Archive of Our Own ^beta

Apparently Nate was a little fired up about some of last year's "overly generous" Christmas gifts. Like, how did that even make sense? Overly generous. What?

And Parker was worth every penny.

"You spent $100,000 on a motorcycle?" Eliot growled at him.

Hardison scoffed. "Don't hate the gift. Hate the elf."

"I do hate the elf."

Hardison knew Eliot well enough to know that "hate" was code for "love," when in present company. Eliot was probably just jealous. Last year's gift for him had just been to get his car detailed and a new stereo system put in. Nice, but no six-figure motorcycle.

Hardison gave the best presents. They couldn't stop him. Come on. He was Alec Hardison.

Hardison's generosity was deeply ingrained. Nana had scrimped and saved to get each and every one of them as much as she could under the tree on Christmas, and Hardison wasn't about to do any less for his family.

Nate wanted to ban gifts between the team. Sophie negotiated him back to fifty bucks a pop.

Fifty bucks? Really? Did they not understand that Hardison manipulated the stock and real estate markets according to his whims and had, in essence, infinite money?

Eliot shook his head at the conclusion. Parker huffed, "Fine, whatever."

Hardison completely ignored it all because he'd already bought his gifts and no way were they going back, they were perfect.

if Eliot was jealous over the motorcycle, he'd get over it once he got this year's gift.

It'd just taken Hardison a while to come up with something so perfect.

Whirlie Glee Glee.

Baby Joy Rage.

Whirlie Glee Glee.

Baby Joy Rage.

Whirlie whatever.

Baby. Joy. Rage.

Yes.

Okay, Nate was masterminding this one, but she was the one who was here. And sometimes she saw angles on things that he didn't.

Baby Joy Rage sounded like it had a lot of angles.

Also, she wanted it.

Stealing was what she did. It was like a present to herself.

Eliot sounded like he was having fun giving the dolls away to kids. That was nice.

But then, after they'd done all the big grifting stuff to spread it around and make the dolls valuable, they still weren't valuable enough.

They needed a new angle.

"The doll's a bust," Eliot said.

Parker scowled at him. "Whirlie stupid thing would have done worse."

"And youre an expert on this because...?"

Nate tried to get them to stop arguing, but Parker could see in Eliot's eyes that he was spoiling for a fight. He hadn't gotten to fight yet on this one, and he probably wouldn't get to. There was no one involved that it would be helpful to hit.

"Because I was there," she told him. "It spoke to me."

"It spoke to you?" Eliot said in the. most. disbelieving tone.

"Yes! It reminded me of a toy my social worker used to make me do exercises with."

"Are you kidding me with that?"

Now he was just pushing to push. So Parker pushed back. "Oh, like you always do what you're supposed to?"

"This is stupid."

Sophie tried to get them calm now. "Guys, just settle down."

Then Nate said, "Wait a minute. Exercises - what kind of exercises?"

"Identifying emotions, or something like that."

It had helped. It had. Parker didn't think it had helped the way the social worker had meant it to.

Parker was angry all the time. When she looked at the broken doll, she was angry. When she looked at the girl with ice cream, she was angry.

When she looked at the two kids on the beach...

She was angry. But she also felt a little less lonely.

She could feel angry and other things at the same time. Joy and rage.

She could feel angry together with someone else who felt angry, and that was better.

Eliot loved arguing. Arguing was one of his soaring things. It gave him a high.

Parker really was annoyed with him, but she also loved him, and she wanted him to have that. She wanted him to have what he needed.

Anyway, Nate explained how they were going to tell people that the doll could help their kids like that, even the ones that were probably fine and happy and normal, not like her. Not like her team of odd criminals.

Nate was one of the oddest, one of the saddest. Even after Sophie had gotten into his mind, gotten in far enough to keep his heart company. Made him a little less lonely. He could still be sad.

She wondered what he really felt about this.

"Isn't this, I don't know, wrong? Messing with Christmas presents, playing with parents' fears? I mean, don't you feel just a little bit guilty given the holiday?"

"Mmm, no."

He hadn't really thought about it. But then, he didn't usually feel much about their jobs. He didn't usually feel much about anything, if he could help it.

