A/N: So this story has been on hiatus forever, but I finally figured out where I want it to go next. Leverage doesn't belong to me. Reviews are always appreciated!
Three Months Later
It was a quiet night at the offices of Leverage Consulting and Associates, version 2.0, otherwise known as Nate's apartment. Hardison sat alone in the living room, drinking an orange soda and flipping channels on the TV. Nate was upstairs, presumably asleep. All of the others had left hours ago, but Hardison had stuck around. Initially, it had been to finish compiling the surveillance data for their latest job, but once he'd finished he hadn't been able to work up the momentum to get up off the couch and go home. It wouldn't be the first time one of them had crashed on Nate's couch; they'd all slept there on occasion. It was actually pretty comfortable.
He paused for a moment on the local news, his eye caught by the 'breaking news' alert, and he turned the volume up a little.
"- fourth shooting in Quincy in as many days. The police have no leads as to the shooter's identity and are asking anyone with any information to call -"
He resumed his channel surfing, settling on a rerun of Buffy as his thoughts turned to Tessa. Any mention of murders or suspicious deaths made him think of her nowadays.
Despite his initial reservations about her presence in Boston, Tessa hadn't made any trouble for the team. She didn't spend much time with them when she was in town, and she wasn't in town that often. In the last three months, she'd worked at least a dozen jobs, all of them outside Massachusetts. She'd been gone more than she'd been here, and Hardison actually noticed her more in her absence than anything else. When she was gone, Eliot was more irritable, less likely to tolerate the petty day-to-day conflicts with his teammates that inevitably arose. Tessa had been gone for two weeks this time, and this morning Eliot had nearly taken his head off for eating the strawberries in Nate's fridge. It wasn't like he'd known that Eliot was planning to make a strawberry shortcake with them. He hadn't even known Eliot baked. He cooked, sure, but baking was more of a girl thing.
At least he'd been smart enough not to say that to Eliot. He liked his nose just the way it was. He didn't want to give Eliot an excuse to flatten it.
Hardison had fallen asleep three episodes into what was apparently a Buffy marathon. He woke up with the sun shining in through Nate's window and the delicious smell of homemade pancakes invading his nostrils. Eliot hadn't made pancakes in weeks.
In two weeks, specifically.
He was unsurprised to find Tessa sitting at the kitchen counter, watching Eliot as he flipped the pancakes in the pan with an expert jerk of his wrist.
"Morning, guys," he said, earning a grunt from Eliot and a wordless wave from Tessa, whose mouth was full of pancake. "Yo, Eliot, hook a brother up with some pancakes."
"I'm not your brother," Eliot muttered, but he was already putting a fresh batch onto a plate. He shoved it at Hardison, who contemplated needling him for his crankiness but vetoed that idea in favor of enjoying his pancakes without tempting Eliot to take them away from him. Eliot's triple-berry buttermilk pancakes were the stuff of legends, and he wasn't going to risk losing his share just because Tessa's return hadn't cured Eliot's bad attitude this time.
"Did you have a nice trip?" he said instead, directing the question to Tessa, who had washed down her mouthful with a long swig of coffee. She looked like she hadn't slept in days.
"Delightful," she replied, her tone dry. She didn't elaborate, which was probably for the best. He wasn't sure he wanted to know what she'd been up to.
There was a rustling from upstairs; Nate, who must have caught the scent of pancakes and coffee. Tessa turned her head to look for the source of the noise and Hardison saw the bruises on the side of her face. Suddenly, Eliot's crankiness made sense.
"You want some more?" Eliot asked, interrupting Hardison's train of thought, and although he wasn't even halfway through his first serving, he didn't hesitate.
"Yeah, man, absolutely."
Eliot's glare could have withered an entire forest.
"I wasn't. Talking. To you."
Tessa's gaze flicked from Eliot to Hardison, who caught her eye and mouthed 'ouch', miming pulling a knife from his heart. She laughed at his antics and nearly choked on her coffee, which earned Hardison another glare from Eliot.
"Tess?" Eliot prompted, and she shook her head, setting down her coffee cup. Her wrist was bandaged, Hardison noticed belatedly, and he wondered what other injuries she was concealing.
"Nah. I need to get some sleep. I'm going to head upstairs." She slid off of the barstool, favoring her left leg, and brushed a kiss against Eliot's cheek as she passed him.
Hardison saw the indecision on the hitter's face and was pretty sure he knew the cause. Usually, when Tessa returned from a job, Eliot disappeared for a day or so. None of them ever asked where he went because it was obvious that he was spending the day with her. This time she'd come back hurt, so the protective streak that Eliot tried so hard to hide had to be working overtime, but the team was supposed to be meeting in fifteen minutes to work out the game plan for their current mission. He couldn't just disappear upstairs with her right now.
