A/N Hello hello everyone! Happy Monday and welcome back! We're getting close to the end now... so I hope you enjoy it!

Nate ignored the 'closed' sign on the door to McRory's and let himself into the bar.

"Hey Nate," Cora greeted, putting the last chair up on a table before crossing over to him. "Thanks for coming down," she said quietly, "I've gotta lock up and I didn't know what else to do."

"You did the right thing calling me," he assured her.

When he'd first picked up the phone to find Cora on the other end of the line, telling him that he needed to come do something about Eliot because he was drunk in the bar, Nate's heart had leapt into his throat. One, because Eliot didn't get drunk. The hitter prized control over all things, it was a fundamental facet of his personality. In all the years he'd known him, he had only seen Eliot allow himself the slightest buzz, and even that was only when he was surrounded only by his teammates in a controlled environment. Never alone and in a public bar no less. And two, because of point one, he didn't know what kind of drunk the younger man was. Even intoxicated, Nate was sure there wouldn't be a whole lot any of them could do if he chose to get belligerent. But Cora assured him that wasn't the case, and that she was mainly calling Nate because she didn't think Eliot should be alone and while she had to close the bar, she didn't want to just kick him out.

Looking over Cora's shoulder, he spotted Eliot easily in the otherwise empty bar. He was sitting in the corner booth, with his back against the wall, a single glass and a two thirds empty bottle sitting in front of him.

"Has he been there all night?" he asked lowly.

"Yeah," Cora confirmed. "Came in 'bout nine I guess, asked for a drink and told me to leave the bottle. Hasn't said a word since and he's just scared off anyone who's gotten too close with that glare of his."

"Alright, I'll take care of this," he sighed. "Why don't you go on home. I'll lock up."

"Thanks Nate," she said gratefully, pulling the keys out of her pocket and handing them over. "I'll see you tomorrow."

Nate saw the redhead to the door, turning the lock behind her, before going to deal with his drunken teammate. He got the same glare that everyone else must have gotten when he slid into the booth opposite the hitter, but he'd long since become immune to that particular look.

"What are you doing here?" Eliot asked gruffly.

"Well, you're singing my song," Nate said, nodding at the bottle he'd steadily been working his way through. "I wanted to make sure you're not stealing my act."

"No, you drink Irish whiskey, this is Kentucky bourbon," Eliot replied, as if that made all the difference.

His voice was strong and steady, and at first glance Nate might not have even realized that Eliot was as drunk as he was, except for the way the hitter obviously had to struggle to focus his eyes on the mastermind.

"I'm adaptable," Nate shrugged, reaching across the table and taking a swig straight from the bottle, setting it back down out of Eliot's easy reach. Nate watched Eliot stare at the full glass still cradled between his hands for a few minutes before speaking again. "We've barely seen you this week, and then I get a call from Cora." Eliot didn't even bother to acknowledge that he'd spoken, so Nate tried coming from a different angle. "Do you want to tell me what happened with you and Parker?"

Eliot head shot up so fast, Nate would be surprised if it hadn't made him dizzy. The mask the hitter normally wore to conceal his emotions was gone. "Why would you think something happened between me and Parker?"

"She's been gone for three weeks now and you're getting drunk, alone in a bar," Nate pointed out. "It's a pretty straight line to draw between those two points."

There was also the fact that while Eliot had been doing an admirable job of pretending that things were business as usual, anyone who really knew him could see the dark cloud that had surrounded him since Parker's abrupt departure. It went far beyond his normal surly facade.

"I fucked up, Nate," Eliot sighed, going back to staring into his glass as though it held all the answers. "I fucked everything up."

"What happened?" he asked, taking another swig from the bottle. Nate usually tried not to get involved in the personal lives of his crew, but this was obviously affecting the team, what with his thief's disappearance, and his hitter an absolute mess.

"I slept with Parker," he confessed, with an honesty he wouldn't have dared if he was sober.

When Nate didn't respond right away, Eliot looked up, expecting to see condemnation in the other man's face. Instead, he found only confusion.

"And…?" Nate said leadingly.

"What do you mean, and?" Eliot retorted irritably. "I slept with Parker and she took off, Nate. End of story. And I don't mean that she didn't stay for breakfast. She left the damn state."

"Wait, you mean for the first time?" Nate asked, genuinely surprised.

"Yes, for the first time!" Eliot exclaimed. "What did you think?"

"Honestly," Nate admitted, "I thought you two had been together for a while."

"What? No! Why would you think that?!"

