Born perfect, born different, born better than your best
Если кто не знает, я пишу фанфикшен. Более того, я пишу слешный фанфикшен на английском языке. Делаю я это не часто и публикую обычно в другом месте, но тут меня вставило и я решила что повешу и здесь. Если хотя бы один человек это прочитает и откомментит, я буду очень приятно удивлена 
Fandom: Leverage
Title: Five reasons Alec Hardison shouldn’t have kissed Eliot Spencer
Rating: R
Paring: Alec Hardison/Eliot Spencer, a bit of Hardison/OMC
Summary: Alec Hardison is a master of inappropriate crushes. But Eliot Spencer takes the gold.
Disclaimer: I owe nothing.
читать дальшеAlec Hardison had a tendency to crush on the most inappropriate people. Always had. It started way back when he was a small child, but then it was normal since no one has any wholesome meaningful relationships while still in kindergarten. Or in middle school. Even in high school – not everybody works out, you know. That’s just life, right?
The problem was, it wasn’t working out, period. Ever. And the older Alec got, the harder it became to just move on and hope things would be better next time. After all, how many times do you have to be completely disappointed in love to finally get the message? In the end of the day it isn’t even funny anymore, you just sit and wait to see how the life is going to screw you this time.
Life was one inventive bitch.
At sixteen Alec had his first ‘love at first sight’ experience. Nothing special, really. Pretty boring, even, for a guy as colorful as Alec. He walked into a diner, he saw the cute red-headed waiter, he fell hopelessly in love. Then he noticed the ‘Help needed’ sign and was singing up for the afternoon shift before his new soulmate even finished serving his table and turned around.
The guy was perfect – a bit older than Alec and a bit shorter, with clear blue eyes and the sweetest smile in the world and yeah, the hottest ass Hardison'd ever seen. He also had an IQ of a cucumber, which became apparent when they actually started talking. Alec held down the job at the diner for three more months just to convince himself it didn't matter. The end result was utter disappointment, one kissing attempt and a painful shiner. Hardison moped for weeks, then went to a party, got drunk and gave the first blowjob in his life to the nastiest jerk in the whole town.
And as far as his crushes usually ended, this time he got off easy.
His other fuck-ups included the aforementioned jerk who, apparently, had no idea Hardison was actually a guy, an avant-garde musician who made him feel incredibly guilty for wanting to have money, his best friend's younger brother and, to top it all off, his very married college professor. All stellar choices, all either completely inaccessible or with a tendency to make Hardison feel miserable.
So yes, he wasn’t exaggerating. He was doomed to fall for the most unattainable and unsuitable people.
It was safe to say that this time he'd outdone himself.
Yes, Alec Hardison was a master of inappropriate crushes. But Eliot Spencer took the gold.
It wasn’t like Alec hadn’t seen it coming, really. At the time he joined the team, he hadn’t had any soul-crushing experiences for almost a year, and the universe was way past due with the delivery. When Alec followed Nate in that park after their first job he was vaguely aware something was going to go wrong, and a week later he already knew what – he was going to silently pine for one of his co-workers while making lewd jokes involving another one. The key word there was ‘silently’, because there was no way Alec was going to make a move. He still valued his teeth, thank you very much.
Five reasons Alec Hardison shouldn’t have kissed Eliot Spencer
1. Eliot Spencer is oblivious.
Wet dreams and inappropriate feelings aside, it was only friendly to ask your colleagues over to watch a game. And Hardison was a friendly guy - everyone thought so. So he did invite Eliot over, along with Nate, of course. After all, only asking one of them would be suspicious, or worse, rude. As it happened, it was August and thirty degrees Celsius outside - a perfect time to have your sexual fantasy over for an evening of friendly dude-fun.
Eliot came with cold beer, without Nate and dressed in a sleeveless shirt. The way Eliot's muscles bulged under his tanned skin made Hardison's mouth dry and his cheeks hot as he stayed right there in the hallway, gulping. Thankfully, Eliot's lack of manners saved Alec from embarrassment. The man simply invited himself in, brushing past Hardison, so close the heady smell of fresh sweat mixed with something sickeningly fruity – Alec refused to think it was Eliot's shampoo because his fragile sanity might have just snapped if he had – almost kicked him off his feet.
They spent ten minutes left before the game making meaningless small talk but even that was almost too much work for Hardison, whose brain cells were preoccupied with processing all the eye candy he was getting. Of course, he'd seen Eliot before, and sometimes even in more revealing attire, but not without threat of imminent death looming in the background and certainly not that close. Hardison's mental overdrive was interrupted when Eliot gave him a bottle of beer - Alec clutched it, thankful he could do something with his hands, then fumbled with the remote.
He wasn't quite sure what sport they were supposed to watch and on what channel.
