nobody knows you're numbering days, a leverage fanfic

I don't own Leverage.

nobody knows you're numbering days.
5105 words, 1/1.

He first notices it in the middle of a job (but of course).

They're in a soaked corner of Seattle, sitting on Hardison's lumpy motel room bed as they listen to Sophie and Nate cheat their way into a board meeting of the biggest lumber manufacturing company in the Northwest.

They're always in close quarters when they're working. Each one of them has a finely honed and developed sense of suspicion and paranoia, which leads to a revolving door of pseudonyms, charades and false-truths whenever they have to travel for a client. In Texas, he and Nate had checked into a motel at the next town over as brothers, while Sophie, Hardison and Parker came a day later as business colleagues. In Belgrade, Nate was an executive and the rest of them, his entourage. A million different identities, combinations of lies to conceal their true intentions, flies in a spider web.

This time, they've allowed themselves the luxury of three rooms. Nate and Hardison are playing father and son, apparently, although Eliot isn't sure how they reasoned that out when making the reservations. Sophie had offered Parker the single room but Parker quickly and abruptly declined.

"You take it," Parker had said, offering no further explanation. "Eliot doesn't bite. Right?"

A shrug. "Not unless it's under the right circumstances," had been his reply, which had led to a twenty-minute discussion between Sophie and Hardison about the mythic depths of his sexual history and thus Eliot had totally and completely missed the first sign that something was a little off.

He definitely notices it now, though. He knows the value of stillness to the point of second nature. On one of his first jobs, he'd nearly blown the entire thing when he'd tripped an alarm system on accident on account of an ill-timed sneeze. He still has the scar from the guard dog, goddammit, so he'd learned.

But Parker has this way of making him jittery. Frequently, he finds himself pacing in her presence, or fiddling with the furniture, jiggling his leg, or a million other replaceable and incredibly irritating nervous habits that never in his life he'd ever thought he'd be prone to. It's unsettling, it's strange, but mostly it's just fucking annoying, which is why he tends to make an effort to keep his distance from her whenever he can.

Which is why when he can't stop rubbing his palms on his jeans because he can feel the body heat rising from her skin, he finally catches on and realizes that she's been fucking following him around.

He takes one breath, two, then decides to test it. Rising slowly from the bed, he walks casually to the window, peering out into the water-stained city streets.

He counts thirteen beats in his head before he hears her rise as well, leaning over Hardison's shoulder to grab a bag of potato chips before perching on the thin desk, conveniently placing herself within his arm's reach.

He frowns, and thinks back a little, and remembers the plane ride spent listening to her hum along with her iPod, cab rides with her squished up against his arm, meetings in Nate's cramped room with her blonde head inches away from his knee. Only when he'd scouted out the mark does he remember being alone and even then he'd had her voice in his ear.

He watches her in the reflection of the window, bickering with Hardison as if nothing is out of the ordinary. But he sees her glance towards his profile between sentences, and as he watches, she crosses her legs slowly and deliberately brushes the back of his shin with her foot.

He can see the muscles of her thighs shifting beneath the thin material of her pants, and for the first time since he was fifteen years old, he feels the urge to bite his nails.

Eliot is a coffee man. Upon moving into the Leverage offices, the rest of the team quickly learned the benefits of keeping the cupboards stocked with Colombian blend.

The only other one who drinks it is Parker. Eliot sees her at all times of the day and night with a mug in her hand, sitting cross-legged on the kitchen table and staring off into space. He is afraid to approach or disturb her in those moments, the ones where she is lost to reality. He's not sure why, though.

Once, he caught her eating a frozen Hot Pocket with her coffee.

"You could cook that," he pointed out.

"I could." She shrugged and dipped it into her mug. "Tastes better this way with the vanilla blended stuff, though."

He filled up his own coffee mug, the familiar action soothing him. Routine, habit, rhythm. He likes these things. "The Amaretto is better."

Parker shrugged like she wasn't listening, but a month later, a day after he'd left Aimee staring at his back for the last time, the coffee in the office kitchen had a distinct Amaretto scent.

