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one
Alice gets there first, always, and orders both their drinks: she gets a tall mint tea for herself and a tall white chocolate mocha for Peggy. Sophie said doing this was a sign of consideration and friendship and would encourage Peggy to continue feeling positively towards Alice.
Alice likes going for coffee with Peggy; she’d like to keep on doing it. Peggy is – normal. Nice and normal and she likes Alice. It’s so weird that experiencing something horribly pedantic like jury duty could create such a fun friendship – Alice is not used to good things coming from bad experiences – but there is a precedent for it, actually, in that Parker’s crew formed into a permanent arrangement in reaction to being blown up together. As bad experiences go, that was maybe one of the worst. It had knocked Parker out, and it was always bad when Parker got knocked out; worse, when she woke up in cuffs.
Peggy is almost always right on time if not a few minutes early. Once she was half an hour late because her car broke down, but she texted Alice to let her know, so Alice wouldn’t worry. Peggy is considerate like that. Even on that day full of inconveniences, Peggy was smiling when she saw Alice, like a smile was the natural reaction to seeing her. Like seeing Alice made Peggy happy. Alice bought Peggy a piece of cake that day, too, and took her out for ice cream, remembering Peggy saying once that on a bad day she needed a fix of frozen dairy deliciousness to feel good again.
Alice thought about buying Peggy a new car, but Sophie said that was a bit too grand a gesture. “The ice cream was just right,” Sophie assured her. “You’re doing so well, Parker.”
“Okay,” Parker said, uneasy, unsure. Alice still wanted to buy Peggy a car, though. Or Parker could steal her one. That could be fun. Parker had always liked boosting cars.
Alice and Peggy went and did other things, too. They got manicures together once, but then Parker ruined her nails gripping onto a window ledge thirty stories up two nights later, and Alice had to make up a really stupid story to explain that to Peggy on their next coffee day. Peggy took Alice out to vegetarian restaurants that she’d heard of through the nutritionist grapevine, but then afterwards they gleefully cheated on a meatless diet by going to a Burger King drive-through. Parker still wanted to take Peggy art-stealing, but Alice compromised by taking Peggy to rock-climbing walls. It was fun to put Peggy in a harness and teach her how to climb, show her it didn’t have to be scary to fall.
Sometimes Peggy looks at Alice like Alice is beautiful and funny and good. Like Alice is a good person. Sometimes Peggy looks at Alice like she maybe would like to kiss her, and like maybe all these times they’re going out as friends could just as easily be them going out on dates. Maybe they are dates, kind of, half-date, half-outing. Like Peggy and Alice are moving towards something together, something normal and sweet, something that would never hurt because Peggy is not the kind of person who could hurt Alice (though Parker doesn’t know if Alice is the kind of person who couldn’t hurt Peggy, which makes Parker feel – wary).
Then Sophie cons the crew, and Parker gets caught by Sterling, and Hardison has to blow up the office, and they manage to salvage everything in the end but they still have to scatter. Parker puts Alice away, folds her up into a small box and tucks it inside, and, really, Peggy was Alice’s. She was never Parker’s. So it doesn’t hurt Parker to leave Peggy behind.
She can do it without even a flinch.
two
Parker is a very good thief, so it really should not surprise Sterling when he wakes up stolen.
Turnabout is fair play, he supposes, rattling his cuffed hands around the bedpost. He can slip them by breaking his thumbs, but that is such a (literal) pain, not to mention he’s done it too many times already. He’s definitely going to have arthritis in his hands if he makes it to old age, and he’s not looking forward to the aches of those old breaks haunting him. So he lies there and feels her breathing in the dark.
“This is all very titillating,” he drawls, “but I feel my arms going numb, so.”
“I knew a girl,” Parker says, “whose mother tied her hands so tightly for so long that she had to have one of them amputated.” Parker’s voice, disembodied, floats eerily through the room. Its affect is flat. “She had a prosthetic. But she’d take it off at night and I’d see the stump. She said she could still feel it, her hand. Tingling.”
Despite himself, Sterling’s eyes roll in their sockets, alarmed and alert. They’re trying to adjust to the lack of light: trying to spot his captor. He’s still in his own room, in his own apartment, which is somewhat of a relief.
“She said her mother did it so that she wouldn’t touch herself at night. She said that’s when bad touches happen. At night.” Parker’s voice drops even lower, and is suddenly closer: and she’s looming over him.
Sterling bucks his hips up to get the momentum to scissor his legs into a kick; but her reflexes are faster, and carry her out of his path. Gravity brings Sterling’s lower body back down to the bed with a thump and quick as a flash she’s straddling his hips, pinning him with her surprisingly strong thighs.
