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thebigbangjob: The Tower of Babble 3/4
Part 1, Part 2, Masterpost.
By the time 8pm rolls around, Eliot's shot down thirty different guys in The Warehouse. Thirty. He makes Nate swear on his soul that he'll never tell anyone. Eliot's tempted to shred the pile of numbers that have also been slipped to him by the more nervous guys, but he'll save them; they should make awesome kindling for one of Parker's fires.
The total slides up to 32, and Eliot's doing that panicking thing he's so irritated about, but he can't help it. Paranoia has clammy hands and likes taking him for a whirl every now and again.
"It was a joke, I knew it," Eliot says as The Warehouse's giant clock reads 8.05. "I knew it."
"Shush now," Nate says. "He's here."
"He's-" Eliot hates his friendly relationship with paranoia, he really does, because paranoia doesn't let him go, no—it dips him around 180 degrees and makes him start panicking about something else. "I should have worn plaid, I really should, I could hide against the walls of this stupid rustic farmish club and be invisible, and-"
"Eliot, calm down." Nate shakes him by the shoulders, his hands a warm and familiar weight. "I'm here if you need to escape. And no, you should never wear plaid. Have you seen you in that shirt?"
"I look like an office boy," Eliot says, picking at the cuffs. Nate slaps his fingers away.
"It totally brings out your eyes," Nate says, "and shows off your muscles. You're totally hot in it."
Eliot opens his mouth to respond, because hell, that statement needs some sort of response, because Nate's still really close in the dim light of the club, and his eyes are trained on Eliot's, and Eliot can see a pulse point in Nate's neck, and it's shuddering, fluttering quickly, and the air between them is sort of hot and heavy, and Eliot's mouth is dry again, and what's up with that? Eliot opens his mouth to say something to that effect, and Nate leans in a little, like he's really interested in what Eliot could say, and that much intent focussed purely on him is making him a little dizzy.
"Hi, sorry I'm so late."
Moreau's words snap them out of whatever spell they're under. Eliot jumps, nearly spills his drink, but Nate takes it from him and smiles at him waveringly with an atta boy expression. Eliot turns and grins at Moreau.
"Hi," Eliot manages, in a squeak. He stares at Moreau, completely unsure of what to say, and should he apologise, and what if this was a joke after all, and Nate's patting him on the shoulder again. He flickers a glance at Nate.
"I'll be over there if you need me," Nate says, jerking his head in the direction of the corner of the club. Eliot watches him go for a moment, but then Moreau slides into the seat next to him, and Eliot focuses his attention directly on him.
Moreau pushes something forward. It looks like some sort of cocktail. He has a similar one in his hand. "It's nice to actually get to speak to you, Spencer," Moreau says, picking up his own cocktail. Eliot picks up his own, feeling a little clumsy, like his body doesn't fully belong to him. "I've been meaning to for a while, actually."
"Me too," Eliot says. "Um. Obviously."
Moreau smiles. His teeth are white and neat, straight like a ruler. The thought hits Eliot out of nowhere that he much prefers Nate's uneven teeth, the way they make every one of Nate's smiles a little ironic, a little knowing. He shakes that away, because Nate is over in the corner probably getting hit on by a thousand girls right now, and he's on a date with Moreau, and the possibility of sex rears its nice head again into Eliot's thoughts, so he shoves Nate out of his head the best he can.
"I enjoyed your song," Moreau says.
So maybe the possibility of sex is a little further away than Eliot had hoped for. Eliot's blush must be a Guinness World Record. It has to be. "I, uh, have unfortunate musical tendencies sometimes," he says. "Once I thought it was absolutely hilarious to end songs in the middle of their choruses with the word lemon. Lemon was the tell—the point at which the song had to stop. So it would be like, Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Lemon, or Mama, just killed a man, put a gun against his head, pulled the lemon and I'd stop, and think it was hilarious." Eliot shuts up abruptly, realising he didn't take a breath throughout and, oh crap, living in the Tower has ruined him, ruined him for life, because in the Tower he's amongst other babblers, safe and sound in a nest—a family!—of other people who do the same and so cannot judge him, and here he is, on an honest-to-actual-goodness date, and he's babbling. Mindlessly. Idiotically. He's been totally ruined. He's never getting laid again in his life.
"It's... like a proper joke. A comedian's joke," Moreau says, nodding along with his own words like it's an essay question that he's actually growing to understand. "They end jokes where you least expect them to in order to raise a laugh. There's humour mechanics in it."
"Humour mechanics," Eliot repeats, because it's not possibly fair that Moreau's this smart and this hot and it's bad enough that Nate exists in the world; why there are two such impossible creatures in existence is beyond Eliot. The world so far has made sense to Eliot—you're either hot or you're smart. Eliot, for example, is on the attractive scale and has left his intelligence a million miles behind him in glee, because since he's pretty no one expects clever things from him.
"All right, you got me. That's not a real term. But it sounds almost like it could be," Moreau says.
"Oh, you do that too!" Eliot feels the smile he forced onto his face relax, and the relaxation pours into his shoulders; he feels infinitely more comfortable, especially as Moreau's face tilts in confusion. "I have a stock answer in my theory seminars about postmodernism. Hell if I know what I'm saying."
Moreau laughs. Eliot gauges his facial movements, and thinks it's possibly even a genuine laugh, and that's a definite chalk mark in the sex is definitely possible! column. "Your friend..." Moreau leans around Eliot, and frowns, "he looks like if he could kill me by staring he would."
Eliot glances back. Nate's gripping his glass of flat lemonade like it might possibly refill itself if he can glare at Moreau hard enough. He feels bad. He should have slipped Nate some money to keep refilling his soft drinks, especially as Nate's like his bodyguard for the night. He makes a mental note to cook him pancakes or something in the morning. "Oh, that's just Nate. He's my... wingman?" Eliot tries the word out. It doesn't feel quite right. "Trusty lieutenant?"
"I thought you might come alone." It sounds like a come on. Moreau smiles at him, slow and predatorily, and he leans in a little closer, looking deliberately at Eliot's mouth. Eliot swallows and sips at his cocktail; his dry mouth doesn't go away.
"Your note didn't say come alone," Eliot says, "although if it did I wouldn't have come, that would be a terrifying note to receive from someone you've potentially just crazily humiliated on YouTube, it would sound like you were going to jump me or something."
"That is sort of what I've got planned," Moreau says. Eliot stares, and it hits him all at once, this juxtaposed image he has in his head. Moreau, so close to him, flirting and warm and real and there, floating the possibility of sex. Nate, somewhere far behind, an impossible goal with too much hold on Eliot's heart.
Eliot says it before he can lose his nerve. "Good."
Which is how he feels later, when Moreau tugs him into one of the toilet stalls and pushes him up against the door. Moreau's hot and in full control of his body, and he kisses like he's a shark, and his hands are like an octopus, like he's got eight hands everywhere at once, and where the crap are all the fish metaphors coming from? Moreau kisses him again, and, yes, there it is. Moreau tastes like vodka and cherryade and bourbon, which might have been the cocktail they had, but his tongue is thick and feels huge in Eliot's mouth, and he doesn't really have any finesse. He just slobbers it around in Eliot's mouth like it's some... giant fishtail.