(She startles, but does not surprise. He likes that.)

He can tell how much she hates the waitress outfit by the way she keeps messing with the skirt, glaring at it every time her hands are drawn to the hem.

It is a ridiculous outfit, but no more ridiculous than some of the disguises that he's been coerced into wearing. If he has to dress up as a Miami Vice mob boss one more time, someone's knuckles are getting broken.

She's supposed to wait on Sophie and the mark at a local theme restaurant, giving her opportunity to swipe the keycard that will get them into the inner offices. It's some tacky pirate themed Hooters rip-off, which means her blouse is striped with red with ruffles on the sleeves, and her skirt would be indecent in any other establishment.

He's in the kitchen in case something goes wrong, staying inconspicuous by looking busy but not actually doing anything to mess up the flow of the work. The smell of grease and flour makes him wrinkle his nose. He settles into chopping vegetables in a corner – chop, chop, rhythm, routine. He enjoys it.

He sees Parker enter, dropping an order slip onto the rotation before sidling up next to him. Her skirt pools around her hips as she hops up on the counter, and he slices his palm open with the knife.

"Shit."

"Smooth, Emeril." She tilts her head back and winces as it hits the metal cupboards above the counter. "Ow."

He scowls and grabs a towel, pressing it to the cut on his hand. "Don't you have tables to wait?"

Parker shrugs and rubs the back of her head, a thin line of irritation between her eyebrows. "I guess."

"Well, maybe you should go take care of that," he says pointedly.

"Don't wanna."

He sighs and presses a hand to his jaw, temporarily interfering with Hardison's electronic ear bugs. "Why do you keep following me around?"

Parker mirrors his action, that small, satisfied smile creeping over her lips. "Why are you letting me?"

Don't tell anyone, but they'd met before.

Not like it was all that surprising. The world they lived in was a tight-knit one. On the run from someone or another more often than not had them all paranoid and suspicious, which led to keeping close tabs on anyone who made waves in their criminalistic, warped community. And if anyone could make waves, it was Parker.

Eliot remembers the first major job she'd pulled off, a bank heist in Silicon Valley. He'd been in New York at the time and had heard about it on the news. A few phone calls and he'd gotten her name – one of her names, actually. He's still not sure if 'Parker' is her first name or her last, he's not sure if anyone really knows, but he'd been impressed. And wary.

About a year later, he'd been working security for a money launderer in Toronto who was as mean and unpleasant as he was ugly, trying to figure out a way to get out of the job without having to kill anybody. (He hates impolite people. It's Southern weakness.)

During a party, he'd noticed a small breeze that shouldn't have been there, and noticed an open window on the third floor. Following the air, he'd found his boss's office door ajar and a thin blonde woman loading stacks of bills into a knapsack.

Frozen at his flashlight, she'd raised an eyebrow at him, and he made a split decision as the walkie-talkie on his hip gargled. Slowly, he'd radioed to his team that everything was normal and watched as she sailed out of the window, cutting through the air silently.

The next morning, he'd been fired, and he smiled to himself and thought, so that was Parker.

Two years later they met for the second first time, and he still doesn't know her full name and he's not a man to push. (But he hopes she'll offer, in some secret place in his head. Not enough to ask, though. Not that he thinks she'll tell him, anyway.)

He hates it when they get their cover blown. Sophie once told him that she kind of enjoys it in the sense that it challenges her skills, or something, but Eliot is of the opinion that Sophie is the craziest out of all of them.

Somebody had recognized Hardison (Eliot suspects a World of Warcraft connection) and thus handcuffed he, Sophie and Parker to an air vent before running off to tattle to the faithful boss. Parker had slipped out of them as soon as the guy's back was turned and, in a move that had apparently stunned Sophie and Hardison speechless, knocked him unconscious with one hit to the exact nerve in his neck.

"I thought only Jackie Chan could do that shit," says Hardison, and Sophie grins.

(Eliot isn't surprised. He taught her how to do that.)

