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kathierif_ficTitle: Floating In A Most Peculiar Way 2/2
continued from Part 1 here
The Leverage was surrounded by and filled with vents. They were in the floors, the ceilings, and in the walls. Some of them were filled with cooling water or wires, others were used to ventilate the entire ship. Most of them were barely big enough to allow a person of Alec's statue to crawl through them on their stomach, but there were also some in which he could almost stand. Those were the main vents, and those were the vents he was heading to now.
He continued crawling, the flashlight held between his teeth muffling his curses, until he reached a junction and a bigger vent. Here, he could at least sit up, and here he could also see the first traces that someone was living in these vents. A pair of bright green boots had been discarded next to an access point which let in thin stripes of light.
Hardison looked through the grates into the storage room.
It was the biggest part of the ship, and it held everything, from their water tanks to Eliot's work-out equipment. The part of their food that didn't come from a Matter Compiler, too, was stored here. From his current point, Alec could see that an agile person could climb the crates and swing up into the access point. He had no doubt that Parker could do it without even thinking twice about it.
Rolling his eyes, he continued to crawl, careful not to put too much weight onto the grate. He was pretty sure that, should it open, he would fall to his death and Eliot would mock his dead and broken body for being so clumsy.
He encountered more traces of occupation. A set of old-fashioned manual lock-picks and locks, a collection of spoons, which, he figured, he had to talk to Parker about before Eliot figured out where exactly their silverware had gone, a blanket, and, finally, when he had reached the biggest vent in the ship, Parker herself.
She had wrapped herself into a blanket and the hood of her sweater was pulled over her head. Wrapped in her arms was a stuffed bunny.
"Hey girl," he greeted softly and moved a box of cereal out of his way. "It's me. Don't - don't run, okay?"
"Hardison." Her voice was flat, without even the barest hint of emotion, and her eyes were dull when she looked up at him.
"I just want to talk to you," he said soothingly and sat down next to her, close enough to see her breathe, but with enough distance between them to allow her some personal space.
"Talk? About what?" she asked with a confused frown.
"About..." Alec trailed off. "I don't know," he admitted. "Just talk. Why are you hiding up in these vents? Why are you trying to hide from us?"
"I'm not trying to hide," Parker argued. Her voice was louder now, but still without emotion.
"Then why are you here and not in the kitchen with us?" Alec wanted to know.
Parker did not answer. She didn't even look at him. She was staring straight ahead, at the dull grey of the wall in front of her, and Alec felt worry and concern fill him.
"Parker?" he asked carefully. "Hey, Parker, are you listening to me?"
He reached out to her, keeping his moves slow and deliberate, to avoid spooking her. When she didn't react, he closed his hand around her arm.
Parker's skin was freezing and hard. It wasn't soft like skin and flesh. Instead it had sharp edges like the delicate insides of an engine.
"Parker?" he asked worriedly. She flinched back violently and hunched defensively over her arm, which, he saw as he held up the flashlight, was wrapped up in what looked greasy, oily rags.
"It's nothing," she said quickly. Too quickly, he thought and narrowed his eyes at her, and Parker flinched again.
"Seriously?" he said and reached for her arm again. "Seriously, what's going on?"
Parker didn't answer, but she didn't try to pull away as he grabbed her wrist gently and extended her arm toward him.
At first, he didn't understand. He thought she had stolen something valuable, but then, she was a thief and she stole for a living. There was no reason for her to hide if it was something simple as that. Everybody on board knew that she was a thief. If something went missing and nobody knew where it was, it was standard procedure to ask Parker, more or less politely, to give it back, and she usually did. Stealing was like breathing for Parker, and nobody blamed her for it.
Alec glanced up, into her face. She still hadn't moved a single muscle, but her eyes were wide and focused on his face.
"I'm not gonna hurt you," he declared softly. "Just let me see what happened, okay?"
He wasn't used to this skittish side of Parker anymore, and he didn't want to scare her but, at the same time, he had a feeling that he needed to find out what had happened. It was the same kind of feeling he'd had the first time he'd sat down in front of a computer. He just needed to know how it worked, and he didn't have any peace until he'd mastered the art of hacking into even the most secure files.
Slowly, he unwrapped the rags from Parker's arm. His fingers quickly became greasy with oil, and his frown grew bigger.
"Parker?" he asked again.
Her other arm suddenly shot out and her hand closed around his wrist, just before he could push back the last layer and look at what was hidden underneath.
"You can't tell anyone," she hissed urgently. "Hardison, you have to keep quiet. Please!"
He didn't reply. Instead, he glanced down at Parker's arm, carefully cradled in his own broad hand. Her skin was pale, almost translucent, against his, and it still was too cold.
Along the entire length of her forearm, the skin was split open in what Alec thought had to be a really bad injury. But instead of bone and blood, he only saw the clean lines of machinery.
"What..." he started, but Parker shook her head, blonde hair flying, before he could get out more than this one word.
"I don't know," she said and leaned her head back against the wall behind her. "I was lucky." She looked down at her other arm. "This one bleeds. That one doesn't."
Alec reached for her other hand, and to his astonishment, he realized that it was warm.
"How much of your body is like this?" he asked with a wave to her injured arm.
"I don't know," Parker admitted. "Maybe...half?" She shrugged and pulled her arm out of his grip, to wrap it up again. "Please don't tell anybody. Please, Hardison."
Maybe it was the shock. Alec wasn't sure, but he found himself agreeing to keep quiet about his discovery and not tell anyone, not even Nate or Eliot. He didn't remember how he left the vents, his thoughts occupied by a million other things has he crawled back the way he'd come and almost broke his neck as he fell, face-first, out of the access point in the engine room.