She already knew that. She wanted him to know about her, though. "I do."

"Why?"

"Because!" He couldn't be closed off enough to not understand why some people would want to defend Christmas. Not when he understood so much.

"Parker, why is it that people give each other Christmas presents?"

"To be nice." It's polite. It's normal. And it's awesome. It makes people happy.

"No, because they're being programmed by these giant corporations that do all this research to figure out how to push these psychological buttons in people to make them get these presents, right? Make no mistake, what we're doing is we're manipulating fears and making these toys, all of it. This... this is Christmas." He thought back over what he'd said. "Yeah." He nodded. "Let's get to work."

He meant this. This was a message from the heart.

(Nate's heart was a scarred old badger who was missing an ear, who peered out at her with hard concern.)

Nate was messed up. Probably the most messed up of all of them, and he'd never denied it. But he was usually right, one way or another. What did he see when he looked at Christmas? He saw what he was so good at seeing everywhere. Greed, manipulation, exploitable chinks in the system.

Parker had always taken presents at face value. Getting stuff had always been one of her favorite things. Getting stuff with value from other people simply because it was desirable. Simply because other people wished they had it. That was what value meant. That was why you could use money to count things. It was objective.

But other people liked money for other reasons. Because they saw all the things that could be bought with it. All the different things it meant to them.

Presents were the same, Parker supposed.

Parker saw money, objective value. Nate saw manipulation. Hardison saw caring. Sophie saw gestures. Eliot saw art, and learning.

Because those were the things they loved.

Parker saw what Nate was trying to say, she thought. But he was saying it in a very Nate way, always thinking about what not to do because it played into the hands of people he didn't like.

But what he meant was this:

When you give someone a present, think less about its objective value. Think more about how to give a person what they value.

Nate wanted them to look out for themselves, take care of themselves. Not get manipulated if they could help it. Normal presents meant that they'd failed.

And that was why Nate didn't want normal presents. That was why all Nate wanted was for them not to give him normal presents.

But the factors were different for each of them.

And the factors for her... might have been changing a little.

This would take some thought.

Eliot helped Hardison shoot a promotional video for the creepy two-faced doll. And he actually made it sound good. The man was a damn genius. Sounded like he knew what he was talkin' about.

"Dude, how do you come up with this crap?" he asked.

"I studied early childhood development," he said simply, then moved on to the pitch for Eliot's grift. Apparently he had to get word out to the blogger moms.

"Blogger moms?" he whined.

Hardison explained how critical it was to the plan as a whole, how much leverage the bloggers had, and then brought up one of the sites.

Eliot was pretty sure he'd picked this girl with Eliot in mind.

Hardison was dangling this out in front of him like bait. The opportunity to flirt with these cuties. Didn't seem to be bothering him.

He remembered a grift a long time ago, trying to get into a clinic to visit Nate. It was family only, though. He'd flirted with the receptionist, and when that hadn't worked, he'd claimed to be Nate's brother. Hardison had rolled with it, claimed to be Eliot's partner.

See, he thinks the flirting makes me jealous, but it doesn't.

Maybe it had been more than a line for the con. Maybe he really didn't have to choose. It was really true that he could play at this, that he could keep falling a little bit in love with women he met and still have the two of them to love even more.

He could have little slices of the lives he wanted but couldn't have, he could taste roles he didn't have space for in his life.

He wasn't sure if it would make things better or worse, but he might as well find out.

"All right, look, listen to me. If I'm gonna do this, all right, I want to... I want to be tough dad. You know what I mean? Cool dad. Just enough to turn her head. Don't go overboard on this. Keep it simple. You know, someone who's... who's not afraid to make a PB&J, okay, but still wants to go out in the yard, get dirty, kick the soccer ball around a little bit, strict... but fair."

Hardison smiled. He clearly knew he had Eliot right where he wanted him.

Hardison had been writing this blog for his cover. About pretend-him and his pretend-kid.

"You put in there that we went to the superbowl?" Eliot scowled.

"Oh, yeah, man. Yeah, you even met some of the players. Now, what I was thinking - tell me what you feel. You guys go on, like, a road trip, cross-country, you do a tour, something like that."

