Eliot is very aware of any lesson life teaches him.

Boxing taught him the value of personal space. Martial arts taught him the importance of staying in control of emotions. Being a commander taught him that a man like him can't have any of the things other men can.

He doesn't get desperate in tough situations. He doesn't let himself be overwhelmed by emotions. He's faced Death every day of the last twenty five years of his life, and he's not impressed by it. When his moment comes he will accept it in the same phlegmatic way he accepts anything else.

Parker can't do that now.

He watches her upset face and feels her emotions bumping from wall to wall in that cave, hitting him hard in the middle of his chest. Eliot tightens his jaw and looks at her with a stoic face hoping she will breathe his control and get a hold of herself.

Of course, count on Parker to not do anything he wants her to.

She has her own strange, bizarre way. The way of a child. Innocent and naive, in her criminal lifestyle. And like a child she can do anything she wants in her own world.

In that world of grand theft and impossible air ducts she is alone, just like he is in his. But in that world she comes across shiny things, not dead bodies. For that she's not prepared. He knows she needs to be, but it doesn't mean he's happy about it.

He will lock her inside her bubble anytime he can, but right now she needs to see the only reasonable way to go. The only reasonable, useful thing they can do. Because they are the only ones who could ever do it.

She's strange and childish and gets on his nerves half the time. However, she's learned self-preservation like no one else – but him – did. No one else looked out for her but herself.

She's new to the sweetness Hardison is teaching her; she's new to the sisterhood Sophie is teaching her; she's new to the justice Nate is teaching her.

She's new to the loss and the regret and the guilt she's learning from a dead man on a mountain. Parker wants to do the right thing. She's louder than he is, and she cries, and her watery eyes become so big, and her heart is so broken than he doesn't know how to deal with her.

Eliot is used to pure violence, to walking on razor blades and parrying fatal blows. He's not used to this, to the openness Parker forces him to face; her tears make him feel useless and weak and make him stupidly wish his arms were more fitting to hug and comfort than to hit and break. What he can do right now is to make her understand that she is stronger than that, that she can survive this and make something good out of it. They both can, because they are different and wrong in they own way, but they are what they are, what no one else can be. The key to the reading of each other's heart.

This is why he can get to her through her tears and her absence of rules and order. This is why she can nullify his demand of personal space and fill it with tender oddity and big smiles.