So... he just won't make out with this dude in the future. That's fine. They can just use each other for other things, like... Moreau's hand rubs over the crotch of Eliot's jeans, and then he pushes Eliot away slightly, looking a little angry. "Dude," Moreau says, "nothing? Seriously?"
Eliot doesn't quite know what Moreau means, until Moreau takes Eliot's hand and rubs it against his own crotch, and hello. Moreau is huge. It's clear even though Moreau's still fully clothed. Eliot swallows. "I could-" Eliot says, moving his fingers a little, but Moreau doesn't look interested now. He looks pissed.
"I don't do one-sided one night stands," Moreau says. "Don't worry. There's plenty of guys out there who want me to fuck them." He manhandles Eliot down onto the closed lid of the toilet, and flickers something at Eliot. Eliot catches it. It's a business card. The guy's a First Year student and has properly printed business cards. Eliot thinks suddenly that Moreau's actually kind of a douche. Moreau opens the door and looks down at him, cold and disapproving, and then he smiles, almost sadly. "Call me when you've got your brain out of Ford's arse," he says, "'cause seriously you can do so much better than him."
"What?" Eliot sputters, "I-" But Moreau just looks at him sadly, shakes his head and shoves the door shut behind him.
Eliot takes a few minutes to compose himself, because Moreau's actually not that much of a douchenozzle, and he was almost kind to Eliot there at the end when he could have been so much more pissed. Eliot's lucky Moreau's just a student or whatever, because he can totally picture Moreau in the future as a hot drug lord or gun smuggler, something dangerous, he has the hot European exotic thing going for him, and that smirk. Little!Eliot actually perks up a little at that though and Eliot scowls down at his crotch. "So now you want to come out to play," Eliot tells it. "You are totally grounded." Then he clamps his hands over his mouth because this is a shared toilet. Thankfully he can't hear anyone else. He breathes a sigh of relief.
Then he realises if it's the smirk he's interested in, it's probably because Moreau's smirk reminds him of Nate's self confident smirk, and Eliot is totally screwed. And not in the good way he had been hoping for when Moreau manhandled him into the toilet stalls.
He takes a few moments to compose himself, pushing out of the cubicle and up against the sinks, staring at his own flushed reflection in the mirror. His lips are chapped a little; Moreau kissed without talent and without mercy. Eliot stares at himself. He should be furious at Nate for lying to him, because he doesn't look hot in that shirt at all, he looks like someone he's not, someone on the verge of growing up and Eliot's nowhere near ready for that.
Eliot comes out of the toilet, almost ready to tell Nate that, but he doesn't. Nate's leaning against a sofa near the toilets, looking kind of pissed off.
"Can we go?" Eliot says, awkwardly.
Nate looks at him for a long moment and shakes his head a little. "I've got to be somewhere. I'll meet you back at the Tower."
"Huh?" Eliot says, before he can stop himself, because the vodka cocktail Moreau bought him is making him a little dizzy, and apparently it is possible for Nate to look even more pissed off.
"The whole world doesn't revolve around you," Nate snaps, and then immediately looks contrite. "I'm sorry. I just- these places give me a bit of a headache."
Eliot feels ashamed almost immediately. Nate's dislike of partying has become almost an ongoing joke in the Tower—it's easier to forget that every joke has a foundation in real life for some reason. "I'm sorry. Can I walk you to the bus stop, or...?"
"Bus, yeah. Thanks." A smile crosses Nate's face like lightning, drifting away when Nate almost notices it and schools his face into something plainer. Eliot's stomach hurts a little, because maybe something happened while Eliot was failing to get laid, and he doesn't know, and maybe Nate's hurt. "Come on," Eliot says, nodding his head at the door. Nate looks at him oddly again, but nods, and they leave.
- - - - -
Nate's bus is apparently after the one Eliot needs to take, and it's headed to the university itself. He probably has a burning need to go to the Media lab or the Open Access Centre or something; either that, or he's going to roll around on the 5th Floor of the Library, pressing his face against the books to wipe off the stench of an actual social life.
Eliot drops back into the Tower at a disappointing 10pm into a rather tense atmosphere. Sophie just glares at him from the corner of the room as she delicately taps a small netbook. Hardison's playing Super Mario Galaxy and cheating outrageously (because seriously, who needs to wander around collecting lives before they go into the Bedroom levels? Eliot doesn't voice his derision at Hardison cheating, because anything is better than the suckage of last term's Portal addiction. By suckage he means his own lack of a portal gun to zap Hardison away when he's playing it.) Parker's punching the buttons of a really old Gameboy and muttering something about stealing a spade and now everyone in Hyrule is calling her a THIEF in capital letters. Eliot makes the mistake of innocently remarking that he would have thought Parker would be pleased about being recognised in-game for what she is, and Parker actually yells at him for ten minutes solid, because apparently she's the best thief ever and best thieves ever do NOT get caught. Especially by pixelated shop owners.
Eliot makes himself a cup of tea, actually cleans out the teapot and washes down the counter rather than sit down in the weird atmosphere, and he sinks down into one of their dilapidated armchairs, counting the marks in the wall where Hardison and he threw darts without a dart board.
Nate comes back a couple of hours later, still looking moody and withdrawn, and Eliot really wants to fix it but he doesn't have a fucking clue how. Sophie's ganked off about the weird conversation they had earlier, Hardison's jabbing at his laptop now and whining about download speeds, and Parker's poking miserably at a half-eaten bowl of Cocoa Pops, which is seriously out of character—but Parker kind of feeds off their moods at the best of times, so it stands to reason she'd feed off them at the worst of times too.
Everyone's in a bad mood. Eliot drums his fingers against his jeans, and sighs. Someone has to do something, and in the Tower, if someone mentions doing something, they're volunteering to take the lead. So Eliot thinks about what he could do to cheer everyone up.
He doesn't think they'll appreciate most of his thoughts, so he changes his plan. If he can cheer one of them up for sure, maybe the others will topple, like dominoes. He doesn't have a spare laptop for Hardison to putz with, or enough money to take Sophie shoe shopping, and if Eliot knew the one thing in the world that would cheer Nate up he would have done it a million times already. Parker, on the other hand, while she's a complicated life form, she has a nice list of things to cheer her up.
"Parker," he says loudly. Everyone's heads lift a little to look at him, and he looks straight at her, grinning his most maniacal grin. She looks at him curiously. "Let's go into the garden and burn some shit."
Parker's grin is slow and like the sun.
Eliot and Parker make so much noise collecting debris from the garden and from behind the small useless shed (there's no door, no floor, a broken window and a mouse inside and that's it) that they've been amassing for the last fortnight, since their last epic burning session. Parker starts stacking it up, and Eliot prods at a large branch that's been in the garden since September. Maybe if he had an axe...
Except either Parker's a crazy mind reader or she's been thinking the same thing, because she reaches into her large pockets and actually pulls out a mini axe. She throws it at him. Eliot freaks out and ducks just in time for the axe to embed itself in the wavering wood of the shed.
"The hell?" Eliot splutters. "You don't throw axes at people!"