Predictably, only one of them watched the game, and it wasn't Alec - he was watching Eliot instead. The beer had gone warm in his hand before he made a swallow that did nothing to make his mouth less dry or his face less hot. There was not enough beer in the whole world to make watching Eliot Spencer's slightly damp hair stick to his neck or the muscles rippling under his smooth skin or the beer glistening on his full lips any less arousing.
Eliot didn’t notice a thing.
The game ended entirely too soon for Alec’s liking and he made a few relaxed (he hoped they sounded relaxed, at least) remarks about Eliot staying and hanging out for a while. Later, when his mind became less clouded, the only way he could think of to justify that was his masochistic streak – a few hours of oogling what you can't have wasn't enough for him. Eliot didn't accept the offer though - he had a date that night. Watching sports always made him hot, he remarked to Alec with a dirty smirk, and strutted out - but not before clapping Alec on the shoulder and thus providing him with one more jerk-off fantasy for the evening.
2. Eliot Spencer is hopelessly straight.
Maybe Hardison was too chickenshit (or too sane - you never know where the line is with those things) to make a move on Eliot, but he was just masochistic enough to try hanging around him as often as he could. It was not enough working together, not for the full-on misery treatment Alec was used to. So he and Eliot watched sports, ate lunch and, wait for it… cruised bars together. Tequila, dancing and girls - Hardison could have lived without the latter but he made do. It seemed that by some cruel twist of fate he was good with women. Probably because he didn't give a shit whether he got the hottie of the evening or not. What he did care about was Eliot, and in a weird way Hardison came to enjoy their nights out. The part where his desperate crush came out of the bar with a girl on his arm was a bit of a letdown, but the minutes just before that were what Alec liked - the way Eliot bumped their shoulders and winked at him when he said goodbye for the night, and the sort of respect he saw in the man's eyes when he scored with a pretty girl. The girl got the boot ten minutes after Eliot left, of course, but it felt nice being good at something besides 'geek stuff'.
Yeah. You don’t have to comment on that.
Alec spent the evenings after escapades like that jerking off to porn and wondering how it was that Eliot managed to look times hotter than anyone you could ever find online, no matter how much you paid. He also wondered just how much shit Eliot would beat out of him if he ever found out about Hardison's midnight sessions, and also how much heartbreak a person could actually take without irreparable damage to emotional health. Despite ‘not much more’ being the usual answer to the latter question, Alec continued following Eliot around whenever man went out – and no, watching him walk away with someone who wasn’t Alec for the hundredth time didn’t make seeing it again any easier.
One evening, when Hardison felt more tired than masochistic, he bailed on their plans to go out to another seedy bar, got a cab and spent a lot of his ill-gained money dancing in the gayest bar in the city, turning tricks like motherfucking Brian Kinney. That became his new ritual - accompany Eliot to a breeder central, watch him make passes at women in skimpy clothing, play the part of a wingman, then hop into a cab and find a good lay for himself. In all of that he somehow ended up with a boyfriend - two times Eliot’s size and barely half the man’s strength, a smart and sophisticated man who would have been a perfect fit for Alec except that he wasn’t.
Boyfriend meant less 'straight nights out' with Eliot and more getting laid - all healthy, of course, and all normal. The only thing wrong with that picture was the way Eliot's knowing smirk made Hardison's fucked-out ass ache. And the anger Hardison felt when he wondered why Eliot could tell that his colleague got mightily laid the night before but couldn't tell he wished it was Eliot who'd nailed him.
3. Eliot Spencer is the best friend Hardison had since high school.
The boyfriend thing didn't last, of course - nothing could last in a situation like that, except for Hardison's continuing fucked-upness, and even that varied from day to day. Sometimes he'd think he was over Eliot and ready to start over, new, improved and hopefully smartified by the experience, but after a day or two of denial he returned to desperate pining, desperate fucking and a steady diet of all-night MMORPG binges.
So when James informed Alec they were breaking up, the only thing that came as a surprise was the amount of screaming, crying and general drama that came with it. All the blame flying around made Hardison queasy and miserable, and when he called to work to tell he wasn't coming in that day it was Eliot who showed up at his doorstep with too much booze and a movie. Hardison would have rather been alone - he was too tired to keep up appearances and God knew what could have happened had he slipped up about anything - but he didn't have the heart to say it, not to Eliot anyway. So he smiled thankfully, let Eliot in and listened to his idiotic chit-chat as they watch cars and helicopters explode on-screen and scantily clad women perform unlikely martial feats. That was probably the first time he didn't think about how hot Eliot looked - didn't think about how he looked at all, truth be told. And it should have been the end of his crush, but in the best traditions of Alec's life, it wasn't.
