From this ancient prompt list, because I am the worst and it took me forever to get around to this.  I just want everyone to be proud of me because I almost went somewhere REALLY terrible with this prompt.  Because the last episode of Leverage fucked me all the way up and I remain vengeful about that.  That near miss will be obvious.

The con had unraveled at light speed.  Things had gone south almost as quickly as the time Leverage Incorporated had stolen the maquettes of the David, leaving Parker scrambling to adapt their plan and salvage as much as possible.  They’d managed to get the files that would prove their target responsible a fistful of deaths revolving around tainted eggs, but now Eliot’s earbud was fried.

Well. He thought it was fried—admittedly he hadn’t devoted a lot of time to checking in more detail.  Between the black eye swelling on his face (bone undamaged, bruising unlikely to occlude vision), the blood seeping into his jeans from a nasty knife cut to his thigh (missed the artery, unlikely to prove lethal, would inhibit full range of motion) and the four cracked-hopefully-not-broken ribs impeding his breathing (another hit would shatter them along the fissures) and, naturally, the fact that he was tied to a chair (efficiently, they had practice), the earbud had taken low priority.  If it was fried, he was going to murder Hardison with his bare hands, assuming he got out of this with both hands intact.  

Also assuming that the others got out of this to be murdered, of course, which was never a certainty when someone had the forethought to take their hitter out of the equation.  Eliot almost would have been reassured if the target’s hired muscle (most of them half-decent, with a small command structure of better trained mercs) was busy torturing him, because if they were occupied with him, the others would have time to get out.  Instead, they had managed to knock him out with a hard blow to the head (mild concussion, vertigo manageable for motion) and left him here alone, tied up and out of play.  But he was trying not to think about that, because if he thought too hard about the kind of disaster that could befall Hardison and Parker when he wasn’t there to take the hit for them, he got a little lightheaded (possibly the concussion, more probably a mild anxiety response).  So the dead earbud had to take a back burner to getting the fuck out of here and finding the other sixty-seven percent of Leverage International.

“Totally waterproof, Eliot,” he muttered under his breath as he twisted at the rope behind his back (thick hemp cord, not the best for restraining a prisoner but definitely not the worst).  “Never gonna short out again.”  He’d found some slack, but forcing the rough cord over the joint of his thumb was giving him trouble, the skin wet and tacky from his unplanned dip into the water feature in the lobby.  “Could take it to the bottom of the ocean.”  It helped a little that the rope had abraded his wrists raw, until slick blood seeped down his knuckles, offering some lubricant.  “Damn it, Hardison.”  

He huffed out a breath, pressing his wrists together and trying to ignore the twinge in his ribs.  The rope slipped a little looser and Eliot tucked his thumb as close to his palm as he could—he didn’t want to resort to breaking the joint unless he had to, it would be a liability in a fight and he already had as many liabilities as he cared to manage in one day.  He pushed his shoulders back, until his ribs screamed with it and every instinct told him to relax and curl up around the injured bones and wait for the pain to pass. Eliot had spent his entire adult life training his body to ignore pain, just another misfire of nerves, something to work through and disregard.  The rope slid, that critical fraction of an inch, and he twisted his wrist and—there.  His thumb was out.  He slipped his palm and fingers free and brought both hands around to rip the rest of the rope off, trying to force feeling back into his fingers as quickly as possible as he clumsily unpicked the knots holding his legs to the chair.

Eliot didn’t so much stand as drive himself to his feet through main force, the jagged cut in his leg protesting when he placed weight on it.  He pushed it away and turned to the door (locked, steel, impossible to break down) with a critical eye.  He would need wire, or something else that could pick the lock, or, barring that, something to break the hinges—none of which he had access to. The chair’s heavy wood frame wouldn’t stand up to it, and there was little else in the room.  Ceiling tiles it was, then.  It was a standard industrial building ceiling, plain tiling covering the piping and a crawl space—or rather, a very short gap that could be used as a crawl space if the crawling person was determined enough. Eliot was feeling determined.