How could he not? Was what Nate wanted to say, but he chose to be more diplomatic about it. "You have to admit, you two have been… closer, for months now. I noticed that things were changing, but after the way Parker reacted when you got hurt, and seeing you two together at your place..." he shrugged, unapologetic. "I just assumed."

"Well, we're not. Were not... are not?" Eliot tilted his head, clearly having confused himself. "I don't know. I'm drunk," he admitted, taking another swig from his glass.

"My mistake, then," Nate said blandly.

"I never asked for this!" Eliot said explosively, as though Nate had made some kind of accusation. "I have a rule; you don't get involved with people you work with. It always ends messy," he explained, jabbing hard at the wooden table top with one finger to punctuate his point. "It's a good rule! But she just… wormed her way in there before I even noticed what was happening. Do you have any idea how this even started?"

Nate didn't and he wasn't sure he wanted to, but Eliot was on a roll, the alcohol in his system loosening his reticent tongue.

"Dinner, that's it. She would show up looking to be fed every couple weeks, and the next thing I know she's all but moved in and I don't even know how it happened. Yet for some reason, I don't care! I should have cared. Why didn't I care?!" he exclaimed, gesturing broadly. "I'll tell you why... I'm the frog and she's the boiling pot of water that I didn't have the sense to jump out of until it was already too late. And now she's gone, but I can't even go home because she's still everywhere I look, and in everything I touch, and her absence is so loud it hurts."

"I always knew there was a romantic poet underneath there, somewhere," Nate said, hiding his amused smirk behind taking another drink from the bottle. It wasn't funny, not really, considering the situation, but he never would have figured Eliot Spencer to be a talky drunk.

"What the hell, man!" Eliot exclaimed, both appalled and offended. "No. I'm not. Take that back. Why would you even say that?"

"My apologies. I take it back," Nate placated, not sorry at all. "You were talking about what happened with Parker," he said leadingly, getting him back on track. "Why'd she leave?"

Eliot threw his hands up. "I don't know why she left! I was following her lead this whole time, before I even realized we were going somewhere. When it happened, it seemed to me like it was an inevitable conclusion, but I clearly misread the fucking signs somewhere because she's gone." He slumped back in the booth and threw back the last of his drink. "And now I'm fucked, and the team is fucked, and everything is just fucked."

Eliot seemed to have run out of steam so Nate figured it was his turn to say something.

"Do you want my advice?"

Eliot reached forward to grab the bottle from Nate's side of the table. "I don't know if you're qualified to give advice until you get your own shit together with what's going on between you and Sophie."

"There's nothing going on between me and Sophie," Nate countered.

"You're just proving my point, Ford," Eliot drawled, pouring another three fingers into the glass.

"Well, I'm going to tell you what I think."

"As long as you're not about to tell me that I'm a tree. I already heard that one last week."

"A tree?" Nate asked, honestly perplexed.

Eliot just waved a dismissive hand.

Nate knew when to let things go. "Why haven't you just gone to New York and found her yet?" he asked.

Eliot sighed and took another swing of his drink. He was silent long enough that Nate thought he might not answer. "I've thought about it," he finally admitted. "I probably think about it more than I don't."

"Then why haven't you?" Nate asked, genuinely curious. "Is it a pride thing?"

Eliot sighed heavily, while pride might have been a contributing factor he could have swallowed it down, had it been the only one. But it was more complicated than that. Thoughts of songbirds dying in cages crossed his mind.

"She's left a whole trail of breadcrumbs to follow, and you're the retrieval specialist," Nate continued when Eliot didn't respond immediately. "This is what you do best."

"As much as the idea of tracking her down, throwing her over my shoulder and bringing her home, is a tempting one…. she left," Eliot responded, as if Nate could have forgotten. "That was her choice. I'm respecting that choice. I don't understand it, I don't like it, but I'm respecting it. I'm not going to force her to do anything she doesn't want to do. If she wants to come home, she knows where I am. Right where she left me..."

"Ever think that maybe she wants you to come and get her?" Nate offered.

Eliot rolled his eyes. "Come on, Nate, you know Parker better than that. That's a Sophie move, the whole cat-and-mouse chase thing. Parker doesn't play games like that; they don't even occur to her. She went to New York because she wanted two hundred miles between us," he said morosely. "She's already spooked. If I push it while she's still skittish, she's just going to bolt again. And who knows where she'd end up, or if she would bother letting us know where she's at next time."

He was right of course, horse metaphor that Parker would not appreciate notwithstanding, and Nate knew it.

The two men sat in silence while they finished the bottle and Nate knew that if his intention had been to try to cheer Eliot up, he'd done a piss poor job of it. But there was still one thing he could do tonight.