"Sorry," Parker says, and then, in a funny voice that is probably supposed to be him, mutters, "You don't throw axes at people." Eliot stares at her. Parker narrows her eyes at him. "Big baby." She stalks past him and pulls the axe out of the shed. "I'll cut the wood. You make yourself useful and go buy us some matches. I used the last to make marshmallows melt."
Eliot stares at her. "And you couldn't have mentioned this when I suggested we burn stuff?"
"I'm mentioning it now. What's your problem?" Parker wields the axe like a maniac and chops the large branch in half in one go.
"I could make you a list," Eliot mutters. Parker narrows her eyes again. "All right, all right, I'm going."
There's still half an hour until the Co-op closes, so Eliot sets off at a quick jog, but slows down at the end of Cardigan Road because there's a woman sat on a bench crying and Eliot feels instantly awkward even though it can't be his fault. So he tries to walk by casually, and it's the familiar label of a Jack Daniels whiskey bottle that catches his attention, and it's just as he's cursing his brain for being attached to alcohol labels that he realises he knows the woman crying.
It's Cora McRory.
Eliot stands and stares because there is something about crying women that breaks male brains, and maybe it's close to the area of the brain that has the potential to consider suicide, because that broken bit of his brain makes him sit down right next to her, even though he thinks belatedly maybe she won't exactly want one of her students seeing her this way.
He reaches into his back pocket and pulls out the ever-present packet of Kleenex. His mother loaded each pocket of each piece of clothing he owns with one, and Eliot washes his clothes even with them in it, and the Kleenex sort of survive. Eliot thinks maybe they're made of cockroaches or something, but even he's wise enough not to mention this to the sobbing lecturer.
Eliot holds out the slightly mangled packet until the worst of Cora's sobbing subsides. Her eyes wobble on seeing the tissues, and then more tears erupt when she sees who's holding them, which isn't exactly the reaction he was going for.
He waits for her to quieten a little. "I nearly killed someone with an appetiser once," Eliot says, staring ahead into the dark street, not looking at her at all. "It was terrible. I meant to throw it into the bin and I threw it into someone's face so hard it lodged in their nose. There was lemon and shrimp everywhere."
Cora sniffles a little. Eliot risks a glimpse. She's clutching her half-drunk whiskey and staring into the street. There's a Co-op bag on the floor and the telltale tail of a new receipt which shows she only bought it fifteen minutes ago, so Cora's downed half a bottle of Jack Daniels in Eliot speed. Eliot's brain rampages through the horrible list of things it could be to entail chugging Jack Daniels. "I'm not sure what-" Cora says, unsteadily.
"I was working as a waiter at this really fancy hotel. The person I nearly killed was Delia Smith."
"This still doesn't make any sense, why are you telling me this?"
"I swear," Eliot says fervently, "if you tell a single soul I nearly killed the nation's favourite cook? People will mob me. I've been humiliated enough this week already-"
"Oh, the Saveloy video, that was pretty funny, actually."
Cora's already heartbroken or some shit, so Eliot swallows down the hit and takes it and decides to think about the whole faculty watching him being an arse later. "Yes, well. I nearly killed Delia Fucking Smith, and I would be torn to pieces if everyone found out, so if you could very kindly keep it to yourself I would be much obliged."
He sees the moment Cora gets it—that he's revealed some awful shit so that she'll feel more comfortable talking about her secret in return. It's not a surprise she took a while to realise, because people are always underestimating Eliot. Nate tells him it's his superpower, but Eliot got depressed when he said that because Nate's superpower is so much more awesome. Nate wins, like, every board game he ever plays. The pieces, the random draw cards, it's like he can control them at will, even when he plays like a maniac. Eliot's considered on more than one occasion pimping Nate as a professional Monopoly player because Monopoly boards, like, bend themselves to his every manic machination. And he's thinking about Nate again. Argh.
"If it's because I'm a student that you don't want to talk to me," Eliot says, "I'll transfer from your class or something. I'm pretty sure I could get you Alec Hardison from Irina's seminar group. He actually does the readings."
Cora takes a deep, shaky, shuddery breath in and says, "That's very kind of you, Eliot, but it's not necessary; I won't be taking your seminar group anymore."
"But-" Eliot's brain whirs and he turns to face her. "But I'll do the reading! I'll make everyone do the reading. We'll be the bestest seminar group in the world, you don't have to ditch us-"
Cora laughs a little. The sound is muffled by the tears still running down her face. "Again, that's really kind of you. But pointless. The university board fired me."
"The university board what now?" Cora opens her mouth to tell him again, but Eliot holds up his hand. He got it the first time. "Sorry, I heard you, it's just fucking ridiculous. Seriously?"
"Seriously," Cora repeats. "Apparently Victor Dubenich provided them with proof that I had stolen his Bakhtin paper. Somehow he'd gotten hold of all my research, I have no idea, and he presented it as his own. I got into my office, checked my safe, and it was gone. The President summoned me, and..." She shakes her head. "You know the rules about plagiarism, how hot the university is on it. I was out on my arse within five minutes. So I thought. Well. Might as well get hopelessly drunk."
"Well, believe me, it's not the answer. Unless you like being on YouTube." Eliot reaches over and pulls the bottle from her hands. She doesn't even put up a fight—she knows he's right.
"Get rid of that for me, will you?" Cora's voice is barely a whisper, and Eliot's proud of her, because she's a grown up and has learned the vital lesson he hasn't about alcohol not really being good for you. He knows if he dumps the bottle she'll be tempted, so he unscrews the lid and downs the whole half-bottle at once and pushes the empty bottle into the bin next to him. His throat burns and his stomach is already protesting, but it's totally for the greater good, so whatever.
Cora stares at him like he's grown an extra head. "I thought you'd tip it down the drain right there or something."
"Oh," Eliot says. "Um. Oops. It's okay. I've ruined my body totally. It takes way more than this to get me drunk."
She blinks at him, all four eyes going at once. Ah, Eliot thinks, shit.
"You... do you have friends? Someone to call?" Eliot says, while his brain is still just about functioning. "Because you should. Right now. You shouldn't be alone."
Cora opens her mouth to protest, and Eliot's impatient when he's drunk, and he's feeling the burn of being drunk now. His brain feels a little like wool stuffed into a plastic bag too tight for it, and he's really not sure where that simile came from. He leans over Cora and yanks her phone out of her bag. "Hey," she protests, and Eliot bats her half-hearted attempt to get it back away.
He scrolls through the contacts. "Tell me who to call or I'm calling-" Eliot squints. "Your dad."
"He's in Ireland!" Cora squeaks.
"Well, then," Eliot says, as reasonably as he can manage. "So I guess you'd better tell me who to call or he's going to have to fly over here and that's going to cost a bunch of airmiles, right?"
"Fine. My housemate's name is Mikel Dayan."
"Thank you." Eliot finds Mikel's name and hits the green button. He waits for Mikel to pick up.
"Ford is right. You're an irritating ass," Cora grumps.
"I am," Eliot agrees, and then his brain makes him pay more attention. "Wait, Nate talks about me?"
"All the time," Cora says. "I'm his project tutor. Not your relationship counsellor, by the way."
Eliot wants to say something in return, but the line connects and a female voice with a hot accent says, "Hello?"
"Hi, my name is Eliot Spencer, I'm one of Cora's students. She's pretty drunk on a bench outside of the carpet shop at the end of Cardigan Road in Winton, can you come and fetch her please? She's pretty upset."