The problem now is an unconscious financial director who knows too much. Preoccupied with the vital final stage of the con, Nate tells him to keep the guy drugged and out of the way until they need him again. Eliot doesn't like it, it lacks style, but they don't have the luxury of style in situations like this.

He and Parker drag him back to their room, a rag lightly laced with chloroform below his nose. (He is surprised to see that Parker has intimate knowledge of how to drug someone just enough to keep them out, but not enough to get them killed. Although considering what he does know about her, he really shouldn't be.)

They've dragged him in and handcuffed him into the closet (just in case) and now they've got approximately two hours and thirteen minutes to kill, and Eliot decides that enough is enough.

"So show me how you escape from these things." He swings the extra pair of handcuffs around his finger, raising an eyebrow in challenge. He schools his expression not to change as she looks up at him.

"You can't do it the way I do," she says. "I flex my wrists as they're put on. They're thin enough so that when I unflex, I can slip them off."

"I didn't think that ever worked," he says.

She shrugs. "A lot of people think that a lot of things are impossible when they aren't," she says. "All you need to do is figure out the trick."

"Ah." He sits next to her on the bed. "So the trick is – handcuffs just don't fit you?"

"No, they fit me," she says. "Just barely, is all."

Eliot remembers a night spent with a LAPD detective five years ago. He'd handcuffed her to her steering wheel and listened to her cuss him out as he cleaned out the evidence against him in her trunk. After he'd thrown it all in the ocean, he'd fucked her in the front seat, her head banging against the window and a long line of curses running from her mouth.

He's thinking of that now as he hooks one cuff around Parker's wrist and the other around the bedpost. He reaches up and presses his jaw. "You have to be quiet, you hear?"

Parker's eyes glitter and she presses her own jaw line with her free hand, leaning back and spreading her legs open invitingly. "I'm always quiet," she informs him, and lets him slide her jeans off. "How about you?"

He doesn't kill people for money. Ever. Not that there aren't people who've tried to convince him.

He has killed, though. Sometimes on accident, sometimes in defense. But never on purpose, and never anyone who didn't really, really deserve it.

Two years before he'd ever heard of Victor Dubenich, before Nate's divorce, before Sophie tried to go legit, he'd gotten a call from a contact, one whom he'd done jobs for in the past.

"Name's Parker," came the voice over his secure phone line. "She's causing a lot of problems for my associates and I – you'd be paid triple your regular rate. Quadruple if you get it done before the end of the month."

Quadruple the regular rate would've been enough money to retire, to buy a house somewhere and spend the rest of his days in blissful silence. But he doesn't kill people for money. Sometimes, not even when they do deserve it. And especially not when they don't know it's coming.

(There are lines he crosses and ones he doesn't, but on this particular one, he will never waver.)

Eliot and Parker drag the unconscious whistle-blower back to his office two hours later, and the only signal that anything is different is the ligature mark on her right wrist that only he notices.

Nate has a gift of manipulation, and Eliot can tell that it scares him to use it sometimes. It never fails to impress in a situation such as this, though, when they're under the wire and forced to improvise. At any rate, their environmentally passionate clients get to save their forests and the company suffers a harmful blow, while their annoying friend gets discredited and fired.

There's a creeping sense of satisfaction when everything gets wrapped up nicely, but with a lingering uneasiness that speaks of Eliot's paranoia. One day, he knows, things will get messy, and he knows the longer it takes to happen the harder it will be to clean up, which is why he doesn't trust this as easily as he'd like to.

They usually go out for drinks after a job well-done, but with everyone's growing uneasiness at Nate's issues, growing more obvious by the day, they quietly separate for their respective corners of the motel, eyes barely contacting before skittering up and away, flirting with the edges of understanding.

They pull out their ear bugs and return them to Hardison's case for safekeeping (a relief, the exodus of the team from his head and his thoughts) and then in the elevator back to their room, Parker tells him that she wants him to fuck her so hard that she won't be able to stand up the next morning.