"Come on, let's go upstairs," Nate said, sliding out of the booth.

"Why?"

"Because you're in no condition to get yourself home, and I have a perfectly good couch you can sleep this off on." Lord knows he had slept on it enough times when he'd been too drunk to navigate the spiral staircase.

"I can get myself home just fine," Eliot insisted obstinately. But when he stood up for the first time in hours, and the whole world tilted for a moment under his feet, he reconsidered. "Upstairs is good too."

"Yeah, that's what I thought."

xXxXxXx

Eliot woke up with a pained groan, facedown on Nate's couch, in a pool of his own drool. It took him more than a few moments to realize that he hadn't fallen out of another third story window, but instead had the mother of all hangovers. It took even longer for him to disentangle himself from the blanket Nate must have tossed over him at some point so he could stumble to the bathroom.

After taking care of business, he popped a couple of Tylenol from the bottle in the medicine cabinet, before washing it down with an almost absurd amount of water that he drank straight from the tap, his dehydrated body screaming for more. Once he'd drank as much as he could stand, he washed his face before looking at himself in the mirror. He looked like hell, but that was hardly a surprise. He felt like he'd been hit by a car. No, scratch that. He'd been hit by cars on more than one occasion. Right now, he felt worse. There were several reasons why he didn't drink to excess, and this right here was right near the top of the list.

He was actually grateful that he'd slept in his boots, because now he wouldn't have to deal with trying to get them back on before he dragged himself home to rethink the life decisions that had brought him to this point.

Heading back out to the main room, he didn't even have the energy to be surprised by the fact that Sophie was sitting primly on the sofa he'd just vacated, the blanket he'd been using now folded neatly and draped over the back of the couch.

"Where'd you come from?" he asked gruffly.

Sophie didn't answer. "Coffee?" she offered instead, extending one of the two mugs she was holding in his direction.

"You're an angel," he said, taking the cup gratefully.

"Do you want to talk about it?" Sophie asked, after he'd had a few minutes to let the caffeine hit his blood stream.

"My hangover? No, not really."

"Do you want to talk about Parker?" she clarified.

He knew what she'd meant. "No, I don't want to talk about that either," he said, taking another gulp of his coffee, wanting to finish the cup so he could leave. He should have known that Nate would call Sophie in as reinforcements. "I've done enough of that."

"I just thought you might want to talk to somebody who understands. Someone who knows what it's like," Sophie said gently.

"What what's like?" Eliot asked, his head too fuzzy to even begin trying to decipher her cryptic statements.

"What it's like to be in love with someone who can be… emotionally unpredictable."

It took all of Eliot's self-control not to spray his mouthful of coffee all over the floor, but it was a close thing. "Who said anything about love?"

Sophie gave him that look that always made him feel like she was looking right into his soul, and it was all he could do to not squirm under her scrutiny.

"I don't know if you're just lying to me, or to yourself as well," she said, taking a dainty sip from the mug in her hands. "But if you want to pretend that you would behave the way you have been the last few weeks, if you didn't love Parker… well, I'm an actress, I've always been good at suspending disbelief."

Eliot's brow furrowed deeply, not quite sure how to respond to that.

"It doesn't matter what I feel," he grumbled, sidestepping the issue entirely. "She made her feelings pretty damn clear when she took off."

"Yes, she most certainly did at that," Sophie agreed, a knowing grin curling the corners of her mouth.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Eliot asked of her obviously loaded words.

"Come on, Eliot," she rolled her eyes. "You know Parker, probably better than anyone. She ran because she was scared. What is she most scared of?"

"Hairless cats, the Pillsbury Doughboy, and dolls that talk," he answered without hesitation.

"No- wait, what?" Sophie asked disbelievingly. "The Pillsbury Doughboy?"

"He creeps her out," he shrugged. There was a whole thing with a recurring dream that ended with her trapping him in the oven and watching him beat on the glass until he turned a golden brown. But that wasn't relevant at the moment. "It's a long story."

It took Sophie a minute to bounce back from that. "Her feelings, Eliot," she said, getting the conversation back on track. "She's scared of her emotions. She never learned how to process them like everybody else. The stronger they are, the more they unnerve her."

Eliot just glared into the dregs of his coffee, obstinately ignoring the point Sophie was trying to make.

"It's clear to me, that she only left because she loves you," she said, simply.

"Would you stop saying that word," he huffed.

"What? Love?" Sophie asked, unable to resist teasing him a little. "What bothers you more to hear, that you love her or that she loves you?