Parker had assured him that usually, malfunctions like the one she'd suffered healed on their own. Alec shuddered at the thought of how she'd figured that one out, how many injuries she'd already suffered to know that the mechanics had been there for as long as she remembered and that they'd always been part of her.
He was pretty sure that nobody was born with mechanical parts, though. Someone had implanted these in her when she'd been really young. The thought alone was enough to make the bile rise in Alec's throat. He felt deep compassion and sympathy for a younger Parker, and at the same time, a growing anger and disgust at the people who had done that to her.
Something, he decided, had to be done.
He didn't know yet what exactly, but it didn't stop him from sitting down in front of his computer, logging into the galaxy-wide net and starting to dig.
~*+*~
~*+*~
By the time he shut down his connection and looked up from his computer again, his eyes were gritty and blood-shot, the little clock at the edge of his screen told him it was late the next morning, and his brain was buzzing with facts and knowledge about robotics, cyborgs, androids and hybrids. Once he'd figured out where to start looking, the knowledge had fallen into his lap like an avalanche, each fact followed by several others, and every so often, he'd had to stop reading and press a fist against his mouth to stop the rolling and lurching of his stomach.
Cyborgs, he'd found out, had been created as fighting machines that were stronger and more durable than even the strongest humans. They had only one purpose in their lives, and they went after it with the cold ruthlessness and efficiency of computers. Robotics, on the other hand, were fairly common and used as prosthetics and hard manual labor, just as androids, which were completely mechanical and only looked human.
Parker belonged in the group of the hybrids. Like cyborgs, hybrids were part human, part machine, but they hadn't been created to fight. Alec still didn't understand how someone could take a little girl like Parker once had been and implant her with mechanical parts, but he was following some leads to figure out who exactly had done this to Parker, and, most likely, many others. If he was playing this right, he could sell it to Nate as a new case and they could get some kind of revenge or compensation for Parker, he thought grimly as he stood and stretched, his joints creaking and forcefully reminding him that he'd remained in one position for too long.
Everything he had read indicated that Parker's arm would heal itself within twenty-four hours and he made the decision to check up on her again later. First, he needed to stretch out and have a little nap - he just hoped that there wasn't any emergencies he needed to deal with. Nate had been quiet since they had finished their last job, content with navigating the ship back to the central planets, and there had been no word yet about a new job. It would only be a matter of time, Alec knew, but as long as everything was still quiet, he could take advantage and rest.
~*+*~~*+*~~*+*~
Eight hours later, Alec found himself in the vents again, his back bowed to prevent him hitting his head on the low ceiling and his back pulsing with a low ache.
There was, he thought darkly, a good reason why he was happy to let Parker do as much of the crawling-in-small-spaces as possible. He simply wasn't made for this.
"Well?" he asked Parker and nodded in the general direction of her arm. "How's it look?"
Parker shrugged slightly. "I don't know," she said and glanced down, at her arm. "Not good?"
"Not good?" Alec repeated disbelievingly. "What do you mean, not good? Did you not heal?"
"No?" It sounded more like a question than anything else, but Alec didn't pay attention to it. Worry and fear had balled themselves into a hard knot right under his breastbone and was now spiraling through his entire body, until he had to clench his teeth to hold back the nausea that went with it.
"How could you not heal, you're supposed to heal from all kinds of injuries and those implants are supposed to be top of the line, state of the art, it's even supposed to grow with you!"
"It does." Parker shook her head, her blonde hair flying. "Something went wrong."
Cold sweat broke out along the line of his spine, and Alec swallowed thickly. "Something went wrong?" he parroted.
"Yeah, something went wrong." Parker frowned. "Hey, it's a computer part. Can't you fix it?"
Alec was aware that his mouth had opened and closed a few times without any sound escaping, but he couldn't do anything about it. Fixing Parker - that was more than hacking into a governmental email account while juggling chainsaws while the ship had caught fire, and he was fully aware of it. On the other hand, it was Parker, and he would do anything for her. She was like a little sister, a foster sister maybe, and he felt fiercely protective of her.
"I'll see what I can do," he finally said. "But I'm not sure about poking around in your insides!" The thought brought another wave of nausea to the forefront of his mind. "Someone else needs to do that."
"No!" Parker's outburst was almost violent and it came with a frightening lurch of her frame in his direction, as if she wanted to stop him physically from telling anyone else. "You can't tell anyone! You promised!"
"Whoa!" Alec held up his hands in an attempt to placate Parker. "Hey, I'm not doing anything you don't want me to. I'm your friend, Parker."
She leaned back against the wall. "They can't ever find out," she said, her voice small, and for a long moment, Alec wanted nothing more than wrap his arms around her, pull her close and hold on to her with all the strength he had.
Parker would probably taze him if she knew what he was thinking, so he did the next best thing and promised her again that he wouldn't tell anyone. It seemed to calm her down well enough, but it left him with a bad taste in his mouth as he crawled back to the access point from which he'd come.
~*+*~~*+*~
Figuring out a fix for a hybrid, Alec thought as he balanced his portable computer on his knees, was a lot more difficult than he had anticipated. Millions of complicated and intricate systems had to work together perfectly to allow her a normal range of motions, and those were embedded in delicate, human flesh. He was confident that he could figure out the mechanical systems, but he hadn't found a solution yet as to how he would bring his fix into Parker. He couldn't simply jam a drive into her and transfer data like that, even if the blueprints he'd downloaded all indicated that a slot for a small thumb drive existed somewhere. He was afraid of asking Parker about it and he wasn't suicidal enough to investigate it on his own, and so this question remained unanswered.