It was all the more depressing because of the whole hopeless thing, but Alec was never an all-or-nothing kind of guy. It was all about compromise, so he kept his mouth shut no matter how badly he wanted to blurt out a love confession and kept his eyes on the screen. Eliot didn't ask questions, which meant Hardison didn't have to lie and make any excuses. The only thing he did was leave all the assumption-making to Eliot and get impossibly drunk with him. It was a miracle he didn’t try to get into Eliot’s pants, with all the booze in his blood, but later, when Eliot fell asleep on the couch, Alec had a full-on crazy stalker moment standing over him and staring at his face. It was scary, not only because there was a chance Eliot's instincts would kick in and he'd wake up, but mainly because they didn't. Eliot's instincts were sleeping on Hardison's couch along with the man himself. And Alec, still a bit freaked out by the notion, couldn't go to sleep. He sat down with his back to the sofa, just close enough to feel the warmth of Eliot's arm brush his back. The thought that he might be inches from touching Eliot's thigh kept him awake for half an hour but he never gathered enough courage to check the theory.
They drank coffee together in the morning, Eliot making fun of Alec for passing out on the floor, and Alec giving as good as he got. The smile never left his face, and the frantic "don't you dare screw this friendship up" never stopped running through his head.
4. Eliot Spencer is fucking incomprehensible.
In the end simply being Eliot's friend without any hopes for more didn't turn out to be that bad. After two months of pestering and whining Eliot even took Alec horseback riding, looking pissed off like sixteen PMSing women whose husbands forgot their tenth wedding anniversary. Seeing that made Hardison inexplicably happy - he fought undignified giggly noises on the way there and even near the horses, when Eliot changed his usual angry demeanor for being eerily quiet. Of course, in a couple of minutes it took all of Hardison to stay in the saddle and not cry uncle. Eliot didn't pull punches - metaphorical, thankfully - but never showed any sign of annoyance. Well... maybe his mouth was kind of twitchy. But only the last ten minutes, and it went away as soon as Hardison got off the horse. Eliot took another twenty minutes - the time Hardison used to hobble to the locker rooms - to ride a few circles around training ground alone. When they finally got to the car, he still wasn't done being creepily calm and content. It was probably what lulled Hardison into stupidity. That was the only way he could explain the words that spilled out of his mouth as he sat down in the car.
“Man, I feel like I’ve been riding a twelve-inch dick for the whole day.”
Realization of what he'd just said hit Alec a second after. He managed to keep his sexual orientation to himself for so long, and to slip up like that was stupid, stupid, stupid. Hardison's eyes darted to Eliot's face. He was scared shitless of what would happen next but when he met Eliot's unreadable stare he suddenly realized that he didn't know the reaction he'd get. He didn't know anything about Eliot Spencer, didn't know anything at all except the front that he'd been putting up and the fact that Alec was hopelessly in love with him. So when Eliot just nodded and put the car in gear Alec wasn't sure if that was a good or a bad thing. He didn’t push his luck though, shut up and stared out of the window, chewing his lip. He had five or six worst-case scenarios worked out in his head by the time they reached his apartment building, along with escape plans and an estimate of what it would cost him and a very vague idea of what kind of security he’d need to keep someone like Eliot Spencer away. Nothing happened. Eliot stopped the car and Hardison went up to his apartment, his knees shaking and his palms wet.
Nothing changed, either.
***
Well, almost nothing, because now Hardison keeps catching these looks, these strange damn looks he can’t for the life of him read but he thinks it’s want. Or regret. Or quite possibly – most likely – annoyance. It’s never long enough to know for sure and sometimes Alec thinks he’s imagining things, but honestly, he'd have to be more paranoid than Parker for something like that. So Hardison assumes he really sees something – and that is all he needs to act. What the hell, yeah?
5. Eliot Spencer is a frigging moron.
Sadly, it’s not as simple; even now that Alec’s made up his mind and is all determined and goal-oriented. He tries asking Eliot to a movie, but Eliot apparently doesn’t understand Alec's subtle 'just the two of us, you know. hang out...' and the evening is pretty much screwed as soon as Eliot thumps Alec on the shoulder and disses his movie choice. Hardison tries suggestive looks and Eliot just assumes Hardison’s hung over. By the time Alec is thinking of resorting to an anonymous love letter he is pretty sure Eliot isn't as much completely straight as completely clueless. He wonders if he’d imagined that new look in Eliot's eyes or mistook it for something that it wasn't. He even ponders talking to Sophie – who, incidentally, is suspiciously attentive to him recently. After discarding the idea of unleashing Sophie onto his private life Alec proceeds to drown in introspection and guesswork. He goes from hopeful to desperate in a matter of hours and then does it all over again, only in bells and whistles. When Parker comes up to him and says that certain computer games damage a person's nervous system, Alec decides he’s had enough of the drama. They have the plan for tomorrow and it doesn’t include him, not until the evening, so he might as well just go home. He walks past Eliot, who looks a bit distracted and all the more dreamy for it, and curses his destiny one more time.
