Fic: Trust (Leverage, Gen, PG-13)
Happy Leverage Day!!! &hearts Okay, since it's Reveal Day over at leveragexchange, it's safe for me to post this story in my journal now.
Title: Trust
Author: sheryden
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Gen. It includes the whole team, but it is centered on Eliot and his relationship with Nate.
Spoilers: Brief mention of “The Order 23 Job”
Warnings: Not really.
Disclaimer: They’re not mine. I’m just having fun with them.
Summary: Eliot wasn’t used to people caring what happened to him.
Notes: Okay, I wrote this for cyphersushi, who asked for either slash or gen. I sort of intended on making this Nate/Eliot slash, but it turned into a look at their relationship in general. The prompts I used were promises, just you and me, and free-falling, though the latter one is more metaphorical than literal.
Eliot dragged himself to his feet, cussing and shaking and berating himself internally. He’d let his guard down for a moment, long enough to wind up flat on his back after diving out of path of an oncoming car. Eliot had recognized the car as it sped away. It belonged to the team’s mark, a sniveling little accountant who wore polyester suits and smelled like garlic all the time.
Scowling at the memory of the man, Eliot glanced down at his shirt sleeve, now covered with the blood oozing out of the gash in his arm. It wasn’t a big gash, but he’d still have to try and stitch it up later. Fuck. He hated stitching himself up one-handed.
Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Nate and Sophie approaching in a hurry, so he tried to shake off the disorientation he felt and stand a little straighter.
“Where the hell have you been?” Nate snapped as he reached Eliot.
Eliot ran a hand through his hair. “I had to walk away for a minute.”
“A minute?” Nate said as his eyes darted to Eliot’s bleeding arm. “We’ve been looking for you for a half an hour. We couldn’t reach you on comms.”
He winced internally. “I turned off my earbud.”
“You turned-” Nate paused and took a breath. “You wanna tell me why?”
“Not really.”
Sophie walked over to Eliot and surveyed the damage to his arm. “We were worried, Eliot,” she said in a soothing voice. “We thought something might have happened to you.”
“I can take care of myself.”
Nate flashed Eliot what Parker and Hardison liked to call The Look, but he didn’t press the matter. Instead, he motioned toward the bloody mess on Eliot’s forearm. “How bad?”
“It’s gonna be a bitch to stitch up, but it’s no big deal.”
“Anything else hurt?”
Eliot shook his head. “No. Just the arm and a few bruises.”
And his pride-that was mortally wounded. He’d nearly been mowed down by an accountant in a Volkswagen Jetta. It was the kind of thing that could lose a man his reputation as a badass.
“All right,” Nate said, his words clipped and tinged with frustration. “Hardison and Parker are waiting in the van.”
***
On the way back to Nate’s place, Eliot listened to Hardison rant and rave about how “I am not the great and powerful Oz,” and how they had the comms so “I can keep track of ya’ll in case you wind up bleeding in a ditch.” And then he started muttering under his breath about cowboys. Parker sat between them, nodding in agreement with Hardison and scribbling on her fingertip with a ballpoint pen.
“Well, at least we can take good news back to the client,” Sophie said brightly, as Nate parked the van.
Eliot glanced up. “Our mark got away, though.”
“Well, he won’t come back,” Sophie reassured him. “We have too much on him.”
Nate turned in his seat and looked at Eliot. “Come on up. I want to look at your arm. The rest of you will be down in the bar?”
“Sounds like it,” Hardison said, motioning for Parker to follow him.
Nate climbed out of the van and slammed the driver’s side door just a little too hard. “I’ll be upstairs.”
Sophie leaned close to Eliot and laid a hand on his shoulder. “Now listen,” she said. “Nate’s probably going to try and talk to you about what happened today, which means he’ll probably yell and blunder through the whole thing. But what he means to say is that he cares about you, and you scared him. So don’t lose your temper.”