Keeping quiet about Parker's malfunction while still caught in the relatively small space of a ship proved to be hard, as well. In the evenings, when the lights were dimmed, Nate was at the wheel and staring out into space while drinking and thinking about who knew what, when Sophie had long given up and gone to bed, Alec crawled into the bunk he shared with Eliot and pressed his aching forehead against the other man's shoulder, trying to find some peace of mind to get the rest he needed. More than once, he wanted to confide in Eliot, but he had promised Parker to keep her secret, and he simply bit his tongue and swallowed the words that wanted to escape.
He could do this. He could find a fix for Parker, and he would find a way to get it into her, into the shattered arm that was pretty much useless by now and wouldn't get better until the mechanical parts in it would be replaced and adjusted.
In addition to working on that fix, he had to keep the ship up to their standards, make sure the engines were running smoothly, and pull together information about potential new clients.
"I'm done," he muttered one evening, his forehead pressed against Eliot's clavicle. He was lying sprawled and half across Eliot's strong body, the steady thrum of Eliot's heartbeat soothing and comforting him. "I'm so done, man. I need a vacation. On a planet. With real beaches and real water. You wanna come?"
Eliot grunted an answer that Alec couldn't decipher, but his hand came up and brushed briefly against the back of his skull in a caress that was unexpectedly gentle, and Alec took that as confirmation of Eliot's interest. His lips twisted into a smile. A vacation with Eliot would probably end up a real disaster. Eliot would want to spend as much time outside as possible, and Alec would hide in their hotel room with junk food and as much electronical entertainment as he could find. Alec wasn't comfortable with too much outdoors - he had grown up on a series of space stations and moons, wherever foster care had sent him, and had spent only short amounts of time planet-side. Eliot, on the other hand, was planet-born and bred and quickly grew restless when they were on board of the ship.
For a short second, he wondered where Parker had grown up, but he was too tired to spend much time thinking about it. Probably, he realized, like him, moving from one foster home to the next until she'd fallen off the grid and found herself living the life of a thief.
Tomorrow, he decided. Tomorrow, he would talk to her again and would try to convince her once again that she could trust the others. And then -
He didn't know, and he forced himself not to worry about it.
His fingers curled into Eliot's soft-washed shirt as he relaxed and slowly drifted off to sleep.
Eliot, he knew, would manage to squirm out from under him when he'd had enough sleep or just grew annoyed for whatever reason, and he didn't need to worry about him. There was no reason for him to move away from Eliot's chest and from the hand that was still petting him.
~*+*~~*+*~
"Come on, girl. I'm begging you here. Don't be stupid." He knew how pathetic he sounded, but Alec didn't care. "You can trust Eliot. You know you can tell him."
"No." Parker's voice was flat, but there was no hesitation in her voice. She was as stubborn as ever, and no matter how much Alec begged her - on his knees, if he needed to - she wouldn't give in.
"Come on, girl." He slumped against the wall of the vent and rubbed his hand over his face. "We can...I don't know, I can fake an engine malfunction, we can find a nice planet, go to a clinic there if you don't want Eliot to do this. Please, Parker."
"No!" She flinched back from him this time until she was sitting as far from him as she could while being hooked up to a hastily-written diagnostics program Alec was running on her. "No hospital."
"I don't get it, man." Alec glanced down at the screen of his portable computer. "I really don't get it. You know Eliot has your back. How often has he gotten you out of a sticky situation, huh? Just because he growls and grumbles doesn't mean he isn't trustworthy. Okay, he isn't trustworthy, but he wouldn't do anything to hurt you. Too much. Ever. You know Eliot. He's a teddy bear."
It was a good thing they were in the vents, he thought. If Eliot knew that Alec thought of him as a stuffed toy, Alec's ass would be kicked out of their bunk a few times per night. Eliot was vindictive like that.
"He won't like me anymore," Parker muttered, her voice oddly hollow as her words echoed along the vent.
"He...what?"
"Eliot. He won't like me. You know he won't."
"Parker..." Alec trailed off. "What are you talking about? Of course he'll still like you. He probably won't say it, but..."
Parker shook her head almost violently. "Everybody knows Eliot isn't a fan of technical stuff and computers," she pointed out. "He threatened to break your computer yesterday."
"Yeah, but he wouldn't do that to you, girl." Alec shook his head and lifted his hands to gesticulate. "First of all, Nate wouldn't let him. And second, Eliot likes you."
"He does?"
"Yeah, I'm pretty sure, deep down in his heart, he does." Alec nodded vigorously.
Parker opened her mouth to say something, object probably or point out the many occasions when Eliot had threatened a piece of delicate equipment, but before she could say a single word, a thumping sound interrupted their conversation.
A thumping sound, as if someone was banging on the outside of the vent they were sitting in, which, Alec knew, was pretty much impossible, since they were in the wall, in the ceiling, to be exact, and there was no way anyone could bang on the walls.
"You know, you guys," a growl came from underneath them, "you're sitting right on top of a ventilation opening there."
"I know," Parker answered absent-mindedly. "Makes for good eaves-dropping..." She trailed off. Her eyes went almost comically wide, and she bit her lip.
"It really is," Eliot agreed readily.
Alec rolled his eyes. "What are you, a lurker?" he called out while his fingers moved quickly across his keyboard, to try and find out where exactly they were, where Eliot was.