Standing on the arms of the chair offered him just enough height to push the ceiling tile up and over, and then haul himself up after it.  He felt one of his ribs (seventh rib on the right) give with a small snap as he pulled, but once he was stretched over the tiles (sturdier than most, unlikely to give under his weight at once) with no sign of a developing pneumothorax, he decided to ignore it.  He could deal with broken ribs once he had Hardison and Parker safe and intact and out of this place.

Eliot aimed for the exterior of the door (fifteen feet from start) and crawled, army-style, between the poured concrete of the next floor up and the ceiling tiles. It hurt, miscellaneous grit and dust collecting in his slashed leg and scraped wrists, but it didn’t take long until he could hear a pair of voices below him.  Perfect.  He lifted out another ceiling tile as silently as he could manage and dropped straight onto one of the half-decent hired muscle.

“Holy shit!” the other guy yelped as Eliot took his target to the ground (sharp blow to the head on impact, rendered unconscious, possibility of subdural hematoma, probability of survival: sixty percent). Eliot didn’t respond except to snatch the Glock at his target’s hip (Glock nine mil, standard issue for American law enforcement, most common gun on the market, sticky trigger) and aim directly at the other guy’s chest.

“Now,” Eliot said, standing, and his voice was a thick rasp, heavy and black with anger. “Let’s be real clear.  I don’t like guns.  Don’t mean I won’t shoot you right here.  And my aim’s real good.  So let’s start with the basics: gun on the floor.”  The other guy did as he was told, dropping his own Glock with a clatter. “Kick it away.”  It skittered across the floor to Eliot’s foot. “Good.  My team.  The thief and the hacker.  Where are they?”

“I—I don’t–”

Eliot cocked the gun.  “You want to answer me.”

“Oh my God,” the guy said, half a moan.  Eliot almost couldn’t blame him—a bloody, furious prisoner dropping from the sky would shake anyone up—but he didn’t have time for this.  He aimed at the man’s leg and fired, leaving a streak of red (grazing shot, painful but nonlethal, probably wouldn’t even need much recovery time save in case of sepsis).  The guy screamed and clutched at his thigh as Eliot returned his aim to his chest (bullet just to the left of the sternum, direct puncture of cardiac muscle, probability of survival: next to zero).

“If you’re not useful,” Eliot said, steady and simple, “I’ll need to find another guy. Don’t make me find another guy.”

“I don’t know where they are!” the guy panted, sliding down the wall to sprawl on the floor, his hands going red where they were pressed to his leg.  “They were trying to find you!  I—I saw them on floor three fifteen minutes ago!”

“Good start. What floor is this?”

“T-twelve. Jesus Christ, please don’t shoot me again.”

“I barely shot you,” Eliot said, considering the gun and regretfully putting the safety on. “I’m gonna keep this for a few more minutes.  You put pressure on that and call someone for your buddy and he might even wake up.  I need anything for the elevator?”

“N-no.”

“Good.” He bent over the bleeding man and removed a radio from his jacket (on standby).  “Gonna take this too.  You gonna tell anyone I’m out, or are you just gonna bleed quietly?”

“I—I won’t tell anyone, I swear to—oh fuck, ow.”

“You never been shot before?” Eliot asked, arching an eyebrow skeptically.  “Hold out for better work, kid, you probably ain’t even gettin’ paid that well for this.  You definitely ain’t gettin’ paid well enough to get shot.”

“How m-much are you getting paid?” the man demanded, half spitting the words, like an insult.

“Not a damn thing,” Eliot said, and smiled, showing all his teeth.  The man paled visibly and wilted back against the wall. “Try not to work for such bastards next time.”

The man made a vague noise as Eliot left, cautiously making his way toward the elevator. He’d just pressed the ‘down’ button when the radio crackled to life.

“I’ve got the hacker, where’s the little blonde?” the voice on the other end demanded.

“I’m on her tail,” Eliot said without thinking, putting on a vague Bostonian accent over his usual drawl.  “Where do you have the hacker, I’ll bring her to you.”

