Notes: Chapter Title comes from the Song Mr. Seeker by Creed.
Chapter Two
Mr. Seeker
Flintwood Youth Center L.A.
18 years ago
He was waiting.
For what? He wasn't entirely certain. A sign maybe. Something to force his hand.
He should just leave. He could just leave.
But that didn't really matter, did it?
"Are you ready?"
Eliot looked up, surprised by the voice. The boy, man now really, approaching him seemed like a stranger.
A part of him learned long ago to fear strangers, even if he knew this man wasn't really a stranger.
They were at the doors of the youth center, his home for a few short but eternally long years after he met Samuel and his life was forever changed. The place both he and this stranger called home.
"Charlie?" He asked, uncertain.
"Are you ready?" Charlie asked again, that smile everyone around here recognized gracing his lips.
Eliot had to look away, almost afraid that what was whipping through his mind would show in his face.
"Yes," Eliot told him.
A hand took his own, shockingly gentle and surprisingly warm despite the chill in the air. "Lets go in then. They're waiting for you, aren't they sensei?" The man mocked gently. The thought of the students brought a small smile to Eliot's lips to match and making those last few steps easier.
Yes, they were waiting for him.
In the darkness a light appeared between him and Charlie, bright fire, the sign he'd been looking for.
The fingers intertwined with his own promised a new path to take, of burning down old worlds and raising new hell, of wind and fire.
Of fate.
The fire burned brighter against the night and they walked into the waiting darkness of the building.
London, Present Day
His mind was spinning. Charlie? Dead? Suicide?
He blinked against the afterimage of the nineteen year old boy racing next to him into the youth center. Of long days spent on the streets learning to survive and short but wild nights learning to live.
He reached for the door, ready to leave, get the fuck to LA and find out what the hell had happened.
He could still feel the weight of Charlie's hand on his shoulder from barely a few weeks ago. Charlie had surprised him by visiting Boston and the two had spent a night just walking through the city, catching up.
They were always catching up it seemed. Ever since they'd lost contact after Eliot left LA for the first time, they'd never had enough time together to do anything but play catch up. It had taken them eight years to find each other again and in the years between then and now Eliot could count on one hand the number of times they'd been together for longer than twenty-four hours.
He'd never even gotten around to thanking Charlie for N-
The sensation of a hand on his shoulder became very real.
Eliot turned sharply, half surprised to find it was Sophie, though he wasn't sure why he'd thought she would just let him walk out like this. "I have ta go," he said again. "An' old friend of mine died. I need to find out why."
Sophie's face was unreadable as she answered. "Tara's already looking into it. I'm sure she'll call as soon as she knows something."
Eliot couldn't even begin to construct a polite response to that statement. They both knew it wasn't true.
"'m going Sophie." He said, turning away again. He needed to get out and get some air and figure out what the hell had gone wrong. Charlie was a specialist, same as Eliot, and he'd been fine when they'd last seen each other. A little worried. A little paranoid. But that was normal for both of them.
"Then wait ten minutes and let me grab my bag, because I'm coming with you."
That took him off guard enough that it took him a half second to respond. "No Sophie. You're stayin' here or 'least stayin' away. There's stuff goin' down and I don't want you around if things turn out badly."
"I wasn't asking." Sophie shot back, her voice clipped. "This obviously has you off balance and from what I saw earlier your head wasn't anywhere near clear to begin with. You need to stop running off by yourself and let us help you for once."
"I need to stop running?" he asked, his voice perfectly, icily, calm. "Look where we are! You ran off to London and left us ta try to pick up the pieces. Hardison's been freaked, he almost got killed, Parker's been fuckin' scared. I was the one who had to pick up the pieces you left us in and try to pretend I wasn't worryin' about you because if either of them thought I was just a little worried they'd freak out even more. And don't even get me started on Nate. You don't get ta talk about runnin' off to me."
Her expression, almost startled at first turned snide. "Don't get you started on Nate?" The snarky tone and perfectly posed expression would have hidden the hurt from anyone who didn't know her as well as the team. "Finally figured out what he had now has he?"
The forced control of his voice almost broke at that. "Tell me this isn't about Nate. That you didn't fucking leave us because I stole your boy toy and you wanted to teach him a lesson."
Something in her eyes changed, the tone of her voice shifting from icy to almost brittle. "It's not," she almost whispered, eyes fleeting away from him. "…not completely and… not like that. Eliot, you know I wouldn't leave you all just because of that."
The emotion, he wasn't even sure what it was, seemed genuine in a way he wasn't used to seeing from her. She actually seemed… vulnerable… and he found himself softening his tone to match. "But it is part of it."