"Yeah," Eliot called up. He sounded vaguely annoyed, the way he did sometimes when he wasn't quite pissed off yet, but could easily get there, with just a few gentle prods and pokes. "That's what I do."
Alec grimaced as he realized that they were right above the common area, above the kitchen. Eliot hadn't even needed to search for them. They had practically fallen right into his lap.
Parker probably thought Alec had done this on purpose, to set her up, and Alec didn't dare to look at her for a long moment.
"Will you come down now?" Eliot called out.
Parker's shoulders were slumped, but she still managed to look graceful as she climbed through the access grate and landed on her feet, her injured arm pressed tightly against her chest. Alec, who scrambled after her, looked more like a bag of potatoes falling through the hole and onto the ground.
"Hybrid, huh?" Eliot said to Parker and pushed a bowl in her direction.
"How did you know?" Parker wanted to know, but she reached for the bowl and curled herself around it protectively, as if she was afraid he would take it from her again.
Eliot shrugged. "Dated a bioengineer," he said by way of explanation. "'Sides, Hardison's not exactly subtle."
Alec wanted to protest, but the air was still knocked out of him and all he managed was a weak wheeze that didn't sound very threatening.
"Show me that arm."
Parker hesitated for a split second. "You promise you don't hate me?" she asked, her voice small enough that Alec's heart ached for her.
Eliot stared at her for a long moment.
"I promise," he finally said. "Come on, Parker. Let's take a look."
~*+*~~*+*~
The shower on board of the Leverage was small and there were strict rules about what to do in them and what not, courtesy of Sophie, who had threatened Alec's health more than once and had probably used neurolinguistic programming or more severe threats on Nate and Eliot.
Right now, Alec was standing on the tiles and letting water run over his shoulders while his head was hanging low. The water that swirled around his feet - to be filtered and re-used - had a reddish tinge as blood sluiced off his hands and forearms.
His stomach rolled at the memory of cutting into Parker's flesh, exposing gleaming metal and shattered pieces of crystal while her blood was painting Eliot's and his hands red.
He clenched his teeth and took slow, even breaths to keep himself and his stomach under control while reaching for the soap and beginning to scrub at his arms. He needed to get clean, get the smell and sight of Parker's blood off of him.
A sharp hiss and the cold draft of air against his exposed skin alerted him that someone had broken the door's encryption and was standing in the small space in front of the shower, but he didn't turn around to face them. Instead, he kept scrubbing.
"Hey."
The muscles in his shoulders and back tensed and knotted at the sound of Eliot's gravelly voice.
"How's Parker?" he managed to ask, his mouth dry and his throat tight.
"She's fine, Alec." Eliot's broad, strong hands that could do so much damage slid carefully over Alec's back. "She's asleep, but she'll be fine."
"You sure?" He almost bit his tongue as soon as the words were out. Of course Eliot was sure. He knew what he was doing and, just an hour ago, Alec had watched how these hands had carefully sewn the wound on Parker's arm shut, the same hands that a few days before had crushed a guy's windpipe.
"Come on, Hardison." Eliot grabbed his shoulders and turned him around, to face him. He was frowning slightly, his hair already matted down by water, and Alec could see the dried flakes of red on the cuticles of his hands. They had both worn gloves, but Parker's blood had still gotten on their skin. Alec knew that he should be worried about that, but he didn't have it in him right now.
"She's fine," Eliot repeated, his jaw set and his eyes blazing, and it was the expression on his face that finally convinced Alec.
Parker couldn't be anything but fine. It would annoy Eliot, and she wouldn't dare annoying him that much.
In his brain, that made enough sense to allow him to relax, finally, and wrap his long arms around Eliot's shoulders, to cling to him while he let Eliot kiss the rest of his doubts away.
Sophie gave them a dark look when they emerged from the shower together, but she didn't say anything, and Eliot wandered off to check on Parker.
"She okay?" Sophie asked Alec after a moment of silence, and all the muscles in Alec's shoulders that Eliot had managed to relax tensed up again.
"What?"
"Parker." Sophie rolled her eyes. "We know what you did, Hardison."
"We didn't do anything!" The denial was quick on his tongue, and he was glancing furiously around, trying to find an escape route.
"We know," Sophie said gently. "What she is. Nate said she can fix herself." Her lips thinned slightly. "So I just want to know if she's okay."
There was no escape. Sophie had him pinned, and she knew, had known from the beginning, and Alec didn't know if he wanted to cry in relief that he didn't have to keep this particular secret or be annoyed on Parker's behalf because Sophie and Nate knew and they never let on that they knew, but in the end, he just exhaled and shrugged.
"She'll be fine," he repeated Eliot's words and went to get some orange soda.
His knees were still trembling slightly as he sat down in front of his computer and stared at the blank screen.
~*+*~~*+*~
Two days later, Parker was hanging from the support beams in the ceiling of the common area by her fingertips again, a happy smile on her face and the white bandage on her arm a bright spot against her dark clothes.
"Dammit, Parker," Eliot growled as he walked past, a fistful of green leaves in his hand, and Alec relaxed in his chair and continued hacking into a government email account with a smile on his face.
Things were going back to normal, he felt. A thought occurred to him, a genius idea to make Parker's mechanical parts even better than they already were, and he reached for another laptop when Nate wandered in, an all too familiar expression on his face.
"We have a new client. Hardison?"
Parker landed after an elegant salto and curled up at the table next to Sophie, Eliot put down the herbs and the sharp knife, and Hardison took the small external drive Nate handed him and plugged it into his computer.
