75 Godiva Street, Monday Afternoon

[geniuswithasmartphone]

Another weird weekend and Hardison wasn't entirely sure what to do with it. Being a teen seemed a lot more fraught than being a little kid and that wasn't even taking getting beaten up by a tiny version of his boyfriend into account.

But that wasn't the main issue on his mind right now. Hardison was looking at the howling wasteland that was their kitchen and shaking his head. Tiny!Parker had kindly left some of his sodas behind during her burglary spree, but not much else.

"How'm I supposed to get breakfast?" Hardison asked Val, who was sitting by his feet. "No bowls, no fridge--I'm pretty sure she even stripped the countertops!"

Hopefully she hadn't gotten very far with their belongings, or Eliot was going to have to remodel their kitchen. Again.

[Open! Will pickup pings when I'm conscious again.]

Comments

[geniuswithasmartphone]

"But I just hate that whenever this island twists you up somehow, it comes out for me," Hardison said quietly, remembering the time with Gaunt, too.

[vdistinctive]

Eliot flinched away, stepping out of Hardison's arms to lean against the wall, facing away. He remembered Gaunt all too well, too.

"You're the one who's always there."

[geniuswithasmartphone]

"An' I don't ever not wanna be because I'm scared that it's gonna lead to another clinic trip," Hardison said, mirroring Eliot's body language and leaning against a cabinet that was missing all of its fixtures.

[vdistinctive]

"So . . . what're we gonna do?" Eliot asked. "I can't stop the island from turnin' me into a scared teenager."

Because that was the thing, what Caleb had hit nail on the head: teen!Eliot had been terrified. And even now, Eliot wasn't handling fear super well, when it came to his partners.

[geniuswithasmartphone]

"Shit, man, I dunno," Hardison said, scrubbing the side of his face. "I don't think any number of notes sayin', Eliot, you grow up an' accept yourself an' these fine-ass people an' y'all are gonna live happily ever after would have fixed this." He felt hungover and he hadn't even drunk anything. "An' it's not like I didn't push, I know that."

[vdistinctive]

Yeah, notes from his 'future self' were never going to be super reassuring for young Eliot. At least not after the age of about 13.

"I'da gone off on someone by the end of the week," Eliot said, hand coming up automatically and finding -- nothing. The wolf necklace, the one Hardison had given him to replace the long lost claw, was sitting safe and sound on his bedroom dresser. Assuming teen!Parker hadn't stolen it. "I could play polite around grown-ups alright, but I wasn't exactly known for my self control at that age."

[geniuswithasmartphone]

"An' I was mouthy because I couldn't hold my own against nobody but I sure as hell could go down takin' verbal shots if nothin' else," Hardison agreed. "The only way I had of standin' up for myself when I wasn't behind a computer."

Beat.

"You're lucky I didn't know your full name, though, or you woulda gotten porn magazines delivered to your house with your name on 'em."

[vdistinctive]

"Gay porn," Eliot observed. "Jesus, my pop woulda died a good 20 years early if that'd happened."

Eliot would have been bounced off the football team, too. And he could have kissed his army career goodbye, which was what he'd really been afraid of, as a kid. DADT was well in force at the time, and the army was the only way he'd known of to get the hell out of town.

And, well. The path he'd ended up on thanks to Uncle Sam hadn't been straight and narrow in any sense of the word, but it was what had led him to the people he had now.

Teen Eliot had had plenty of reason to be terrified. He'd just been damned stupid about how he'd responded to it.

[geniuswithasmartphone]

"Well, yeah, of course," Hardison said, scratching the back of his head and feeling a little sheepish. He could also trace the likely fallout from that little stunt and it would have been bad. "Probably as kinky as I could find, too."

[vdistinctive]

Eliot's mouth quirked up faintly. "You got a vindictive streak a mile wide, you know that, right?"

[geniuswithasmartphone]

"No doubt," Hardison said, his mouth quirking up, too. "What I lack in strength, I make up for in gettin' even."

[vdistinctive]

“Now if we can just teach ya how to block.”

That wasn’t actually funny, was it.

[geniuswithasmartphone]

Noooot really, no. Hardison just raised an eyebrow--or tried to. The cut on his brow twinged and he dropped it again. "Might have to look into it," he said mildly.

[vdistinctive]

Fuck.

"I don't know what else to do, man," Eliot admitted. "Other than --"

Other than him leaving for Hardison's protection.

[geniuswithasmartphone]

"I don't either," Hardison said with a sigh. "Cause, I mean, the danger ain't you, man."

Wouldn't stop him from flinching a few times over the next few days, but at least his head knew that much.

"So stop thinkin' stupid thoughts, cause I know you are. It ain't you."

He just wished that argument didn't sound like something straight out of a Lifetime Original movie about spousal abuse.

[vdistinctive]

"Except it is," Eliot said. Because -- yup. Of course he was doing this. "We're not talkin' about the times I get turned into someone else, here. I was like that as a kid. I have all that inside of me, every day."

[geniuswithasmartphone]

"Yeah, but you know what else you got inside you every day?" Hardison asked. "Control. More control than anybody I ever met. Enough control that we planned a whole con around it. Control earned in sweat, blood, an' tears an' ain't none of those exaggerations."

[vdistinctive]

Eliot stepped into Hardison's space, watching for a flinch.

"Fat lot of good that does us when this damn place is all about stripping control away."

[geniuswithasmartphone]

Hardison tried to stand his ground. He did. He knew the point Eliot was making, after all.

He still flinched. Small, quickly controlled, but he wasn't stupid enough to believe that Eliot didn't notice.

"Then we gotta figure somethin' out. We ain't never found a rule yet we couldn't figure out how to break. The important thing is that we figured it out together."

[vdistinctive]

Eliot nodded a little and stepped back again. "That a 'no', then?" he asked quietly. "On the clearing out for awhile?"

Because he wasn't sure how often he could see that flinch and still keep that firm handle on his control. He held himself back from breaking down as often as he did from lashing out.

[geniuswithasmartphone]

Maybe the breaking down would help?

Hardison hesitated. "You do what you feel you gotta do for your own peace of mind," he said quietly. "But you ain't gotta go for me. In fact, I'd rather you didn't. But I'd understand if you felt you had to."

[vdistinctive]

Eliot was pretty thoroughly convinced that couldn't be true.

"If I did, the island'd probably find some other way to smack you, anyway," he said.

Why leave when he could self-flagellate just by looking at his boyfriend's bruises?

[geniuswithasmartphone]

Eliot could be very wrong sometimes, though!

"Also, you'd be leavin' me an' Parker alone in a house with a half-demolished kitchen to fend for ourselves," he reminded. "We'd probably end up starvin' to death with scurvy."

Beat.

"Well, not scurvy. I still have my orange soda."

[vdistinctive]

The strangled sound that came out of Eliot's throat could potentially be mistaken for a laugh. "She didn't steal that, huh? 'Least teen Parker had some taste."

[geniuswithasmartphone]

"She just knows some things are worth more than the dollar value assigned to them," Hardison declared because that definitely sounded like a Parker conclusion, yes.