Work Text:
Eliot stumbled his way out of the Seattle warehouse where the mark had had a small army of goons waiting for him. He’d barely had time to warn Parker they were blown before they’d started laying into him. Ten, fifteen guys, maybe. And at least a couple of them had reputations he’d recognized.
Eliot grimaced and clutched at his ribs as he braced himself against a wall.
“Hardison, you there?”
Nothing but static from his earbud. Eliot tapped at it, but all that happened was a short squeal that made his ear ring. He must have taken a hit to the head, which would also explain why the world was tilting slightly to the left.
“If you can hear me man, I don’t know if I can make it to the rendezvous. You might need to track me.”
Slowly he slid down the metal wall, sitting to try and conserve what little energy he had left.
When Eliot pulled his hand away from his ribs, it was bright red with his blood.
“And Alec,” he said as his vision started to go gray, “I don’t say this lightly, but I think I’m gonna need a hospital.”
Eliot’s earbud had shorted out shortly after the first couple hits, and Hardison was stuck in the damn van, trying to help Parker extricate herself from the mark’s office while also tracing whatever backhack had blown their cover.
And he was stuck in the damn van.
“Hardison,” Parker spoke into comms, “I lost Eliot. Anything?”
“Nope,” he said, wheeling from one monitor to another, trying to reboot the glitching earbud in the middle of his tracing. It took a solid ten minutes of tweaking and cursing, but in the end it wasn’t even something he did. It was Eliot. He did something to the earbud, and suddenly, through the crackling static, Hardison could hear him.
“If you can hear me, man, I don’t know if I can make it to the rendezvous.”
“Eliot, Eliot man, you read me?”
He continued on as if he hadn’t heard, Hardison dropping the back trace, half listening to Parker strap herself in for a rapid descent in an elevator shaft through Eliot’s heavy breaths.
“You might need to track me.” Eliot paused, and Hardison held his breath as he heard the rasp in Eliot’s. “And Alec, I don’t say this lightly, but I think I’m gonna need a hospital.”
“Hardison, go.”
He hadn’t even needed Parker’s words; he was already moving, pulling up Eliot’s last ping on his phone and heading to what looked like the warehouse district where Eliot had been headed when he was ambushed, backhack be damned. Let the enterprising little IT mosquito get stuck in his snare web instead of following Hardison down the venus fly trap he’d been leading him to.
He had a retrieval specialist to retrieve.
As Parker let her rig fly her down to the basement level plan H exit, she didn’t get her normally bubbly feeling in her chest. Instead she felt itchy, almost like she did when a rig got stuck and she was dangling ten stories in the air but not quite.
It felt more like half molten broken glass, if she really had to put words to it. Like broken ribs but-
The sounds Eliot was making.
As she landed, Parker put her hand to her earbud, trying to close out the other noises and just listen to Eliot’s breathing. Yeah, that was definitely the bad lung noise.
“Hardison, be super careful when you move him. It sounds like he might have a punctured lung.”
Alec’s curse was nearly drowned out by the squealing tires on the van and the noise of Parker shedding her rig. They could retrieve it at a later date, once they made sure Eliot was safe.
She was closer than Hardison had been, even if he had the advantage of the van. She kicked off her low, sensible con shoes and ripped the slit in her skirt higher, taking off down one of the hallways mapped out in her brain that she knew would take her out to the warehouses.
They had to get to Eliot.
Eliot’s eyes opened slowly as he heard a vehicle pull up on front of him. Too slowly. He was down a lot of blood, and he couldn’t really breathe all that well.
Punctured lung, something in his brain dragged up. Internal bleeding from that damn stab wound, in the right area for a shot at his kidney or his liver. He’d been busted up and patched back together enough times to know that this wasn’t good.
Then Hardison was there in front of him, his hands hovering and wondering where to touch him, where it wouldn’t hurt.
Eliot wanted to laugh, but with his current lung situation that might be a bad idea. Instead he took his less bloody hand and brought it up to Hardison’s face, leaving the one putting pressure on the hole in his side.
“God, Hardison-”
“Shh,” Alec said, his face grey as he looked at Eliot, trying to inventory his injuries. “Don’t talk. There’s an ambulance on the way. I had to tell them-”
Eliot pulled him down for a kiss, shocking the younger man into silence. He pulled back, trying not to cough, and let their foreheads rest against one another.
“I don’t think I’m going to get another shot at this, so I just need to say it,” Eliot managed between wheezes.
He opened his mouth to continue, but there was sudden movement behind Hardison as Parker flew in from nowhere and executed a jump that nailed one of the goons who’d woken up and was coming for them in the chest with her knee. Then she was there, they were both there and Eliot couldn’t keep it up any longer.
He took his hand from his side and clutched hers with it.
“I love you, both of you, have for years.” It was getting even harder to breathe and he swore he could hear sirens in the distance. “Didn’t wanna fuck it up, so I didn’t do anything.” He coughed and groaned low at the pain. “But I didn’t wanna die and not tell ya. Didn’t wanna…”
Hardison immediately swooped in and supported Eliot as he passed out. Then things happened very quickly as the ambulance swerved around the corner and paramedics began to swarm the three of them.
It seemed wrong, after what Eliot had just told them, to say he wasn’t Eliot’s boyfriend, that they had just been a couple walking by and found him, but it had been the story they’d agreed on years ago when Eliot had insisted they come up with one if they were ever in this situation. The medics gave odd glances at Parker’s torn skirt and lack of shoes, but they didn’t ask questions.