"Yeah, yeah, I like that, I like that, or, and I'm just gonna put this out there, what if I took him on a tour of all the ballparks in America, Hardison, huh? Or maybe took him to the opera, or the moon, huh? You know, believable father-and-son stuff!"

The conversation devolved into chaos for a moment, Hardison muttering excuses, Nate trying to interrupt, Eliot complaining about the photo at the top of the blog. He couldn't recall ever making such a damn cheerful face in his life.

Hardison raised his voice to try and get the ball back. "Hey! Hey. Excuse me, man. I'm sorry if this kind of writing opens me up creatively! I'm usually stuck lookin' at binary codes all day. Maybe I was writin' the father that I wanted one day, okay?" He had trouble getting coherent words out, stalled a little, usually Eliot and Parker's trademark. "What's the problem with getting emotionally butt nekkid!"

"Whoa!" he interrupted.

"Oh, please don't," Nate said, and yeah, of course Hardison said that when Nate was right there between them, the one person on the team Hardison knew Eliot hadn't told that they were getting physically naked together on a pretty regular basis.

"I'm just tryin' to share my feelings on paper."

Nate made noises like he'd like to be far away right now. Tried to get them back on the subject of the job.

Hardison read aloud from that woman's blog, about how great Eliot had come across on the grift. "You don't deserve none of that."

This was the kind of bickering which usually turned hot and heavy, between them. Hardison was just taunting him.

Eliot stalked off to have some private time with his nose buried in Hardison's pillow.

He worked himself hard, wore himself out, and fell asleep in Hardison's bed.

Which was where Hardison found him, half an hour later. Chuckling gently as he looked at Eliot laid out over his bed.

"Now that's a pretty sight," he said.

Eliot squinted up at him, grumbling wordlessly.

"You feelin' better?" Hardison asked.

He took a breath, assessed himself, his state of mind.

"Yeah, actually," he said. "Would've been better with you here, though."

"Maybe. You looked like you were in a bitey mood, though. Wasn't really feelin' that, myself."

Eliot couldn't really argue that, with the bite marks still fading from the meat of his thumb.

"Okay, fair," he said, chuckling.

Hardison sat down on the edge of the bed. "You want to talk about why this job's bothering you so much?" he asked.

Eliot pushed himself up onto his elbows as he thought about this.

"You know parenting isn't all about the expensive stuff you can do for your kid, right?" he asked. "It's about quality time, teachin' lessons, stuff like that. And you're puttin' all this shit in the blog about all the probably great, really expensive, really rare stuff that the average dad isn't gonna be able to pull off. This is dream stuff, Alec, and no kid needs all of it."

"Yeah, I know," Hardison said. "I just wanted to make you sound good, you know that, right, man? Give you appeal. And not just for the job."

"It's just... it's a lot to live up to, all that and everything else I asked you to put in, and damn it, I told you not to overdo it."

Hardison frowned. "You don't think this is the kind of dad you'd be? Don't think you could pull it off?"

Eliot sighed. "No, it's not that."

"Then what?"

"It's hittin' a little close to home," Eliot said. "The problem is the more I think about it the more I think I could do it."

Hardison squirmed around until they were laying side by side, shoulder to shoulder, and it didn't seem to matter that Hardison was wearing a lot more clothes. He was just there. "You want this? You want a kid? You wanna be the tough dad who teaches lifelong lessons about the value of hard work? I can see it."

"I want a lot o' things, you know that."

Hardison was quiet when he said simply, "I know."

Eliot needed to change the subject, get away from this dangerous ground. "Did you really study childhood development, like, in college?"

Hardison held up his hand, wiggled it from side to side. "Much as I ever, y'know, went to college. I was already tryin' to stay off the radar at that point. Did a lot of the course work for a lot of things. Doesn't really line up with the degrees my aliases have at all."

"You ever wish you'd done the whole deal? Normal college life, dorms and parties?"

"Nah," Alec said. Then, "Not a lot." He turned his head to look at Eliot. "So I'm pretty sure that ChardonnayMom chick totally digged what you had goin' on. So are you gonna get with her?"