Next time he sees Eliot is in a hospital bed. The room is overcrowded - or so it seems to Hardison, although it's really just the team. Eliot is a bit confused and most likely embarrassed, equally for allowing himself to get hurt and for getting all the attention, but bears it with patience that is rare for him and is most likely a pleasant side-effect of the morphine. Or getting three bullets to your chest. Eliot’s pale, slack-jawed and looks seriously disgusting. Alec has no idea what to do or say to him like that, but what he knows is when you feel more socially inept than Parker, it's time to get the hell out. So he slips away, pretending he didn't feel a hazy stare on his back. He gets an attack of uncontrollable crying just outside the hospital; then takes a taxi home.
Two days later Hardison’s in that hospital room with a shit-eating grin on his face and a huge fucking bouquet in his hands. He's not quite sure what he's doing here, he only knows that sitting on his ass in front of his laptop doesn't work anymore and he needs some kind of prop to pull of this whole ‘a friend visiting’ cover. Eliot raises his eyes from the Chinese crossword Parker is doing on his bed - God knows where she picked up solving puzzles as socially acceptable behavior for visiting a hospitalized colleague - and snorts, then winces. Alec feels briefly bad for causing that twinge of pain but at that point his brain is too jumbled for him to care. The fact that Eliot's annoyed frown makes him insanely happy probably contributes too.
"Flowers? Seriously?" Eliot has his 'I don't get you weirdos' face on. For Alec the fact that the man's emotional range remained pretty much unchanged despite the near-death experience seems strangely comforting and he smiles in that special way he knows irritates Eliot something fierce.
"Well, isn't it something you bring to someone who's in the hospital?" Eliot hides a grin and Alec knows he’s pulled it off. He’s just a moronic colleague who decided to make an equally moronic joke. Or maybe not – there is that look again, that fucking look that at this point makes Hardison not hopeful but irritated. Eliot, the bastard, quirks a smile.
"I’m shot, not pregnant, you know." He says in a patronizing tone.
Hardison is so good at playing dumb he sometimes wonders whether there’s some truth in his acting.
"Oh, you aren’t?" He raises his eyebrows and looks around, an expression of ridiculously fake surprise on his face. "Cause you sure have the thing down, with the moodswings and all that." Joking around Alec can handle. That's pretty easy, actually. Seeing someone he loves in a hospital bed - not so much.
Eliot flips him off and watches Parker as she puts the flowers in water. Alec tries to look sideways to understand what the guy's thinking, but no luck. Even if Eliot is a moron, he’s still a good conman, and his gameface is always on. Yeah, that’s his brain that’s missing, Hardison decides.
Parker finishes with the flowers and looks at Alec, her lips pursed; then turns her head to look at Eliot.
"God you are dense." She sighs, shaking her head, before taking her crossword and pen and heading out of the door. She stops in front of Hardison and stares up at him. Her eyes are grey. Hardison smiles like he has no clue.
"What?" he asks, taking a small step away from her. Someone should tell the girl about personal space.
Parker sighs, gives him an eye roll and walks out of the hospital room. Now Hardison is left staring at Eliot and not knowing what the fuck to do – again. He doesn’t miss a beat.
“What’s with Parker?” Alec asks.
Eliot answers with a careful shrug – it still tugs on his wounds but it doesn’t feel like someone ramming hot pokers through his torso which is a considerable improvement.
“Well, you know Parker.”
Yes, they all know Parker. Hardison nods with a smile, then shifts on his feet. It takes him a few seconds to find his footing and sit down next to Eliot’s bed. They continue the bickering, then change the subject to sports. Hardison makes a particularly obscure Star Trek reference so Eliot could feel all superior and manly – you really need that when you’re in a hospital, Hardison knows that. Eliot takes the bait and rolls his eyes before proceeding to call Hardison pathetic, who launches into a lengthy monologue about artistic merits of Star Trek. At this point Eliot orders him out because he ‘can’t listen to this, man’. Alec’s happy to go – he’d seen Eliot and even annoyed him a little, and Eliot always feels better when he’s irritated.
So Alec heads for the door, but Eliot’s voice stops him.
“Hey Hardison.” When Alec turns around, Eliot’s smiling at him in an annoyingly smug way. “Those are some very nice flowers. Thank you.”
Eliot’s hair is soft, and his cheeks are rough, and his lips are wet and taste like a medical waste container. His breath is warm. His eyes are blue and very, very surprised – so surprised that Alec can’t see any anger yet but he knows it will be there in seconds.
The next person to be very, very surprised in the room is Alec himself when Eliot puts a hand on his neck and pulls him in for another kiss that tastes like shit and is so much better than the first.
So yeah. He probably shouldn’t have done this. What were the reasons again?