“Conference room on the fifth floor,” the voice said.  “And hurry up!”

“Yes, sir,” Eliot said, and turned off the radio as the elevator arrived.

The ride was brief—companies this big and wealthy didn’t half-ass their elevators, in Eliot’s experience—but even the few moments of standing still were a brutal reminder of the ache in his ribs and leg.  Eliot took a deep breath, experimental (broken rib grinding but not pressing on the lung, as good as could be hoped for), and let it out slowly as the doors opened.

‘Conference room’ was fairly unhelpful in an office, but Hardison was a talkative guy at the best of times—Eliot paused at the first place where the hallway split into three, stilled his breathing, and listened.  Left.  He couldn’t make out the words, barely more than a faint mumble, but the rolling lilt was unmistakable, even through doors and walls.  There was also a complete lack of other voices, so: left.

He moved as quietly as he could manage, compensating for his injured leg, gun held ready.  It was heavy in his hands, the grip familiar—he had never preferred Glocks, they were neither sufficiently precise for his tastes, nor capable of sufficient blanket ruination to compensate, but he was as good a shot as he had told the kid upstairs.  His hands were steady, the movements familiar as he cleared each room he passed.

Eliot hadn’t handled a gun since the disastrous job after Jimmy Ford’s death, some three years prior, but they were easy.  Barely muscle memory.  Pull the trigger, and your target went away. No muss, no fuss.  No chance to take it back, no matter who was on the other end.

Eliot shook himself out of his dark thoughts, pushing them back as he came to a closed door, with a pair of raised voices behind it.  He hammered on it with a closed fist and called, “I got the blonde.”

There was a moment of quiet, followed by Hardison’s smug, “Oh, you in trouble now.”

Eliot threw his uninjured side into the door, and it slammed open with a crash, knocking one of the thugs inside into the wall hard enough to send him to the ground. Eliot didn’t dare give them (four mercenaries, including the one on the ground, all armed, one holding a gun three feet from Hardison) a chance to rally, and shot the man nearest Hardison in the shoulder (left shoulder, likely nick of brachial artery, probability of survival: twenty-five percent with rapid treatment) before the fourth man had even hit the floor.  The other two (a woman and a man) seemed torn for a critical moment, and Eliot shot the man in the leg (shattered patella and tibia, probability of survival: eighty percent, probability of permanent damage: almost certain) before turning to the woman and pointing the gun directly at her throat (pull trigger, bullet to jugular, leave her to bleed out, probability of survival: zero).

“I shoot, you die,” he said, in case she hadn’t picked up on that detail.  She was calmer than the man he’d just shot in the leg (more professional, more experience) and there was a small but noticeable flat spot at her side (concealed sheath).  “Gun on the floor, knife on the table.”  She eyed him, cool and detached (not her first time on the wrong side of a gun), sizing him up.  “You might be able to take me down,” he said, tipping his head in an approximation of a shrug.  “But you sure as shit ain’t gonna walk away from it, either.”

“Fair enough,” she said with a shrug, and pulled out her gun, holding it between two fingers as she set it on the ground.  The knife went next, pulled out and set on the table, and Eliot nodded to the corner, where her coworker was bleeding from the shoulder.

“Better put some pressure on that.  You don’t leave until I say you do, so make yourself useful.”  He waited until she was fully occupied, her hands bloody and busy, to abandon the gun in exchange for the knife and turn to Hardison in the chair (much less thoroughly tied down than Eliot had been).

“Your damn earbud fried when I hit the water,” Eliot said, giving Hardison a narrow look.

“My man,” Hardison said, grinning blithely through a bloodied mouth and a black eye. “You look like hell.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Eliot muttered, carefully sliding the knife between Hardison’s wrists and slicing the rope to pieces.  “You ain’t exactly Prince Charming right now either.”

“Of course not,” Parker said from overhead—because, Eliot thought to himself as Hardison stood, of course Parker had been in the ceiling the whole time. “That’s because he’s the prince in the tower.”