"Stop," he repeated with a growl.

"Honestly," she tisked, amused. "Between the both of you, it's a miracle you two even managed to get this far."

"Damnit Sophie." He was too hungover to listen to this bullshit.

"My point is, is that Parker is just as pragmatic about sex as you usually are. If sleeping with you didn't mean anything to her, don't you think she would have just woken up and gone about her day like nothing had happened? Think about it."

Eliot didn't respond, but Sophie could tell that he was considering her words. Setting her empty mug on the coffee table, she stood and headed for the spiral staircase.

"Once she works through her feelings," she called over her shoulder, "she'll come home."

Eliot didn't want to think about it anymore. He wanted to go home, take a hot shower, and go back to bed for a couple hours. Setting his mug on the coffee table next to Sophie's, he stood to do just that.

xXxXxXxXxXxXxXx

A month.

Four weeks.

Twenty-eight days.

No matter how Eliot sliced it, it had been a long time now, since Parker had disappeared into the night without a word. But he still wasn't used to her being gone. He'd thought he would have been by now. He also thought she would have come back before now too. He was wrong on both counts. He hated being wrong.

Sitting in his dimly lit home, he stared into the amber glass of bourbon cradled in his hands, while he meditated on the many ways he'd gone wrong in the last few months. He hadn't touched a drop since he'd overindulged the week before, which had resulted in an unfortunate over-share with Nate and the worst hangover he'd had since that time when he was sixteen, and he and his cousin had stolen his uncle's moonshine and had gotten shit-faced in the barn. But he was feeling extra morose this evening and pulled the half-full bottle of the good stuff out from the back of the liquor cabinet.

Time passed, marked only by the steadily dropping level of bourbon in the bottle. Eliot was leaning forward to grab said bottle, so he could yet again fill his glass, when Parker's sketchbook caught the corner of his eye.

He wouldn't have given it a second thought, except for Hardison's voice in the back his head, urging him to just take a quick look. The hacker had continued to bring it up over the last few weeks, until Eliot had threatened to throw his laptop out the window if he mentioned it one more time. He tried to put it out of his mind, but the damage had been done. Even as he brought the glass up to his lips and took a long swallow of his drink, he couldn't take his eyes off the rather innocuous-looking book that sat on his coffee table.

Inching forward so that he was sitting on the very edge of the couch, he propped his elbows on his knees and sat silently, just contemplating the sketchbook in front of him. He wasn't exactly sure how long he simply sat there staring at it, before his resolve broke.

"God dammit," he muttered to himself, as he reached out and flipped open the cover.

The first couple of pages weren't much of anything. Roughly sketched designs for some new rigs she had talked about building. The security system for the Egyptian wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The floor plan for… the Hague? Eliot wasn't sure he wanted to know how or why Parker knew the layout for the International Criminal Courts and simply turned the page. That was a question for another day.

Then, the rest of the team started popping up. A sketch of Hardison drinking directly from a two-liter bottle of orange soda. Nate, leading a briefing. Sophie, dressed in costume for a con. Him and Hardison bickering. Nate and Sophie leaning over a pile of papers together, among others.

But then the sketches of the others started to disappear, replaced by only drawings of him. His eyes widened as he took in page after page of his own image. He leaned over to turn on the lamp to better see by, and pulled the book into his lap, as he studied the hours worth of work Parker had deemed worthy to put into these sketches.

It seemed like she had been intent on capturing every single one of his expressions. And capture them she had. The way his eyes crinkled when he smiled his genuine smile. The exasperation he wore when Hardison went on one of his nerd spirals. His look of concentration when Nate was laying out the complicated workings of a new con. The pained look of horror he couldn't suppress whenever he was subjected to Sophie's acting. The anticipatory smirk that formed when he knew someone was going to give him a good fight. His head thrown back in laughter in a moment of rare, but genuine amusement that it seemed that only Parker could pull from him these days.

She'd drawn his hair in all of its many styles. Pulled back in a ponytail, tied halfway up, and left down. The way it curled naturally if he let it air dry, and when he tied a bandana around his forehead to keep it out of his way while he cooked.

She'd dedicated pages upon pages to his hands, of all things. He knew they were his, other than in the context of the other sketches, because she'd gotten all the details right. Like the scar on his left index finger from where he'd sliced it when he'd been learning how to cook, and the way the third knuckle on the ring finger of his right hand had never healed quite right after he'd broken it many years before. He never, in a million years, would have guessed she'd paid so much attention to his hands if it weren't for the evidence right in front of him.