Fandom: Leverage
Title: Five reasons Alec Hardison shouldn’t have kissed Eliot Spencer
Rating: R
Paring: Alec Hardison/Eliot Spencer, a bit of Hardison/OMC
Summary: Alec Hardison is a master of inappropriate crushes. But Eliot Spencer takes the gold.
Disclaimer: I owe nothing.
читать дальшеAlec Hardison had a tendency to crush on the most inappropriate people. Always had. It started way back when he was a small child, but then it was normal since no one has any wholesome meaningful relationships while still in kindergarten. Or in middle school. Even in high school – not everybody works out, you know. That’s just life, right?
The problem was, it wasn’t working out, period. Ever. And the older Alec got, the harder it became to just move on and hope things would be better next time. After all, how many times do you have to be completely disappointed in love to finally get the message? In the end of the day it isn’t even funny anymore, you just sit and wait to see how the life is going to screw you this time.
Life was one inventive bitch.
At sixteen Alec had his first ‘love at first sight’ experience. Nothing special, really. Pretty boring, even, for a guy as colorful as Alec. He walked into a diner, he saw the cute red-headed waiter, he fell hopelessly in love. Then he noticed the ‘Help needed’ sign and was singing up for the afternoon shift before his new soulmate even finished serving his table and turned around.
The guy was perfect – a bit older than Alec and a bit shorter, with clear blue eyes and the sweetest smile in the world and yeah, the hottest ass Hardison'd ever seen. He also had an IQ of a cucumber, which became apparent when they actually started talking. Alec held down the job at the diner for three more months just to convince himself it didn't matter. The end result was utter disappointment, one kissing attempt and a painful shiner. Hardison moped for weeks, then went to a party, got drunk and gave the first blowjob in his life to the nastiest jerk in the whole town.
And as far as his crushes usually ended, this time he got off easy.
His other fuck-ups included the aforementioned jerk who, apparently, had no idea Hardison was actually a guy, an avant-garde musician who made him feel incredibly guilty for wanting to have money, his best friend's younger brother and, to top it all off, his very married college professor. All stellar choices, all either completely inaccessible or with a tendency to make Hardison feel miserable.
So yes, he wasn’t exaggerating. He was doomed to fall for the most unattainable and unsuitable people.
It was safe to say that this time he'd outdone himself.
Yes, Alec Hardison was a master of inappropriate crushes. But Eliot Spencer took the gold.
It wasn’t like Alec hadn’t seen it coming, really. At the time he joined the team, he hadn’t had any soul-crushing experiences for almost a year, and the universe was way past due with the delivery. When Alec followed Nate in that park after their first job he was vaguely aware something was going to go wrong, and a week later he already knew what – he was going to silently pine for one of his co-workers while making lewd jokes involving another one. The key word there was ‘silently’, because there was no way Alec was going to make a move. He still valued his teeth, thank you very much.
Five reasons Alec Hardison shouldn’t have kissed Eliot Spencer
1. Eliot Spencer is oblivious.
Wet dreams and inappropriate feelings aside, it was only friendly to ask your colleagues over to watch a game. And Hardison was a friendly guy - everyone thought so. So he did invite Eliot over, along with Nate, of course. After all, only asking one of them would be suspicious, or worse, rude. As it happened, it was August and thirty degrees Celsius outside - a perfect time to have your sexual fantasy over for an evening of friendly dude-fun.
Eliot came with cold beer, without Nate and dressed in a sleeveless shirt. The way Eliot's muscles bulged under his tanned skin made Hardison's mouth dry and his cheeks hot as he stayed right there in the hallway, gulping. Thankfully, Eliot's lack of manners saved Alec from embarrassment. The man simply invited himself in, brushing past Hardison, so close the heady smell of fresh sweat mixed with something sickeningly fruity – Alec refused to think it was Eliot's shampoo because his fragile sanity might have just snapped if he had – almost kicked him off his feet.
They spent ten minutes left before the game making meaningless small talk but even that was almost too much work for Hardison, whose brain cells were preoccupied with processing all the eye candy he was getting. Of course, he'd seen Eliot before, and sometimes even in more revealing attire, but not without threat of imminent death looming in the background and certainly not that close. Hardison's mental overdrive was interrupted when Eliot gave him a bottle of beer - Alec clutched it, thankful he could do something with his hands, then fumbled with the remote.
He wasn't quite sure what sport they were supposed to watch and on what channel.
Predictably, only one of them watched the game, and it wasn't Alec - he was watching Eliot instead. The beer had gone warm in his hand before he made a swallow that did nothing to make his mouth less dry or his face less hot. There was not enough beer in the whole world to make watching Eliot Spencer's slightly damp hair stick to his neck or the muscles rippling under his smooth skin or the beer glistening on his full lips any less arousing.
Eliot didn’t notice a thing.