Things were back to normal.
The end.
continued from Part 1 here
The Leverage was surrounded by and filled with vents. They were in the floors, the ceilings, and in the walls. Some of them were filled with cooling water or wires, others were used to ventilate the entire ship. Most of them were barely big enough to allow a person of Alec's statue to crawl through them on their stomach, but there were also some in which he could almost stand. Those were the main vents, and those were the vents he was heading to now.
He continued crawling, the flashlight held between his teeth muffling his curses, until he reached a junction and a bigger vent. Here, he could at least sit up, and here he could also see the first traces that someone was living in these vents. A pair of bright green boots had been discarded next to an access point which let in thin stripes of light.
Hardison looked through the grates into the storage room.
It was the biggest part of the ship, and it held everything, from their water tanks to Eliot's work-out equipment. The part of their food that didn't come from a Matter Compiler, too, was stored here. From his current point, Alec could see that an agile person could climb the crates and swing up into the access point. He had no doubt that Parker could do it without even thinking twice about it.
Rolling his eyes, he continued to crawl, careful not to put too much weight onto the grate. He was pretty sure that, should it open, he would fall to his death and Eliot would mock his dead and broken body for being so clumsy.
He encountered more traces of occupation. A set of old-fashioned manual lock-picks and locks, a collection of spoons, which, he figured, he had to talk to Parker about before Eliot figured out where exactly their silverware had gone, a blanket, and, finally, when he had reached the biggest vent in the ship, Parker herself.
She had wrapped herself into a blanket and the hood of her sweater was pulled over her head. Wrapped in her arms was a stuffed bunny.
"Hey girl," he greeted softly and moved a box of cereal out of his way. "It's me. Don't - don't run, okay?"
"Hardison." Her voice was flat, without even the barest hint of emotion, and her eyes were dull when she looked up at him.
"I just want to talk to you," he said soothingly and sat down next to her, close enough to see her breathe, but with enough distance between them to allow her some personal space.
"Talk? About what?" she asked with a confused frown.
"About..." Alec trailed off. "I don't know," he admitted. "Just talk. Why are you hiding up in these vents? Why are you trying to hide from us?"
"I'm not trying to hide," Parker argued. Her voice was louder now, but still without emotion.
"Then why are you here and not in the kitchen with us?" Alec wanted to know.
Parker did not answer. She didn't even look at him. She was staring straight ahead, at the dull grey of the wall in front of her, and Alec felt worry and concern fill him.
"Parker?" he asked carefully. "Hey, Parker, are you listening to me?"
He reached out to her, keeping his moves slow and deliberate, to avoid spooking her. When she didn't react, he closed his hand around her arm.
Parker's skin was freezing and hard. It wasn't soft like skin and flesh. Instead it had sharp edges like the delicate insides of an engine.
"Parker?" he asked worriedly. She flinched back violently and hunched defensively over her arm, which, he saw as he held up the flashlight, was wrapped up in what looked greasy, oily rags.
"It's nothing," she said quickly. Too quickly, he thought and narrowed his eyes at her, and Parker flinched again.
"Seriously?" he said and reached for her arm again. "Seriously, what's going on?"
Parker didn't answer, but she didn't try to pull away as he grabbed her wrist gently and extended her arm toward him.
At first, he didn't understand. He thought she had stolen something valuable, but then, she was a thief and she stole for a living. There was no reason for her to hide if it was something simple as that. Everybody on board knew that she was a thief. If something went missing and nobody knew where it was, it was standard procedure to ask Parker, more or less politely, to give it back, and she usually did. Stealing was like breathing for Parker, and nobody blamed her for it.
Alec glanced up, into her face. She still hadn't moved a single muscle, but her eyes were wide and focused on his face.
"I'm not gonna hurt you," he declared softly. "Just let me see what happened, okay?"
He wasn't used to this skittish side of Parker anymore, and he didn't want to scare her but, at the same time, he had a feeling that he needed to find out what had happened. It was the same kind of feeling he'd had the first time he'd sat down in front of a computer. He just needed to know how it worked, and he didn't have any peace until he'd mastered the art of hacking into even the most secure files.
Slowly, he unwrapped the rags from Parker's arm. His fingers quickly became greasy with oil, and his frown grew bigger.
"Parker?" he asked again.
Her other arm suddenly shot out and her hand closed around his wrist, just before he could push back the last layer and look at what was hidden underneath.
"You can't tell anyone," she hissed urgently. "Hardison, you have to keep quiet. Please!"
He didn't reply. Instead, he glanced down at Parker's arm, carefully cradled in his own broad hand. Her skin was pale, almost translucent, against his, and it still was too cold.
Along the entire length of her forearm, the skin was split open in what Alec thought had to be a really bad injury. But instead of bone and blood, he only saw the clean lines of machinery.
"What..." he started, but Parker shook her head, blonde hair flying, before he could get out more than this one word.
"I don't know," she said and leaned her head back against the wall behind her. "I was lucky." She looked down at her other arm. "This one bleeds. That one doesn't."
Alec reached for her other hand, and to his astonishment, he realized that it was warm.
"How much of your body is like this?" he asked with a wave to her injured arm.
"I don't know," Parker admitted. "Maybe...half?" She shrugged and pulled her arm out of his grip, to wrap it up again. "Please don't tell anybody. Please, Hardison."
Maybe it was the shock. Alec wasn't sure, but he found himself agreeing to keep quiet about his discovery and not tell anyone, not even Nate or Eliot. He didn't remember how he left the vents, his thoughts occupied by a million other things has he crawled back the way he'd come and almost broke his neck as he fell, face-first, out of the access point in the engine room.