Eliot nodded and watched as Sophie climbed out of the van to join Hardison and Parker in the bar.
***
“Hold still.”
“Nate, I can do this myself.”
Gripping a needle in one hand and bracing Eliot’s arm in the other, Nate glanced up. “You said you didn’t want to do this one-handed.”
“Well I changed my mind,” Eliot said through gritted teeth. “I’d be better off letting it bleed.”
Nate went back to stitching up Eliot’s wound. He hadn’t said much about Eliot going missing during the job yet, but he had rubbed the wound just a little harder than he needed to when he cleaned it and now he was holding a needle just a little too tight. Eliot knew he was in for a lecture at some point. Hell, Nate was probably composing it in his head as he knitted Eliot’s skin together.
And he had it coming, if he was being honest. He did go AWOL on them, and that could have put the team in danger. Eliot prided himself on being competent and professional, but today, he’d flaked.
When Nate’s silence finally started to get to him, Eliot decided to broach the subject. “I know you’re pissed,” he said.
“This is the second time you’ve turned off your earbud during a job,” Nate said without looking up. “Yeah, I’m pissed.”
Eliot clenched his jaw. “You’re bringing up the thing in the hospital? I explained to you about that.”
“You mean the time you took out your earbud and almost tossed a guy over a railing while we were in the middle of a job?”
“Nate.”
“Yeah, you explained that to me, and you told me you’d never do it again.”
“I wasn’t off the grid for that long.”
Nate tightened his grip on Eliot’s wrist. “It was long enough, Eliot” he snapped. “You damn well know better than to go off and cowboy your way through a job.”
Yanking his arm away from Nate, Eliot stood up and fought the urge to knock Nate across the room. “Least I know when to take myself out of the situation,” he growled. “You used to stumble through jobs drunk off your ass when you had no business being there. So don’t you fucking lecture me.”
Nate stood up and took a step toward Eliot until he was face-to-face with him. “You are not making this about me, Eliot.” he said. “We’re talking about you.”
Eliot clenched a fist. “You best take a step back, or I’m gonna hand you your teeth.”
Nate held his ground. “You want to hit me? Go ahead. Or you can sit down and let me finish your arm.”
For several moments, neither of them moved. Eliot’s eyes remained locked with Nate’s, and he could see that Nate wasn’t planning to give in. Not only was Nate stubborn enough to stand there all day if he needed, he also wasn’t particularly intimidated by Eliot’s abilities. Gradually, Eliot forced himself to calm down and unclenching his fist, he lowered himself onto the chair.
Eliot held his arm out so Nate could finish tending to it. “Look, Nate. You have every right to yell at me. I screwed up. But I wasn’t cowboying my way through the job. I was just trying to get my head together.”
“Eliot,” Nate said, his voice softening a little. “You are a consummate professional. You’re the one I’m not supposed to have to worry about. But this is the second time you’ve gone off on your own, and I need you to understand. When you go silent, we think maybe you’ve been grabbed or you’re dead or something.”
They sat quietly for a moment, and Eliot closed his eyes. A couple of years ago, he’d never have bothered to explain himself-hell, he didn’t have anyone to explain himself to back then. Now, people gave a damn, and that scared the crap out of him. Gazing up at the ceiling, Eliot said, “I’ve been dealing with some stuff this past week. I kind of have an anniversary coming up.”
Nate reached behind him and snatched the antibacterial cream off the table. “Anniversary of what?” Eliot could tell he was trying to keep his tone casual. They usually didn’t do the touchy-feely stuff, so he was probably as uncomfortable right now as Eliot.
Using his good hand to pull up the bottom of his shirt, Eliot gestured at a long, jagged scar on his side. “Of this.”
“How’d it happen?”
Eliot shook his head. “Just an Army thing. Guy I thought I could trust… I found out I couldn’t. That’s all I really wanna say about it.”