She folded her arms around herself, making her look surprisingly, frighteningly small. "I told him I left to find myself, learn who I was, and when I came back I'd tell him my real name. Truth is I don't have one. My mother was a grifter… she never gave me one. I… Sophie's the closest I've ever come to having an identity. This team… this family… it grounded her. Gave me a reason to keep her… but she was created as someone for Nathan Ford to chase and somewhere along the line she became someone meant for him to love and maybe in another story he would have. But now… she's a dead end Eliot. She's been changing and growing and… she's not Sophie anymore. I'm not Sophie anymore."
Silence. He didn't know what to say.
He didn't think she'd ever been this honest with him.
Then she seemed to snap out of wherever her mind had gone and she covered again but there was an expression that made him think that maybe she'd never been that honest before with anyone.
Maybe not even herself.
"I'm sure he hardly notices I'm gone in any case," she said, recovering a bit of her normal voice.
"He knows you're gone," Eliot told her, repaying honesty with honesty and maybe just… so much that had been up in the air was coming out. Feelings and thoughts pressed back and denied for so long being spoken almost as they finally allowed to exist. "Trust me. He knows."
She looked up at him, something in her expression making him the one to look away this time.
"I might have been the one he got but you're the one he's always wanted." The words burned as they came out. "I just… I put out first." He gave a cold bitter laugh. "Put myself in his way. Took care of him. Didn't leave when I damn well should have. You played hard to get, nah, you showed dignity, standards. I just threw myself at him, knowing even as broken as he was, even if he never got better, it was more than I deserved." He shook his head. "Even now there are some days I think if you came back for him he'd choose you."
A shrug, forced disinterest, mentally shoving away the feelings trying to smother him from the inside. He'd spent the entire relationship knowing that it was probably wasn't going to last. That this was one of those good things in his life that he should enjoy while he could but expect it to end so he'd be ready to move on. Like the team. He wasn't sure when along the line it had gotten out of hand, that thinking that 'this will end someday, probably soon' had become painful.
But he wasn't going to start lying to himself now. He'd just ignore the pain and enjoy it while it lasted.
"He'd be safer with you," he finally added. "Hell, once you figure out who you are maybe you'd be able to fix the problem 'stead of him trying to fix you."
He knew she was moving closer but still flinched unconsciously when she spoke.
"Eliot," she said. He hadn't expected sadness in her voice. He looked up, surprised. "You don't really believe that do you?"
Empathy on her face. Pity.
He pulled away, turning his back, pushing up his walls.
He didn't want her pity. Didn't need her pity.
There was no reason to pity him. He lived in reality. He'd enjoy this ride while it lasted but it wasn't like it was going to break him when it ended.
He'd let that happen once. He knew better now.
And he couldn't exactly expect to meet another Nathan Ford to put him back together if he broke again.
"Go," he said to the door and Sophie. "Get your bag. I'm leaving for the airport as soon as I can get a hold of Hardison." A beat and he heard himself add. "If you're ready to go in time, you can come with me."
She hesitated a moment, the silence and the things said and unsaid hanging heavily in the air before she turned, slipping into her bedroom and leaving him to study the grain of the wood of her door and the afterimage of a blue eye'd boy still swimming through his head.
Los Angeles, CA
18 Years Ago
Blue eyes watching him, always watching, but safe watching, protective watching.
Like his eyes watching Joey.
But he'd never watch Joey exactly like those eyes watched him.
Charlie ran a hand through his hair, gentle, always gentle with him. "Are you sure you want to do this?" he asked Eliot, hesitating another moment. "I… I don't want to hurt you more."
"You won't," Eliot told him, willing his body to relax. It would make this easier if he was relaxed. "I'd rather it be you than anyone else." He hesitated just half a second before saying the words he used to think he'd never say to anyone again. "I trust you. You'll keep me safe."
Charlie wrapped strong arms around him, pulling him closer before letting go. "Are you ready?'
Eliot took a step back, meeting Charlie's eyes and nodding. "Say the words."
Boston, MA
Present Day
Five hours sober, if that even counted as being sober, and the coffee in his hands seemed to taste wrong without the splash of something extra.
Or maybe it was that he didn't seem to be able to make coffee with the same kick Eliot did.
He'd tell himself it was the later.
The newspaper sat on the counter in front of him, the crossword puzzle mostly done but quickly losing the ability to hold his interest.
It was going to be a long two weeks.
"Nate?"
Tara's disembodied voice rang through the apartment and Nate could have sworn five hours was not nearly time enough for the hallucinations to start.
