Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

When he picked Eliot and Molly up from the ABQ airport, and Eliot casually introduced Molly as his “replacement,” enunciating the word carefully and looking Hardison dead in the eye, daring him to start yelling, Alec did not give him the goddamn satisfaction.

At least, not until they were back home, and Parker came out of the house asking if Eliot had brought home another duckling, her own duckling hanging back on the porch. And even then he started in a normal tone of voice.

It escalated quickly.

A corner of his brain noticed Molly, clapping Eliot on the back in a gesture that smacked of commiseration before heading up to the porch and going inside with Josie, but the majority of his attention remained invested in letting his husband know that this was NOT OKAY.

Dammit, Eliot.

Before — before they came so close to losing…before his nightmares almost came true — when Sophie and Nate walked away, Nate’d asked Eliot if he’d look out for him and Parker. As if that was even a question, but then for a mastermind, dude always was weirdly oblivious. Eliot’s response, “‘til my dyin’ day” was romantic and badass, because that was Eliot for you, but it was also a clear expectation. Eliot intended to die for them. Or, at least before them. And sure, if he and Parker were creakin’ around in their eighties and Eliot in his nineties decided to finally kick the bucket, then he could live with that, for whatever time he had left, anyway, but he knew Eliot didn’t expect to get old.

He wanted Eliot to get old.

Maybe he was being selfish, but Hardison was a frelling criminal, and that came with the territory. Altruistic methods be damned.

But you don’t tell Eliot he can’t save people.

He’d considered it. Once, Eliot had asked him if he’d keep on doing this with Parker, ‘cause Parker wasn’t going to stop. And he’d been down for that. But while Parker did some crazy shit, it wasn’t Eliot’s flavor of crazy shit, which involved way too many bullets, torn muscles, concussions, and a fair number of broken bones. He wasn’t down for Eliot dying on them.

And then it nearly happened.

After answering and inventing plausible answers to way too many doctors’ questions about Eliot’s prior head traumas, and what he did for a living, and what long-term pain meds was he on, because he had to be on something, and did he have other family they should contact, because his chances of waking up from this were slim to none, Hardison had sat down on a hard bench next to a silent Parker, her face white and set. “When he wakes up,” he said, because he wasn’t going to consider any other options, “we’re done.”

She’d nodded and stared through the doors where they’d taken Eliot, saying nothing.

And Eliot, stubborn ass that he was, did wake up.

His right foot, ankle, and lower leg had to be painstakingly reconstructed — he came this close to losing them. Broken ribs — the docs had a lot of questions about the number of prior injuries there too, and for once Hardison hadn’t had answers. He knew he should tell them as many details as possible, and to hell with cover stories, or Eliot’s paranoia, but Eliot hadn’t told him. Or let him see the damage. For that reason alone, it was good they’d started sleeping together, just so he and Parker could keep an eye on the idiot.

Parker answered in more detail, which he wasn’t sure if she knew, or just invented what sounded plausible to her, but the doctors had moved on from “impossible” to “implausible” and he understood that. Eliot was all kinds of implausible.

In any case, it wasn’t the broken bones, or the internal trauma, or how a bone shard barely nicked the artery underneath his collarbone and he almost bled out on them in the ambulance. Getting run over by a car wouldn’t kill Eliot Spencer. That just knocked him down, and dragged him, and as it turned out, there’s a lot of opportunities to slam a skull into asphalt repeatedly under those circumstances.

Hardison thought a lot about the hockey job, staring down at Eliot, deep in a medically-induced coma as they waited for the swelling to (hopefully) go down. He thought about Eliot going out on the ice to take hits for a guy who couldn’t take another one.

“Never again.” He’d told the room, and in answer a ceiling panel shifted aside and Parker’s tired face peeked out. He didn’t ask what she was doing up there. Or how long she was planning to stay.

“Where should we live?” she’d asked him, and he remembered that their place in Chicago was burned, that they’d need somewhere no one would look. At least it gave him something to focus on.

