When Parker woke up, she blinked the sun out of her eyes, noting that Eliot had forgotten to close the blinds when he put Cooper to bed. She rubbed the sleep out of her eyes and looked around. A frown spread across her face as she realized she was alone. Usually a light sleeper, the movement of Cooper climbing over her to get out of bed normally would have woken her up. Apparently he was getting sneakier, and she knew that could only mean trouble. With any luck, he'd end up a better thief than her, provided he didn't grow too tall or broad.

She stretched, joints popping in relief, and Parker climbed out of the bed. She hadn't noticed the room much the night before, but groaned when she saw the stuffed animals scattered across the floor. She had specifically instructed him to put them in the hammock hanging in the corner, its sole purpose to carry the menagerie.

"Cooper!" he was going to be in trouble. She opened the bedroom door and padded down the stairs, looking around for any sign of her son. Brows furrowed when she didn't find him in the kitchen. There had been no snack before bed like usual, so she had expected the boy to be ravenous come morning. But it was far too clean to have been struck by hurricane Cooper.

"Monkey?" She called again, and walked over to one of the air vents. They were just a little bit too small for her. The width of her shoulders was something that she had no control over despite how flexible she was, and despite the odd ways she could contort her body, but Cooper could still fit for the time being. Though admittedly, Parker was confident that he'd be too big within the next five or six years. But they were one in the same, and as far as Cooper was concerned, air vents were like an at home version of the caves at the rock gym.

He had a habit of disappearing inside without warning, and Parker had spent half an hour looking for him the first time before she thought to call his name into the air vent, and the response he gave had flooded her entire being with relief, though she hadn't even been aware of the near paralyzing fear that had plagued her before. Parker still had difficulty naming her feelings.

"Cooper?" She called into the vent, and waited quietly for a reply. When no reply came, her frown deepened, and she returned upstairs, wondering if he was hiding from her, because he'd done that before too. "Cooper if you don't get out here right now, you're not coming with me this weekend," she threatened loudly, checking the bathroom, and her bedroom and closet. She moved back to his room, and couldn't help the worry that was settling in, because Cooper's closet was literally the last place to look.

She pushed the bedroom door open, and stepped inside and only then did she notice it, his favorite stuffed animal, the octopus, on the floor at the foot of the little twin bed.

One. Two. Three.

She didn't have to count to know that a leg was missing, one of the tentacles torn off, she could see the loose stuffing, and almost afraid to look, she peered out of the window. Her-their loft was on the fourth floor, the bedrooms a story higher, but even at such a distance, she could make it out, a purple tentacle on the pavement below.

The realization hit her like a bag of cinder blocks to the chest, and Parker fell back away from the window. Her worst nightmare, but not quite. From the moment she had held Cooper for the first time, she had been imagining his death, that ever present, petrifying fear that she couldn't escape. There was nothing she was more afraid of than that. Except…

She had never even stopped to consider this possibility. Maybe too awful to even imagine, she couldn't breathe, couldn't gasp for breath couldn't even register the burning in her lungs and didn't notice the light-headedness that was setting in, the way the world was spinning as she lay curled up on the floor at the foot of his bed, hands clutching the stuffed octopus.

She knew Cooper wasn't dead, knew that what she thought had been her worst fear paled in comparison to the possible reality. He'd been taken; she knew the word but couldn't even bring herself to think it.

Kidnap.

And she didn't know where he was, or if he was okay, or if he was being treated like she had. Like another blow to the gut, she didn't know what was happening to him, but even speculation was too painful to imagine.

It didn't take a grifter to recognize when Eliot was ticked off by something, but it certainly didn't hurt, and she had been the only one in the sitting room, book in hand, when Eliot returned to the hotel. "Everything alright, El?" She had asked, peering over the rim of her reading glasses. A grunt had been the only response, and a few doors slammed a bit louder than needed, and she didn't see the irritable hitter until the morning.

She walked out of the bedroom, wrapping her robe more tightly around her, it was early, barely sunrise, but she wasn't entirely surprised that Eliot was already awake. He was perched at the breakfast bar in the small kitchen, a coffee mug in hand and his forehead resting on the tile countertop.

"Good morning," she greeted lightly, pouring herself a cup of coffee.

Only a growl.

"Okay, someone's grouchy," she rolled her eyes. "What happened last night, you were fine when we left?" She sat across from him at the bar.

"Nothin', it's fine," he growled back, picking his head up off of the counter.

"Obviously it's not. What happened, has she moved on or something?" Sophie furrowed her brow. She wouldn't pretend to understand the relationship that Eliot and Parker shared- had shared, but she wouldn't have suspected that sort of issue between the two. At least last night both had seemed mutually interested.

"No. She just. She," Eliot huffed, leaning his head in his hands, "She's so different, so I don't even know. She flinched, Sophie. From me. Like she was scared I'd hurt her." His voice hitched. "She's never done that before."

Sophie leaned across the table, resting a hand on his arm, "Eliot, are you sure she wasn't just surprised? It has been five years."

He shook his head "It's been five years, but I know her better than that. It wasn't surprise. It was scared."

And it was; he knew that he had caused that reaction. And it wasn't entirely unusual really. He scared women all the time, and sometimes he scared men too. That was the normal, the standard reaction. Eliot had killed people, could do it on instinct. For a while, murder had just been a reaction. Overseas, in the war, he hadn't been himself, and he couldn't get rid of that, couldn't go back all the way.

But Parker? Never once had she looked at him with fear. Even in the occasions in which he had threatened her, hoping to scare her into some sort of normalcy, Parker had never batted an eye at his nature.