"Nate?" The screens for the briefings blinked into life, the far left showing Tara standing on what looked like the roof of a building, adjusting the laptop and webcam she was using. "Anyone there?"
Leaving the crosswords for the far more interesting mystery of why Tara was contacting him, he crossed over to the briefing area. "I'm here. What's happening?"
"I found us a job." Tara started. "Well… I found a job. I know the teams taking time off but I need to move." She paused, took a breath. "I'll run it solo myself if I have to but I could use any help I could get. Even just having a partner…"
…Interesting… He took a sip of the coffee, not noticing the difference for the first time.
It had been a long time since he'd run a job without the entire team at his back.
"What's the job?"
She typed something on the keyboard and brought up a picture of a tall and wiry man in his middle ages. Nate could almost hear Eliot in the back of his head saying this guy was military, it was a very distinctive stance. "Samuel Kent, career military researcher. Spent most of his younger years climbing the ranks as fast as he could until he got to a point he could run projects of his own. Started studying behavioral conditioning and modification and applying it to condition and train super-soldiers. He had a few breakthroughs and during a study conducted in the eighties actually managed something of a success. Unfortunately a few of the other subjects had psychotic breaks due to the increasingly inhumane experiment and they attacked and killed the success."
Nate nodded, withholding comment.
"He'd been on his way out for awhile, too much money and nothing to show for it but that got enough attention that Samuel was quickly shown the door. Not long later he reappeared on the streets of L.A., he was making another attempt on his own, using boys taken off the streets as the subjects. They were younger, already more susceptible because of that, and he chose the ones on the run from the worst homes, hoping to get the ones who were already broken and unstable. He'd show them just enough kindness, just enough attention and affection, to keep them doing what he asked until he pulled them in too far for them to get away. Mix that with the fact he didn't have an oversight committee to keep his methods sane and safe… he killed a lot of boys. But he also managed to create thirteen "students" embedded with varying degrees of behavioral conditioning who were practically brainwashed."
This was starting to sound like one of the conspiracy theories Eliot and Hardison tormented Parker with, except it was all… just a little this side of believable. He knew with the right tactics and a bunch of broken run aways no one cared about or would come looking for… "What happened? You said this was twenty years ago. Aren't we a little late?"
Tara shook her head. "During the third year of the program one of the survivors of Samuel's last official experiment heard he was in L.A. and went there to put him down. They found out what was going on and approached two of Samuel's students. Echo and Charlie.
"Charlie was the oldest in the group and was fighting the conditioning. Normally Samuel would have killed him but Charlie and Echo were a sort of sub experiment Samuel was conducting. One of the problems of the conditioning was that first getting a student to take it relied heavily on their survival instincts and the boys who he took in often were past the point of caring. This was the case with Charlie and Echo, but they cared about each other, even if they were nearly suicidal on their own. He could use their need to keep the other alive to force them to take the conditioning, but it meant he couldn't kill Charlie when he was starting to reject it and their focus was on each other rather than him."
Nate nodded, catching onto the importance. "Echo and Charlie were 'vulnerable' then. If the one trying to take out Samuel offered them a way out they might do it to protect the other."
"Exactly. The three of them devised a plan together. The students had been taught to only trust Samuel and fellow students. A good way of keeping out outsiders but once Echo and Charlie turned they eventually managed to turn all the students. They used the tactical skills Samuel had been teaching them to take down the project and destroy the headquarters… but Samuel escaped.
"They scattered afterwards, throughout LA, some young enough went into the foster system, most went underground into the crime world somehow. The three who started everything stayed close, keeping track of everything and an eye out for Samuel until one day Echo just disappeared. The other two found blood at his apartment, eventually tracked him through police reports to find out he'd been taken to a warehouse and tortured. By the time they got to the scene the police had taken away the body but the blood at the scene was enough to tell them someone twice Echo's size couldn't have possibly survived. They split up but kept in touch."
Nate watched Tara on the screen, her face had never once betrayed anything but… "So… you're our client?" A hint of surprise flashed across Tara's face before a look that plainly said 'of course, why did I even bother?' "You're the one who found them. Makes sense. What's going on now?"
She took a breath, just a hint of emotion showing now that she wasn't trying as hard. "Charlie's dead. A little under a month ago he came through Boston, telling me he'd heard rumors that sounded disturbingly like Samuel was back in action in L.A.. He went to look into it and next thing I know he's dead. I want to look into this Nate, but Samuel knows me and he knows what I look like. I'll need a partner if I even want to get close."