There's a middle-aged couple in there with them, and they scoot away into the corner of the elevator while the husband glares at Eliot, as if it's his fault that Parker has no sense of discretion. He shrugs and lets her stick her hands down his pants just to see the expression on their faces as they get off two floors early and gets to hear her giggle for the first time, pressed up between his chest and the wall.

(Does he object to the general idea, Parker wonders later in a genuinely curious voice, or is he just jealous, and he laughs in a way he thought he wasn't capable of anymore.)

He'd caught her crying once, in Belgrade. She'd been locked in the bathroom and he'd known it was her from the angry tinge to it, the thinly veiled fury hidden behind the sobs.

Nate would've distracted her. Sophie would've offered a solution. Hardison would've comforted her. Eliot left her alone.

(He does not kill for money and he does not invite himself into other people's pain. Death and sadness, these are the most private things, and it's a crime that he wouldn't forgive himself for.)

She can stand up the next morning, actually, but it hurts like a bitch. So she takes a bath and they miss the plane on purpose and spend most of the day ordering room service and recuperating. Both their cell phones ring a few times in the morning, but they fall silent as the sun sinks slowly beneath the horizon, warmth working sluggishly through the dispersing rain clouds like the beetles clambering through the muddy grass.

She's not the type to plan ahead, he's starting to learn. She probably woke up one day and just decided to make this happen on a whim, without any thought to any reservations he might have on the matter. (Not that he really had much of any. But he doesn't have to let her know that.)

He is the type to plan ahead, though. There's a reason he chooses strangers, women from different cities and countries, people who don't know who he is or what he's about. There's no risk when there's no future, no danger. He left a lot of things behind with Aimee, but his ability to care about a woman wasn't one of them. (His willingness to try, though, is long gone.)

What they're doing is dangerous in a way that she hasn't considered. She's not the type of person who thinks about such things. He's the one at fault here because he can see the possible consequences of their actions spreading out in front of them. He's not an island anymore, not like before and neither is she. Now that he's a member of a team, he doesn't have the luxury of doing what he wants when he wants to do it.

If they lose interest, if they get hurt or killed, if it doesn't work out – or if it does. Neither of them are prepared for any possible outcome.

(But he didn't push her away. In fact, he handcuffed her to a bed and skipped them ahead a couple chapters – and he's not sure what, if anything, that means.)

They play I Never on the plane ride back. Eliot hasn't played it since ninth grade, but he has a feeling that she plays it all the time.

She's kicking his ass, anyway.

"I never…Jesus, I can't think of anything else." She sighs and her bangs blow up off her forehead. "I never…had sex on a…stage." He huffs and drains the last of his drink. "Really? Seriously?"

"I dated a theatre major."

"You went to college?"

He snorts. "No."

"Slut." She drains the last of the mini airplane bottle and waves at the attendant, eyebrow raised. (People have two reactions to Parker – they're freaked out and ignore her, or they're freaked out and bend over backwards to make her happy. The longer he knows her, the less instances of the former he sees.)

He leans back slightly in his seat, watching her profile. "I never ripped off Hardison's wallet."

She grins sheepishly and gulps at her fresh drink.

"I knew it was you!"

She shrugs, an impish look on her face, tilting her head at him. She looks like a bird. "I'm tired of this game."

"I'm not having sex in the bathroom." He shakes his head. "Overrated."

"I wasn't talking about sex," she says irritably. Digging in her backpack, she pulls out a small, brightly colored case. "Monopoly?"

He blinks and grins involuntarily. "All right."

(She makes him laugh. He likes that.)

After one too many close calls, he'd found her one afternoon swinging pathetically at the punching bag that Hardison had kindly installed for him in the basement.

"Oh, just stop," he said.

"Fine." She backed up and kicked at it in frustration. Sweat poured down the back of her neck, creating a line of moisture between her shoulder blades. "You show me how to do it, then."

So he taught her how to defend herself, how to fight dirty and how to recognize when the best thing to do is to run and hope for help. How sometimes, submission is safer than defiance, and how certain men, men like Eliot, wouldn't think twice before snapping a little thing like her in half for the right price.

"Not like you," she said.