"I'll be down in three minutes," the voice says, and cuts the line.
Three minutes later, this gorgeous girl slips out of one of the buildings opposite, looking hugely worried, and she goes straight for Cora, helping her to her feet, putting her arms around her waist and her face really close to Cora's and woah, apparently Cora's gay too, which is something Eliot's definitely adding to his mental fapping folder for later. He wonders idly how long is polite before wanking over the idea of your heartbroken tutor with her lesbian roommate, and he's not so drunk he doesn't know that's the most inappropriate question ever.
"Thanks, Eliot," Mikel says, dragging Cora away.
"Bye," Eliot says to their disappearing backs. He checks his watch. The Co-op closes in five minutes. "Shit!"
He legs it around the corner. It's just Co-op Perry on duty, too, which is irritating, as Perry doesn't like selling things with five minutes until closing time, but Eliot does his scary face and Perry sells him a box of matches and a bag of marshmallows without too much hassle. Perry doesn't give him a bag, but that's normal. Eliot vows to ask Cora later, when he's reinstated her back at the university, how to extract bags from Perry, because it's an impossible task.
It's when he's walking back to the house that he realises where his thoughts went—directly to the assumption he's going to help Cora clear her name. Huh. Apparently he does have a helpful streak in him after all. But he doesn't have a clue on how to start.
He quickens his pace. He's buzzed from the whiskey and clutching marshmallows to his chest like a crazy man, but he has a mission, and he has possibly more sober and definitely cleverer people waiting at home, and maybe they'll have a clue.
Maybe they can save Cora McRory's reputation.
- - - -
When Eliot ran back to the house, marshmallows and matchsticks in his hands, all four of his housemates were hunched over the fire. But as soon as he started blurting about Cora's dismissal, Nate stalked back inside, and Eliot doesn't blame him—he's probably off-put about the stench of whiskey on Eliot's breath, which makes him sound crazier than normal (an achievement!)
Eliot's confused by the move - what he's saying isn't crazy at all. It's not fair that Cora has been fired, Dubenich is an arse, and the idea that Nate isn't taking him seriously is more than irritating, Eliot's angry.
So he does an unwise thing. He is still drunk, after all.
He goes inside and barges into Nate's room without knocking.
Nate's just lying on his bed, reading a textbook, like nothing is wrong at all.
"Dude," Eliot says, "why did you walk out? I need you."
Nate's back tenses a little at the last three words. He doesn't turn around, though. "I had work to do. And what did I say about barging into my room unannounced?"
"That it's fucking manly and impulsive, and yes I'm quoting Firefly, and you can't start complaining now when you let me sleep in here naked last night," Eliot says.
"You guys know the window's open and we can hear you, right?" Sophie's voice floats in from outside. Eliot makes a strangled sound and crosses Nate's tidy room and shoves the window closed and closes the curtains for good measure. Nate sits up then, looking from him to the closed curtains nervously, although Eliot can't figure out why Nate would be nervous.
"You're the one person I thought would definitely help me," Eliot says. "I need your brain."
"My brain," Nate says. "Right." His voice goes a little quieter at the end, like he's disappointed, which Eliot thinks would make no sense even to his sober brain, because it's a compliment, so why's Nate disappointed, because it's not like Nate wants Eliot to need anything else of him. Eliot wants Nate's arse; that's a completely different thing.
"Cora was nice," Eliot says, pacing so he has that to think about. If he's worrying about staying upright he can't be worrying about Nate's odd mood swings. "Cora was- is awesome. Fucking awesome. She knew I never did the reading and still didn't get me in trouble. Dude, we have to find out who did this and punch them in the face. I know Dubenich is sleazy scum. He has to have framed her. There's no way that Bakhtin piece is Dubenich's, no way. Cora's the Queen of Bakhtin. We-"
"Eliot," Nate says, in this desperate, quiet tone which sounds too much like a refusal, so Eliot keeps going, in the hope that maybe he can babble Nate into submission.
"-have to do this, she would do it for us, and we all have such good skills, there's got to be something we could all do together, and Parker's got some crazy thing about beating the security guards so we could do it tonight-"
"Eliot," Nate says, presumably to chide him for even mentioning doing something that might break some rules or maybe an unimportant law or two.
"-and then we'd get her back and I would really study if we had her back, I would totally do the reading and I'd take your next session too, and-"
"Eliot."
Eliot finally shuts up, and looks at Nate. Nate's looking lost, and that floors Eliot into silence. Nate takes a deep breath, and tenses his shoulders, like he's about to rip a plaster off or something. Eliot's about to break the silence again, ask if Nate's okay, when Nate speaks.
"If you're going to punch out anyone, you're going to have to punch out me," Nate says.
Eliot stares. Nate's words don't make sense. He blinks, and thinks them through again, and they still don't make much sense. He searches Nate's face for clues. He thinks he's memorised Nate's face so much it might even be imprinted in relief on his inner eyelids. Nate looks pale, too pale, and his fists are clenched and hanging loose at his side, and he looks tired, like he hasn't slept for a hundred years.
He doesn't want to know what Nate means. He doesn't want to know the thing that could make Nate so unhappy. But he has to know, so he can fix it. So he can get his Nate back. "What do you mean?"
Nate draws in a long, shuddering breath and tilts his head up slightly—Nate's I'm being brave gesture. "It was me," Nate says. "I'm the one who got Cora fired."
- - - -
Nate outlines what happened as briefly as he can. Eliot perches on the edge of Nate's desk and listens; it's what friends do, although Nate keeps flinching, like he's waiting for the punch.
Apparently Dubenich came to Nate in The Warehouse and asked him—with the threat of expulsion if he refused—to go to Cora's office and steal the notes. Nate's reputation as the most honest guy on campus was like having a free-for-all key card to the place. One of the secretaries even opened Cora's safe for him.
Nate's so torn about it, Eliot can't be mad at all, which is kind of frustrating and leaves him wondering what Nate would have to do to piss him off. Probably something like... betray him, and all the guys in the Tower. That would do it. Eliot can't stand seeing Nate like this, so he crosses the floor and sits down on the edge of Nate's bed so it's harder to stare at him.
Not that it really ever stops Eliot from staring at Nate.
"Why would Dubenich come to you? And what could he threaten you with?" Eliot's torn between wanting to hare off and punch Dubenich in the face several times, which would be nice and soothe the short-term itch, but it won't do Nate much good in the long term. Thankfully his other urge is easier to assuage—he leans in and tugs Nate against him. Nate fights it for a second, but then relaxes against Eliot's shoulder, pushing his nose into the fabric of Eliot's shirt.
"He... knows my past," Nate says, his voice muffled a little. "He knows who my dad is, and he tried to use it against me, and he fucking succeeded. Eliot, he used my family against me."
"Your dad..." Eliot squints. "How could who your dad is be used against you?"
Nate pulls away. His eyes look swollen red and raw, and he tilts his head defiantly, like he's on the attack, and Eliot wants to blurt out that it's okay, that he doesn't have to know, but Nate's too fast for him. "My dad's Jim Ford. Jim Ford of Boston."
