A/N: You can all thank ficfinishing on LJ for the speedy updates. Seriously. I was slacking on this story until I entered it into the current round of that.

CHAPTER TEN
Snow Angels

Parker's curled up on the couch, staring at the television but not actually watching it. It was more of a thing to look like she was doing so Hardison didn't notice she was actually staring at him in her peripheral vision. The rest of the team had gone the next afternoon, and they had been alone together for a whole forty seven minutes. Parker knows that because she's been keeping track. It's making it seem longer, watching the minutes tick by, but it was all she could do. Forty seven… no, forty eight minute now… and counting. The clock was taunting her with it's ticking… only she knows she's the only one who can hear it because it's a digital clock, and digital clocks don't actually tick out loud. But it might as well be ticking, the way it's just taunting her. It's been forty nine minutes now, and neither of them have spoken to each other.

Everyone looked at her really weird when she got out of the bathroom last night, but she just explained to them that she had to change her tampon. She didn't, she only had three periods a year with the birth control she was on, and she wasn't due until February. But she knew they would stop asking questions after that, and they did. She didn't actually need the birth control, after only having sex with women most of her life, it seemed kind of pointless to be on it. But at the same time, she'd rather be safe than stupid, because if anyone knows how unpredictable and sudden rape can be, it's her. She can defend herself now, break in and out of many places, but that doesn't make her invincible.

Fifty four minutes.

"Alright, I think we're set," came Hardison's voice through the silence of the room, only dully fixed previously by the low sound of the television.

Scooby Doo was trying to solve a mystery with his human friends. Or is it the other way around? The humans try to solve a mystery with their dog? And yet, if it was the other way around, why would it be named after the dog specifically? It was one of her favorite shows, but sometimes she just doesn't get it. Dogs can't talk. Or maybe they can, and you have to be wearing a specific color all the time to hear it. Velma is orange, Daphne purple, Shaggy green, Fred blue… Parker thinks she'd like to be yellow, cause her hair is kind of yellow, and she thinks it might be fitting.

"His reservation is conveniently 'lost', and I overrode the system so everytime he tries to rebook his ticket it will delete it automatically in the computer. Should keep him busy for a bit," Hardison tells her, then looks up at the girl across from him.

Parker doesn't look at him, or at least, she was pretending not to. Peripheral vision and all that. But she can see Hardison narrow his eyes at her, as if trying to study her, before he gets up and comes over to sit next to her on the couch.

Right next to her, on the small little couch. Parker's trying to breathe. She can, but not well, but she thinks she's gotten better at hiding Spaz-Parker's tendencies.

"Are you pissed at me about something?" Hardison asks her.

"No," Parker answers shortly, and doesn't look at him. Spaz-Parker tended to get… spazztastic when she does that. Yes, it's a word.

"Cause you've been acting weird ever since I told you I looked up your mother," Hardison continues, then pauses as something clicks in his head and he says slowly, "In New York… near here. Is that why you've been…? Cause of her? Her being near here?"

"What?" Parker asks, and turns to look at him finally. Then her eyes widen. She didn't even think of that. Why didn't she think of that? She's been so busy trying to play keep away her feelings from Hardison that she didn't even realize she was in the same city her mother was. How is she supposed to feel about that? Did she feel something about that… at all? She couldn't figure out what this feeling was inside of her, so she couldn't name it properly.

"Your mother," Hardison repeats, and looks at her, attempting to gage her reaction.

"My mother," Parker repeats softly, just staring at him. Usually staring at him directly resulted in a spaz lately, but now she's too caught up in different kinds of thoughts to spaz on cue. Is there a spaz cue? Parker thinks briefly she should look for one so she can stop it before she gets… cued. Cued up to… spaz?

Crap, she's confusing herself.

"What?" Parker asks again, and looks at him like he said something foreign, except he said nothing at all. He's looking at her, partly in worry, and she shakes her head to get herself out of her own thoughts. "No," she says, and blinks a couple times. Then she turns her head away, back to the television, "No."

Her mother is here… somewhere close by. She doesn't know what to think about that, what to do about that. Should she do something about that? Probably not, her mother hasn't seen her in almost twenty years.

"Then why have you been acting like you hate me or somethin'?" Hardison asks her, and Parker hears the change in the pitch of his voice. She's not sure what that means, but she has an idea.