Parker had assured him that usually, malfunctions like the one she'd suffered healed on their own. Alec shuddered at the thought of how she'd figured that one out, how many injuries she'd already suffered to know that the mechanics had been there for as long as she remembered and that they'd always been part of her.
He was pretty sure that nobody was born with mechanical parts, though. Someone had implanted these in her when she'd been really young. The thought alone was enough to make the bile rise in Alec's throat. He felt deep compassion and sympathy for a younger Parker, and at the same time, a growing anger and disgust at the people who had done that to her.
Something, he decided, had to be done.
He didn't know yet what exactly, but it didn't stop him from sitting down in front of his computer, logging into the galaxy-wide net and starting to dig.
~*+*~
~*+*~By the time he shut down his connection and looked up from his computer again, his eyes were gritty and blood-shot, the little clock at the edge of his screen told him it was late the next morning, and his brain was buzzing with facts and knowledge about robotics, cyborgs, androids and hybrids. Once he'd figured out where to start looking, the knowledge had fallen into his lap like an avalanche, each fact followed by several others, and every so often, he'd had to stop reading and press a fist against his mouth to stop the rolling and lurching of his stomach.
Cyborgs, he'd found out, had been created as fighting machines that were stronger and more durable than even the strongest humans. They had only one purpose in their lives, and they went after it with the cold ruthlessness and efficiency of computers. Robotics, on the other hand, were fairly common and used as prosthetics and hard manual labor, just as androids, which were completely mechanical and only looked human.
Parker belonged in the group of the hybrids. Like cyborgs, hybrids were part human, part machine, but they hadn't been created to fight. Alec still didn't understand how someone could take a little girl like Parker once had been and implant her with mechanical parts, but he was following some leads to figure out who exactly had done this to Parker, and, most likely, many others. If he was playing this right, he could sell it to Nate as a new case and they could get some kind of revenge or compensation for Parker, he thought grimly as he stood and stretched, his joints creaking and forcefully reminding him that he'd remained in one position for too long.
Everything he had read indicated that Parker's arm would heal itself within twenty-four hours and he made the decision to check up on her again later. First, he needed to stretch out and have a little nap - he just hoped that there wasn't any emergencies he needed to deal with. Nate had been quiet since they had finished their last job, content with navigating the ship back to the central planets, and there had been no word yet about a new job. It would only be a matter of time, Alec knew, but as long as everything was still quiet, he could take advantage and rest.
~*+*~
~*+*~~*+*~Eight hours later, Alec found himself in the vents again, his back bowed to prevent him hitting his head on the low ceiling and his back pulsing with a low ache.
There was, he thought darkly, a good reason why he was happy to let Parker do as much of the crawling-in-small-spaces as possible. He simply wasn't made for this.
"Well?" he asked Parker and nodded in the general direction of her arm. "How's it look?"
Parker shrugged slightly. "I don't know," she said and glanced down, at her arm. "Not good?"
"Not good?" Alec repeated disbelievingly. "What do you mean, not good? Did you not heal?"
"No?" It sounded more like a question than anything else, but Alec didn't pay attention to it. Worry and fear had balled themselves into a hard knot right under his breastbone and was now spiraling through his entire body, until he had to clench his teeth to hold back the nausea that went with it.
"How could you not heal, you're supposed to heal from all kinds of injuries and those implants are supposed to be top of the line, state of the art, it's even supposed to grow with you!"
"It does." Parker shook her head, her blonde hair flying. "Something went wrong."
Cold sweat broke out along the line of his spine, and Alec swallowed thickly. "Something went wrong?" he parroted.
"Yeah, something went wrong." Parker frowned. "Hey, it's a computer part. Can't you fix it?"
Alec was aware that his mouth had opened and closed a few times without any sound escaping, but he couldn't do anything about it. Fixing Parker - that was more than hacking into a governmental email account while juggling chainsaws while the ship had caught fire, and he was fully aware of it. On the other hand, it was Parker, and he would do anything for her. She was like a little sister, a foster sister maybe, and he felt fiercely protective of her.
"I'll see what I can do," he finally said. "But I'm not sure about poking around in your insides!" The thought brought another wave of nausea to the forefront of his mind. "Someone else needs to do that."
"No!" Parker's outburst was almost violent and it came with a frightening lurch of her frame in his direction, as if she wanted to stop him physically from telling anyone else. "You can't tell anyone! You promised!"
"Whoa!" Alec held up his hands in an attempt to placate Parker. "Hey, I'm not doing anything you don't want me to. I'm your friend, Parker."
She leaned back against the wall. "They can't ever find out," she said, her voice small, and for a long moment, Alec wanted nothing more than wrap his arms around her, pull her close and hold on to her with all the strength he had.
Parker would probably taze him if she knew what he was thinking, so he did the next best thing and promised her again that he wouldn't tell anyone. It seemed to calm her down well enough, but it left him with a bad taste in his mouth as he crawled back to the access point from which he'd come.
~*+*~
~*+*~Figuring out a fix for a hybrid, Alec thought as he balanced his portable computer on his knees, was a lot more difficult than he had anticipated. Millions of complicated and intricate systems had to work together perfectly to allow her a normal range of motions, and those were embedded in delicate, human flesh. He was confident that he could figure out the mechanical systems, but he hadn't found a solution yet as to how he would bring his fix into Parker. He couldn't simply jam a drive into her and transfer data like that, even if the blueprints he'd downloaded all indicated that a slot for a small thumb drive existed somewhere. He was afraid of asking Parker about it and he wasn't suicidal enough to investigate it on his own, and so this question remained unanswered.