They were too busy trying to save Eliot’s life.
Too busy to even notice when Parker slipped away and dragged the muscle she’d knocked out behind a convenient pile of concrete slabs.
“Where are you taking him?” Hardison asked as they loaded Eliot into the back of the ambulance.
“Grey-Sloan Memorial,” one of them shot over his shoulder, then slammed the door shut behind him.
As the emergency vehicle tore away from the spot where Eliot had lain, Hardison turned to see Parker staring at where she’d wiped the blood on her clothes. He carefully put an arm around her shoulder.
“C’mon, mama, we need to get outta here before the cops show up.”
Several hours later, Parker paced the short length of the van as Hardison concentrated on hacking into the Grey-Sloan Memorial Hospital patient database from the parking lot of said hospital.
“Looks like they found the ID Eliot had on him and are using that,” he said, trying not to look at what else was written in his chart. “He was awake enough at some point to respond to it anyway. And it looks like they’ve got the best of the best working on him,” he continued, pulling up the names of the two main surgeons. “Maggie Pierce and Meredith Grey, top of their fields. Bunch of really big medical awards, and reps that they don’t easily give up.”
Parker hadn’t stopped pacing.
“I tweaked his ID, put you in as his sister. As long as we don’t run into the EMTs who saw us, there’s no reason that we can’t just go in and ask for updates.”
Parker still didn’t speak, just started changing her clothes, using her emergency stash from under one of the counters. Made Hardison realize he probably should too, especially if he was going in as her husband. It’d be the only way he’d be able to get in and see Eliot, anyway.
Four more hours later, and one of the doctors came out and found them. The older, dark blonde one, Dr. Grey.
“Mrs. White? I’m one of your brother’s surgeons, Dr. Meredith Grey. Your brother is out of surgery and he should be okay.”
Hardison felt them both sag in relief against each other.
“Can we see him?” Hardison said.
Parker still hadn’t said a word other than what she needed to at the emergency room counter.
“He’s just had surgery on a punctured lung and for a laceration on his liver, but we managed to close everything back up. He lost a lot of blood in the process, but we were able to give him a transfusion and stabilize his ribs. He’s in recovery now, but he hasn’t woken up just yet.” The doctor smiled. “I’m glad he’ll have family there when he wakes up.”
She led them through a warren of hallways and medical people and people like them, with worry on their faces, until she led them to a bed where Eliot lay, hooked up to different machines with tubes and monitors that beeped and hummed.
He could feel Parker shaking.
“If there’s anything you need, any questions you have for me, I’m here,” the doctor said, then stepped back and pulled a curtain around them, giving the three of them the illusion of privacy.
He and Parker both sat in the provided chairs next to the hospital bed, and settled in to wait.
“I’m just glad you had one of your IDs that stated you were a veteran,” Hardison said, holding Eliot’s too still hand. “The didn’t even question all your other scars, any other damage.” He ran a thumb over the back of Eliot’s hand.
“The last time I was in a hospital like this,” Parker said, startling Alec into looking at her. “Was after the accident.” She still hadn’t stopped shaking, nor had she released Eliot’s other hand, keeping a firm watch on his face for any changes. “He didn’t wake up then either.”
Hardison’s heart broke for the young girl she’d been, from what little he knew about her brother from that damn psychic’s cold read.
“He’s gonna wake up, mama. It’s Eliot we’re talking about.” He reached across Eliot and cupped her cheek with his free hand. “Till his dying day, remember? And he’s not dead yet.”
The doctors came around several times after they’d moved them to a private room, usually surrounded by packs of interns, but there was no change in Eliot’s condition. Not until very early the next morning.
Slowly, so slowly that Parker thought she was imagining it at first, Eliot opened his eyes. With a sharp intake of breath, he squeezed both of their hands.
Hardison woke from his light doze with a start, yelling out the door for someone. Parker didn’t care who.
She leaned in close to his ear and whispered to him.
“You’re Leo Webb, veteran. I’m Alice White, your sister, and I’m married to Jake White.” She said, flicking her eyes over to Hardison in the briefest of signals.
To any of the medical people coming in, it would look like she was giving her brother a kiss on the cheek, glad he was alive.
They would have a lot to talk about after the doctors and the cops left. Cause the damn doctors had called the cops.
Time to do what Parker did best; get her family out of a job gone sideways.
Five hours and about eight million forms later saying that he was checking out against medical advice and stubbornly stating he couldn’t remember anything, Eliot was wheeled to the front doors of the hospital and gently loaded into the van.
He fell asleep on the drive back, but woke up enough to get inside the brew pub’s back door and stumble into the bed Parker and Hardison directed him to.
It was only later when he woke up fully that he realized it was their bed, and he had one team mate on either side of him.
He carefully tried to extricate himself from them, but the moment he started to move, Parker’s had was on his shoulder, and Hardison was a half second behind her.
“Eliot,” Alec spoke first. “Do you really not remember anything?”
He considered lying for a moment, but decided against it.
“I remember calling you for help. I remember you guys getting there. I think,” he swallowed hard. “I think I may have said some things-”
“You told us you loved us.” Parker interjected, meeting his eyes. “You told us you loved us and then you almost died.” Her grip on his shoulder firmed slightly. “You don’t get to die on us.”
“Not ever,” Hardison added, his hand rubbing lightly up and down his shoulder from behind.
“Cause we love you too, Eliot.”
“Till our dying days.”