The game ended entirely too soon for Alec’s liking and he made a few relaxed (he hoped they sounded relaxed, at least) remarks about Eliot staying and hanging out for a while. Later, when his mind became less clouded, the only way he could think of to justify that was his masochistic streak – a few hours of oogling what you can't have wasn't enough for him. Eliot didn't accept the offer though - he had a date that night. Watching sports always made him hot, he remarked to Alec with a dirty smirk, and strutted out - but not before clapping Alec on the shoulder and thus providing him with one more jerk-off fantasy for the evening.
2. Eliot Spencer is hopelessly straight.
Maybe Hardison was too chickenshit (or too sane - you never know where the line is with those things) to make a move on Eliot, but he was just masochistic enough to try hanging around him as often as he could. It was not enough working together, not for the full-on misery treatment Alec was used to. So he and Eliot watched sports, ate lunch and, wait for it… cruised bars together. Tequila, dancing and girls - Hardison could have lived without the latter but he made do. It seemed that by some cruel twist of fate he was good with women. Probably because he didn't give a shit whether he got the hottie of the evening or not. What he did care about was Eliot, and in a weird way Hardison came to enjoy their nights out. The part where his desperate crush came out of the bar with a girl on his arm was a bit of a letdown, but the minutes just before that were what Alec liked - the way Eliot bumped their shoulders and winked at him when he said goodbye for the night, and the sort of respect he saw in the man's eyes when he scored with a pretty girl. The girl got the boot ten minutes after Eliot left, of course, but it felt nice being good at something besides 'geek stuff'.
Yeah. You don’t have to comment on that.
Alec spent the evenings after escapades like that jerking off to porn and wondering how it was that Eliot managed to look times hotter than anyone you could ever find online, no matter how much you paid. He also wondered just how much shit Eliot would beat out of him if he ever found out about Hardison's midnight sessions, and also how much heartbreak a person could actually take without irreparable damage to emotional health. Despite ‘not much more’ being the usual answer to the latter question, Alec continued following Eliot around whenever man went out – and no, watching him walk away with someone who wasn’t Alec for the hundredth time didn’t make seeing it again any easier.
One evening, when Hardison felt more tired than masochistic, he bailed on their plans to go out to another seedy bar, got a cab and spent a lot of his ill-gained money dancing in the gayest bar in the city, turning tricks like motherfucking Brian Kinney. That became his new ritual - accompany Eliot to a breeder central, watch him make passes at women in skimpy clothing, play the part of a wingman, then hop into a cab and find a good lay for himself. In all of that he somehow ended up with a boyfriend - two times Eliot’s size and barely half the man’s strength, a smart and sophisticated man who would have been a perfect fit for Alec except that he wasn’t.
Boyfriend meant less 'straight nights out' with Eliot and more getting laid - all healthy, of course, and all normal. The only thing wrong with that picture was the way Eliot's knowing smirk made Hardison's fucked-out ass ache. And the anger Hardison felt when he wondered why Eliot could tell that his colleague got mightily laid the night before but couldn't tell he wished it was Eliot who'd nailed him.
3. Eliot Spencer is the best friend Hardison had since high school.
The boyfriend thing didn't last, of course - nothing could last in a situation like that, except for Hardison's continuing fucked-upness, and even that varied from day to day. Sometimes he'd think he was over Eliot and ready to start over, new, improved and hopefully smartified by the experience, but after a day or two of denial he returned to desperate pining, desperate fucking and a steady diet of all-night MMORPG binges.
So when James informed Alec they were breaking up, the only thing that came as a surprise was the amount of screaming, crying and general drama that came with it. All the blame flying around made Hardison queasy and miserable, and when he called to work to tell he wasn't coming in that day it was Eliot who showed up at his doorstep with too much booze and a movie. Hardison would have rather been alone - he was too tired to keep up appearances and God knew what could have happened had he slipped up about anything - but he didn't have the heart to say it, not to Eliot anyway. So he smiled thankfully, let Eliot in and listened to his idiotic chit-chat as they watch cars and helicopters explode on-screen and scantily clad women perform unlikely martial feats. That was probably the first time he didn't think about how hot Eliot looked - didn't think about how he looked at all, truth be told. And it should have been the end of his crush, but in the best traditions of Alec's life, it wasn't.
It was all the more depressing because of the whole hopeless thing, but Alec was never an all-or-nothing kind of guy. It was all about compromise, so he kept his mouth shut no matter how badly he wanted to blurt out a love confession and kept his eyes on the screen. Eliot didn't ask questions, which meant Hardison didn't have to lie and make any excuses. The only thing he did was leave all the assumption-making to Eliot and get impossibly drunk with him. It was a miracle he didn’t try to get into Eliot’s pants, with all the booze in his blood, but later, when Eliot fell asleep on the couch, Alec had a full-on crazy stalker moment standing over him and staring at his face. It was scary, not only because there was a chance Eliot's instincts would kick in and he'd wake up, but mainly because they didn't. Eliot's instincts were sleeping on Hardison's couch along with the man himself. And Alec, still a bit freaked out by the notion, couldn't go to sleep. He sat down with his back to the sofa, just close enough to feel the warmth of Eliot's arm brush his back. The thought that he might be inches from touching Eliot's thigh kept him awake for half an hour but he never gathered enough courage to check the theory.