"Y'know, the couch is really comfortable," Hardison said, before he'd realized he was going to say anything. "We all sleep there. I slept there last night, and I feel very refreshed. It's got some, uh, like some lumbar support or something, and it's really good for your back." He gestured to his own back as proof, feeling like an idiot but unable to think of a graceful way out of the conversation he'd foolishly started. "You could try it out. I mean, if you wanted to."
He wasn't sure how to interpret the tiny smile that Tessa gave him, but when he finally made himself look over at Eliot, the hitter's expression told him that he'd made the right move, however clumsily he'd done it.
"He's right about that couch," Eliot said, pouring more pancake batter into the frying pan. "You should try it out."
"With such a ringing endorsement, I think I'll have to."
She didn't say anything else to either of them, but as she limped past Hardison, she kissed his cheek the same way she had Eliot's. He ducked his head to hide his smile and went to grab the spare blanket from the hall closet. By the time he returned with it, Tessa was already asleep, sprawled haphazardly across the couch.
"Give me that," Eliot said from behind him, and took the blanket from Hardison's unresisting grasp. Hardison watched the hitter tuck the blanket around her still form, brushing her hair away from her face with a surprisingly gentle hand.
"That's sweet," Hardison murmured to himself, wishing Sophie had been here to see the typically gruff Eliot tucking his assassin girlfriend in as though she was as fragile as spun glass.
"Huh?" Eliot asked, half-turning to look at Hardison, who immediately rethought the wisdom of calling Eliot 'sweet' where there was a chance Eliot might hear him.
"I said let's eat," he replied quickly, not waiting around to see if Eliot bought the lie. "My pancakes are over here getting cold, and Nate's are gonna burn."
Eliot returned to the kitchen with a muffled curse, but managed to rescue the pancakes. He started another batch as Nate came downstairs, fully dressed but still rubbing his eyes sleepily.
"I smell pancakes," Nate began, but cut himself off when Eliot shoved a full plate in his direction. "Ah. Thanks."
"I went over the surveillance from Bellington's house," Hardison said softly, with a glance toward the living room. "We got some good stuff. He made a call yesterday –"
"Hardison," Nate interrupted, his voice pitched as low as the hacker's as he leaned conspiratorially toward him.
"What?"
"Why are we whispering?"
"We're whispering?" Without warning, Parker had appeared behind Nate - from where, Hardison wasn't sure, and it would only give him a headache to try and figure out how she'd gotten into the apartment. "Why? Are we telling secrets?"
"No, we're trying not to wake up Tessa, who's asleep on Nate's couch," Hardison said, with a nod toward the couch. Nate straightened, looking like he might have something to say about that arrangement, but Parker cut him off.
"Tessa's back?" she said, perking up. "She was supposed to bring me a present -"
"Let her sleep," Eliot interrupted, handing Parker a plate of pancakes. "Here. Eat your breakfast. You can have your present later."
"So she did bring me something?" Parker bounced in her seat as she stuffed a whole pancake into her mouth with her bare hands. "What is it? Is it money? Did she steal it?"
"Don't talk with your mouth full," Eliot scolded her, exasperated. "And use a fork. You weren't raised in a barn."
"What does that have to do with anything?" asked Parker, sounding baffled. "Do barns have forks?"
"Never mind," Nate said, cutting off the argument before it could begin in earnest. "Let's just try and keep it down, all right?"
Parker muttered something about barns having pitchforks, and then frowned at Nate.
"Wait. I still don't understand why we're whispering."
"Because Tessa is sleeping," Hardison repeated patiently.
"Then shouldn't we just talk normally?" Parker looked over to Eliot for confirmation. "Doesn't she sleep like you sleep?"
Eliot looked pained, and Hardison guessed that whatever Parker was talking about wasn't something Eliot had planned on sharing with the whole team.
"How does he sleep?" Nate asked, interested.
"He says that people are easier to kill when they're sleeping, and if someone wants to kill you while you're asleep they'll try to sneak up on you and be quiet and whisper, and so he learned to wake up if people are being sneaky around him. So if I'm going to break into his place in the middle of the night, I need to make regular people noises and not sneaky noises so he doesn't wake up and think I'm someone who's trying to kill him."
"Why are you breaking into his place in the middle of the night?" demanded Hardison, and Parker shrugged.
"I get bored. And he's not usually asleep. Only sometimes."
"Tessa is okay with you breaking into Eliot's place?" Nate asked. Parker gave him a puzzled look.
"Why would Tessa care? It's not like I do it when she's there."
"You don't?"
"Nope. When she's there, I'm supposed to knock so she doesn't shoot me."
