Work Text:
morning routine
Hardison reads five newspapers online as he eats breakfast. He reads like he eats his cereal, steadily, fast. Sometimes Parker peers over his shoulder for a bit and then quizzes him later about the things she saw on the page--European soccer scores, celebrity gossip, economic conferences in some distant city. He always knows what she's talking about and remembers the details, and sometimes, when she asks him to, he explains what they really mean. He's almost as good as Sophie at explaining things, and he doesn't give her the kind of look Sophie sometimes does.
Hardison scrubs his bare feet absently through the carpet as he reads. He has lovely feet.
Eliot reads the paper too, but it's the local one and it's the print edition, even, which Parker thinks is pretty funny. Particularly when she watches him fastidiously lay the pages flat on the table and turn the pages using only the corners. Eliot doesn't like newsprint.
This morning he is doing this wearing sweatpants, a t-shirt with the arms ripped off, and a bandana holding his hair back, because they aren't working today and he has already had the first of the eight million workouts he does on their days off. Yoga, or something. He is also wearing reading glasses perched on the end of his nose, and delicately sipping his french-pressed, italian-roasted, hand-ground-by-Hardison cup of coffee. While flipping the pages using only his thumb and forefinger. Parker thinks he looks kind of foolishly adorable, both thuggish and scholarly. Kind of like a rottweiler puppy doing math homework.
Hardison laughs and she looks over at him; he glances up and catches her eye and says, "cartoons." Then he is stretching, lifting his t-shirt to idly rub his stomach. Hardison has a lovely stomach, too. He gets up and puts his cereal bowl in the sink.
Parker has finished her sandwich of toast and peanut butter and grape jelly. The light coming through the windows is clear and blue, and everything in the room is outlined in it. She feels good; she feels safe. "I have an idea," she says, "for what we should do now," and Hardison and Eliot both look up at her and smile.
halloween
They have to go to a costume party for a job, and it sounds like the most tedious thing in the world. Nate's role is all behind the scenes, so he doesn't have to dress up, the lucky bastard. Sophie is fussing about their costumes, about their cover identities, their "essential selves", about "concealment and revelation" and some dude named Stanislavsky; she has worked herself into quite a state trying to decide what each of them should be. Then Hardison announces he is going as a Jedi.
"Exactly, Hardison, you have completely understood what I'm trying to get at, here," she says, and she looks so pleased that he doesn't tell her that every costume he wore since he was eight was some variation on "Jedi". You just can't go wrong with a robe and a light saber. Behind her back, Eliot gives him a look and mouths something that looks like "suck-up", unless it's "fuck you", or maybe "fuck me." But probably not the last one. Maybe.
Parker looks squirmy and bored and grim, but Sophie firmly tows her off into the next room where Nate keeps a lot of junk, including racks of clothes to use on the job. They rustle around in there for a while; Parker lets out a few angry shrieks. Hardison already has his Jedi costume, so he gets it out and puts it on, just to see if it needs any attention. Eliot disappears for some Eliot-related reason; off to polish his adamantium knuckle knives, or something, and then Hardison spends a little time imagining Eliot as Wolverine. It's a disturbingly easy thing to imagine.
Sophie comes in and says, "ta-da!" and then disappears--he blinks and there's Parker, dressed in a pocket sized white tuxedo with a nipped-in waist and geez, tails, her hair sleekly brushed back into a twist, every inch of her gleaming and satiny. She looks sulky and wary. Hardison gulps and closes his mouth and then smiles at her and then can't think of what to say. "Who," he starts, and then says again, "who..."
"Marlene Dietrich!" shouts Sophie from the next room.
"Sophie's idea," mutters Parker, "Mar-lay-nuh Dee-trich," like a kid reciting a lesson, and hey, she gets the "ch" sound right. Or close, anyway. Suddenly, she sings "falling in love again--never wanted to--what am I to do--can't help it..." in a startlingly deep voice, and gives him a wicked grin. Hardison's nether regions begin to murmur appreciatively.
"You full of surprises, girl," he says. And then Eliot comes in dressed as a priest. A really hot priest. And man, suddenly this party is looking up.