Home
Home has always had a different meaning for Eliot
Home.
It had always had a different meaning to Eliot than most people. He'd lost his first home when he was thirteen and the bank had foreclosed his family's house and farm and they'd had to leave the only home he'd known.
When he was seventeen he'd dropped out of school and taken to the road with a stable's road team. He hadn't really had a home since. Eliot had rented apartments, owned condos, stayed in hotel rooms, even slept in cells and prison camp barracks, but it had never really been home. Homes were for people who weren't ready to pick up and leave any moment.
When he joined the team and got an office he flirted with the idea of finding himself a home. He got an apartment, even furnished it more than the bare necessities for survival and comfort. After helping Willy out he even took back a few of the things Willy kept in safe keeping for him to furnish his apartment. It had almost felt right. It had felt like home enough that he'd started to tell the others he was going home at the end of a job instead of simply saying he was going.
After he started this thing with Nate it felt a little more like home. They started staying over at each other's places and spending long nights and it felt good, safe.
It wasn't long though before they realized there were some problems with those arrangements. Eliot only kept beer in his apartment, since he had long ago sworn off anything stronger in the interest of not getting to drunk to fight well. Nate's place didn't have all the knives or other safety measures Eliot kept in areas he frequented to be as prepared as he liked. They couldn't even really fix the problems as easily as they'd like. They worked with thieves who had loose ideas about privacy and both had to be careful not to leave too many traces of themselves in the other's apartment.
It hadn't been too long after they realized this thing didn't look to be over anytime soon that they reached a logical conclusion.
They started looking for an apartment they could share. They'd both keep their own, both to keep up appearances and since they both valued their space. It wasn't like money was a problem anyway.
The apartment they ended up renting was small and ambiguous, perfect for laying low. With one decent sized bedroom, a bathroom, decent sized kitchen and a big main room they had all the space they really needed. Furnishings were simple enough, with little flairs of splurges for top grade kitchen utilities, a TV set that Hardison would of approved of, a pool table, and the best security system on the market. They set up a system that would let either of them know when the other entered or left the apartment.
At first Eliot wasn't as sure about the new arrangements as he thought he would be. It made all sorts of sense but he just… he hadn't lived with anyone since he was a kid.
It wasn't until the end of the first job they had after getting the apartment, when Eliot left the offices with a call of "Headin' home" over his shoulder, and ended up walking through the door of the apartment to find Nate already waiting for him that it started to fall into place.
It was a few hours later, when he was drifting to sleep in Nate's arms, Eliot first really admitted to himself that truth. His definition of home was different than most, it wasn't a house or a place or a town. People said home was where the heart was.
His home was wherever he and Nate were together.