By the time Eliot woke up, Nate and Sophie had arrived, with Nate looking awkward and guilty, Sophie thankfully taking command, and Hardison having settled on Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was small, but not too small, and he’d found them a ranch, with a large adobe house, a barn, and a lot of fenced pasture. He chose it because it was still a bit more country than city, but forward-thinking enough that the three of them wouldn’t raise too many eyebrows. He thought Eliot would like the tangle of cottonwoods and fishing on the Rio Grande, and he sold it to Parker on the basis of the three-thousand-foot Watermelon Mountain. (Also known as the Sandias, but once Parker started calling it Watermelon, he wasn’t about to stop her.)

By the time Eliot had healed up enough to move, he had a better idea of what they were facing. The neurosurgeon had given them a long list of symptoms, starting with aphasia and interrupted by a slightly hysterical giggle-fit when she mentioned irritability, ‘cause damn, if Eliot was irritable then things would probably be okay.

Now, two years on, Hardison was beginning to think they would be. Eliot had more good days than bad, when sentences came out in order and made sense, when his hands didn’t shake, and he’d carefully test out a memory that might not have been there the day before. Other days, he’d get frustrated, snap and snarl and lose control when his mouth, his hands, his head wouldn’t obey him. The irony of that didn’t escape any of them.

Parker found the mustang auction a year back, after Eliot nearly sliced off his finger when cooking and flung the knife across the room in frustration. She’d dragged them both along, told Eliot he needed to protect her from the murder horses, and they’d ended up buying one, an Appaloosa that she named Fruit Loop. Somehow the cereal theme stuck. Eliot trained Fruit Loop, then Cheerio, Corn Flake, and his latest project, Raven Bran. (Hardison’s choice, because damn that pun was too good.) They’d ended up giving Corn Flake to a woman down the road, who’d lost her last horse, and was looking for a new friend, but the others were still there, keeping all of them sane.

Eliot couldn’t be angry or frustrated when he trained the horses. He had to be patient with them, which seemed to make him more patient with himself. For their part, he and Parker swallowed different sets of fears and learned to ride.

They were okay.

He’d thought they were okay.

And then Parker lied about where she was going and tried to pull a complex job involving crooked cops in the Boston Police Department and an FBI identity that hadn’t been touched in years. She’d only called him in the last minute, before coming home with a broken wrist and a kid who jumped every time Eliot growled.

Though really, if Eliot had just growled, it probably would have been fine. But no, he’d lost it worse than Alec had seen in more than a year, smashed up the living room and punched a wall made of adobe, not drywall, before storming off, leaving Parker vibrating with anger and Josie with fear.

The stupid thing was, Eliot wasn’t pissed at Parker. Alec knew that. He was pissed at himself, and that he’d lost control. He couldn’t imagine what that felt like, for a man like Eliot.

So maybe Alec wasn’t proud of the fact that he’d gone and yelled at Eliot to stay in the barn if he was gonna behave like one of his feral horses, and Eliot had taken that to heart, even after he’d calmed down, and refused to come back to the house. Took more than a day before he’d let Alec check his hand, which was swollen, but not broken. He hoped it wasn’t the only thing.

Parker went down to talk to Eliot after a few days, and the next day she took Josie on a field trip, while Eliot finally came back into the house, and made an enchilada so packed with green chilies that neither he nor Parker could handle the heat, but Josie loved it. It served as an apology of sorts. He still stayed out of her way, and she still looked like a deer in headlights whenever they did cross paths, but Alec had long since learned to accept baby steps.

He was carefully ignoring the fact that Parker had brought home a thief to train. Getting Josie out of a bad situation was good. Great. It hurt, her not telling them, but he got why she hadn’t, which hurt too. He knew this was hard for her. That they’d been making decisions based on the needs of one, and him and Parker arguing about it was out of the question, if they wanted to keep Eliot from doing something stupid. None of this was fair.

