Listen, of all of the ways they’ve all betrayed each other – Sophie conning them in LA, Parker working with Archie Leech on that Steranko job without even telling them let alone asking for help, even Eliot keeping his involvement with Moreau a secret and letting the guy nearly drown Alec in a pool – out of all of that crap, this is the one that sucks the most, right here. Because, you know, they’d only thought Eliot was dead for like – a day, at most, until they’d broken into the morgue for his body, all of them still aching and fucked over from the backlash of the particle reactor explosion. And of course the morgue had been full to the brim, not enough room for the dead, really, and Eliot hadn’t been there.
They’d looked through all of the body bags and his body hadn’t been there and they’d promised each other that they were going to at least bury him, not let him be just another john doe, just another tragic mass grave. Learning that Eliot had bailed out of the body bag on the way to the morgue from the computer records but hadn’t contacted them had been – awful, and confusing, and now here Eliot is. Apparently alive and well, still in Central City. Could presumably have gone back to Portland at any time… but didn’t.
“Couple days ago,” Hardison says. “Watched to make sure you weren’t in the middle of a con I might blow.” His hands are shoved deep into his hoodie pockets. Making fists. He’s got a computer bag slung over his shoulder. He’s got bags under his eyes. He hadn’t wanted to come back to god forsaken Missouri, but he’d needed to see Eliot.
He kind of can’t even look at the guy. They were supposed to be a team. No, they were supposed to be something a little more than a team.
There’s a part of him that wants to smile, a part of him that remembers what it’s like to laugh: It catches in his throat and forms a lump of coal, serving as a reminder that he’s been naughty. It’s not just the fact that he didn’t say anything, that’s its own separate issue, but Eliot can’t allow himself a chuckle or two at Hardison’s kindness.
Here is a man with a heart, a guy who knows what it means to treat someone the way you want to be treated. Eliot gives him a reason to grieve and Hardison gives him back respect and dignity. It’s not, nor will it ever be, a fair trade.
His brows knit in consternation. Hardison’s got no reason to be nice to him.
Eliot waits for the yelling and the screaming, the demands for an explanation. Why catch him in a public place where they can’t cause a scene? What is Hardison looking for? He turns the questions around and around in his head, knowing full well that these sorts of puzzles are well beyond him. Eliot prefers dealing in simple things: Hit it, break it, destroy it.
People aren’t his kind of puzzles.
He perches his arms upon the table as he scoots forward and pinches his lower lip between his fingers, mulling over how to respond. “They caught my face on camera.” Indirect, professional, unrelated. There’s an elephant stomping all around the place and the only thing Eliot can do is work out how he got sloppy enough for Hardison to trace him.
His hand balls up into a fist. Eliot flexes his fingers, as if trying to tell his own body to calm the fuck down.
“What do you want to know?” he asks, as if it’s a suitable peace offering and not a given. Hardison deserves to know everything but Eliot knows that the knowledge could kill him; they’ll do everything they can to try and save him but he’s known since the day he set foot on American soil that there’s no bringing a ghost back from the dead. They gotta let go.
They gotta let go or else he’s gonna think he’s still got something to hang onto.
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