He considered it a moment before responding. "I'll help you do recon. Depending on what we find we'll make our next move. If we need help we can call in Parker and Hardison." He glanced toward the clock, it was already late and there was no way he'd be on a flight before nine o'clock, if any even left Boston for L.A. at that hour. "I'll be on the first flight out in the morning."
Tara nodded stiffly. "Contact me when you get your flight time. I'll pick you up at the airport. Hopefully I'll have more information by then."
The screen went blank and Nate reached for his cell phone to call Hardison.
Los Angeles, CA
18 years ago
Charlie locked eyes with him, moving closer, hand resting on his shoulder, saying words whose meanings logged into his mind, into his heart, without really even registering in his conscious.
Eliot knew the steps to this dance. He'd been dragged unwillingly through it over and over again.
But this wasn't that.
This was Charlie. Strong but gentle Charlie. Charlie who protected him.
Charlie who loved him.
This was his choice.
Charlie leaned in, pressing a kiss to his lips and Eliot forced himself to relax, forced his mind to clear, and waited for the next step.
"Are you ready?" Charlie asked again.
Eliot nodded and closed his eyes.
"No. Watch me." Charlie told him. "I want you to remember it's not him."
He opened his eyes, seeing blue eyes lock back with his.
Then the world went away.
Los Angeles, CA
Present day
"Where are we?" Sophie asked, breaking the strange silence that had been between them since they left London yesterday. In the hustle of trying to get here, running on mostly adrenalin and what sleep they could catch on the flight, they hadn't really spoken more than necessary. Everything they'd said and hadn't said keeping the silence too thick to break.
But here they were standing in a one room apartment in a decaying and abandoned apartment building at some ungodly pre-dawn hour of the morning and Eliot was walking around, hand never quite touching things. The expression on his face was focused, like he was trying to remember something just out of reach.
"My old apartment," he said simply.
"How old?" Sophie asked, turning sharply when she heard something that sounded distressingly like rats. Or roaches. In a place like this it may have very well been either.
"From the first time I lived in L.A." Eliot supplied. "Fifteen years ago. The building was half empty then. I guess after what happened the rest of the tenants cleared out."
"What happened?" Sophie asked, unconsciously moving closer to Eliot really really wanting to get out of here and away from whatever was making that noise.
"The reason why I don't drink." That caught Sophie's attention. She turned to look at him, raising an eyebrow. "At least not enough to get drunk. I was working as a thug for a local drug boss, just starting out. The boss thought I was gettin' too good and told the rest of the guys I worked with to take me out. On my twenty-first birthday they took me out drinking, got me too drunk to fight back. I woke up tied to a chair here. They spent the next three days trying to get me to tell them where I'd stashed my money." He must have seen her confused expression because he explained. "I spent only as much as I needed to survive and sent the rest of my pay to my sister. She got into college and I was doing what I could to pay for it." A half bitter smile. "At least until she found out how I was paying for it."
A memory from when she first heard about Joey floated up in the back of her mind. Hardison's voice stating Josephine had attended Kentucky university for two years but never graduated.
"Of course I'd never told them about Joey," Eliot said. "They thought I had it stashed away somewhere." He shook his head. "Sometime in day three I managed to get loose… or the black knight did. First time he got out."
Oh dear.
"I left L.A. after that. Didn't come back until we all got together."
"So why did we come here?" Sophie asked, nearly jumping at the sound on the floor above. She knew that had to be a rat.
"Because something ain't right," Eliot muttered, almost to himself. "I remember them holding me here but… that doesn't make sense."
"Why not?" Sophie asked trying to focus on the subject at hand, looking around and trying to see the apartment as it had been fifteen years ago. It was cramped and small, long since stripped of anything of value or use but…
"I had neighbors, Sophie, and the walls are thin. I was screamin' in pain on an' off for three days an' no one called the cops."
She swallowed hard, trying to force back the mental image of a twenty one year old Eliot tied to a chair, bloody, and crying out in pain.
"There's a warehouse not a block from here," Eliot continued,"It would have been easier to just take me there." Suddenly he seemed to focus on something and moved, bending down in front of the tiny ventilation shaft near the floor by the mattress-less and rotting cot.
With practiced moves he loosened the grate and pulled it off, reaching inside and pulling out a bundle wrapped in plastic and apparently duct taped to the inside of the vent.
After clearing a section of floor with his foot Eliot opened the package and dumped it onto the floor.
Pictures fell out.
Head shots of a bunch of boys Sophie guessed to be between the ages of sixteen and nineteen, photos of groups of them, and nearly a dozen photos of a single blonde haired blue eyed boy over the course of several years, probably his late teens to early twenties.
Eliot picked up a photo of the boy and what Sophie guessed was his seventeen year old self standing next to the sign for the New Sparks Youth Center. "This isn't right."