Parker leans down, her eyes visible and insane even in the dim light. “I don’t like it,” she hisses, “when someone takes me, and keeps me, and doesn’t let me go.” She grinds her pelvis into Sterling’s pelvis. It’s a sexual act but is the least sexual experience Sterling has ever had. It’s like Parker is trying to hurt Sterling in the worst way she knows how, and this is how she chose to do it. In the dark, with him tied down; with her on top. With him unable to escape.
Learned behaviour, Sterling thinks in the back of his mind, beneath the panic and adrenaline.
Parker rocks her hips. Not like she’s getting off but like she hopes it hurts Sterling that she’s moving against him like this. She puts her face close enough that she can exhale harshly all over his face but not so close that he can lunge at and bite her. “It makes me angry,” she says, punctuating her words with a hard thrust down, so hard it feels like she’s bruising his hips. “I take it personally.” She braces her hands on his wrists, pushing them uncomfortably in their cuffs, against the post. The angle and pressure hurts up to his elbows, and aches up to his shoulders, and she just pushes harder when he makes the smallest noise of pain. She rides him like she’s fucking him, but it’s not sex. It’s -
Sterling doesn’t want to name what it is.
When she decides she’s done she gets off of him. It’s still dark in the room, too dark; he can barely see the outline of her. She leaves.
He ends up having to break his thumbs to get free, after all.
three
Their dates are so much fun.
This one time they start out where Parker has the tiny golden bell and Apollo steals it from her in the mall food court while posing as janitorial staff and then Parker steals it back in a really deft move while distracting him by tripping him into the path of some nuns, and then he manages to herd her into the department store at the end of the mall and she has to escape into the duct work, only he’s anticipated that and is already in there, so they have this whole nostalgic chase through the air shafts thing going on.
They have art-stealing races, too, where they sabotage each other at every turn to up the ante, and whoever wins gets to choose the other’s handicap on the next date (like, one time Apollo stipulated that Parker could only turn left, and once Parker forbade Apollo the use of his hands’ three middle fingers).
After a heist-date they go to a neutral location like the park or the bar and deconstruct the trickiest parts of what they’d just pulled off; give each other some handy tips, sometimes sit a little closer than they normally would to each other.
It’s really great, but it’s not something that can last, mostly because Apollo doesn’t like to stick to one place for so long, and he definitely doesn’t like to stick to one crew. And – well, Parker’s crew, they’re, you know. They’re a lot more than just her crew.
When they say goodbye that last time they don’t hug or kiss or touch hands or anything like that. But Apollo gives Parker the little golden bell as a sort of token, and Parker reverse-lifts it back on him when he’s not looking, and they know they’ll see each other again, some day down the road, because they’re the best in their business and the best tend to cross paths.
four
The stuff with Tara doesn’t start, not really, until after Sophie’s back and Tara’s gone.
It sort of started earlier, like when Tara would keep her notes in code and Parker would try to crack it (most of the time simple frequency analysis would do it, though she had to compensate for the underlying language being non-English – Russian, Polish, Spanish, French, annoying), and then Tara would get more complex and Parker would treat it as the challenge it was, and so on. But that was just playing, really.
It wasn’t until after Parker dangled Tara over the edge of a building that it really got physical, though. Like – physical.
Like, when Tara was breezing through town and stopped to help them out on their latest job since they were still a man down (Nate, prison), and Parker came up afterward to her hotel room, it got physical like – pushing Tara against the wall and pulling her skirt up, around her waist, nudging her panties aside and getting a finger inside her where she was wet already, Parker settling the heel of her palm firmly against Tara’s clit while Tara made out with Parker’s neck, hot and wet and moaning and, “That’s good, that’s so good, god, give me another finger, yes.” And yeah, if Parker were normal, her wrist and fingers would probably be cramping up; but like she’d said to Tara before, she clung onto the sides of buildings with those hands, they were strong. And they could keep on going like they were battery-operated. They could keep on going until Tara was a sticky, taken apart mess, flushed and heavy-lidded and giddy-laughing.
Parker’s never been too clear on sexuality or relationships or – really any normal human interaction, because she’s been shaped too thoroughly from too young an age by abnormal human interaction, abusive interaction – but she’s good at sex. She knows how a body works too well not to be good at sex. And she’s really good at sex with Tara. And they have a lot of really good sex together.
Tara isn’t shy about her opinion that Parker is terrifying – almost being murdered by someone tends to strip away any illusion that they may be happy, fuzzy, and benign at heart – but she doesn’t let it stop her from being Parker’s friend, either. She’s hard like Parker is, like Eliot is; she can do anything, even the most horrible thing, and live with herself after.
They stop having sex a few months into this sporadic thing they have going when Parker says that she’s not sure she likes it.