The sound of the front door opening was music to Eliot's ears. Maybe Sophie's arrival would give him the opportunity to redirect this conversation to a topic that wasn't going to result in bloodshed.
"Sorry I'm late," Sophie called to them, shutting the door and making a beeline for the kitchen. She barely even hesitated when she noticed Tessa asleep on the couch, and Eliot gave her points for not bringing it up. "Ooh, do I smell pancakes?"
Eliot handed her the plate he'd been saving for her. "Can we get started now?" he demanded, with a glare for Hardison that promised painful retribution if he didn't start talking about the job.
"Uh, yeah. Okay. So, I put together the surveillance on Bellington, and I found some interesting stuff."
He cued up the presentation to the screen in the dining room and launched into a detailed explanation of their mark's financial information. Anything to get Eliot to stop giving him that look.
Their planning session lasted two and a half hours. Eliot suspected Tessa hadn't really slept much - she wasn't used to sleeping in a room full of people, and it was hardly secure - but she gave every appearance of being asleep when the meeting finally broke up and he went over to wake her.
"Tess," he murmured, his hand touching her shoulder. "Hey. You up?"
"I am now," she replied, stretching lazily and yawning before letting Eliot pull her up to a sitting position. "This really is a nice couch."
"Can I have my present now?" Parker asked from the other side of the room, and Tessa smiled at Eliot.
"It's in my bag by the door, Parker."
Parker took off across the room, digging through Tessa's bag with abandon, and then stopped abruptly.
"Um…it's not a gun, is it? Like the one Sullivan got for you?"
"There is no gun like the gun that Sullivan got for me," Tessa replied, warming to the topic the same way she did whenever anyone brought it up. "She stole me the Philadelphia Derringer that John Wilkes Booth used to assassinate Lincoln. The actual gun. That was one of the most famous assassinations of all time."
"It's not like the security at the Ford's Theater Museum is that great," Parker muttered, and Tessa grinned.
"All of the guns in that bag are mine," she told Parker. "The papers in the envelope are for you."
Parker pulled out the envelope, coming back over to drop down onto the couch next to Tessa as she opened it.
"What did you - oh." Parker had finally gotten a look at Tessa's face, and she froze as she took in the hunter's battered appearance. "What happened to you?"
"Occupational hazard," Tessa replied, shrugging off the question. "Open the envelope."
Parker tore open the flap obediently and pulled out a thin stack of papers.
"Ooh, blueprints," she said, admiring the floor plan in front of her. "It looks like a museum, but I don't recognize it. It's pretty small…maybe eighty thousand square feet, total."
"That's small?" Eliot asked, and Parker shrugged.
"By museum standards it is," she pointed out. "The Louvre is six hundred and fifty-two thousand square feet. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is over two million."
"I'm not even surprised that you know that."
"It's the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh," Tessa said, interrupting Eliot.
Parker gave Tessa one of the looks that Eliot usually gave Parker, the ones that suggested there might be something wrong with her.
"Thanks?" Parker guessed, and Tessa laughed.
"They have a new exhibit coming next month that I thought you might like to take a private look at," Tessa explained. "It's a collection of famous people's childhood toys, including a bunch of stuffed animals."
"Seriously?" Parker asked, her face lighting up with excitement.
"There's a brochure under the blueprints."
The blonde flipped through the papers until she found the brochure, reading snippets of it aloud in wonder to Eliot and Tessa.
"Elvis Presley's teddy bear Mabel…I thought she got chewed up by a dog, but I guess they fixed her up. Oh, and Teddy from Gilligan's Island, and the other Teddy who belonged to Mr. Bean."
"I don't know if there will be any bunnies, but maybe Bunny would like to see it anyway."
"Bunny will love it," Parker declared, hugging the blueprints possessively to her chest. "This is awesome."
Tessa extended her arms to Parker, who hesitated for a second and then leaned into the embrace. Parker wasn't used to people just hugging her like that, but Tessa did it a lot. She only did it to her and Eliot, though, and when she'd asked Eliot about it he'd said that if Parker didn't want Tessa to hug her, she should just tell her to stop. Parker didn't want her to stop, really, she just wanted to know why Tessa hugged her but not Sophie or Nate or Hardison. Sophie was a really good hugger, but Parker was mostly awkward about it, and she had pointy elbows. If Tessa was going to pick someone on the team to hug, she'd probably do better hugging Sophie than Parker.