"Maybe you should go and talk to her, now that you've both had a chance to calm down," Sophie suggested, interrupting Eliot from his musings.

Just a grunt, but Eliot stood up, downing the rest of his coffee, and with a loud slam of ceramic on tile, he stalked off.

"Hey!" The little boy shouted from a locked room, "Hey I know you can hear me!" He shouted at the top of his lungs. Food in the corner sat untouched and the little bed remained empty and made. Instead, Cooper had sat himself on top of a shelf, eyes fixed on the sole camera in the room. His mother had taught him how to spot them whenever they went shopping.

"I want my mommy back!" He screamed, his voice hoarse from over use, he had no idea how long he had been locked up in the room, couldn't remember what time it was when he had woken up to that man standing over his bed, a cloth pressed to his mother's mouth, and Cooper for the life of him couldn't figure out why she hadn't woken up when he had screamed for her.

Something was wrong, he knew it, but he could see her chest rising and falling, he knew she was alive. "If you don't give me back, Mommy's super hero friends are going to get you and kill you." He shouted even louder. That much he had confidence in. Eliot and Hardison and everybody would save the day, but he was worried about his mother, needed to know she was okay too.

The lights flickered before going out completely. "That doesn't scare me, you nummyhead!" Cooper stared directly into the camera lens, and so he didn't notice the door handle turn before it flung open, startling the little blond boy so badly that he nearly fell off of the shelf.

"You shut up and come with me," a large, angry looking man growled, his hand wrapping around the little boy's small upper arm and dragged him off the shelf and out of the room.

"Ow, ow stop!" Cooper shrieked, struggling against the grip. "Let me go!" He demanded before sinking his teeth into the man's arm and another piercing shriek as he was thrown across the room.

He had practiced what he was going to say in five or six different variations, but he still hadn't figured out what to say exactly when he rang the buzzer to be let into her apartment building. No answer, he checked his watch, nine am, roughly, no reason why she wouldn't be awake. The hitter snagged the open door, holding it for an elderly woman and her groceries.

After helping the woman get all of her bags to the kitchen, he proceeded on to the fourth floor. He rapped his knuckles on her door, waiting for it to open, or for her to shout at him to go away, or at least some sort of life behind the door. But still, no answer. Louder this time, he knocked again. Eliot frowned. She had mentioned the day before not having to work, and he knew well enough that young boys didn't sleep in past eight if they could help it. He twisted the door knob, surprised when the heavy wooden door swung open mostly of its own accord.

"Parker?" He called gently, stepping over the threshold into her home. It felt oddly invasive. Sure he'd been there before, less than twenty four hours ago, so it was nothing new, but this time he hadn't been invited, and he wasn't quite sure if he was overstepping his boundaries, since he wasn't even sure if they were friends at the moment.

Not after her reaction the night before. The fitful sleep, the awful dreams in which she didn't just flinch, but screamed and ran away, and that look of terror in her eyes. He had no idea what to think of her reaction, had no idea what had caused it, the fear. Had she really run away because of him?

But something felt off, and Eliot Spencer had learned five years ago not to ignore his gut instincts when it came to Parker. Last time he had, she disappeared without a trace. She had vanished into thin air, right after that one con. Her voice had sounded funny when she came back online on their coms; he had suspected something, but said nothing. And then she had flitted away.

It was quiet and just as clean as when he had left the night before. Glancing around, he started up the stairs. "Parker?" He called again, a hand resting on Cooper's doorknob. He knew that he was more likely to find the thief in her own room, but it was the only room in the place he hadn't been in, and Parker's bedroom certainly seemed like overstepping the boundaries, even if what he was doing at the moment wasn't. Even on good terms, Parker's bedroom was a place he wouldn't want to enter without explicit permission. So instead he swung open Cooper's bedroom door, entirely not at all prepared for what was in front of him.

"Parker?"

Somewhere in the back of her mind, Parker could hear Eliot calling her name, but it was muted, like shouting underwater, and she was still struggling to breathe. Kent. That was his name, one she hadn't thought in years, and she could feel her skin crawl just at the name, his hands on her cheek, shoulder, and knee. She could feel the sting of finger shaped bruises on her neck, wheezed great gasping breaths like her windpipe was being crushed.

Bitch, that was what he had called her, not that he was the first. Or the worst. Her collection of foster fathers had all had color vocabularies, but she had never seemed to bruise so easily before, never felt so helpless. She was an adult; this was supposed to be behind her.

"Parker." She could hear him calling her name a little more clearly. No, not just behind her, those feelings were supposed to be gone from her life entirely. She had Cooper, she had vowed to the boy that he'd never experience the same sort of horrors that she had suffered through as a child. She had promised him that the very first time she had held him in her arms. But she had failed, miserably. Someone had Cooper; someone had taken her son for some unknown reason with an unknown agenda and for all she knew that could be torturing her sweet little boy.

She barely registered the arms being wrapped around her, couldn't concentrate on anything except struggling for air between her gasping sobs. But the song, his voice she started to notice/ Eliot was singing to her. Eliot.

Another punch to the gut. She was an awful mother. She had feared that too, from the beginning. How was she supposed to be a good mother when she'd never had one herself? She had nothing to go on, no example, and this only proved how horrible she actually was. She couldn't even pull herself together to start looking for him. She didn't know just how long she'd been on the floor, fetal, wracked with the terrifying possibilities, but every second she spent overwhelmed, was another moment Cooper suffered. And so even though she couldn't compose herself entirely, she managed a few words between tiny sobs, "Cooper, taken. Eliot please?"

"Darlin'," his hands in her hair, that much she could register. "Darlin you've gotta calm down."