Nate gazed at him for a long moment. “Okay,” he said finally. “Fair enough.”
“It’s just that it was a long time ago.”
Nate nodded. “You sure none of the bruises are serious?”
“Yeah, I’m sure. I’ll have a sore shoulder tomorrow.” Eliot took a breath. “Nate,” he said, “I flaked because I thought I saw someone I knew.”
“The guy you thought you could trust?”
“Yeah.”
“You think he recognized you?”
“No.” Eliot shook his head. “No, it wasn’t actually him.”
“How can you be sure?”
Now this was moving into territory where Eliot preferred not to go. “Because I watched him die,” he half-whispered. “Trust me, he’s gone.”
“Maybe he’s a ghost, and he’s come back to get revenge on you.”
At the sound of Parker’s voice, both Nate and Eliot both turned to look at her. She was sitting on the stairs, looking engrossed in the conversation. Eliot wondered how long she’d been sitting there. He suddenly felt exposed and started taking a mental inventory of everything she might’ve heard.
“I mean, it’s a possibility,” she said brightly.
Nate pointed toward the door. “Parker, go,” he said firmly. “We’ll be down in a little bit.”
Looking defeated, Parker stood up and trudged out of the room.
After she disappeared out of the door, Eliot turned to Nate. “Are we sure she’s not a ghost?”
“Pretty sure.” A brief smile flashed across Nate’s face.
“Nate,” Eliot said. “It’s important to me that you know I don’t go around hallucinating. It was just a thing. I-”
Nate shook his head. “I don’t think that.” He finished bandaging Eliot’s forearm and leaned back in his chair. “After some of the stuff you’ve been through in your life, I’d be worried if you didn’t have a… thing once in a while.” He paused. “So what happened after you thought you saw the guy?”
Eliot swallowed. What had happened? He’d gotten dizzy and breathless. He’d felt a wave of panic begin to creep up his spine. He’d turned off his earbud and had beaten a path out of the parking lot to lean against a cold, damp wall so no one would see him freak out.
He looked down at the floor. “I just walked away to get my head straight.”
“If you needed to get out of there, you could have told me that. Hell, you could have told me this was a bad time of year for you. We didn’t have to take the job in the first place.”
“I thought I could handle it.”
Nate leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. “Look, I know you don’t like to ask for help.” Eliot started to protest, but Nate held up a hand. “Just listen to me. I don’t like to ask for help either. But we’re a team. We gotta trust each other.”
“I do trust you Nate.”
“Even though I walked around drunk for a year?”
“Even though.”
Nate reached out a hand and laid it on Eliot’s shoulder. The gesture made Eliot feel warm and relaxed. “You gotta promise me something. Make sure I know what’s going on with you. Okay?”
“All right.”
“And keep your damn earbud in.”
***
When Nate and Eliot walked into McRory’s, Parker was sitting alone at a table folding and unfolding a napkin. Hardison was standing at the bar chatting up a too-thin girl with curly hair, and Sophie was sitting a few feet away from him, lost in thought and stirring the ice around in her empty glass.
Parker poked her head up and motioned Eliot over to her table. After Eliot plunked himself down, she whispered, “Are you still in trouble?”
He smiled and shook his head. “No, we’re good.”
She perked up. “Good,” she said. “’Cause I need to ask you something.”
Eliot licked his lips. “Okay.”
“Okay,” she said, sitting up straight. “Who is the great and powerful Oz? Hardison won’t tell me.”
Biting back a laugh, Eliot made a point of glancing over his shoulder before he leaned in and whispered, “He works for the CIA.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” he said. “But nobody’s ever met him. Nobody that survived it anyway.”
As he let Parker chew on that image, Eliot glanced over his shoulder again and saw Nate standing at the bar, watching them with a grin on his face.
Trust wasn’t something Eliot gave freely. It was messy and fleeting, and it had nearly gotten him killed more than once. But these people, they were getting under his skin. He still wasn’t ready to lower his defenses entirely, but it was good to know that at the end of the day, someone gave a damn.
