Roughly On Par with the Cakemaker of Kiev

Hardison pressed the End Call button on his phone and then flung it onto the couch. It landed so hard it bounced back up and crashed to the floor. Whatever. He had like a million others and, honestly, the sound of something breaking was welcome. He followed that up with a sharp punch to the wall, trying to vent his fury out through violence.

Ouch. Nope. Okay, bad idea. The sound of something breaking was only okay if it wasn't his fingers.

On the bright side, the pain took sharp the edge off his anger, leaving him clear-headed enough to think. Okay, Nana and a bunch of her friends had gotten swindled out of their pensions. She was still financially secure, of course, not that she knew it. Hardison had long ago set up various accounts and trusts for her. But the same couldn't be said for her friends--and she didn't know she wasn't in any financial trouble yet, because he couldn't explain to her about all her money without answering some uncomfortable questions about where it all came from.

Step one: let the crew know they had a new job. Stat. Sorry, vacation, but Nana took priority. Step two: dig up all the information about Deon Walker and his shady operation and make up an info briefing. Step three: use that information in Chicago to nail Walker's ass to the ground. Step four--

Actually, wait. Step one was going to be 'get some ice for his hand.' Everything else came after that.

( The Pensioner Pyramid Scheme )

***
The taxi from the airport dropped them off in front of an unassuming white house on Luella Avenue, not far from Trinity Hospital. Hardison had his own place in Chicago, of course, and his own car, both under a pseudonym stolen from Mister What, and neither of which would do him any good for awhile. His car was in longterm storage across the city and he had no reasonable explanation for the existence of an apartment that was still furnished and rented and yet had sat empty for years, without even a sublet. In the end, it had been easier to agree to stay with his Nana in her place than try to argue with her about where they were staying.

He could con a bunch of thieving Russians so well that they'd kidnapped him, but put him on the phone with the woman who'd raised him and he was barely able to fib about the weather.

"We'll be able to get the car in a few hours," he said, hoisting his duffel bag full of electronics over his shoulder. That was all his bag contained; his clothes had been split between Parker and Eliot's bags to make room for more gadgets. "Someone at the storage place is gonna drive it over. Had to tell Nana that I was borrowin' it from an old friend. Otherwise she'd've insisted we drive hers an' she needs that for her shift at Trinity's." He was babbling, he didn't need to tell his crew why using Nana's car for their work was a terrible idea. It was just nerves. Not about the job--please, they could take down scum like Walker in their sleep--but bringing two of people he loved most in this world to his childhood home to meet the third. Nothing much had changed in the few years since he'd been gone. He tried to see it with strangers' eyes.

The same blue station wagon Nana'd bought the year before he'd graduated high school sat in the driveway that could use a good resurfacing. The house had a two-car garage, but it had been converted into a playroom back in the 90s, a few years before Hardison had come to live here. The lawn was a little shaggy, more clover and weeds than grass, but still green. Hardison wondered whose job it was now to mow it. The outside of the house was in good condition; Nana had 'won a contest' for discounted siding a few years back and the contractor had 'known a guy' who did roofing was was willing to shingle the roof for a fraction of the usual cost. It had still run Nana a few thousand dollars to get all the work done, but there was no cover story in the world that could make her believe she could get it done for less. Hardison knew that for a fact--he'd asked Sophie to help him come up with one and even she'd been stumped.

Which made Nana getting conned all the more surprising.

"So, uhh, yeah," he said, swinging open the gate to lead them up to the front door. "This is the place. Home sweet home."