Eliot had shrugged at that and pointed out that Tessa knew Parker better than she knew the other three. It was true that Parker had been spending a lot of time with Eliot and Tessa; Nate and Sophie had been doing their weird kind-of-flirting stuff again, and Hardison had gotten a new video game that he played nonstop, so she'd been bored lately. And when Tessa was around, she was really fun to play with. She liked trying out Parker's new rigs, and she'd taught Parker a bunch of stuff about guns, and she was nice to Bunny. And when Tessa wasn't around…
Parker thought that when Tessa wasn't around, Eliot was probably sad. People were sad when the people they loved were gone. Eliot loved Tessa, and Parker loved Eliot - not boyfriend-girlfriend love, but some other kind of love where he thought she was weird but he still liked her and she thought he was nice even when he was cranky. She figured that if Tessa couldn't be with Eliot, she could go over to his place and keep him company. The first time she'd done it, he hadn't realized it was her breaking into his place and he'd thrown a knife at her, but she'd ducked, and after that they'd worked out a system so he'd know it was her and not somebody trying to kill him.
"Parker," Eliot said, and his tone of voice told her that this wasn't the first time he'd tried to get her attention.
"What?" she asked, startled. Eliot made one of his irritated faces.
"Tess needs to go upstairs and get some sleep."
"Okay," Parker agreed, and then realized that she still had her arms around Tessa. "Oh. Right."
She released Tessa and Eliot took her place, sliding his arm around Tessa's waist and pulling her to her feet.
"I'm fine, Eliot," Tessa insisted, and then hissed in pain when she put too much weight on her injured knee.
"Yeah, you're fine," Eliot retorted, sarcastic. "Parker, grab her bag and go open the door to my place, will you?"
Over Tessa's protests, Eliot picked her up, carrying her out of Nate's place and up the stairs. Once they were safely upstairs, Parker disappeared; probably back down to Nate's place, although with her anything was possible. Eliot grabbed a sports drink from the fridge, an ice pack from the freezer, and two bottles of pills from his extensive medicine cabinet, bringing all of it into the bedroom. Tessa was lying right where he'd left her, curled up on top of the duvet.
"Let me see that knee, darlin'," he said, and she rolled obediently onto her back, letting him pull off her jeans and inspect her swollen knee.
"It's just sprained," she told him. "I got lucky, Eliot. Sprained knee, sprained wrist, black eye. Small-time stuff."
"On a big-time job," Eliot added, placing the ice pack on her knee and handing her a couple of pills from each bottle. "Here. Anti-inflammatories and analgesics. No narcotics." He waited while she took the pills, washing them down with the purple Gatorade he'd brought her. "You're working too hard, Tess."
"That's rich, coming from you."
"I'm serious," he insisted. "Maybe our team works as many jobs a month as you do, but we do them as a team. You're working alone. It's more difficult and it's more dangerous."
She opened her mouth to argue with him, then shut it again, shaking her head.
"You're right."
"And you can't…" He trailed off as her words registered. "What?"
"You're right, Eliot," she sighed. "I never did this many jobs in Europe. I just - being back here in the US is weird for me, and now you have this incredible team that shouldn't work but it does, somehow, and I want to get to know them without interfering with your work, but I also feel the need to prove to myself that I can still do my job on my own. I think maybe I'm just - I don't know. Overwhelmed."
"Tess."
"Eliot." She gave him a wan smile, squeezing his hand. "I'm fine. I'll be fine. You guys are leaving in an hour."
He growled at the reminder. He really didn't like having to leave her here alone while she was injured.
"We're talking about this when I get back."
That earned him a 'whatever' gesture as she settled in for another nap, and he stole a quick kiss as he grabbed his pre-packed duffle bag.
"Do me a favor, Tess. The team is only gonna be in Arizona for a couple of days. Don't take any more jobs while I'm gone."
"Eliot -"
"Just take a little break, darlin'. That's all I'm asking. It'll be fun. You can sleep in, take bubble baths, watch Nate's big screen TV…"
"This is really important to you, isn't it?" She'd opened her eyes again and was watching him with interest. "All right. If you insist, I'll take a couple of days off."
"Really?"
"Really."
"You promise?"
She snorted with laughter. "What is this, the third grade? I pinky swear, Eliot. I won't take any new jobs while you're gone."
"Good." He paused, knowing he had to get back down to Nate's but wanting to spend just a little while longer with her. "Did you know that the pinky swearing thing started with the Yakuza? If they offended their boss, they had to cut off part of their pinky finger as penance."
"I remember," she said, with a note of humor that surprised him. "It still makes me smile when I think about it."
He almost asked, and then he remembered that the Yakuza leader she'd assassinated had turned up missing a finger. The cops had thought he'd cut it off himself before slitting his wrists, since the finger had been next to the body and there was no sign that anyone else had been in the house.
"Remind me not to piss you off," he told her, tossing her an extra blanket as he headed for the door, and her laughter followed him out into the hallway.