“That’s generally a princess, darlin’,” Eliot said, and she smiled down through the missing ceiling tile, tired but smug.

“Yeah,” she said.  “But I’m the knight, so he has to be the prince in the tower.”  She folded herself through the hole and lowered her body as elegantly as an unfurling ribbon to the floor, still grinning like she’d won something.

“So what’s that make Eliot?” Hardison asked, rubbing at his wrists.

“The dragon,” Parker said, in the blank way she did when someone missed something she thought was evident.  “Obviously.” She looked around the room, interested, and remarked, “You shot a bunch of people.”

“Yeah,” Eliot said.  “Most of them’ll be fine.  Eventually. You get the files out?”

“’Course I got the files out, what d’you take me for?”  Hardison huffed, annoyed.

“Look,” Parker said in her most reasonable voice, looking at the woman still holding pressure on the man Eliot had shot in the shoulder.  “You guys have officially failed your jobs.  This company is screwed.  You might as well let us leave.”

“We’re leaving regardless,” Hardison clarified.  “But it would be easier this way.”

“How ‘bout we just go, then?” Eliot snapped, impatient and starting to feel his skin crawl—the job was done and he wanted out of this building and out of this city and back in the safety of their own headquarters above the brewpub.  “C’mon, Parker, move it.”

Whether the building officials had actually taken Parker’s advice to let them leave or they had simply managed to get lucky, Eliot wasn’t sure.  Either way, they made it all the way to the lobby before someone tried to stop them—the man Eliot had knocked down with the door.  He looked out of it, like the blow had concussed him badly, but his aim was spot-on as he raised his gun and aimed.

At Parker.

The lobby unraveled into screaming (civilians, uninvolved, disposable if necessary to protect Parker and Hardison), and Parker started to turn, eyes wide.

Eliot’s brain kicked into overdrive and analyzed the angle of the gun coldly (just under Parker’s ribs, unacceptable), the distance to the muzzle (not enough for Parker to move after the gun fired, unacceptable), the man’s finger (tightening on the trigger, unacceptable), the space he had to maneuver (two feet, limited by injuries, doable in half a second).  

He hit Parker like a truck, a bare fraction of a moment before the gun fired, an explosively loud sound in the echoing room.  She hit the marble floor and rolled, graceful, end-over-end, and the bullet hit Eliot in the chest.

He had about enough time to bring the knife he’d taken off the woman upstairs up and throw it, hard, and watch it sink into the man’s shoulder before he could feel the gunshot wound start to ache.

“Eliot!” Parker shrieked, scrambling back over and grabbing him by the arm.  “Oh my God, Eliot, why did you do that?”

“Don’t be an idiot, Parker,” Eliot muttered, and coughed.

Oh. That hurt.  It had been a long time since he’d been shot in the chest. He could taste blood, bubbling in his throat, and the dizziness he’d been pushing away since regaining consciousness tied to a chair surged up in force.  His vision blurred black, and when it cleared he was leaning against Hardison, Parker’s shaking hands pressed to his chest.

“Help,” Parker was calling, and Eliot thought distantly that Sophie had trained her well, because she sounded terrified.  “Help, that guard just shot my boyfriend!”

Eliot wanted to say something about maybe not drawing attention to the three thieves clustered together on the lobby floor, but then people were moving—toward the guard.  Someone was pulling out a phone and calling an ambulance, and someone else the police, and voices were murmuring about how the poor man on the floor looked like he’d been through hell.  Funny how people reacted sometimes.

“Eliot,” Hardison was saying, and Eliot made himself focus, pushing away the white-hot stabbing through his chest and the taste of copper on his tongue.  “C’mon, man, tell me what to do, if you were a hard drive I’d have this.”

“Pressure,” Eliot said.  “And–”

“If you tell me not to panic right now, I will murder you,” Hardison hissed, but his broad hand came to replace Parker’s smaller ones, and pressed down with enough force that pain sang down Eliot’s nerves and his vision went white.

