Rating: pg-13
Pairing: Parker and Eliot
Prompt/Prompter: Don't ask me when I learned fear (Adrienne Rich)/tigriswolf
Notes: Warning: Implied Sexual abuse

Don't Ask Me

It had been an odd situation from the get-go. Eliot and Parker weren't normally paired up to go off and do things together. It was a simple math of her job being to never be seen and his job to be seen (if only long enough to punch somebody) not going very well together.

But they had gone in together.

And the job had gone south.

And there had been too many sub-automatic weapons for Eliot to face without being turned into mince meat before he could even get near one so they'd retreated and ended up locked in their mark's panic room which was actually a pretty decent place to hold down the fort until the others figured out how to get them out of there.

Until their mark cut the power and the place became pitch black.

Eliot gave him decent marks for making their stay uncomfortable, but failing marks for building a panic room with an external power supply.

He was just mostly glad they'd both been sitting down when the lights went out.

Parker shuffled closer to him and instinctively he put an arm around her. He knew she didn't like the dark, at least not a perfect dark like this. He also knew she'd made a living off of facing her fears. She'd be okay, but he could help.

Yeah. He'd focus on that one and ignore that this kind of darkness was one of the few fears he'd learned to live with rather than conquer.

Parker squeezed his hand and patted it in what he guessed was supposed to be a reassuring manner. Out of the team she and maybe Nate (because what didn't he know?) knew his fears. She'd snuck into his room one night and turned the lights off thinking he'd left them on on accident and she was "Using her powers for good". She'd gotten distracted by a shiny silver knife and when her presence woke him up in a dark room with an unknown being nearby…

It was one of the only times he could actually remember apologiesing.

She'd asked him then, why he was afraid of the dark. He'd told her it was a lot of reasons, that most prisons and dungeons he'd been in liked to leave you in the dark and after awhile all that pain and fear stuck.

She'd seemed to accept that answer, he was glad. He might be a con but he'd made a promise to himself early to never lie to the team in order to hide from them who he was. After all, they were his family now. They had a right to know him. If asked a serious and direct question he would give an answer.

He closed his eyes as she leaned her head against his shoulder and hoped she'd never ask the question the other's might of thought to ask. "If there's a lot of reasons what's the first?"

"Don't ask me when I learned fear." He whispered to the dark, and Parker nodded.

She started whispering about the huge vault they'd found in the basement whose locking mechanism was trying to elude her fiddilies and all the money that was probably behind it. The words warded off the memory building in the dark, of a night nearly twenty five years gone when his step father had come into his room in the dead of night and the brutality of his abuse had gone places Eliot hadn't even known were possible before.

The tension in his chest eased a little and he couldn't help wondering who was protecting who.