Hell, sometimes he cut loose and hacked a bank on the side, just to keep his fingers nimble. But that was low risk, compared to what she’d done...and what she was possibly thinking of doing, training Josie. They’d agreed. They were done. They changed together.

Which brought him back to Eliot running off to Boston and retrieving Molly Connell.

It wasn’t that he was particularly worried about Eliot off by himself. Unless it was a Really Bad Day, Eliot could handle himself. And he’d made the concession to turn his location data on for his phone, as a silent message to Alec that he was okay.

Of course, Eliot texting him mostly gibberish from a Boston emergency room freaked him out, till he figured out it was Molly in trouble and Eliot needed documentation to pretend he was her dad and get past paperwork.

So it’s not like he was surprised when Eliot brought her back. But…

“YOUR REPLACEMENT??? ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS!?”

“Josie got Molly settled and I think they’re friends,” Parker announced, slipping into bed after her spying session on the other side of the house. She snuggled into Eliot’s arms, murmuring, “I’m glad you’re back.”

“M’ too,” he said into her hair, and Alec felt the low rumble of the words, pressed up against Eliot’s spine.

He was still scared shitless about the “replacement” comment, but he’d gotten the yelling out of his system at least.

“Kid’s a mess,” Eliot said, and it sounded almost like an apology.

“Messy is cool. I’m glad you got her to come. I am. Just don’t — There’s no replacing you, man, so don’t say that shit, okay?” He laced his fingers through Eliot’s hair, gently massaging his scalp.

Eliot shifted. “‘M holding you back. With a…another thief, an’ a hitter —”

Parker sucked in a breath. “We change together.” He knew she meant it, but the words had become a habit, almost thoughtless as they slipped out.

He’d use them anyway. “I ain’t — We ain’t doing jobs. Running a crew. And you want to train someone up, to what, be like you?” Eliot growled, rather than dignify that with a response, but Alec meant it. No question, Eliot’s skills had saved them countless times, but the cost — “Is that fair to her?”

“Fair?” The single word came with a healthy dose of derision. Maybe he deserved that. Molly and Josie and Eliot and Parker, and hell, even him, they all knew nothing was fair. They’d tried to even the balance, as much as they could, but it wasn’t like they could change the world.

“I-I can’t condone you sending kids out there alone. But I also can’t…” he swallowed, hard. “Please. I’ll beg if I need to, I ain’t above it. But I can’t lose either of you.”

“They’ll need a crew,” Parker said, ignoring his begging and shifting immediately into problem-solving mode. “A family of their own.”

Eliot hummed in agreement. “Alec, any hackers needin’ a rescue?”