"I don't think so," Eliot answered. "But it was nice, to think about it."

"Oh, you got someone else you'd rather spend the night with?" Hardison teased, jostling him.

Eliot jostled back, Hardison escalated with a shove, and then. Well.

Eliot had everything he needed, right here.

Parker knew Hardison loved giving her stuff because Parker liked stuff. He wasn't being controlled or brainwashed by corporations.

Well, maybe a little. But he was controlling and manipulating the companies right back, every day. So it seemed fair to her.

And she wasn't going to stop Hardison from giving her presents. It made them both happy. Like Eliot cooking for them.

Although, right now Hardison looked like he'd eaten something sour.

"What?" she asked him, poking the frowny crease between his eyebrows.

"Nate was sayin' evil evil things about Christmas. Sophie tried to stop him. She knows how much you love Christmas."

"Christmas is Christmas," Parker agreed.

"Do you think..." Hardison began. "You think he's tryin' to push us away? So he can sulk like a big ol' grinch?"

Parker frowned thoughtfully. "Maybe," she said. "But there's something else, too. Something about... value."

"You're workin' it out, huh?" he said fondly.

"Yeah, I am," she agreed. "So how's the new plan going?"

He checked the stats on Baby Joy-Rage (she refused to call it Feels-A-Lot, she chose it based on name alone, after all) and they were soaring.

"And you doubted me," she said archly, "just like the rest of them."

"Me?" Hardison raised his hands in defense. "No. I would - I wouldn't do that."

"Mmm-hmm. Yep." She was a little mad. She was mad a lot. But she could feel a lot of things at once.

She put her mad into scaring the people over at the Lucky Beans building so they'd go away and Nate could do his thing.

Nate got set up. In the van, they listened in.

Nate started off the grift by saying that he wasn't interested in money. Which was an interesting choice, she supposed, and odd the way Nate was odd. He was definitely going for odd. She knew the game well. Playing to your own strengths, oddity-wise, was usually a good idea.

"I did it for my son, Nestor, yes, who is now in federal prison."

"Oh?"

"Yes, it was a nasty episode, involving horses and men from Tacoma."

That was a good call. Horses, in Parker's opinion, were always ominous.

Sophie piped up then. "Mr. Greipal has often said that he wished that there had been a toy like Baby Feels-A-Lot during Nestor's developmental years."

"I wish there had been a toy like Baby Feels-A-Lot during Nestor's developmental years," Nate said, as if she hadn't spoken.

Parker... recognized that one. That was her. That was the thing she did where they fed her a line for a grift and she repeated it exactly and everyone looked at her funny. Or she said the obvious flat-out, just because it was true, and they gave her a "well, it is Parker" look. Or she replicated that phenomenon for a grift, to be odd. They'd learned that it was eerie from her.

Nate had stolen her art.

Not her museum-art. Her Eliot-art. The kind of art where sharing it, spreading it around, just made it bigger, more valuable.

As a gift to her, Nate had stolen her art, made it better, and given it back.

She supposed that "no gifts" depended on how you counted.

"Sophie."

"Oof! Don't sneak up on me. Yes, Parker?"

"You need the practice not jumping. Everyone except Eliot does. Anyway, Hardison told me that Nate said bad stuff about Christmas."

"He did, did he?" Sophie looked at her like she was worried. "Hardison didn't tell you what it was?"

"Nah, I don't need to know. It's just Nate stuff. It's always just true enough. Saint Nicholas is too Santa Claus. Just, you know, different facets. The best things have lots of facets and some of them are shinier because the others are dark."

"That's very astute, Parker," Sophie told her.

"He tried to get us to not give each other presents because he's only looking at the dark facets of presents. It's hard for him to see the bright ones. We need to change the angle."

"And how would you suggest we do that?" Sophie asked.

"We see the things we care about. I noticed because Nate sees control and manipulation because he cares about those. I just always saw getting stuff because that was all I cared about, but Nate turned it around. He gave me some fan art." She looked at Sophie. "Eliot helped me care about art."

Sophie watched Parker for a long moment. "We see what we value in not just gifts, but the concept of gift-giving," she said contemplatively. "So I need to talk about what a gift is, in a way that can get all of us on the same page. I need to frame it so it's about something that all of us value from each other."