Title: Trust
Author: sheryden
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Gen. It includes the whole team, but it is centered on Eliot and his relationship with Nate.
Spoilers: Brief mention of “The Order 23 Job”
Warnings: Not really.
Disclaimer: They’re not mine. I’m just having fun with them.
Summary: Eliot wasn’t used to people caring what happened to him.
Notes: Okay, I wrote this for cyphersushi, who asked for either slash or gen. I sort of intended on making this Nate/Eliot slash, but it turned into a look at their relationship in general. The prompts I used were promises, just you and me, and free-falling, though the latter one is more metaphorical than literal.
Eliot dragged himself to his feet, cussing and shaking and berating himself internally. He’d let his guard down for a moment, long enough to wind up flat on his back after diving out of path of an oncoming car. Eliot had recognized the car as it sped away. It belonged to the team’s mark, a sniveling little accountant who wore polyester suits and smelled like garlic all the time.
Scowling at the memory of the man, Eliot glanced down at his shirt sleeve, now covered with the blood oozing out of the gash in his arm. It wasn’t a big gash, but he’d still have to try and stitch it up later. Fuck. He hated stitching himself up one-handed.
Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Nate and Sophie approaching in a hurry, so he tried to shake off the disorientation he felt and stand a little straighter.
“Where the hell have you been?” Nate snapped as he reached Eliot.
Eliot ran a hand through his hair. “I had to walk away for a minute.”
“A minute?” Nate said as his eyes darted to Eliot’s bleeding arm. “We’ve been looking for you for a half an hour. We couldn’t reach you on comms.”
He winced internally. “I turned off my earbud.”
“You turned-” Nate paused and took a breath. “You wanna tell me why?”
“Not really.”
Sophie walked over to Eliot and surveyed the damage to his arm. “We were worried, Eliot,” she said in a soothing voice. “We thought something might have happened to you.”
“I can take care of myself.”
Nate flashed Eliot what Parker and Hardison liked to call The Look, but he didn’t press the matter. Instead, he motioned toward the bloody mess on Eliot’s forearm. “How bad?”
“It’s gonna be a bitch to stitch up, but it’s no big deal.”
“Anything else hurt?”
Eliot shook his head. “No. Just the arm and a few bruises.”
And his pride-that was mortally wounded. He’d nearly been mowed down by an accountant in a Volkswagen Jetta. It was the kind of thing that could lose a man his reputation as a badass.
“All right,” Nate said, his words clipped and tinged with frustration. “Hardison and Parker are waiting in the van.”
***
On the way back to Nate’s place, Eliot listened to Hardison rant and rave about how “I am not the great and powerful Oz,” and how they had the comms so “I can keep track of ya’ll in case you wind up bleeding in a ditch.” And then he started muttering under his breath about cowboys. Parker sat between them, nodding in agreement with Hardison and scribbling on her fingertip with a ballpoint pen.
“Well, at least we can take good news back to the client,” Sophie said brightly, as Nate parked the van.
Eliot glanced up. “Our mark got away, though.”
“Well, he won’t come back,” Sophie reassured him. “We have too much on him.”
Nate turned in his seat and looked at Eliot. “Come on up. I want to look at your arm. The rest of you will be down in the bar?”
“Sounds like it,” Hardison said, motioning for Parker to follow him.
Nate climbed out of the van and slammed the driver’s side door just a little too hard. “I’ll be upstairs.”
Sophie leaned close to Eliot and laid a hand on his shoulder. “Now listen,” she said. “Nate’s probably going to try and talk to you about what happened today, which means he’ll probably yell and blunder through the whole thing. But what he means to say is that he cares about you, and you scared him. So don’t lose your temper.”
Eliot nodded and watched as Sophie climbed out of the van to join Hardison and Parker in the bar.