There were drawings of his fists wrapped in tape, ready for a workout. His fingers stretched out over the fret of his guitar in a E-minor chord. His hand wrapped around the handle of his favorite chef's knife, accurate down to the nick on the wooden handle. A longneck bottle of beer dangling carelessly from his fingertips. There was a two-page spread of his knuckles, split and bruised in different configurations, and after seeing the rest of her drawings, he couldn't help but believe that each one was from a different specific fight.

They weren't all just pencil sketches and character studies, however. Some pages were devoted to full-fledged drawings that she'd taken the time to finish in color. They were quiet moments, frozen in time, some of them he recognized specifically, but most could have been from any number of days. As he carefully studied each and every one, he wondered what it was about these particular moments that had driven her to put them down on paper. Why these snapshots in time were worth immortalizing to her.

A picture of him standing in his kitchen, leaning over the bar with an empty fork in his hand, having offered her a bite of whatever he was cooking. The pleased half-grin on his face, telling him that she'd enjoyed what she'd tasted.

Him, in profile, sitting in his customary spot on the couch reading a book. Parker's legs emerging from the bottom of the frame, her feet sitting in his lap, the hand not holding his book resting easily on one of her ankles.

Leaning in the doorway between his bedroom and bathroom, a toothbrush dangling from his lips, one ankle crossed over the other. His attention focused entirely on Parker, who, from the perspective of the drawing, was already in bed.

But there was one particular picture that made him pause. He remembered the moment from his perspective with crystal clarity, so it was a bit of a shock to see it from Parker's perspective replicated on paper. It was from the night of the storm when the power went out. And just as he'd committed the sight of her illuminated by the table full of candles to memory, it seemed that she had done the same. But what really got his attention was the look she'd drawn on his face. He had no doubts that it was accurate because it captured the expression it seemed that everyone had caught on his face recently. He just wondered if Parker had understood it, even while she recreated it. That he had been looking at her with eyes full of love.

Climbing to his feet, he took the sketchbook and the bottle with him as he headed back to his bedroom. He paused only to pull his sweatshirt over his head and let his jeans fall to floor before crawling into bed, the now nearly-empty bottle in one hand and the sketchbook in the other.

He went through the entire book a second time, seeing himself as Parker saw him. Reaching the last picture, he quickly flipped through the blank pages at the back, idly thinking that when… if she came back, she was going to need a new sketchbook soon. When his thumb caught on on the thicker cardboard back cover, he spotted a flash of color hidden between the blank pages at the back of the book. It took him a few moments to find it again, his curiosity piqued by the sketch separated from the rest.

It was hands again, but there was one key difference. It wasn't just his, but Parker had sketched her own as well. She'd drawn their hands entwined, her fingers laced through his. The way he'd held her hand at night to assure her he was still there.

Tracing the heavy graphite lines with his eyes he could actually feel the ghost of her hand in his. Such a skilled hand in a petite package. The delicate bones disguising their strength, soft skin broken up by tough calluses hard won from years of climbing and rope work.

His hand ached from the emptiness that was echoed in his chest.

Shutting the sketchbook, he set it on the nightstand. And just as he was turning off the light, he spotted his cellphone poking out of the pocket of his discarded jeans.

Before he could talk himself out of it, Eliot had already snatched the phone off the floor and hit the speed dial for her number.

It went directly to voicemail, but he'd expected that much.

"How did you get this number?!" Parker's voice asked accusingly, before the beep.

"Parker…." he trailed off, not sure what to say. He hadn't thought this through like he should have. Of course, if he'd given himself a moment to think about it, he would have remembered that this was a bad idea and he wouldn't have called at all. When he realized that he'd been silent so long that she'd probably think he'd hung up, he spoke again.

"Darlin', come back to Boston already. Everybody wants you to come back. I want you to come back," he admitted into the dark. "If you left because of me, because of what happened, well…" he trailed off, pinching the bridge of his nose and squeezing his eyes shut. "...we don't have to talk about it. We can pretend it never happened, I mean, if that's what you want. I don't want you to stay away because of me. I never want you to leave because of me or because of something I did. Please Parker, just… just come home."

He fell silent again for several long moments, before whispering one last confession over the line.

"I miss you."

Hitting the End Call button, he tossed the phone away, not caring where it ended up. Closing his eyes, he leaned back against his pillows and let the alcohol coursing through his bloodstream pull him into a restless sleep.

A/N Alrighty, one more chapter to go! I can't believe after all this time we're almost to the end! It was my birthday this weekend so maybe leave me a present and let me know what you've thought so far?