She flickers her eyes over to glance at him before looking back at the television. "I don't hate you," she told him, and tried to keep her voice steady so she didn't have that change of pitch like he did that would reveal things she didn't want him to know.

There's a silence that settles in around the two of them again, all except for the dull noise of the television set. Finally Hardison gets up and goes over to his luggage. Parker watches him curiously, until he turns around and she diverts her eyes back to Scooby Doo. When he sits back down he hands something to her, "Here."

Parker glances at him briefly, then down to what he was giving her. And then this feeling, this warm, good feeling spread all over her. She found herself smiling as she took the paper from him. The picture of her mother. "Figured you'd want it," he tells her, and she looks up at him.

She doesn't know where it came from exactly, or why she found herself doing it, but suddenly her arms are around him. She practically pounced, which made him have to keep his balance from the force, and let out of "Oof!" as she squeezes him. He looks surprised, and hell, she was even surprised that she did it. The only time she had ever hugged any of them was when she as doped up on anti-psychotics. She was never really a touchy-feely person, but for some reason, she just needed to.

And then she was up, quicker than lightning, and off to put it someplace safe in her luggage. She can see Hardison watching her with a goofy looking smile on his face from her physical contact, and even though it looks almost cartoonish, she smiles to herself, turning away so he can't see, because she finds it cute.

Turning to face him finally after it was tucked away safely she tells him, "We should go make snow angels."

"What?" he asks, momentarily taken out of his own thoughts by her suggestion.

"Snow angels. You lay down in the snow and—"

"I know what they are," Hardison tells her, and cracks a smile, liking that things were becoming a bit more normal. He glances outside at the falling snow for a minute as if contemplating the idea. Then he looks back at her and shrugs, "Why not?"

Parker hops a little in glee, and grabs her jacket. Twenty minutes later they were in the middle of a small park. The sun was setting in the distance, and the children were being filed back into their apartments by their mothers. Parker bites her lower lip softly, just looking at all the snow around her… and then takes off running.

"Parker!" Hardison calls after her, but she doesn't listen. She just wants to run. It's bit difficult in the snow, and she probably looked funny since she was almost hopping in and out of the two and a half feet of it, but it was still fun. But then she kind of tripped in it, sinking a bit too deep and not being able to pull her foot out in time and she falls. She giggles as she hits the snow and lies back, looking up at the sky. It was cold, but it wasn't too bad. She hears another "Parker!" from Hardison before he finds her.

He stands over her, and Parker just giggles again as she looks up at him. She can't help but think about how beautiful he looks, his dark skin up against the dimly lighten sky, snow flakes falling all around him, so she just stares at him. She probably has this stupid smile on her face, but she can't find it in her to care. She loves being in the snow, having fun, playing, too much to care about anything else. This is bliss for her.

She holds out her gloved hands to him and he smirks a bit as he takes them, trying to help her up. But instead of her going up, she pulls hard and he lets out a yelp as he falls into the snow next to her. He sputters a bit as the snow gets in his face and as he wipes it off with his glove, Parker can't help but laugh. "You can't make a snow angel up there," she tells him.

"Little warning would have been nice though," Hardison replies, but he doesn't seem too mad. But then he looks at their positions, them right next to each other and adds, "But now we don't have enough room to make snow angels."

"Yeah we do," Parker tells him, and moves over just a bit so their shoulders are touching. "We can do half an half. You do your right side and I'll do my left. It'll look like a fat person did it."

Hardison can't help but laugh, "A pretty deformed fat person, but if you say so…"

"I say so," Parker confirms with a smile, and then they start. It was a bit hard for them to only do it on one side, or maybe it was a bit hard for Parker to adjust to it because she wanted to do her right side too and continued to kick Hardison a bit on the shins. After so many sorry's, Hardison stopped complaining. Parker thinks he's accepted the bruises already.

They both get up and looked at their artwork. Parker tilts her head and peers down at it, "You're right, it looks deformed." She frowns a bit. "Our poor fat person..."

Hardison laughs, "Told you. You should listen to me more often."

Parker just continues to stare down at their double snow angel deformed fat person, and doesn't even notice Hardison has moved a little bit away from her. Or at least, she didn't notice until she got pelted with a snowball. "Hey!" she exclaims, but then a wicked grin forms across her face as she picks up some snow. Hardison's eyes go wide and he starts running a bit, well, as much as he can through the steep snow. But she throws it and it hits him square on his back.

