Rating:Pg
Characters: Nate+Team
Prompt/Prompter: He chased them all before.
Notes: If anyone is curious about the Eliot bit it's refferencing an older story of mine called Cell Number Eight.
Creatures Not Meant to Be Caged
The first time he caught Parker (the only time he caught Parker) it was an accident. He was auditing a claim, checking over the details of a security system for a museum who he had a feeling were lieing about something, when he walked into a room to find a little blonde slip of a thing stealing what looked like the better portion of the antique diamond necklace exhibit.
He wasn't sure which of them was more surprised.
He recovered first, catching her and handcuffing her and recovering the stolen goods. It wasn't until he was calling for security that it registered that she couldn't possibly be older than eighteen and was probably younger.
It also looked like whatever money she was going to be making from this heist would be the first she'd seen in a long time.
The fact she held her ribs when she thought he wasn't looking like they weren't quite healed from a break… well that would explain a lot.
The guards came and took her away and he got back to his real work.
He wasn't as disappointed as he should have been when he found out she escaped within an hour of his capturing her.
The first time he caught Sophie… well it really depends on your definition of the word. Demascus comes to mind, but then again she slipped away nearly as quickly as he captured her. A few years later in Paris he caught her in a different sense and they danced around one another for the time it took them to take out a mutual enemy.
He thinks somewhere along the line he captured her heart but he isn't sure when or where.
The first time Nate caught Eliot was in Italy. He'd chased the hitter across the borders of nine (or ten, he wasn't entirely sure if Eliot's side trip counted since Nate didn't pick his trail back up until he'd crossed another border) countries over the course of a month slowly but surely catching up to him.
Of course when they met in that interrogation room in an Italian Prison it wasn't the first time they met, just the first time they'd seen each other in five years. It had been a long road since they first met, an odd twist of fate landing them in the same cell in Cairo on one of the worst days Nate had had to date. It had been a long time since they saved each other's lives in that hell hole and escaped together.
Eliot told him where to find what Nate was looking for.
Nate was secretly pleased when he heard Eliot escaped not long later. Eliot was a thief and Sterling sometimes said men like him were no better than animals, and it had taken years before Nate started to firmly disagree with that theory.
But man or animal Nate knew Eliot Spencer was not meant to be caged.
He never actually caught Hardison. Hardison was only starting to appear on the IYS raydar when Sam started getting sick. Actually one of his last cases was tracking a ring of hackers. He'd just started to pin down Hardison's profile when he got a distress call from Maggie that Sam was getting sicker than even before.
He dropped the investigation and then life happened and he never finished tracking down the hacker.
It's a random night when they're celebrating a job well done when Parker tells Hardison that Nate was the only one to ever catch her. Hardison follows this by announcing he's clearly the best thief in the lot because Nate never caught him.
It's later (after Eliot threatened Hardison enough to make him shut up) when things have quieted down that Nate notes theres something *off* with Hardison. His smiles are almost forced. He's laughing too loud and talking to quickly and if Nate didn't know better he'd almost think that…
"You know, insane as it sounds, we like that you caught us." Sophie says next to him, taking a seat. "In a world where we're not seen, not noticed, except for what we steal and even then it's about what we've taken and never about us… that you saw us, chased us, caught us… It made you special."
Nate looks back toward Hardison, trying to understand. "But I chased him." Nate pointed out, not mentioning that the one time he did catch Parker he hadn't been chasing her (though he'd chase her plenty later).
"But you never caught him." Sophie said. "And because you didn't he'll never know whether or not you would have cared enough to let him go."
She left before Nate could argue that he'd never let them go. A smile thrown over her shoulder as she left told him she knew he'd never said anything about the fact they'd all been much more than the security that had been holding them could keep caged.
He hadn't let them go, but he hadn't done anything to stop them from escaping.
In a way he'd seen them all as creatures not meant to be caged.