( In the (Calumet) Heights! )

[Phone call and resulting discussion available for broadcast, everything in Chicago is obviously NFB. Preplayed with the wonderful vdistinctive and whoisalicewhite]

He was trapped. There was no where to move, nowhere to go, and he could feel the air getting thinner. Each breath was harder to draw than the last and his lungs burned with the effort of extracting what little air was left. The phone glowed blue in his hand, Parker's voice telling him he could do it, he could make it, that she needed him, and Hardison wanted to hold on for her, to prove he could do it, hell, just to see her again and make sure that there wasn't new pain in her eyes, but he knew that they weren't going to arrive in time. He strained his ears to hear the sound of the ambulance, the sound he knew he should make out by now, but they weren't close enough, he couldn't hear anything, not even Parker's voice anymore and the phone's glow died, leaving him trapped in darkness, the scent of the rose he'd been buried with and the varnish they used on the casker mixing in his nostrils and making him ill.

Or maybe that was just knowing he was going to die, all alone, in this tiny box he could never get out of by himself...

Deeply asleep and still trapped inside his nightmare, Hardison thrashed about, whimpering in fear, hot tears sliding down his cheeks.

Coffin nightmares were the worst.

[For the two there with him. Obviously]

Once again, Hardison was in trouble. His back against a wall, surrounded by enemies intent on taking him down, for a few seconds Hardison let himself wonder if this was really the way he was going to be taken down.

Aww, hell naw. He was not about to lose to a buncha chumps, even if he was drastically outnumbered.

"Look, Eliot, watch this!" And several seconds of furious button-mashing later, he'd managed to take out all of his opponents, using impressive combos, bright flares of magic, and a few badass items in his inventory. "Bet you was nervous, huh. Not like me. I was cool as a cucumber the whole time." Ignore the way he was sagging against the back of the couch, Eliot, he'd been totally fine.

This was the way Hardison had imagined it going once he moved to the island: no creepy zombie-horror fog outside, the three of them sharing space again, together even while they did their own things, happy and content.

"Oooh, I'm gettin' hungry. Eliot, you seen my bag of gummy frogs? Or maybe we should order more pizza after I finish up this level."

Well, he was happy and content anyway.

[For the crew & expecting one more, but open if anyone else should have a reason to drop by!]

After everything that went down at the docks, Hardison was more than happy to come back to the apartment and just relax. Which, for him, meant a shower, a two-liter of orange soda, and a little bit of light hacking, just to stay on top of things. Sure, surfing the Dark Net was nothing compared to hacking all of reality, hacking reality hadn't come with phat stacks of cash, either.

Hardison settled in at his work station and set his various programs to running. Some were web crawlers, keeping him abreast of current events that might prove useful, others were security programs to wipe away any traces of his online presence. Still others were just tiny things he did to amuse himself; that was one naked celebrity picture leak that he ended before it even began, deleting the pictures from the web and sending a virus back to the machine that had uploaded them to destroy that, too. There was some obnoxious GamerGater on Reddit holding forth; Hardison sent a troll-bot running an algorithm of feminist arguments guaranteed to make the idiot on the other side of the screen froth at the mouth. This program unleashed a new meme into the world to propagate, chosen from the vast library of memes that Hardison had invented and saved to bring forward at a later date.

Sure, he might not have super-powers or a fancy metal suit, but the internet was his playground and there he was king.

Hardison's sense of satisfaction was not fated to last very long, however. Not more than seventy-two seconds after he finished his circuitous path to his little corner of the Dark Net and saw the blinking notice that said--once you broke all the layers of encryption over it--that the Black Book files had successfully been updated on March 12th at 7:22pm. Normally, that would be a good thing, except--

Except Hardison was sitting at his workstation and was not seeing the hard drive. Anywhere. He remembered initiating the backup; it was the last thing he'd done before he and Parker had left to go cliff jumping like the insane adrenaline-junkies he most certainly was not. But he hadn't ejected the drive when he'd gotten home--they'd had more important things to do, thank you--and when he'd gotten up on Friday, he hadn't seen the drive out on his work station to remind him to put it away.

So the last time he could consciously remember seeing the hard drive was two days ago. That was...that was very not good. Because it wasn't here now.

"Parker!" he bellowed. "Parker, I need you!"