"But we all value totally different things," Parker said, frowning.

"No, no, there is one thing," Sophie said. "One thing we all value. Art, that's getting close. But I think there's a simpler way of saying it."

Parker smiled. "You'll do it right," she told Sophie. "You're the best at getting people to do things."

"Hum," said Sophie thoughtfully, looking at her. "Something tells me that so are you."

Hardison always loved the part where they got to give the client the good news.

Hardison just liked giving, period. He hoped Nate wasn't gonna throw out the watch he'd gotten him, just because of some kinda misplaced cynical anti-stuff attitude.

Stuff was great. Corporations and sales techniques? Not so much. He got that. But. Come on. Stuff.

Once the client was gone, Sophie broached the subject of gifts again. "I think it's really sad that we're so cynical about gifts," she said. "I used to - oh, I loved Christmas as a child."

"Yeah, well," Eliot responded, "nothin's genuine anymore."

"That's not true," Sophie argued. "No. I've been thinking about this. And you know what is genuine? Trust."

"Trust?" Parker squawked.

Hardison had a sudden and not negligible feeling that the two of them were in on something.

"Yes, trust! I think - no, seriously," she said as Eliot rolled his eyes. "I think we should give each other some trust for Christmas."

Of course Parker had to bring up the time they'd tried trust exercises and Hardison had fallen on his head. The thing was that Parker knew how not to fall, and she knew her equipment. Hardison trusted Parker all the time to keep him safe with her equipment. But trying to catch someone who fell, on purpose, without a safety line - it had been so odd to her that she'd shrieked and jumped back.

They all showed trust in different ways.

"I just think that, well, we've been through so much together, all of us, and we should give each other something really personal this year, like, um, I don't know, a story or a secret." She smiled. "Who's gonna go first?"

Hardison knew they had secrets from each other. Boy, did he ever. He was Nate's only confidant about his plans for the team, and of course there was Eliot. At this point keeping Eliot's relationship with them quiet from Nate felt more like a game than a secret, but it was still important.

"Eliot," Parker said, as if to welcome him if he wanted to share.

Eliot shook his head.

Which was fine. Eliot had already shown so much of himself, this job. Hardison had seen it, live and in person. And it was... it was beautiful.

"All right," said Nate, and he told them a story. He told them a story that tore his heart right out of his chest and set it in front of them for them to look at.

But he kept breathing, because none of them would take advantage of that weakness. Because there was trust.

"Okay, who's next?" Nate asked, and closed himself back up like a cabinet.

"My Nana knew about the hacking," Hardison said into the silence. "I mean, thousands of dollars appear from nowhere, suddenly your medical bills are covered? That doesn't just happen. And Nana was no fool. So yeah, she figured it out."

He looked around at the others, trying to figure out how to say what he wanted to say.

"She made me promise three things. She said, Alec, promise me this. Promise me that you will use your big brain to get educated, to learn about the world, not just to take what you want. Promise me that you will never steal from anyone who can't afford to lose it. And promise me that you will never, ever let yourself get caught."

Nate had a little smile on his face, and Alec was glad, glad that he could give Nate a little distraction from his own pretty damn awful past.

"She knew she wasn't gonna get to me by saying I couldn't. Me and computers, we were love at first sight. And she knew sometimes you gotta cheat a little to get by at life, if the system's stacked against you. She knew life could get bad and wrong and unfair, and sometimes the only thing to do is fight back. But she still did her level best to make sure I had some rules to live by. Some values. That I ended up alive and free and a decent person. And I'll always remember those rules. And I'll always try my best to follow them."

He was straight up looking at Eliot now, seeing the dad he could be, if he got a shot at it. Thinking it was a shame that Eliot wouldn't probably ever get to do that. Love a kid, give 'em what they needed, set 'em straight if they did wrong. Because he'd be amazing at it.

He snuck a glance at Parker, who was looking thoughtful.

Well. Who knew what would happen for them, way out in the future? Hardison sure as hell had never predicted this team. This family.

He wasn't gonna rule anything out, not yet.