***
“Hold still.”
“Nate, I can do this myself.”
Gripping a needle in one hand and bracing Eliot’s arm in the other, Nate glanced up. “You said you didn’t want to do this one-handed.”
“Well I changed my mind,” Eliot said through gritted teeth. “I’d be better off letting it bleed.”
Nate went back to stitching up Eliot’s wound. He hadn’t said much about Eliot going missing during the job yet, but he had rubbed the wound just a little harder than he needed to when he cleaned it and now he was holding a needle just a little too tight. Eliot knew he was in for a lecture at some point. Hell, Nate was probably composing it in his head as he knitted Eliot’s skin together.
And he had it coming, if he was being honest. He did go AWOL on them, and that could have put the team in danger. Eliot prided himself on being competent and professional, but today, he’d flaked.
When Nate’s silence finally started to get to him, Eliot decided to broach the subject. “I know you’re pissed,” he said.
“This is the second time you’ve turned off your earbud during a job,” Nate said without looking up. “Yeah, I’m pissed.”
Eliot clenched his jaw. “You’re bringing up the thing in the hospital? I explained to you about that.”
“You mean the time you took out your earbud and almost tossed a guy over a railing while we were in the middle of a job?”
“Nate.”
“Yeah, you explained that to me, and you told me you’d never do it again.”
“I wasn’t off the grid for that long.”
Nate tightened his grip on Eliot’s wrist. “It was long enough, Eliot” he snapped. “You damn well know better than to go off and cowboy your way through a job.”
Yanking his arm away from Nate, Eliot stood up and fought the urge to knock Nate across the room. “Least I know when to take myself out of the situation,” he growled. “You used to stumble through jobs drunk off your ass when you had no business being there. So don’t you fucking lecture me.”
Nate stood up and took a step toward Eliot until he was face-to-face with him. “You are not making this about me, Eliot.” he said. “We’re talking about you.”
Eliot clenched a fist. “You best take a step back, or I’m gonna hand you your teeth.”
Nate held his ground. “You want to hit me? Go ahead. Or you can sit down and let me finish your arm.”
For several moments, neither of them moved. Eliot’s eyes remained locked with Nate’s, and he could see that Nate wasn’t planning to give in. Not only was Nate stubborn enough to stand there all day if he needed, he also wasn’t particularly intimidated by Eliot’s abilities. Gradually, Eliot forced himself to calm down and unclenching his fist, he lowered himself onto the chair.
Eliot held his arm out so Nate could finish tending to it. “Look, Nate. You have every right to yell at me. I screwed up. But I wasn’t cowboying my way through the job. I was just trying to get my head together.”
“Eliot,” Nate said, his voice softening a little. “You are a consummate professional. You’re the one I’m not supposed to have to worry about. But this is the second time you’ve gone off on your own, and I need you to understand. When you go silent, we think maybe you’ve been grabbed or you’re dead or something.”
They sat quietly for a moment, and Eliot closed his eyes. A couple of years ago, he’d never have bothered to explain himself-hell, he didn’t have anyone to explain himself to back then. Now, people gave a damn, and that scared the crap out of him. Gazing up at the ceiling, Eliot said, “I’ve been dealing with some stuff this past week. I kind of have an anniversary coming up.”
Nate reached behind him and snatched the antibacterial cream off the table. “Anniversary of what?” Eliot could tell he was trying to keep his tone casual. They usually didn’t do the touchy-feely stuff, so he was probably as uncomfortable right now as Eliot.
Using his good hand to pull up the bottom of his shirt, Eliot gestured at a long, jagged scar on his side. “Of this.”
“How’d it happen?”
Eliot shook his head. “Just an Army thing. Guy I thought I could trust… I found out I couldn’t. That’s all I really wanna say about it.”
Nate gazed at him for a long moment. “Okay,” he said finally. “Fair enough.”
“It’s just that it was a long time ago.”