"Jim Ford..." Eliot's forehead crumples like tissue. The name rings a bell. "As in the mafia King of America? The dude who got jailed a few years ago for every crime under the sun apart from incest and petty theft?"
It might be the cloud drifting in front of the sun outside the window, or maybe Nate's done it to himself somehow, but suddenly Nate looks decades older, like a huge weight is pressing down on him from somewhere. "Yes," Nate says, in a small tight voice. "My dad still owns, like, every major media production company in the world."
"But... that means you could work anywhere, for anyone," Eliot stares at Nate, aware his mouth is dropping open a little, but unable to hold it back. "Your dad, evil though he might be, is the holy grail of every wannabe Media worker in the whole wide world."
"Yeah, well... I wanted to prove I could make it on my own," Nate says. "I know I could walk into anywhere and demand a job and within 24 hours it would be mine. But it would be a lie. And everyone who bent over backwards to arrange it would know it was a lie, and they would know my jailed dad was behind it, and I would never know if it was my own ability doing it, my talent, or the fact my dad could have them shot within 3 hours for not using my stuff. Plus... I guess... If it ended up being Dubenich versus my word, who are they going to believe? Dubenich, a lecturer, or the son of the mafia King of America."
Eliot wishes he could take that sour note out of Nate's voice.
"Mostly it was the other stuff he blustered about threatening me with," Nate says. "If he started saying it, spreading the idea of nepotism, every media company in Britain and America would have to ban me on principle to assuage their shareholders. I would never be able to work in our field. Ever."
"Dubenich took advantage of you." Eliot's voice is high-pitched with outrage. "I wish I could legally punch him, because I totally would."
Nate manages a half-smile, and Eliot's not too unhappy it's not a full smile, because there's so much genuineness in it, through the huge vulnerability Nate's showing in every muscle in his body, that it gives Eliot reassurance his friend's going to be okay, and that's at the crux of everything for Eliot. Crush aside, Eliot'll do whatever he has to in order to keep Nate that way. "Thanks, man."
"No problem. And I won't babble about it as much as I can help it, I promise."
"That means a lot."
"I guess Dubenich overheard us in the lecture hall," Eliot blurts, remembering 'My name is Nathan Ford and I am a thief' with sadness and self-loathing and fuck his lack of brain-to-mouth filter
"It's not your fault." Nate's smile is tight, mirroring some of that self-loathing Eliot's feeling.
"Well, I kind of disagree right now. But-" Eliot squints at Nate. "With these daddy issues, couldn't you have chosen a career that wouldn't clash with your father's, uh, career ventures so much? Like. I don't know. Insurance?"
"Me? In insurance?" Nate turns away from Eliot to stare out into the car park. "Either me, or someone close to me, would die. I'm pretty sure."
"Insurance is dire," Eliot agrees. "Still, it's kind of obvious what we have to do."
"It is?" Nate laughs that self-loathing laugh again, and it just strengthens Eliot's resolve.
"Yeah," Eliot says, and he gets to his feet, and holds out his hand. "Come on. Let's go to the garden. We need the others."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. We're going to get revenge for Dubenich making you steal those research notes by getting them back and somehow implicating him, thus providing a neat circle of closure for you and hopefully in the process redeeming your honest image amongst the media staff," Eliot says, without pausing to take a breath.
Nate squints at him and Eliot's outstretched hand.
"Something wrong?" Eliot asks.
"Yeah. Couldn't you have been... a bit more dramatic?"
"Like how?"
"I dunno. Like.... Let's go steal the notes back."
"You're so whiny when you're like this," Eliot tells him. "Now take my fucking hand and we're going to fucking go and fucking steal the fucking notes back."
"Uh-" Nate begins.
"Don't even say it," Eliot grinds out from between clenched teeth. "Let's just go and do whatever it is we're doing before your arse fuses to your mattress."
Nate takes Eliot's hand and lets him pull him up, except Eliot pulls too hard, and Nate nearly stumbles. Nate puts his hand out to stop himself, and ends up having his right palm flat on Eliot's chest. Eliot looks down at it, at the warmth spreading out from it, then at Nate's face, and Nate just smiles at him easily. "Thanks, Eliot," Nate says, and his voice is warm again, without that tone of despair or anger. Eliot could so overly over think this, so he lets his mind clear and just enjoys the moment. He just smiles back. There's time for thinking later. Right now, they've got work to do.
- - - - -
"...and if we don't save Cora's reputation, then I'll fail my First Year and have to repeat it and you know what the First Year is like. It's not as much work as Second Year, and I'll be off having fun while you all are studying really hard for your Second Year essays, and I'll come back hung over and whiny while you're all working. Think about it."
Eliot had all their attention at the beginning of his impassioned plea to recruit his housemates to this evil wily scheme to regain Cora's reputation and boot Dubenich out on his hairy behind, but he's not so sure he still has it. In any case it's proof he's the King of Babble, and seriously, seriously, he's going to have to fight to stay on topic, stupid alcohol still whirring around in his bloodstream.
"Oh god, my liver," Eliot finishes his speech suddenly and sits down on the coffee table with a thump, dislodging a pile of spam post no one wanted to open, three cereal bowls which may have been cultivating new life forms and a broken hair straightener that Eliot is never copping to being the owner of. Nate shoots him a worried look. "Pre-emptive apology for the damage I've done to it today and yesterday," Eliot explains. "And over the whole last five months. And my whole life."
Nate obviously relaxes, but only just a little.
"So?" Eliot says hopefully, fixing the other three with a look.
"Dude," Hardison says, "you had me from let's save Cora. She's the nicest lecturer on campus. Foxy, too."
Parker fixes Hardison with a glare that could melt ice, and Hardison twitches.
"In a beast-like way, I mean," Hardison quickly backtracks. "She has teeth, and... a tail..." He winces, side-glances at Sophie who shakes her head with a clear 'Not even the Pope is buying that' expression, and tries, "And orange hair?"
Parker's deathly expression subsides. Eliot just stares, because he hadn't realised there was a thing between Parker and Hardison, and also because if he starts talking he might start babbling again and Eliot isn't sure if they could stop him from talking this time.
"You had me at the part of the plan involving the security guards," Parker says, and Hardison lets out this noisy exhale of relief which just gets him a frosty glare from Parker again. He swallows audibly and hides his head in his laptop, typing noisily.
"Sophie?" Eliot prompts. She looks at him, her expression inscrutable, and Eliot's stomach sinks a little, because she's an important part of the plan.
"Of course I will," Sophie says, grinning widely as Eliot turns a little violet from holding his breath in anticipation. She gets to her feet. "You had me from I get to practice my acting."
Eliot watches her go out of the room, muttering about needing to find the perfect outfit, and he stares at the open door for a good minute. He doesn't stop staring even when Nate's hands find his shoulders and press down a little. "We either just unleashed the part of the plan that won't work," he says, still staring. "Or we unleashed a monster."
"Come on, Dr. Frankenstein. Let's prep." Eliot turns and smiles at Nate, who smiles back automatically, and Eliot's stomach twinges again, and maybe it's all the alcohol on a practically empty stomach making him feel so weird. Or maybe it's Nate, who's standing a little closer than he normally does. Eliot wants to say something but he doesn't know what to say. He opens his mouth at the same time as Nate does, and Nate leans in a little, and Eliot has the stupidest, strangest thought again that maybe Nate's going to kiss him, but that's ridiculous, and then Hardison interrupts them.