As he stumbles Parker sees him pick up some more snow, which makes her retreat. He misses the first time and she lets out a, "HA!" before she gets pelted with the second one in the chest. She shrieks and giggles and as she runs she's trying to gather as much snow as she can, pelting snowballs at him as he chases her.

It went on for awhile until Hardison finally catches up to her, but then he trips and falls into her, bringing them both down into the snow. Parker's in a fit of giggles that it takes awhile for her to get out of, and as she rolls onto her back she tells him, "I win."

"Girl, you wish. I am the snowball king," Hardison tells her, and Parker just smiles as she looks up into the sky, watching the snow fall.

There's silence for a while as both of them just lay there. Then Parker tells him, "They're like fairies."

"What are?" Hardison asks, and looks over at her. Parker points up into the sky, at the snow.

"The flakes. Little fairies. Flying, coming down to Earth from... wherever."

Hardison snorts, "I think I've made you watch too much Doctor Who if you're implying fairies are like aliens."

"They could be," Parker tells him in all seriousness. She looks over at him and asks, "How would you know?"

"I wouldn't," Hardison says, then shugs. He looks back up into the sky, at the snow flakes that are falling softly. "Maybe they are."

Then he's looking at her again, turned on his side as he props his head up as he leans on his elbow. Parker looks over at him, and then a funny feeling hits her and she doesn't know where it came from. Hardison was pretty again, the light and the snow and his pretty skin. It made her feel a little funny, so she just looks at him. She finds she can't say anything, like her mouth isn't working. Which is a change, since usually everything that comes into her brain tends to fall out of her mouth automatically.

"You got snow right…" Hardison tells her softly, and flicks a couple flakes off of her cheek softly. "There."

Parker can hear her own heart beating. It was getting louder, faster, and she wasn't sure why.

She does the only thing she can think of, her raises her hand to gently wipe the snow flakes off of his own face. He did it; she figured she's supposed to now. But the funny feeling was getting deeper, more predominant, like it was sinking right into her stomach and started freaking out because it couldn't figure out where to go next. The silence was long, deafening, which made it so much easier to hear how much her breathing had picked up.

She can hear a car pass, then another. She can hear the wind rustle through the trees, and she can hear her breathing again. Her stupid breathing, that seemed so very loud all of a sudden even though she's sure it can't possibly as loud as she thinks it is. Has Hardison gotten closer to her? Or did she move?

"We should…" Hardison starts to tell her, implying going back. Parker notices that his voice is lower, deeper, softer. And when she goes to reply, she realizes hers has gotten that way too, but she doesn't know why since she didn't explicitly give it permission too. It wasn't following the orders her brain was screaming to it.

"Yeah…" she replied, but yet neither of them moved to get up. Instead they're faces were almost touching, and Parker could feel his breath on her lips, and by how many bursts of it there was in such a short time she had noticed hers wasn't the only one that picked up. She closes her eyes, not knowing what to do. Needing to not look at him so she has time to think, but her brain seems to be stuck, unmoving, unthinking. All there is is the breathing, and the heartbeats, and the wind, trees, cars…

His lips touch hers, but only just barely. Parker gets scared and ducks her head down, out of the way so he couldn't do that anymore. She doesn't open her eyes, she still can't think. Her senses seem to be on overload, screaming at her all these things and yet not saying a word at all.

"Sorry, I just… sorry," Hardison apologizes softly, almost automatically, and moves to get away from her. But then Parker grabs him, her body changing it's mind without any kind of conversation or permission from her mind, and then her lips are pressed against his… and she's kissing him.

Oh god, she was kissing Hardison.

There were lips and tongues involved, and she realizes she must have been part at fault at them getting closer to begin with because her full back was only just now against the ground as Hardison was on top of her. There were feelings and tingles and shivers and there… there was just so much that it started to become scary. Too scary. The kind of scary she doesn't know how to quite deal with, so she chooses to not deal with it at all.

Parker breaks the kiss and sits up a bit, forcing Hardison to climb off of her gently. Parker can't look at him, and she sure as hell can't breathe. "It's dark," she tells him, the only thing she can get out of her mouth at the moment and she gets up, out of the snow, and doesn't even wait for him to say anything before she starts running back towards the hotel room.

"Parker! Parker, hey, wait!"

But Parker doesn't wait, she just runs. She runs because it's the only thing she knows how to do. She runs because it's the only thing she's been good at doing her whole life.

TBC…