Nate nodded. “You sure none of the bruises are serious?”
“Yeah, I’m sure. I’ll have a sore shoulder tomorrow.” Eliot took a breath. “Nate,” he said, “I flaked because I thought I saw someone I knew.”
“The guy you thought you could trust?”
“Yeah.”
“You think he recognized you?”
“No.” Eliot shook his head. “No, it wasn’t actually him.”
“How can you be sure?”
Now this was moving into territory where Eliot preferred not to go. “Because I watched him die,” he half-whispered. “Trust me, he’s gone.”
“Maybe he’s a ghost, and he’s come back to get revenge on you.”
At the sound of Parker’s voice, both Nate and Eliot both turned to look at her. She was sitting on the stairs, looking engrossed in the conversation. Eliot wondered how long she’d been sitting there. He suddenly felt exposed and started taking a mental inventory of everything she might’ve heard.
“I mean, it’s a possibility,” she said brightly.
Nate pointed toward the door. “Parker, go,” he said firmly. “We’ll be down in a little bit.”
Looking defeated, Parker stood up and trudged out of the room.
After she disappeared out of the door, Eliot turned to Nate. “Are we sure she’s not a ghost?”
“Pretty sure.” A brief smile flashed across Nate’s face.
“Nate,” Eliot said. “It’s important to me that you know I don’t go around hallucinating. It was just a thing. I-”
Nate shook his head. “I don’t think that.” He finished bandaging Eliot’s forearm and leaned back in his chair. “After some of the stuff you’ve been through in your life, I’d be worried if you didn’t have a… thing once in a while.” He paused. “So what happened after you thought you saw the guy?”
Eliot swallowed. What had happened? He’d gotten dizzy and breathless. He’d felt a wave of panic begin to creep up his spine. He’d turned off his earbud and had beaten a path out of the parking lot to lean against a cold, damp wall so no one would see him freak out.
He looked down at the floor. “I just walked away to get my head straight.”
“If you needed to get out of there, you could have told me that. Hell, you could have told me this was a bad time of year for you. We didn’t have to take the job in the first place.”
“I thought I could handle it.”
Nate leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. “Look, I know you don’t like to ask for help.” Eliot started to protest, but Nate held up a hand. “Just listen to me. I don’t like to ask for help either. But we’re a team. We gotta trust each other.”
“I do trust you Nate.”
“Even though I walked around drunk for a year?”
“Even though.”
Nate reached out a hand and laid it on Eliot’s shoulder. The gesture made Eliot feel warm and relaxed. “You gotta promise me something. Make sure I know what’s going on with you. Okay?”
“All right.”
“And keep your damn earbud in.”
***
When Nate and Eliot walked into McRory’s, Parker was sitting alone at a table folding and unfolding a napkin. Hardison was standing at the bar chatting up a too-thin girl with curly hair, and Sophie was sitting a few feet away from him, lost in thought and stirring the ice around in her empty glass.
Parker poked her head up and motioned Eliot over to her table. After Eliot plunked himself down, she whispered, “Are you still in trouble?”
He smiled and shook his head. “No, we’re good.”
She perked up. “Good,” she said. “’Cause I need to ask you something.”
Eliot licked his lips. “Okay.”
“Okay,” she said, sitting up straight. “Who is the great and powerful Oz? Hardison won’t tell me.”
Biting back a laugh, Eliot made a point of glancing over his shoulder before he leaned in and whispered, “He works for the CIA.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” he said. “But nobody’s ever met him. Nobody that survived it anyway.”
As he let Parker chew on that image, Eliot glanced over his shoulder again and saw Nate standing at the bar, watching them with a grin on his face.
Trust wasn’t something Eliot gave freely. It was messy and fleeting, and it had nearly gotten him killed more than once. But these people, they were getting under his skin. He still wasn’t ready to lower his defenses entirely, but it was good to know that at the end of the day, someone gave a damn.