Ch. 7

Exactly ninety minutes later, Eliot's eyes opened and he sat up. Immediately, he looked over to where Savannah should have been sleeping and was glad to find her where he left her, still asleep. He eased himself up and headed to the kitchen. On his way, he tripped on something that made a delicate tinkling sound. He looked down to find Savannah's spoon amid the broken pieces of her cereal bowl. It must've been knocked over during her freak out. He picked up the pieces of the bowl and tossed them in the trash and the spoon in the sink to be washed after breakfast.

Today felt like pancakes...cinnamon pancakes. He got to work. About ten minutes later, Savannah stirred, and by "stirred" she leapt up in a panic and threw the blanket across the room. Unsure of whether this was another episode or just the residual flailing from night terrors, Eliot turned the stove off. "All clear?"

"Why'd you put a blanket on me?" she asked, jogging to what was now considered her room, presumably to get her precious bag.

There was a sarcastic bite to his voice. "People sleep with blankets?"

She came back out of her room hauling bag. "Assailants sneak up on people when they're sleeping with blankets and strangle their victims with them."

Eliot nodded, feeling safe enough to click the heat back on. "Everything is a weapon. Cinnamon pancakes?"

"Poison, object for choking, suffocation if you want to get creative."

Eliot almost laughed. "No, I'm making some for breakfast. You wanna come eat?"

She just stared at him for a second. The home-and-family feel of the place wasn't something she was used to...yet. "Uh...yeah. Thanks."

He set a plate in front of her as she sat down. Also on the table were two bottles: plain syrup and a homemade cinnamon syrup; and two dishes: plain butter and a homemade cinnamon compound butter. Savannah rolled her eyes at the assortment. "Apparently, there was a sale on cinnamon?"

Eliot prepared the pan for a new batch of pancakes. "Yeah, a long time ago. I told Hardison that Parker wasn't ready to go grocery shopping unsupervised. I swear, I used it constantly, and there always seems to more."

He heard her stifle a laugh. "Where are they, anyway?"

"Oh, hang on." He adjusted an air vent next to the stove.

As if physically summoned, Hardison came in with an expectant smirk. "Cinnamon pancakes?"

"That nose of yours is getting good, Hardison, almost as good as mine," Eliot said, setting another plate of pancakes on the table.

"It's a very distinctive smell," Hardison said with a tone of good-natured mocking.

Shuffling from the ceiling caused them all to look up to see a ceiling tile disappear and get replaced with Parker as she repelled down on a simple rig. "We've told you not to do that, Parker!" Eliot and Hardison said in unison. She shrugged, unharnessed herself, and gave it a yank, causing it to retract back into the ceiling.

"She's still here." She'd just registered Savannah was sitting at the table.

"Play nice, Parker," Eliot warned, handing Parker a plate of pancakes.

Parker seemed to dismiss Savannah altogether as she ate. It didn't matter, though. Savannah was almost done eating. The question "Bathroom?" followed the obligatory compulsive spraying of her dishes. Hardison and Eliot wordlessly pointed to a door, she disappeared behind it.

She took a hilariously long amount of time in the bathroom for her nomadic lifestyle. The was constant beeping, zipping, and shuffling. Eliot figured her paranoia (okay, it probably wasn't as simple as paranoia) forced her to open and close her bag every time she needed something, narrowing the risk that someone would burst in on her and the bag sitting open next to her. She was probably hosing everything her bare skin touched with peroxide. When she reappeared, she still had business to attend to, as her next inquiry was "Roof access?"

Eliot, Hardison, and Parker all looked at each other with a twinge of unease. There was a silent conversation as to how to handle the situation. Finally, there was a synchronized nod. Eliot grabbed a hoodie. "I'll take you." Her narrowed eyes said a lot: She didn't like being babysat, but she understood their position.

"Comms," Hardison reminded him. Eliot nodded and took two off Hardison's desk. He put one in his ear and handed the other one to Savannah. She put it in, they pulled up their hoods, and headed to the roof without a word.

Once they got to the roof, Eliot barely had time to ask what she needed the roof for when the got to work, keeping her head down. She pulled a hair brush out of her bag. He wrinkled his nose as he swore he thought the brush emitted a buzzing sound. He barely got the first word of the question out when she explained, "It has a controlled static cling; makes sure I don't leave behind a trail of hair." Then she pulled out a lighter and set the hair on fire, successfully burning away another trace of her presence. Even the smell was quickly carried off in the wide open space.

"You go through this every day?"

She stowed her things and zipped her "Every day I want to stay hidden; it's worth it. You have a gym or something somewhere in here right?"

"Yeah," he answered, but neither of them moved for several minutes. The repetitive question hung in the air.

There was a look in her eye that gave him hope that her answer might be changing from "I can't tell you" to "I can't tell you...yet."