face was beet red and she had dropped her eyes to the floor.

"So yeah," Lennie finished. "There's that. Blow my measly eight hundred dollar savings tracking down my father's favorite niece and bringing her back to Michigan in time for daddy dearest's internment."

Parker had crossed her arms over her chest again and was hugging her torso, obviously upset, but not as upset as her cousin, whose eyes were glittering with anger and unshed tears. She was clutching the couch cushions in a white-knuckled grip, her forearms shaking with the effort of holding herself together and Eliot felt a strange urge to comfort her. It was foreign, and it heated the back of his neck as he tried to push the feelings away.

"And how exactly do you expect to do that?" Parker asked in a cold, flat voice, drawing his attention again. "Kidnap me? I'm not going Lennie."

"Not kidnapping you," Lennie rolled her eyes again and dropped back over the couch one more time, giving some sort of hand command to the dog, Echo, that had him jumping onto the cushions at her side and dropping his heavy head onto her lap. Fed up with the stalemate, sick of standing at the ready, Eliot moved casually around the edge of the room and dropped into a chair, as much to get off his feet as to keep an eye on her. She watched him as he moved, her gaze flicking from his ankle to his face before returning to her game. He could see her fingers shaking as she stroked her dog's ears idly as it whined, high pitched and keening, acutely attuned to his owner's distress.

"Funeral's not for two days," she continued. Her voice was carefully neutral, but he could hear the effort it took for her to keep it that way. "Figured I'd stick around, let you whine yourself out, then we'd go. Bring you right back, soon's it's done."

"I'm not going!" Parker declared again, her voice high-pitched and petulant.

"Uh-huh."

"Right, well," Nate began in his 'let's be reasonable' tone. "Uh, Lennie. It's been… nice meeting you, but you can't stay here. We're… working."

"Look, I don't care what you're stealing," she tossed our casually, propping her booted feet up on the coffee table in front of her, nudging aside a half-empty bowl of popcorn.

Eliot narrowed his eyes. If it hadn't been clear before that Lennie knew what team did, it was now. The question was how did she know? He thought it unlikely that Parker had told her, but if she hadn't, what was left?

"Took me a long time to find you," Lennie said quietly. "Not letting you out of my sight. We leave in two days, we'll be back in five; then, if you want, you'll never see me again. I'm sure you can all handle me that long."

"So, what?" Hardison asked loudly, stepping up to Parker's side in a show of solidarity. "You just want her to sit around here for two days so you can babysit her? What if we need her?"

The hacker was visibly annoyed, his eyebrows drawn and his mouth thin, and Eliot wondered just why he was so irritated by the appearance of his love interest's cousin. He wasn't sure that Hardison was insightful enough to be aware of the subtle, crackling wire of tension between them.

Lennie's eyes didn't leave the television. "I can keep up," she said flatly.