Damn. Two against one.

~~~~~

Tractors do not make good getaway vehicles.

Trevor had plenty of time to consider this fact, as he high-tailed it across the field, up the dirt road leading away from the Fullers’ farm and toward the little bridge that separated the Fullers’ land from the Mathertons’. They wouldn’t mind him cutting across either — no one in these parts would actually turn him over to the wailing sirens at his back, except that tractors didn’t make good getaway vehicles and even at his top speed of 40 mph, he’d never make it to the bridge before they caught him.

He really needed to have a talk with his mom about what to say when people rang the doorbell. For example, if someone came to the door asking where he was, the correct response was not: “Oh Trevor? He’s not here right now, he’s over at the Fullers’ fixing their tractor, but he should be back before dinner, what did you need to see him about?”

The reason he was certain she said this, despite being over at the Fullers’ in his capacity of local tractor hacker, was that she called to relate the conversation verbatim. She didn’t believe in the summarizing power of the word “like.” Getting to the point cut precious minutes off his available time to flee.

So really, it was all her fault he was about to go to jail.

The tractor jounced over a ridge it had probably created, once upon a time, rattling his spine as it careened up the incline onto the road. He checked on his progress. Not good, very not good. There was one turn off before the bridge, but as long as he was on the road, they were guaranteed to catch up, dirt or no. “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon…”

Up ahead, a plume of dust rose off the intersection. Shit. He’d be cut off before the bridge. If he went back offroad, he’d destroy crops — not an option. So that was it then.

The dust cloud resolved itself into Kayla Shelty’s purple Jeep. He stared at it, blinking. Kayla lived down the road a good ten miles, and she ought to be heading to work in the opposite direction in about half an hour, so why was she…? She swerved onto the road in front of him and he slammed on the tractor’s brakes to avoid T-boning the driver-side door.

“GET IN, JERK!”

“Uh, why?”

“What, you want to be arrested?”

“No, but why is my ex-girlfriend helping me not be arrested?”

“Trev, if you got in the damn Jeep, I’d be helping a lot more.”

He blinked. “Right.”

She was helping him, she explained, spitting her blowing hair out of her mouth, because his mom had called in a panic, and because he’d left an emergency duffle bag under her bed (“Oh yeah, forgot about that”), and well, because repairing tractors was a stupid reason to go to prison.

“You hated me talking about tractors.”

“You never stopped talking about tractors, Trev. It got old.”

Okay, so that was fair, though technically he hadn’t only talked about tractors. He also had a parking ticket phase before he built a bot to help people with that. Once upon a time, he’d been told he had a problem with authority. Sure, he’d been nine at the time, but that just gave him time to explore which types of problems he had with authority. There were just so many to choose from. Authorities sucked.

“Where are you taking me?” They’d lost the black sedans bouncing down a track barely suitable for the Jeep, though the thing did seem to thrive on adversity.

“Me’n my brother used to hop trains all the time. You’re getting a crash course.”

“Cool!”

It wasn’t until after that crash course, with Kayla’s grin and waving middle finger getting smaller by the second that the reality of the situation actually set in. He was on the run. For hacking tractors. At least he knew where he was headed.

Tractors weren’t the only thing he could hack. He’d been messing around with computers since Alec Hardison plopped his hat on ten-year-old Trevor’s head and let him help them steal a potato. He’d gone home with a fascination with technology and a name, carelessly dropped in the server room. It took a few years of digging, and a lot of conspiracy forums, but he found the guy in Portland, all the way across the country from his roots in the Massachusetts countryside. And back then, he wasn’t good yet. Not enough to meet his hero. So he waited. Learned. Tracked and lost and tracked Hardison again, through various places and identities in and out of the states.

Eventually he apparently got good enough, waking up from a faceplant-on-the-keyboard type of night to find a message from “pot00000000” staring at him. Not that the guy ever technically identified himself, but he knew, from hints dropped in forums that they both frequented, in jokes meant for a party of one. A lot of them referenced potatoes. He gave him tips, tricks, downright genius ideas he’d never thought of, but never dropped any clues as to his physical location. Which was cool. IRL out of bounds, he got that.