Admittedly that is really horrible pillow talk, even for Parker, but Tara doesn’t take it badly. She just rolls onto her side and looks at Parker, who is curled a bit away. “You’re not sure that you like – sex? Sex with me? Sex with women?” Her face is calm and thoughtful and not at all upset or angry, and the roiled up tangle inside of Parker soothes down, just a little.
“In general,” Parker decides. “I don’t know if I really like it. Just. In general.”
Tara nods and hums and smiles at Parker, wistful and sad and fond. The lines around her eyes and her mouth crinkle up perfectly when she smiles. “Okay,” she says calmly. She doesn’t reach out to touch Parker or anything like that. And she doesn’t ask questions, either. She just keeps on smiling, and she just keeps on being Parker’s friend.
five
Maggie really likes everyone Nate works with now, but admittedly Parker is her favourite. This could have something to do with how she feels like she was Parker’s favourite first. It’s not just that Parker put together that kit full of things she thought Maggie would need to survive, or that Parker got so angry when she thought Nate wasn’t taking it seriously; it’s the postcards, too.
The first one came two weeks after the bomb. On one side was a photo of a moose. On the other side was a scrawled, Hardison says penpals are a way of being friends long distance.
Parker never seemed to expect Maggie to reply, but it felt – cold? – not to, so Maggie got in touch with Alec and asked for a return address. She could have more easily asked Nate, but then he would get involved, and he was unbearable sometimes, always wanting to be the centre of attention and action.
So Maggie sent a postcard back, one of Paris’ outline in ink, writing, Hardison’s right. It was good to see you again. I’m in France now, and for the next few weeks. Don’t be a stranger.
It probably shouldn’t have surprised her that four days later, Parker had (literally) dropped into her Parisian accommodations and said, “Do you want to help me crack the Louvre?”
They didn’t actually end up stealing anything, but they could have. And, Maggie had to admit, it was different in a beautiful, exciting way, being the only one in the museum at night with all those works of art, Parker giggling giddily into her ear.
Parker sent postcards where, instead of words, she’d drawn portraits of strangers she saw in the street, old men and women, children. Once it had been a chess set, game mid-play, shading immaculate. White was winning. She sent postcards that were anywhere from two to two hundred words long, the latter having tiny, eerily perfect print.
They overlapped in DC for two days a few months later, and grabbed lunches and dinners together. Parker’s hair was down and Maggie’s was piled on top of her head in an elaborate cascading curl arrangement. Parker seemed captivated. “Your hair is so pretty,” she said.
Maggie reached out and touched a lock of Parker’s hair. “So is yours,” she said.
“You think so?” The look on Parker’s face was vulnerable, and young, and somehow broken.
“Yes,” Maggie said. “I do.”
Parker blinked rapidly and almost started to smile before stopping herself, which was how Maggie knew she really was pleased. Instead, her eyes softened. “Thanks,” she said. And then, “Hey, do you want to see the restricted parts of the White House?”
and one who she doesn’t date or have sex with, but might one day, and even if she doesn’t that would be okay, because they are friends
When Hardison goes real estate shopping for himself and the crew in Portland, he keeps an eye on the ventilation shaft sizes and how many possible exits there are to a given room. Parker isn’t comfortable without at least three.
It’s something he does on autopilot, just like he always has her favourite cereal fully stocked and just like he never disturbs the food/money caches he finds stashed away in his apartment and the new office space.
Hardison doesn’t try to find out where Parker lives when she’s not in the office. He just makes sure she knows where his new place is and how to get there, and he even gives her a key though they both know she’ll never use it. Keys are too easy, like cheating.
She doesn’t come over every night but she comes over most nights. She has some of her stuff scattered around – most of it is stuff she wouldn’t miss if she never saw it again, but just having it there makes her feel like she has a claim to part of the space. They usually end up working side by side on the coffee table in front of the television (which takes up most of one wall), with Hardison doing something on a laptop and Parker memorizing blueprints and researching the latest security system updates.
Sometimes they watch things on the television, like the news or a movie.
Sometimes Eliot is there too, and he cooks them delicious things in the kitchen. Sometimes Nate and Sophie come and they eat together at Hardison’s table. Parker likes those nights a lot.
Sometimes Parker naps on the couch. During the day, when Hardison is out, sometimes Parker will curl up on his bed and breathe for a while. She likes how it smells in Hardison’s room.
Hardison never tries to touch her, but if Parker sits close to him, he’ll turn his body a little toward her so that she knows it’s okay to lean in and rest against him. Sometimes she doesn’t, and sometimes she does.
When her feet are cold, she steals Hardison’s socks.
She feels like she could be a good person. She feels like she could be happy.
Hardison smiles at her, and she is.