He shook his head at her. "Just how do you know that?"

She shrugged. "You wouldn't hurt me," she said confidently.

"I could." He caught her eyes. "And you don't know that I wouldn't, not for sure." She lifted her chin up stubbornly and he didn't know why he needed to make her understand. "Haven't you learned by now not to trust anyone?"

"Haven't you learned by now that this thing we're doing is different?" She tensed her frame and took a right hook in slow motion. Her form was perfect. "You're different."

"Maybe." He watched as she swung around and stopped a powerful kick inches away from his left knee. She was a natural. "Maybe I'm just lying in wait for the perfect time to take you all out."

She smirked. "Since when are you that patient?"

When he finally turns his cell phone back on at the airport, there's seven voicemail messages, five from Nate and two from Hardison. He sighs in defeat and skips to the most recent one.

"Dude," Hardison is saying. "I don't know what the hell happened to you and Parker in Seattle, but Nate's going apeshit looking for you two. We've got a new client and we're under the clock."

Eliot curses and looks at Parker, who is checking her own phone. She rolls her eyes at it and shrugs at him like, what can we do?

What can they do, indeed.

Their new client wants the money he'd invested back from a cheating business partner, set to skip the country in three days. Eliot drives straight from the airport to the office, leaving Parker to head to the mark's office in order to meet Hardison to plant bugs.

He doesn't get his ear bug back until he gets to the office, so he misses what happens and gets a nasty shock when he tunes in just in time to hear the noises of what is obviously a fight.

"What the fuck is going on?" he demands.

"Guards," Nate says, dialing a number on his phone. Sophie is perched on an office chair, hands wringing nervously, biting her lip.

"Who?" Eliot clenches a fist. "Who's fighting, Parker or Hardison?"

"Parker," Hardison supplies, voice rushed and too loud in Eliot's ear. "Nate, I've got his computer covered. From there we can get audio."

"Good," says Nate. "Get Parker and get out of there. I've got the police on the way to scare them off."

Everyone winces in tandem as they hear her cry out in pain, and Eliot tenses. "Parker, just run," he orders. "Get out of there before you get hurt."

"I'm trying," she says.

"Oh shit," says Hardison. "Parker, behind you. Shit, shit, shit."

"What?" Sophie bites out.

"Three more," Parker says breathlessly. "I – I can't take them all. Hardison – " She cuts off in the middle of her sentence, voice descending into a strangled moan of pain.

"Eliot," says Nate. "Go."

He's already halfway through the door.

Aimee always thought that he'd left out of cowardice, out of some kind of fear of commitment or some other boringly normal problem like that.

The real reason is more sinister, more shameful. He's felt violence beneath his skin his whole life, but it wasn't until he was nearly grown, until he'd faced down the barrel of a predictable life with a predictable woman that he'd panicked.

He'd wake every night from dreams of blood and death and pain and as a jittery twenty-year-old, he'd craved it as powerfully as he'd abhorred it. He still remembers the night he'd realized he had to leave, had to go because his own nature demanded it, when he'd lay in bed with Aimee, smelling her clean girl-scent, watching her sleep peacefully and beautifully as only women can, and realized that all he really wanted to do was kill something.

(It's a dichotomy that he's made his own, the balance between warmth and brutality and almost fifteen years later, he still doesn't understand himself and it scares him more than he likes to admit.)

He drives fast, knows all the tricks of the city and thus gets there before the police do. There's one guard gone, one face down on the ground and the third's got Parker pinned to the wall, blood on her face and broken nails scrambling at the hands clamped around her neck, fighting futilely for traction.

Eliot's thought processes take a backseat and before he even really realizes what he's doing, the guard is on the ground, clutching his broken leg and Parker is gasping for air, holding onto the wall as if she'll fall to the ground if she lets go. (She probably would.)