"Look at this," Hardison calls across.
Nate jumps back as if he's been scalded, smoothing down his shirt even though there's nothing wrong with it, and Eliot gets to his feet, crossing the carpet with Nate to crouch around Hardison's laptop screen. The screen is blank.
"Uh," Eliot says, "Hardison, are you aware your laptop's not really on?"
"Behind you, I hooked it up to the TV; I just haven't paralleled the display to my notebook screen yet," Hardison says very slowly, as if everyone should know it.
Eliot turns to glance up at the widescreen TV on the wall that none of them are sure who it belongs to. There was a crap TV in one week, and then one day the giant TV just appeared. The common Tower consensus is Parker, but Eliot has a sneaking suspicion it's Sophie's, because she was in a commercial for half a second, and she wasn't visible on the small TV screen but you can make her out on the larger screen. He keeps the theory to himself; if it is Sophie, she's liable to take it down or break it if someone calls her out on her screen vanity.
"So I cracked into Dubenich's bank account and checked out his credit card outgoings. The guy's in a lot of debt, but he did make one large purchase at IYS security. So I checked their website to find out what the payment can be, and including delivery I guess he's got this one." Hardison brings up a window to show a large safe, the kind that could be hidden behind furniture.
"Yeah," Nate says, "when I was in Dubenich's office earlier this evening giving him the papers, I noticed one section of carpet had an indent, like he moved his bookcase over to the other wall."
"You noticed one section of carpet had an indent," Eliot mutters, forgetting entirely about his crush on Nate and the idea that he should be nice to the guy he wants to do naked things with. "Who are you, Miss. Marple?"
"I was feeling guilty so I was staring at the floor," Nate says. "And if I was a detective, I'd be Ellery Queen."
"Ooh, I can see that."
"I thought I might dress up as him for Halloween."
"Yeah. You look good in red."
"When you two have stopped flirting," Hardison says crossly. Eliot makes a sound of outrage, but settles his attention back on Hardison. There's some text scrolling up on the screen which doesn't make a lot of sense. There's a lot of semicolons in it for a start. "I've tagged a proxy into his account and hitched it to my mobile... Eliot, are you even listening?"
"Yeah," Eliot says defensively, even though he blatantly wasn't. (He was sort of counting the numbers of hairs on the base of Nate's neck although he will deny this to his grave.)
"Well," Hardison says, "what'd I say?"
"You were explaining how you're still a virgin."
Hardison leaps at Eliot, and Nate has to stand bodily in the way. "This is not the time," Nate says, pushing Hardison back down onto the armchair. "You can beat up Eliot later."
"Hey," Eliot protests, but without much heat, because he really does deserve it.
"Anyway," Hardison says heavily, "we'll get a text message if Dubenich buys anything else, but from what I'm guessing, he only had enough so far to buy the one safe. Which sounds like is in his office."
"Which is the safe we have to get to," Sophie says from the doorway. They all turn to her. She has her mobile in one hand. "I just spoke to Tara Cole. She works part time on the university administration staff, and overheard Dubenich's meeting with the president. Cora said her notes were handwritten, but she couldn't produce them. Dubenich mentioned his notes—which were pitiful—were all typewritten. But Tara checked Dubenich's requisitions over the last year. He has an OCR scanner that has to stay in his office."
"So that's why he kept the notes in his safe," Nate says. "So he can finish scanning them and then destroy the notes. That means we have to go with the plan."
"So... we're sneaking past security guards," Eliot says. "Awesome. I mean, what could go wrong?"
"They'll probably shoot Nate in the face," Parker says, cheerfully.
Nate exhales through closed teeth. "I'm standing right here."
Parker just shrugs. Nate opens his mouth to say something.
"All right, people!" Eliot claps his hands. "Let's uh, go... um..." His voice trails off. He looks at Nate. "Guys, this moment is epic. It needs to be dramatic. So I'm stealing a quote from someone I admire greatly."
"And who would that be?" Nate prompts.
"Joss Whedon, of course," Eliot says, and starts to stride out of the door. "Let's be bad guys!"
Part 4
By the time 8pm rolls around, Eliot's shot down thirty different guys in The Warehouse. Thirty. He makes Nate swear on his soul that he'll never tell anyone. Eliot's tempted to shred the pile of numbers that have also been slipped to him by the more nervous guys, but he'll save them; they should make awesome kindling for one of Parker's fires.
The total slides up to 32, and Eliot's doing that panicking thing he's so irritated about, but he can't help it. Paranoia has clammy hands and likes taking him for a whirl every now and again.
"It was a joke, I knew it," Eliot says as The Warehouse's giant clock reads 8.05. "I knew it."
"Shush now," Nate says. "He's here."
"He's-" Eliot hates his friendly relationship with paranoia, he really does, because paranoia doesn't let him go, no—it dips him around 180 degrees and makes him start panicking about something else. "I should have worn plaid, I really should, I could hide against the walls of this stupid rustic farmish club and be invisible, and-"
"Eliot, calm down." Nate shakes him by the shoulders, his hands a warm and familiar weight. "I'm here if you need to escape. And no, you should never wear plaid. Have you seen you in that shirt?"
"I look like an office boy," Eliot says, picking at the cuffs. Nate slaps his fingers away.
"It totally brings out your eyes," Nate says, "and shows off your muscles. You're totally hot in it."
Eliot opens his mouth to respond, because hell, that statement needs some sort of response, because Nate's still really close in the dim light of the club, and his eyes are trained on Eliot's, and Eliot can see a pulse point in Nate's neck, and it's shuddering, fluttering quickly, and the air between them is sort of hot and heavy, and Eliot's mouth is dry again, and what's up with that? Eliot opens his mouth to say something to that effect, and Nate leans in a little, like he's really interested in what Eliot could say, and that much intent focussed purely on him is making him a little dizzy.
"Hi, sorry I'm so late."
Moreau's words snap them out of whatever spell they're under. Eliot jumps, nearly spills his drink, but Nate takes it from him and smiles at him waveringly with an atta boy expression. Eliot turns and grins at Moreau.
"Hi," Eliot manages, in a squeak. He stares at Moreau, completely unsure of what to say, and should he apologise, and what if this was a joke after all, and Nate's patting him on the shoulder again. He flickers a glance at Nate.
"I'll be over there if you need me," Nate says, jerking his head in the direction of the corner of the club. Eliot watches him go for a moment, but then Moreau slides into the seat next to him, and Eliot focuses his attention directly on him.
Moreau pushes something forward. It looks like some sort of cocktail. He has a similar one in his hand. "It's nice to actually get to speak to you, Spencer," Moreau says, picking up his own cocktail. Eliot picks up his own, feeling a little clumsy, like his body doesn't fully belong to him. "I've been meaning to for a while, actually."
"Me too," Eliot says. "Um. Obviously."
Moreau smiles. His teeth are white and neat, straight like a ruler. The thought hits Eliot out of nowhere that he much prefers Nate's uneven teeth, the way they make every one of Nate's smiles a little ironic, a little knowing. He shakes that away, because Nate is over in the corner probably getting hit on by a thousand girls right now, and he's on a date with Moreau, and the possibility of sex rears its nice head again into Eliot's thoughts, so he shoves Nate out of his head the best he can.