They drank coffee together in the morning, Eliot making fun of Alec for passing out on the floor, and Alec giving as good as he got. The smile never left his face, and the frantic "don't you dare screw this friendship up" never stopped running through his head.
4. Eliot Spencer is fucking incomprehensible.
In the end simply being Eliot's friend without any hopes for more didn't turn out to be that bad. After two months of pestering and whining Eliot even took Alec horseback riding, looking pissed off like sixteen PMSing women whose husbands forgot their tenth wedding anniversary. Seeing that made Hardison inexplicably happy - he fought undignified giggly noises on the way there and even near the horses, when Eliot changed his usual angry demeanor for being eerily quiet. Of course, in a couple of minutes it took all of Hardison to stay in the saddle and not cry uncle. Eliot didn't pull punches - metaphorical, thankfully - but never showed any sign of annoyance. Well... maybe his mouth was kind of twitchy. But only the last ten minutes, and it went away as soon as Hardison got off the horse. Eliot took another twenty minutes - the time Hardison used to hobble to the locker rooms - to ride a few circles around training ground alone. When they finally got to the car, he still wasn't done being creepily calm and content. It was probably what lulled Hardison into stupidity. That was the only way he could explain the words that spilled out of his mouth as he sat down in the car.
“Man, I feel like I’ve been riding a twelve-inch dick for the whole day.”
Realization of what he'd just said hit Alec a second after. He managed to keep his sexual orientation to himself for so long, and to slip up like that was stupid, stupid, stupid. Hardison's eyes darted to Eliot's face. He was scared shitless of what would happen next but when he met Eliot's unreadable stare he suddenly realized that he didn't know the reaction he'd get. He didn't know anything about Eliot Spencer, didn't know anything at all except the front that he'd been putting up and the fact that Alec was hopelessly in love with him. So when Eliot just nodded and put the car in gear Alec wasn't sure if that was a good or a bad thing. He didn’t push his luck though, shut up and stared out of the window, chewing his lip. He had five or six worst-case scenarios worked out in his head by the time they reached his apartment building, along with escape plans and an estimate of what it would cost him and a very vague idea of what kind of security he’d need to keep someone like Eliot Spencer away. Nothing happened. Eliot stopped the car and Hardison went up to his apartment, his knees shaking and his palms wet.
Nothing changed, either.
***
Well, almost nothing, because now Hardison keeps catching these looks, these strange damn looks he can’t for the life of him read but he thinks it’s want. Or regret. Or quite possibly – most likely – annoyance. It’s never long enough to know for sure and sometimes Alec thinks he’s imagining things, but honestly, he'd have to be more paranoid than Parker for something like that. So Hardison assumes he really sees something – and that is all he needs to act. What the hell, yeah?
5. Eliot Spencer is a frigging moron.
Sadly, it’s not as simple; even now that Alec’s made up his mind and is all determined and goal-oriented. He tries asking Eliot to a movie, but Eliot apparently doesn’t understand Alec's subtle 'just the two of us, you know. hang out...' and the evening is pretty much screwed as soon as Eliot thumps Alec on the shoulder and disses his movie choice. Hardison tries suggestive looks and Eliot just assumes Hardison’s hung over. By the time Alec is thinking of resorting to an anonymous love letter he is pretty sure Eliot isn't as much completely straight as completely clueless. He wonders if he’d imagined that new look in Eliot's eyes or mistook it for something that it wasn't. He even ponders talking to Sophie – who, incidentally, is suspiciously attentive to him recently. After discarding the idea of unleashing Sophie onto his private life Alec proceeds to drown in introspection and guesswork. He goes from hopeful to desperate in a matter of hours and then does it all over again, only in bells and whistles. When Parker comes up to him and says that certain computer games damage a person's nervous system, Alec decides he’s had enough of the drama. They have the plan for tomorrow and it doesn’t include him, not until the evening, so he might as well just go home. He walks past Eliot, who looks a bit distracted and all the more dreamy for it, and curses his destiny one more time.
Next time he sees Eliot is in a hospital bed. The room is overcrowded - or so it seems to Hardison, although it's really just the team. Eliot is a bit confused and most likely embarrassed, equally for allowing himself to get hurt and for getting all the attention, but bears it with patience that is rare for him and is most likely a pleasant side-effect of the morphine. Or getting three bullets to your chest. Eliot’s pale, slack-jawed and looks seriously disgusting. Alec has no idea what to do or say to him like that, but what he knows is when you feel more socially inept than Parker, it's time to get the hell out. So he slips away, pretending he didn't feel a hazy stare on his back. He gets an attack of uncontrollable crying just outside the hospital; then takes a taxi home.