Till a few months back, when, on their private chat pot00000000 posted:

if u get in trouble, i’ll be quirky

The train Kayla got him on headed toward the Great Lakes, and he had some good fake passports burning a hole in his duffle. Trying for Canada would be the smartest move. But Hardison and his team weren’t in Canada. They were in Albuquerque for some reason. He didn’t have an exact address obviously, but what else could that mean?

The duffle was well-stocked, and Kayla had clearly switched out the food for stuff that wasn’t expired. Damn, he should probably have shut up about the tractors at some point. Anyway, it also held a supply of cash, with which he bought a shitty van in a tiny town, he wasn’t certain he could find on a map. Technically, he didn’t have enough for the van, but less cash in hand was better than none in the bush, and he offered to fix any computer issue the guy selling it had. Turned out what he had was two teenage boys just discovering...well probably more than their parents wanted to know, and they’d got the viruses to prove it. Computer ones, luckily. He’d be useless at any other kind. By the time he finished cleaning up their system, he’d earned that van.

The thing was so old it had a legit tape deck. The eject button didn’t work, so with the van he inherited American Beauty and a newfound appreciation for the Grateful Dead. He managed to keep the thing running till Albany, where he could finally buy a burner, text his mom spoofing Aunt Carol’s number, only a version who wasn’t deathly allergic to peanuts and wanted to let her know the snickerdoodles came out great. He was the snickerdoodle. Or sn1ck3rd00dl3, on certain forums, but none that the cops were smart enough to find.

With the burner phone he could finally start accessing accounts not in his given name, but he was careful. Just enough to limp into a do-it-yourself repair shop, where he diagnosed the issues, and made friends with the legs of a girl fixing up an old-old-OLD VW bug. Soon enough he met the rest of the girl, Luz, and learned the best junkyard in the area. He stayed in Albany a few days, sleeping on Luz’s couch while she helped him get the van up to snuff for a cross-country trek. By the time he was ready to head off, the van was riding smooth, and the back had been cozied up, with a seat that folded out into a bed, and a little cooking area patched together from scavenged camping supplies.

A week later, he prayed the brakes would hold and rolled down the hill toward the Rio Grande. Lacking an actual location, he drove around until he spotted a random sixty-foot arrow sticking out of a Pantry store parking lot. Normally, he’d avoid it; Amazon owned too much of the world and he could buy better stuff at farmer’s markets, thanks, but he needed a landmark. And a potato.

Having acquired the second ingredient, he took his battered cap off, set it on the dashboard, and lay the potato next to it, before snapping a picture with the phone. In the picture, the giant arrow was visible in the background. Posted to their private chat, it ought to be enough.

It took less than a day. The next morning, he relaxed in the back, sipping coffee, when the definitely locked front doors were slim-jimmed open simultaneously. A girl with short brown hair climbed in, scanned the entire back of the van, including him, and shouted, “CLEAR!”

Trevor frowned. In cop shows, “clear” meant no one in the room. “Should I be insulted?”

“If you want. I don’t give a shit.” She clambered into the back. “You Trevor?”

“Yes. Me Trevor. I’m looking for a guy called Hardison? Or Pot-8-0s”

She nodded, as if that was normal. “Stand up.” He let her pat him down and paw through his stuff before sliding open the side door. “We’re good.”

“Told ya,” said a man’s voice, and then Alec Hardison was in his van. He grinned, stuck out his hand and Trevor slapped it, barely fumbling the handshake they’d invented a decade ago. “Alright, man!” He looked around, and asked, “She got a name?”

“Anne-Marie,” Trevor answered instantly. He could hear a few other people outside, but they didn’t seem that important right now. “‘Cause of the song.”

“What song?”

“Got two reasons why I cry, each lonely night. First one’s named sweet Anne Marie, and she’s my heart’s delight.”

From outside the van a low voice started humming and another guy appeared. “Second one is prison, babe, sheriff’s on my tail. If he catches up with me I’ll spend my life in jail.”

Hardison stared back and forth between Trevor and a guy who could only be Eliot Spencer, though finding information on him had been harder than all the rest put together. “Oookay then. You’re definitely comin’ with us. What’s the rest of that song?”

