The sounds cut in and out, the signal barely hanging on even as Hardison frantically boosts it and finds work-arounds and bends the rules and breaks a few parameters outright in order to compensate for the unforeseen complications.

"Guys, I can't-...Parker, you-...Somebody better-..."

"Oomph-...ugh-...sss-...ah!..." Crackling, offset by the distinct sounds of something plastic skittering across the floor, of scuffles, flesh-on-flesh, grunts and cries, always static crackling.

"Parker?"

"Parker?!"

"Parker!"

"I'm almost-...hey!...'sup?...uhmph-...Par-...we're just-...Hardi-?...We're-...back in range-... Hardison? Hardison? You there?" The crackling finally clears up, Eliot's voice gruff and demanding in their ears. It's the most welcome thing ever greeted in the cosmos.

"There we go! Eliot? How's Parker?"

"I'm fine." But her voice sounds a little wheezy, and that's not the Parker they know. Still, a collective sigh of relief makes the 'buds crackle a little, the devices still edgy and ornery after the scrambler stirred up their innerworkings like bad food scrambles the insides.

"Damn it, Hardison! I thought you said we had coverage!"

"Well, excuse me, Eliot, I can't account for every variable in the whole damned universe, can I? Would you like my job?"

"You want mine?" And the voice is less gruff and more heavy...weighted. Tired. Like today the responsibility is crushing usually strong, able shoulders; shoulders that seemed unbreakable before. Shoulders that they all -all- do more than depend on.

They stand on those shoulders, and place their stead on the speed of the fists to keep anything from knocking them down and the strength of the back to never break. Little do they know the fears hidden beneath those hardened muscles; the instincts -sharp and keen that save them time and time again- and the unshakeable -like they see him as being- insight that tells him that one day...one day he simply won't be able to make it in time.

He's not Superman, despite the joke; he's not Batman, like Parker sometimes calls him; he's not invincible like Nate occasionally wants to pretend him to be; he's not a bouncy ball, the way Hardison thinks he can just bounce back from anything; but he's not soft and fragile, like Sophie's occasional bouts of mothering instincts might almost -almost- treat him.

He just is. And what is will always be bound to being. His being is human. Human means limitations, bound by time and space, dimension, physics, gravity, the magnetic pull of all certain universal laws.

So one day he will not make it in time.

That was when Eliot decided each member of their team needed to be able to fend for themselves in some manner or another, to stretch and bend the rules of the universe just a little; to make time loosen its apron strings and for the puppetmasters to respect the puppets that were they. They couldn't change the universal laws, like they broke man's; but they could perhaps borrow, beg, and steal, cheat, con, and buy off a few to help Eliot's astronomical job out a little.

They'd give time and space and physics a run for its metaphysical money.