Two days later Hardison’s in that hospital room with a shit-eating grin on his face and a huge fucking bouquet in his hands. He's not quite sure what he's doing here, he only knows that sitting on his ass in front of his laptop doesn't work anymore and he needs some kind of prop to pull of this whole ‘a friend visiting’ cover. Eliot raises his eyes from the Chinese crossword Parker is doing on his bed - God knows where she picked up solving puzzles as socially acceptable behavior for visiting a hospitalized colleague - and snorts, then winces. Alec feels briefly bad for causing that twinge of pain but at that point his brain is too jumbled for him to care. The fact that Eliot's annoyed frown makes him insanely happy probably contributes too.
"Flowers? Seriously?" Eliot has his 'I don't get you weirdos' face on. For Alec the fact that the man's emotional range remained pretty much unchanged despite the near-death experience seems strangely comforting and he smiles in that special way he knows irritates Eliot something fierce.
"Well, isn't it something you bring to someone who's in the hospital?" Eliot hides a grin and Alec knows he’s pulled it off. He’s just a moronic colleague who decided to make an equally moronic joke. Or maybe not – there is that look again, that fucking look that at this point makes Hardison not hopeful but irritated. Eliot, the bastard, quirks a smile.
"I’m shot, not pregnant, you know." He says in a patronizing tone.
Hardison is so good at playing dumb he sometimes wonders whether there’s some truth in his acting.
"Oh, you aren’t?" He raises his eyebrows and looks around, an expression of ridiculously fake surprise on his face. "Cause you sure have the thing down, with the moodswings and all that." Joking around Alec can handle. That's pretty easy, actually. Seeing someone he loves in a hospital bed - not so much.
Eliot flips him off and watches Parker as she puts the flowers in water. Alec tries to look sideways to understand what the guy's thinking, but no luck. Even if Eliot is a moron, he’s still a good conman, and his gameface is always on. Yeah, that’s his brain that’s missing, Hardison decides.
Parker finishes with the flowers and looks at Alec, her lips pursed; then turns her head to look at Eliot.
"God you are dense." She sighs, shaking her head, before taking her crossword and pen and heading out of the door. She stops in front of Hardison and stares up at him. Her eyes are grey. Hardison smiles like he has no clue.
"What?" he asks, taking a small step away from her. Someone should tell the girl about personal space.
Parker sighs, gives him an eye roll and walks out of the hospital room. Now Hardison is left staring at Eliot and not knowing what the fuck to do – again. He doesn’t miss a beat.
“What’s with Parker?” Alec asks.
Eliot answers with a careful shrug – it still tugs on his wounds but it doesn’t feel like someone ramming hot pokers through his torso which is a considerable improvement.
“Well, you know Parker.”
Yes, they all know Parker. Hardison nods with a smile, then shifts on his feet. It takes him a few seconds to find his footing and sit down next to Eliot’s bed. They continue the bickering, then change the subject to sports. Hardison makes a particularly obscure Star Trek reference so Eliot could feel all superior and manly – you really need that when you’re in a hospital, Hardison knows that. Eliot takes the bait and rolls his eyes before proceeding to call Hardison pathetic, who launches into a lengthy monologue about artistic merits of Star Trek. At this point Eliot orders him out because he ‘can’t listen to this, man’. Alec’s happy to go – he’d seen Eliot and even annoyed him a little, and Eliot always feels better when he’s irritated.
So Alec heads for the door, but Eliot’s voice stops him.
“Hey Hardison.” When Alec turns around, Eliot’s smiling at him in an annoyingly smug way. “Those are some very nice flowers. Thank you.”
Eliot’s hair is soft, and his cheeks are rough, and his lips are wet and taste like a medical waste container. His breath is warm. His eyes are blue and very, very surprised – so surprised that Alec can’t see any anger yet but he knows it will be there in seconds.
The next person to be very, very surprised in the room is Alec himself when Eliot puts a hand on his neck and pulls him in for another kiss that tastes like shit and is so much better than the first.
So yeah. He probably shouldn’t have done this. What were the reasons again?
@темы: adagio, motherfucker
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31.08.2009 в 01:32So...
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31.08.2009 в 01:41-
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31.08.2009 в 01:46It does lol
Eventhough I do watch American TV (hehe it's quite popular here as well) I'm very bad in celebrities and series characters.
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31.08.2009 в 09:40Anyway I don't know what to say about the text but I have a friend and she also likes to write english stuff. So I guess it's not that strange and somehow charming. Even though I am indifferent to above-mentioned subject.
PS. Am I blind or what? I've mentioned fandom already.