"I enjoyed your song," Moreau says.
So maybe the possibility of sex is a little further away than Eliot had hoped for. Eliot's blush must be a Guinness World Record. It has to be. "I, uh, have unfortunate musical tendencies sometimes," he says. "Once I thought it was absolutely hilarious to end songs in the middle of their choruses with the word lemon. Lemon was the tell—the point at which the song had to stop. So it would be like, Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Lemon, or Mama, just killed a man, put a gun against his head, pulled the lemon and I'd stop, and think it was hilarious." Eliot shuts up abruptly, realising he didn't take a breath throughout and, oh crap, living in the Tower has ruined him, ruined him for life, because in the Tower he's amongst other babblers, safe and sound in a nest—a family!—of other people who do the same and so cannot judge him, and here he is, on an honest-to-actual-goodness date, and he's babbling. Mindlessly. Idiotically. He's been totally ruined. He's never getting laid again in his life.
"It's... like a proper joke. A comedian's joke," Moreau says, nodding along with his own words like it's an essay question that he's actually growing to understand. "They end jokes where you least expect them to in order to raise a laugh. There's humour mechanics in it."
"Humour mechanics," Eliot repeats, because it's not possibly fair that Moreau's this smart and this hot and it's bad enough that Nate exists in the world; why there are two such impossible creatures in existence is beyond Eliot. The world so far has made sense to Eliot—you're either hot or you're smart. Eliot, for example, is on the attractive scale and has left his intelligence a million miles behind him in glee, because since he's pretty no one expects clever things from him.
"All right, you got me. That's not a real term. But it sounds almost like it could be," Moreau says.
"Oh, you do that too!" Eliot feels the smile he forced onto his face relax, and the relaxation pours into his shoulders; he feels infinitely more comfortable, especially as Moreau's face tilts in confusion. "I have a stock answer in my theory seminars about postmodernism. Hell if I know what I'm saying."
Moreau laughs. Eliot gauges his facial movements, and thinks it's possibly even a genuine laugh, and that's a definite chalk mark in the sex is definitely possible! column. "Your friend..." Moreau leans around Eliot, and frowns, "he looks like if he could kill me by staring he would."
Eliot glances back. Nate's gripping his glass of flat lemonade like it might possibly refill itself if he can glare at Moreau hard enough. He feels bad. He should have slipped Nate some money to keep refilling his soft drinks, especially as Nate's like his bodyguard for the night. He makes a mental note to cook him pancakes or something in the morning. "Oh, that's just Nate. He's my... wingman?" Eliot tries the word out. It doesn't feel quite right. "Trusty lieutenant?"
"I thought you might come alone." It sounds like a come on. Moreau smiles at him, slow and predatorily, and he leans in a little closer, looking deliberately at Eliot's mouth. Eliot swallows and sips at his cocktail; his dry mouth doesn't go away.
"Your note didn't say come alone," Eliot says, "although if it did I wouldn't have come, that would be a terrifying note to receive from someone you've potentially just crazily humiliated on YouTube, it would sound like you were going to jump me or something."
"That is sort of what I've got planned," Moreau says. Eliot stares, and it hits him all at once, this juxtaposed image he has in his head. Moreau, so close to him, flirting and warm and real and there, floating the possibility of sex. Nate, somewhere far behind, an impossible goal with too much hold on Eliot's heart.
Eliot says it before he can lose his nerve. "Good."
Which is how he feels later, when Moreau tugs him into one of the toilet stalls and pushes him up against the door. Moreau's hot and in full control of his body, and he kisses like he's a shark, and his hands are like an octopus, like he's got eight hands everywhere at once, and where the crap are all the fish metaphors coming from? Moreau kisses him again, and, yes, there it is. Moreau tastes like vodka and cherryade and bourbon, which might have been the cocktail they had, but his tongue is thick and feels huge in Eliot's mouth, and he doesn't really have any finesse. He just slobbers it around in Eliot's mouth like it's some... giant fishtail.
So... he just won't make out with this dude in the future. That's fine. They can just use each other for other things, like... Moreau's hand rubs over the crotch of Eliot's jeans, and then he pushes Eliot away slightly, looking a little angry. "Dude," Moreau says, "nothing? Seriously?"
Eliot doesn't quite know what Moreau means, until Moreau takes Eliot's hand and rubs it against his own crotch, and hello. Moreau is huge. It's clear even though Moreau's still fully clothed. Eliot swallows. "I could-" Eliot says, moving his fingers a little, but Moreau doesn't look interested now. He looks pissed.
"I don't do one-sided one night stands," Moreau says. "Don't worry. There's plenty of guys out there who want me to fuck them." He manhandles Eliot down onto the closed lid of the toilet, and flickers something at Eliot. Eliot catches it. It's a business card. The guy's a First Year student and has properly printed business cards. Eliot thinks suddenly that Moreau's actually kind of a douche. Moreau opens the door and looks down at him, cold and disapproving, and then he smiles, almost sadly. "Call me when you've got your brain out of Ford's arse," he says, "'cause seriously you can do so much better than him."
"What?" Eliot sputters, "I-" But Moreau just looks at him sadly, shakes his head and shoves the door shut behind him.
Eliot takes a few minutes to compose himself, because Moreau's actually not that much of a douchenozzle, and he was almost kind to Eliot there at the end when he could have been so much more pissed. Eliot's lucky Moreau's just a student or whatever, because he can totally picture Moreau in the future as a hot drug lord or gun smuggler, something dangerous, he has the hot European exotic thing going for him, and that smirk. Little!Eliot actually perks up a little at that though and Eliot scowls down at his crotch. "So now you want to come out to play," Eliot tells it. "You are totally grounded." Then he clamps his hands over his mouth because this is a shared toilet. Thankfully he can't hear anyone else. He breathes a sigh of relief.
Then he realises if it's the smirk he's interested in, it's probably because Moreau's smirk reminds him of Nate's self confident smirk, and Eliot is totally screwed. And not in the good way he had been hoping for when Moreau manhandled him into the toilet stalls.
He takes a few moments to compose himself, pushing out of the cubicle and up against the sinks, staring at his own flushed reflection in the mirror. His lips are chapped a little; Moreau kissed without talent and without mercy. Eliot stares at himself. He should be furious at Nate for lying to him, because he doesn't look hot in that shirt at all, he looks like someone he's not, someone on the verge of growing up and Eliot's nowhere near ready for that.
Eliot comes out of the toilet, almost ready to tell Nate that, but he doesn't. Nate's leaning against a sofa near the toilets, looking kind of pissed off.
"Can we go?" Eliot says, awkwardly.
Nate looks at him for a long moment and shakes his head a little. "I've got to be somewhere. I'll meet you back at the Tower."
"Huh?" Eliot says, before he can stop himself, because the vodka cocktail Moreau bought him is making him a little dizzy, and apparently it is possible for Nate to look even more pissed off.
"The whole world doesn't revolve around you," Nate snaps, and then immediately looks contrite. "I'm sorry. I just- these places give me a bit of a headache."