“Eliot, Eliot, come on,” Parker was saying, and Eliot opened his eyes again.  He was on his back, and he didn’t remember getting there.  Hardison’s hands were shaking almost as badly as Parker’s had, but he was still pressing firmly down on the hole in Eliot’s ribs.  There was a distinctive crackling noise that Eliot distantly recognized—air, he finally thought, feeling like he was making his brain work through molasses. That was air, escaping from his lung through the hole.  “You have to stay with us, okay?  You have to stay awake.  You promised us.”

Eliot blinked for a moment.  Right. He had promised.  They couldn’t function at sixty-seven percent capacity. And Parker’s voice was cracking, and it was his fault, and that meant he had to fix it.

“’S okay, darlin’,” he murmured, wrapping his hand around her wrist.  “’S gonna be okay.”

“Yeah, it is,” Hardison said, fierce.  “Because you’re gonna be fine and you’re gonna keep yelling at me about making my beer too sweet.”

“’S terrible beer.”

Hardison laughed, an alarmingly choked sound, and Eliot carefully focused on the dark, angular face above him.

Oh. Hardison was crying.  

“’S gonna be okay,” Eliot repeated, and this time, when his vision swam and faded, it didn’t come back.

***

At one point in his life, Eliot had bothered with being surprised at waking up when he expected not to.  That point was a long, long time past, so when he opened his eyes and discovered that he was not, in fact, dead, he nodded to himself and took stock.

He was in a hospital (white walls, private room, two chairs, windows showing a dark Chicago, beeping monitors), and he was in relatively good condition.  He wasn’t currently intubated, although his throat was raw (possibly unnecessary although very unlikely, rapid removal to prevent panic upon waking more probable), and other than the drainage tube in his chest (removing fluid, ensuring successful repair of lung tissue) and the IV in his hand (probably nutrients, definitely some high-grade painkillers) he was mostly unattached to the machines.  Two electrodes monitored his heartrate and blood pressure, but nothing else.  He seemed all right, his leg neatly stitched up and his broken ribs set in place around the bullet hole—and as bullet holes went, he’d definitely had worse (Kazakhstan, field hospital, massive hemothorax).

All things considered, he was in good shape.

A warm weight rested beside him, on his uninjured left, blonde hair coiled loosely against his shoulder—Parker, asleep with one hand on his pulse at his wrist.  His other hand, the one with the IV, was in Hardison’s long fingers, who was waking up.

“Hey,” Hardison said softly.

“We caught?” Eliot rasped—and he’d thought his voice had been a wreck before.  It was barely a whisper, now.

“Nah, man, I’m better than that,” Hardison said with a small smile.  “Company had a massive conspiracy in it, when three civilians tried to go to the cops the guards—under the command of the CEO—took matters into their own hands.  You are currently First Lieutenant Eliot Nichols, ex-Green Beret who lost your temper and saved the lives of your girlfriend Alice and your best friend—I figured maybe not dropping all of us on them all at once—Alex.  We should be in the clear until you’re discharged.  Month or so.”

“I’m not stayin’ here for a month,” Eliot said, eyes drifting closed again.  His voice was nominally clearer, his mouth slightly less dry, although not by much.  “An’ I’m not stayin’ on the drugs the whole time I’m here.”

“I thought you’d say that,” Hardison said, amused.  His thumb traced a gentle arc on the back of Eliot’s hand, avoiding the IV skillfully.  “I’m doing some research about how quickly you can leave.  And then we can go home.”

“Mm,” Eliot said.  “Sounds good.”  He cracked an eye open again and said, “Expected to get a lecture.”

“Later,” Parker mumbled into his chest.  “We thought you were dead.  It’s a good lecture.”

Eliot smiled, faint but happy, and his eyes drifted closed again, the drugs pulling him inexorably down.  Hardison’s lips brushed his knuckles, and Parker’s fingers tightened on his pulse point, and Eliot let himself sleep.