She lifts her eyes to his face and lurches forward, arms outstretched. He meets her halfway and lowers her to a chair, muttering something that he won't remember, even seconds after it escapes his mouth. (He may or may not call her 'baby,' judging by the looks he gets from Sophie back at the office later.) She's a total mess, her face all cut up and nasty bruises forming on her neck. "Jesus Christ," he mumbles. Through his ear piece, he can hear Sophie demanding to know if everyone is okay, goddammit, her voice high and thready with worry.

"It looks worse than it is," she croaks.

"Don't talk," he says.

Hardison skids into the room, rumpled and panicky. "Oh thank God," he says, when he sees the guards on the ground.

"Where the hell were you?" Eliot demands as police sirens fill the silence.

"Hey, I took out the third guy," Hardison says. "Well – I tried."

"Cover story," Nate reminds them. "Hardison, get the hell out of there. Eliot, you and Parker were working overtime in the offices down the hall when you caught the Men in Black breaking in. Make sure they take her to a hospital."

"Got it." Hardison's gone in a flash, and Eliot grumbles at his back.

The man whose leg Eliot broke starts to come back into consciousness, groaning loudly, and Eliot kicks him in the temple, ending that problem. Then, he kicks him again. For good measure.

"Feel better?" grates Parker.

"Not really," he replies honestly.

She's the only one who knows what he did with his money. And it was an accident, because he totally didn't tell her. (She snooped through his credit card bills.)

"A car?" she'd said, staring at him as if he'd just announced he was running off to become a ballet dancer.

"A very nice car," he'd corrected. "And several motorcycles."

"You," she'd announced, "are such a man."

"You say that like it's a bad thing," he'd replied, and that was that.

(She didn't tell anyone else. He did have to let her drive his Desmosedici, though.)

In the ambulance, she takes her earpiece out and sticks it in his pocket, motioning for him to do the same.

"You should let the kids know what happened," she says.

"I'll call everyone later," he says meaningfully, and takes his own ear bug out.

At the hospital, they clean up her face and give her pills for the pain. There's no damage to her larynx, but her throat will be sore. It could be worse. (Much worse.)

They give her a private room and tell her they're keeping her overnight for observation. Eliot sits in a chair and stares out the window as a nurse hovers around Parker's bed, tinkering and fussing and generally being annoying. He stifles a smile as Parker tells her bluntly to leave her alone, and as the door closes, he swivels his head to find her watching him.

"Quit being weird," she says, and he snorts and smoothes out his brow.

"I never went down on anyone in a hospital bed," he says, and she laughs.

"Get the fuck over here, then," she says, and kicks the blankets off.

Parker had been very good about keeping quiet that first time in Seattle, to the point where Eliot was impressed.

The ear bugs don't pick up breaths, or any background noise besides the wearer's voice, so they communicated in movements, in expressions and gasps. The voices of the others faded to white noise in their heads and it quickly turned into a game, a slightly voyeuristic rebellion.

He'd had her on her stomach, pulling at the cuff on her wrist and clanging it against the metal bedpost whenever he did something she liked. He found a spot on her lower back that made her wiggle around pleasantly, and he pinned her shoulders to the mattress as he slid inside of her, her face buried in her free arm. She slid across the bed in violent bursts as he pushed his hips against hers, biting her hand as she came to keep from making a sound.

Afterwards, she lay quietly, still on her stomach, and smiled a loose little smile at him. In the ear bugs, they could hear Hardison asking if they'd killed each other yet.

"Well," she'd said, and swung a leg across his stomach. "Only in a good way."

He sleeps in a chair next to her bed and awakes in the early morning from dreaming of rain and how easy that pirate-waitress outfit had ripped beneath his hands. He stands in the bathroom of his hospital room and stares at his reflection and catches up to his own instincts for the second time that week. (He thought he was done with trying, but. Apparently.)

When he goes back into the room, she's awake and getting dressed. Turning, she catches sight of him and smiles, and, well, shit.

"I get to steal some money. From a vault," she informs him cheerfully, holding out his earpiece for him.

He puts it in slowly, watching as she covers up fading bruises beneath cloth and leather. "Sounds fun," he says, and hands her her shoes.

(He's always two steps behind himself, but he catches on eventually.)

fin.