Keeping quiet about Parker's malfunction while still caught in the relatively small space of a ship proved to be hard, as well. In the evenings, when the lights were dimmed, Nate was at the wheel and staring out into space while drinking and thinking about who knew what, when Sophie had long given up and gone to bed, Alec crawled into the bunk he shared with Eliot and pressed his aching forehead against the other man's shoulder, trying to find some peace of mind to get the rest he needed. More than once, he wanted to confide in Eliot, but he had promised Parker to keep her secret, and he simply bit his tongue and swallowed the words that wanted to escape.
He could do this. He could find a fix for Parker, and he would find a way to get it into her, into the shattered arm that was pretty much useless by now and wouldn't get better until the mechanical parts in it would be replaced and adjusted.
In addition to working on that fix, he had to keep the ship up to their standards, make sure the engines were running smoothly, and pull together information about potential new clients.
"I'm done," he muttered one evening, his forehead pressed against Eliot's clavicle. He was lying sprawled and half across Eliot's strong body, the steady thrum of Eliot's heartbeat soothing and comforting him. "I'm so done, man. I need a vacation. On a planet. With real beaches and real water. You wanna come?"
Eliot grunted an answer that Alec couldn't decipher, but his hand came up and brushed briefly against the back of his skull in a caress that was unexpectedly gentle, and Alec took that as confirmation of Eliot's interest. His lips twisted into a smile. A vacation with Eliot would probably end up a real disaster. Eliot would want to spend as much time outside as possible, and Alec would hide in their hotel room with junk food and as much electronical entertainment as he could find. Alec wasn't comfortable with too much outdoors - he had grown up on a series of space stations and moons, wherever foster care had sent him, and had spent only short amounts of time planet-side. Eliot, on the other hand, was planet-born and bred and quickly grew restless when they were on board of the ship.
For a short second, he wondered where Parker had grown up, but he was too tired to spend much time thinking about it. Probably, he realized, like him, moving from one foster home to the next until she'd fallen off the grid and found herself living the life of a thief.
Tomorrow, he decided. Tomorrow, he would talk to her again and would try to convince her once again that she could trust the others. And then -
He didn't know, and he forced himself not to worry about it.
His fingers curled into Eliot's soft-washed shirt as he relaxed and slowly drifted off to sleep.
Eliot, he knew, would manage to squirm out from under him when he'd had enough sleep or just grew annoyed for whatever reason, and he didn't need to worry about him. There was no reason for him to move away from Eliot's chest and from the hand that was still petting him.
~*+*~
~*+*~"Come on, girl. I'm begging you here. Don't be stupid." He knew how pathetic he sounded, but Alec didn't care. "You can trust Eliot. You know you can tell him."
"No." Parker's voice was flat, but there was no hesitation in her voice. She was as stubborn as ever, and no matter how much Alec begged her - on his knees, if he needed to - she wouldn't give in.
"Come on, girl." He slumped against the wall of the vent and rubbed his hand over his face. "We can...I don't know, I can fake an engine malfunction, we can find a nice planet, go to a clinic there if you don't want Eliot to do this. Please, Parker."
"No!" She flinched back from him this time until she was sitting as far from him as she could while being hooked up to a hastily-written diagnostics program Alec was running on her. "No hospital."
"I don't get it, man." Alec glanced down at the screen of his portable computer. "I really don't get it. You know Eliot has your back. How often has he gotten you out of a sticky situation, huh? Just because he growls and grumbles doesn't mean he isn't trustworthy. Okay, he isn't trustworthy, but he wouldn't do anything to hurt you. Too much. Ever. You know Eliot. He's a teddy bear."
It was a good thing they were in the vents, he thought. If Eliot knew that Alec thought of him as a stuffed toy, Alec's ass would be kicked out of their bunk a few times per night. Eliot was vindictive like that.
"He won't like me anymore," Parker muttered, her voice oddly hollow as her words echoed along the vent.
"He...what?"
"Eliot. He won't like me. You know he won't."
"Parker..." Alec trailed off. "What are you talking about? Of course he'll still like you. He probably won't say it, but..."
Parker shook her head almost violently. "Everybody knows Eliot isn't a fan of technical stuff and computers," she pointed out. "He threatened to break your computer yesterday."
"Yeah, but he wouldn't do that to you, girl." Alec shook his head and lifted his hands to gesticulate. "First of all, Nate wouldn't let him. And second, Eliot likes you."
"He does?"
"Yeah, I'm pretty sure, deep down in his heart, he does." Alec nodded vigorously.
Parker opened her mouth to say something, object probably or point out the many occasions when Eliot had threatened a piece of delicate equipment, but before she could say a single word, a thumping sound interrupted their conversation.
A thumping sound, as if someone was banging on the outside of the vent they were sitting in, which, Alec knew, was pretty much impossible, since they were in the wall, in the ceiling, to be exact, and there was no way anyone could bang on the walls.
"You know, you guys," a growl came from underneath them, "you're sitting right on top of a ventilation opening there."
"I know," Parker answered absent-mindedly. "Makes for good eaves-dropping..." She trailed off. Her eyes went almost comically wide, and she bit her lip.
"It really is," Eliot agreed readily.
Alec rolled his eyes. "What are you, a lurker?" he called out while his fingers moved quickly across his keyboard, to try and find out where exactly they were, where Eliot was.