Said I’m runnin but I’ll take my time,
a friend of the devil is a friend of mine,
if I get home before daylight,
just might get some sleep tonight.

Hardison drove, with Eliot riding shotgun, and the scary girl sitting across from him in the rear. She closed the curtains between the front and the rear, so he couldn’t see where they were going, before taking his phone, turning it off and removing the chip. She briefly took his mp3 player too, giving him a weird look at the corded headphones.

“Why not use your fucking phone? And wireless?”

“Uh, because these ‘phones don’t need a battery, or bluetooth turned on, and the mp3 has no wiFi to hack. Why bother encrypting every fracking thing I own, when I can just have older stuff?”

She weighed his response, and nodded, handing back the mp3. “What are you wanted for?”

“I fix tractors.”

She rolled her eyes. “No. What illegal shit did you do?”

“Yeah. It is illegal. Tractors these days come loaded with proprietary software, and farmers aren’t allowed to fix them themselves. They have to take them to licensed, over-priced shops for everything. Which is not cool. So I hack the ones in my area, override the sofware, set it up however they like it, and install an easy program I wrote that lets them do whatever they want. It’s their machine.”

“For free?”

“Sure, everything I do is open source. Live by the GNU, die by the GNU.”

She gave him a flat, blank stare.

Up front, Eliot was singing along to the tape, which, didn’t really match up with the stuff Trevor had managed to dig up about Eliot-Fracking-Spencer, but he had a nice voice, and if he liked Trev’s accidental music selection, then that boded well for his continued survival. Hardison kept starting to talk, or laugh, but always cut off to hum awkwardly along.

“So, I’m good?” he asked the scary girl, who maybe wasn’t that scary, as she tried not to grin and roll her eyes at the weird mix of sounds coming from the front seat.

“Sure, why the fuck not. You’re weird enough. Welcome to The Ducklings. I’m Molly.”

“Ducklings?”

“Stupid nickname. Technically Jo-Jo’s the Duckling, and I’m the Fuckling.”

He considered that. “What else rhymes with…”

“You’re welcome to Suckling.”

“Thanks, I hate it. Who’s Jo-Jo?”

“Josie. She and Parker were the ones who broke into your POS. They’re taking Lucille back.”

He didn’t meet the thieves until they reached a small ranch on what must have been the outskirts of Albuquerque, but he was just guessing. Still, he could smell and hear horses, and there was a big, one-story adobe house in front of him, so “ranch” worked as an identifier.

Molly escorted him out of his own van, and suddenly there was a blonde woman in his face. “Trevor, huh?” she asked.

“Eliot likes his music, mama,” Hardison sounded pleased. Like weirdly pleased.

“Shuddup, Alec,” said Eliot, and for the first time he noticed a lag to his speech before the guy shoved him toward the house. “C’mon inside. You hungry?”

“What’s a duckling? I mean, I know what a duckling is – but like…contextually?” he asked, over dinner, after explaining how he ended up on the run, and maybe fanboying too hard at Hardison, but the guy seemed to enjoy it.

“Molly and Josie,” Parker said, mouth full of tortilla. She swallowed and continued. “They’ve been here about four months. All of you were involved in jobs we did years back.”

“Parker thinks we imprinted.” He could hear the hint of Boston in Josie’s accent.

“You guys were operating out of Boston and you’re calling us ducklings?”

“Yeah. I know,” Molly muttered.

“What?” Parker, for all that she kept saying the name, looked perplexed.

“Official children’s book of Boston is Make Way for Ducklings,” Trevor explained. “And now there’s three ducklings from the Boston area sitting in ABQ. That’s weird.”

“Boston has an official kid’s book? Random.” Hardison waved a hand. “And technically it’s four. Only one’s not in ABQ, but Sophie’s taking some sort of grand tour with hers.”

“So unfair,” Molly grumbled.

“You wanna go learn the…the stuff Sophie teaches, then go on.” Eliot growled.

“Like flirting. And how to make Eliot serve you tea!” Parker said, supremely undisturbed by his tone.

“Fuck that,” Molly said, then seemed to reconsider. “Only tea? Or are there other settings to robo-Eliot?”

Trevor stared at them. “Hang on. You guys are here to train? As a new crew?”

A bunch of highly significant looks passed around the table, before Parker answered brightly, “Yes! If you stay, that’s a hacker, hitter, and thief!”

“And with Sophie’s grifter in training, we almost got a full house.”

“Almost?”

Hardison sighed. “Hey, now I ain’t waiting on the universe or anything, but if someone happens to walk up to Nate and demand he teach them how to mastermind, I wouldn’t be surprised.”