"What's not right?" Sophie asked.
"I met Charlie when I was eighteen," Eliot said. "And the youth center was called Flintwood, not New Sparks."
He seemed strangely disturbed for someone who had just misremembered a name. "It's been eighteen years Eliot. You might have misremembered."
Eliot shook his head. "Ever wondered how I know, how I remember, everything I do?"
Actually yes, though she'd gotten used to it a long time ago and stopped noticing as often. "I used to."
"I have Hyperthymisia." Eliot stated, not taking his eyes off the picture. "Perfect autobiographical recall. If it happened to me or if I witnessed it I can remember it in exact detail." He looked toward her with an almost grim expression. "If I wanted to I could give you a detailed day by day account of my life since I was a seven. Every person I met, every place I went, every fight I was ever in, even any fucking meal I ate. I could repeat back to you ever sentence of technobable I've ever heard Hardison say, still wouldn't understand half of it, but I remember it."
Nothing in his face even hinted he was exaggerating.
"I lived at the youth center for two years. I met Charlie there. Samuel taught me how to fight while I was there. I left that building and entered the criminal underworld. I would not just misremember the name of it."
He gathered the pictures and headed for the door without explanation and Sophie hurried to follow, suddenly not nearly as glad as she should have been to leave this place.
Los Angeles, CA
18 Years ago
The world still felt far away as he found himself watching the slowing rise and fall of the body in front of him slipping into unconsciousness, if he wasn't already.
The world was quiet, sounds seemed distant.
He'd done it. It had felt good. It had felt right.
Now he felt sick.
He turned away, not able to look. He knew he'd feel better once his head slowed back down to a speed that could process this all.
He wouldn't regret this. Hell, maybe he'd do it again.
Panic shot through him at that thought and he looked up, breathing hard.
He was waiting.
For what? He wasn't entirely certain. A sign maybe. Something to force his hand.
He should just leave. He could just leave.
But that didn't really matter did it?
"Are you ready?"
Los Angeles, CA
Present Day
This wasn't right.
He was staring at the burned out ruins of the youth center and he knew something wasn't right.
Everything he remembered, everything… it just…
Wasn't quite right.
Sophie was quiet behind him but watching him with worried eyes.
He walked up to the burned stump of the sign he and Charlie had been leaning against in the picture, mentally reconstructing it.
The letters Flintwood seemed to glow in his mental image and he forced the image to change, to say New Sparks like in the photo.
A flash of pain at his temple like a warning but the image locked in place.
He looked back to the steps where he remembered standing, hesitating. Samuel was going to pay him a little money to teach martial arts to the younger kids and he'd been standing here freaking out when Charlie came by. Charlie had been another 'teacher' who he'd seen but not known well before then. Charlie had pulled him inside and they'd become close quickly in the month that followed, before the Youth Center burned down and Samuel had hired them out with the rest of his best students to local crime bosses as well trained thugs. Samuel had used a special mix of highly addictive drugs to make sure they all did as he said until he and Charlie had led the others to fight back.
Eliot could remember going through the withdrawl.
You didn't make up a memory like that out of thin air.
Eliot had looked to Samuel like a father and Samuel had stuck a needle in his arm and all but pimped him out as a fighter.
He could remember the feeling of betrayal.
You didn't just wake up one morning remembering that for no good reason.
He'd always told himself the drugs were why those few years of his life were so fuzzy. When you're spending all you're time half strung out or in the first stages of withdrawl it doesn't do your memory any favors and he can still remember more of it than most people would.
He walked away from the sign, up to the step he'd been standing on when Charlie first called out to him.
"Are you ready?"
He closed his eyes, forcing his mind to go back years, building the world up around him. The steps of the youth center, the building, the basketball court to his left and open blacktop to his right, the low wall around it, the silence, the darkness.
It had been night.
He remembered meeting Charlie during the day.
He put his hand on the step's railing and only then did he notice the red stain on his hand.
On his shirt.
On the steps.
His eyes shot open and he looked up, hearing steps entering through the front gate of the center.
He met Samuel's eyes across the yard, Sophie's words echoing in his mind but not registering.
The memory snapped back into focus.
Bodies littered around the court, Charlie with the empty containers from the gasoline he'd finished pouring at strategic locations, and an unlit Molotov cocktail in his hand.
"Echo. Check in." The memory disappeared and the breath left his lungs and his eyes reconnected with Samuel's. "Somno, at ease student."
His legs folded underneath him, tension fleeing his body. He barely felt his knees hit pavement before the world went black and he dropped into a waiting oblivion.