"Yeah," Eliot called up. He sounded vaguely annoyed, the way he did sometimes when he wasn't quite pissed off yet, but could easily get there, with just a few gentle prods and pokes. "That's what I do."
Alec grimaced as he realized that they were right above the common area, above the kitchen. Eliot hadn't even needed to search for them. They had practically fallen right into his lap.
Parker probably thought Alec had done this on purpose, to set her up, and Alec didn't dare to look at her for a long moment.
"Will you come down now?" Eliot called out.
Parker's shoulders were slumped, but she still managed to look graceful as she climbed through the access grate and landed on her feet, her injured arm pressed tightly against her chest. Alec, who scrambled after her, looked more like a bag of potatoes falling through the hole and onto the ground.
"Hybrid, huh?" Eliot said to Parker and pushed a bowl in her direction.
"How did you know?" Parker wanted to know, but she reached for the bowl and curled herself around it protectively, as if she was afraid he would take it from her again.
Eliot shrugged. "Dated a bioengineer," he said by way of explanation. "'Sides, Hardison's not exactly subtle."
Alec wanted to protest, but the air was still knocked out of him and all he managed was a weak wheeze that didn't sound very threatening.
"Show me that arm."
Parker hesitated for a split second. "You promise you don't hate me?" she asked, her voice small enough that Alec's heart ached for her.
Eliot stared at her for a long moment.
"I promise," he finally said. "Come on, Parker. Let's take a look."
~*+*~
~*+*~The shower on board of the Leverage was small and there were strict rules about what to do in them and what not, courtesy of Sophie, who had threatened Alec's health more than once and had probably used neurolinguistic programming or more severe threats on Nate and Eliot.
Right now, Alec was standing on the tiles and letting water run over his shoulders while his head was hanging low. The water that swirled around his feet - to be filtered and re-used - had a reddish tinge as blood sluiced off his hands and forearms.
His stomach rolled at the memory of cutting into Parker's flesh, exposing gleaming metal and shattered pieces of crystal while her blood was painting Eliot's and his hands red.
He clenched his teeth and took slow, even breaths to keep himself and his stomach under control while reaching for the soap and beginning to scrub at his arms. He needed to get clean, get the smell and sight of Parker's blood off of him.
A sharp hiss and the cold draft of air against his exposed skin alerted him that someone had broken the door's encryption and was standing in the small space in front of the shower, but he didn't turn around to face them. Instead, he kept scrubbing.
"Hey."
The muscles in his shoulders and back tensed and knotted at the sound of Eliot's gravelly voice.
"How's Parker?" he managed to ask, his mouth dry and his throat tight.
"She's fine, Alec." Eliot's broad, strong hands that could do so much damage slid carefully over Alec's back. "She's asleep, but she'll be fine."
"You sure?" He almost bit his tongue as soon as the words were out. Of course Eliot was sure. He knew what he was doing and, just an hour ago, Alec had watched how these hands had carefully sewn the wound on Parker's arm shut, the same hands that a few days before had crushed a guy's windpipe.
"Come on, Hardison." Eliot grabbed his shoulders and turned him around, to face him. He was frowning slightly, his hair already matted down by water, and Alec could see the dried flakes of red on the cuticles of his hands. They had both worn gloves, but Parker's blood had still gotten on their skin. Alec knew that he should be worried about that, but he didn't have it in him right now.
"She's fine," Eliot repeated, his jaw set and his eyes blazing, and it was the expression on his face that finally convinced Alec.
Parker couldn't be anything but fine. It would annoy Eliot, and she wouldn't dare annoying him that much.
In his brain, that made enough sense to allow him to relax, finally, and wrap his long arms around Eliot's shoulders, to cling to him while he let Eliot kiss the rest of his doubts away.
Sophie gave them a dark look when they emerged from the shower together, but she didn't say anything, and Eliot wandered off to check on Parker.
"She okay?" Sophie asked Alec after a moment of silence, and all the muscles in Alec's shoulders that Eliot had managed to relax tensed up again.
"What?"
"Parker." Sophie rolled her eyes. "We know what you did, Hardison."
"We didn't do anything!" The denial was quick on his tongue, and he was glancing furiously around, trying to find an escape route.
"We know," Sophie said gently. "What she is. Nate said she can fix herself." Her lips thinned slightly. "So I just want to know if she's okay."
There was no escape. Sophie had him pinned, and she knew, had known from the beginning, and Alec didn't know if he wanted to cry in relief that he didn't have to keep this particular secret or be annoyed on Parker's behalf because Sophie and Nate knew and they never let on that they knew, but in the end, he just exhaled and shrugged.
"She'll be fine," he repeated Eliot's words and went to get some orange soda.
His knees were still trembling slightly as he sat down in front of his computer and stared at the blank screen.
~*+*~
~*+*~Two days later, Parker was hanging from the support beams in the ceiling of the common area by her fingertips again, a happy smile on her face and the white bandage on her arm a bright spot against her dark clothes.
"Dammit, Parker," Eliot growled as he walked past, a fistful of green leaves in his hand, and Alec relaxed in his chair and continued hacking into a government email account with a smile on his face.
Things were going back to normal, he felt. A thought occurred to him, a genius idea to make Parker's mechanical parts even better than they already were, and he reached for another laptop when Nate wandered in, an all too familiar expression on his face.
"We have a new client. Hardison?"
Parker landed after an elegant salto and curled up at the table next to Sophie, Eliot put down the herbs and the sharp knife, and Hardison took the small external drive Nate handed him and plugged it into his computer.
Things were back to normal.
The end.