#tease post

Eliot reached ten and as such was perfectly calm when he glared at the hacker.  “We are not keeping her.  This is a child, not a stray dog or cat.”  Or ferret, he thought, but the less said about Sterling-the-ferret and his mercifully short stay in Portland, the better.

Eliot was furious. “That son of a bitch comes near you again, and I swear I’m giving him a wolfsbane enema.”

Quinn couldn’t help smiling at the image.  “You’re supposed to be playing at being my boyfriend, Eliot, not my bodyguard.  I handled it.” 

“What exactly are we going for here, Parker?” Sophie asked, as the thief set about securing their prisoner in place with zip ties she’d taken out of a pocket in her jumpsuit.  “You know I can’t scare her into telling you what you want to know – not like Eliot or Nate could.”

The thief looked genuinely startled.  “I want you to scare her like you scare people.”  She straightened up, hands clenched into fists.  “I can be Eliot for this.”

What you need to control isn’t out there.  It’s in here. Words he hadn’t heard since he was a child, paired with the sense-memory of a hand much like his own resting on his heaving chest.  He could continue to sit here while bits of his sanity shredded away like tissue paper, or accept responsibility for the things he had done – orders be damned – and do something to make sure he never ended up down this hole again.

Someday, Quinn swore to himself, he was going to get over his psychotic compulsion to finish the job – no matter how pear shaped everything went.  “I could have been on my way to Singapore by now,” he grumbled, checking the fit of the handcuffs as well as the rope he’d used to secure Riggs’ unconscious body to a metal chair.  “Should have been.”

Hardison had said once that Quinn was the sort who had poked “radioactive badgers” as a child.  He liked the phrase – it was one of the few things the hacker had said over the years that didn’t immediately move Quinn to punch something.

They’d never actually talked about Eliot having a place in his and Sophie’s relationship – it was more like one day Nate had woken up and realized that it was a fait accompli, as the saying went.  Evenings spent letting Eliot guide them through different culinary experiences had naturally expanded to movie nights in Nate’s apartment, and later into theater outings and concerts in the park.

“They’re coming,” he said, feeling Eliot’s fingers brush the back of his hand.  “You hang on, you hear me?”  Quinn swallowed, trying to convince himself that those weren’t tears blurring his vision.  “We’ll have that thing out of you in no time.”  He tried to smile as he met Eliot’s pale eyes, but it was obvious the other hitter had already figured out how deeply full of shit he was.