Eliot feels ashamed almost immediately. Nate's dislike of partying has become almost an ongoing joke in the Tower—it's easier to forget that every joke has a foundation in real life for some reason. "I'm sorry. Can I walk you to the bus stop, or...?"
"Bus, yeah. Thanks." A smile crosses Nate's face like lightning, drifting away when Nate almost notices it and schools his face into something plainer. Eliot's stomach hurts a little, because maybe something happened while Eliot was failing to get laid, and he doesn't know, and maybe Nate's hurt. "Come on," Eliot says, nodding his head at the door. Nate looks at him oddly again, but nods, and they leave.
- - - - -
Nate's bus is apparently after the one Eliot needs to take, and it's headed to the university itself. He probably has a burning need to go to the Media lab or the Open Access Centre or something; either that, or he's going to roll around on the 5th Floor of the Library, pressing his face against the books to wipe off the stench of an actual social life.
Eliot drops back into the Tower at a disappointing 10pm into a rather tense atmosphere. Sophie just glares at him from the corner of the room as she delicately taps a small netbook. Hardison's playing Super Mario Galaxy and cheating outrageously (because seriously, who needs to wander around collecting lives before they go into the Bedroom levels? Eliot doesn't voice his derision at Hardison cheating, because anything is better than the suckage of last term's Portal addiction. By suckage he means his own lack of a portal gun to zap Hardison away when he's playing it.) Parker's punching the buttons of a really old Gameboy and muttering something about stealing a spade and now everyone in Hyrule is calling her a THIEF in capital letters. Eliot makes the mistake of innocently remarking that he would have thought Parker would be pleased about being recognised in-game for what she is, and Parker actually yells at him for ten minutes solid, because apparently she's the best thief ever and best thieves ever do NOT get caught. Especially by pixelated shop owners.
Eliot makes himself a cup of tea, actually cleans out the teapot and washes down the counter rather than sit down in the weird atmosphere, and he sinks down into one of their dilapidated armchairs, counting the marks in the wall where Hardison and he threw darts without a dart board.
Nate comes back a couple of hours later, still looking moody and withdrawn, and Eliot really wants to fix it but he doesn't have a fucking clue how. Sophie's ganked off about the weird conversation they had earlier, Hardison's jabbing at his laptop now and whining about download speeds, and Parker's poking miserably at a half-eaten bowl of Cocoa Pops, which is seriously out of character—but Parker kind of feeds off their moods at the best of times, so it stands to reason she'd feed off them at the worst of times too.
Everyone's in a bad mood. Eliot drums his fingers against his jeans, and sighs. Someone has to do something, and in the Tower, if someone mentions doing something, they're volunteering to take the lead. So Eliot thinks about what he could do to cheer everyone up.
He doesn't think they'll appreciate most of his thoughts, so he changes his plan. If he can cheer one of them up for sure, maybe the others will topple, like dominoes. He doesn't have a spare laptop for Hardison to putz with, or enough money to take Sophie shoe shopping, and if Eliot knew the one thing in the world that would cheer Nate up he would have done it a million times already. Parker, on the other hand, while she's a complicated life form, she has a nice list of things to cheer her up.
"Parker," he says loudly. Everyone's heads lift a little to look at him, and he looks straight at her, grinning his most maniacal grin. She looks at him curiously. "Let's go into the garden and burn some shit."
Parker's grin is slow and like the sun.
Eliot and Parker make so much noise collecting debris from the garden and from behind the small useless shed (there's no door, no floor, a broken window and a mouse inside and that's it) that they've been amassing for the last fortnight, since their last epic burning session. Parker starts stacking it up, and Eliot prods at a large branch that's been in the garden since September. Maybe if he had an axe...
Except either Parker's a crazy mind reader or she's been thinking the same thing, because she reaches into her large pockets and actually pulls out a mini axe. She throws it at him. Eliot freaks out and ducks just in time for the axe to embed itself in the wavering wood of the shed.
"The hell?" Eliot splutters. "You don't throw axes at people!"
"Sorry," Parker says, and then, in a funny voice that is probably supposed to be him, mutters, "You don't throw axes at people." Eliot stares at her. Parker narrows her eyes at him. "Big baby." She stalks past him and pulls the axe out of the shed. "I'll cut the wood. You make yourself useful and go buy us some matches. I used the last to make marshmallows melt."
Eliot stares at her. "And you couldn't have mentioned this when I suggested we burn stuff?"
"I'm mentioning it now. What's your problem?" Parker wields the axe like a maniac and chops the large branch in half in one go.
"I could make you a list," Eliot mutters. Parker narrows her eyes again. "All right, all right, I'm going."
There's still half an hour until the Co-op closes, so Eliot sets off at a quick jog, but slows down at the end of Cardigan Road because there's a woman sat on a bench crying and Eliot feels instantly awkward even though it can't be his fault. So he tries to walk by casually, and it's the familiar label of a Jack Daniels whiskey bottle that catches his attention, and it's just as he's cursing his brain for being attached to alcohol labels that he realises he knows the woman crying.
It's Cora McRory.
Eliot stands and stares because there is something about crying women that breaks male brains, and maybe it's close to the area of the brain that has the potential to consider suicide, because that broken bit of his brain makes him sit down right next to her, even though he thinks belatedly maybe she won't exactly want one of her students seeing her this way.
He reaches into his back pocket and pulls out the ever-present packet of Kleenex. His mother loaded each pocket of each piece of clothing he owns with one, and Eliot washes his clothes even with them in it, and the Kleenex sort of survive. Eliot thinks maybe they're made of cockroaches or something, but even he's wise enough not to mention this to the sobbing lecturer.
Eliot holds out the slightly mangled packet until the worst of Cora's sobbing subsides. Her eyes wobble on seeing the tissues, and then more tears erupt when she sees who's holding them, which isn't exactly the reaction he was going for.
He waits for her to quieten a little. "I nearly killed someone with an appetiser once," Eliot says, staring ahead into the dark street, not looking at her at all. "It was terrible. I meant to throw it into the bin and I threw it into someone's face so hard it lodged in their nose. There was lemon and shrimp everywhere."
Cora sniffles a little. Eliot risks a glimpse. She's clutching her half-drunk whiskey and staring into the street. There's a Co-op bag on the floor and the telltale tail of a new receipt which shows she only bought it fifteen minutes ago, so Cora's downed half a bottle of Jack Daniels in Eliot speed. Eliot's brain rampages through the horrible list of things it could be to entail chugging Jack Daniels. "I'm not sure what-" Cora says, unsteadily.
"I was working as a waiter at this really fancy hotel. The person I nearly killed was Delia Smith."
"This still doesn't make any sense, why are you telling me this?"
"I swear," Eliot says fervently, "if you tell a single soul I nearly killed the nation's favourite cook? People will mob me. I've been humiliated enough this week already-"
"Oh, the Saveloy video, that was pretty funny, actually."
Cora's already heartbroken or some shit, so Eliot swallows down the hit and takes it and decides to think about the whole faculty watching him being an arse later. "Yes, well. I nearly killed Delia Fucking Smith, and I would be torn to pieces if everyone found out, so if you could very kindly keep it to yourself I would be much obliged."
He sees the moment Cora gets it—that he's revealed some awful shit so that she'll feel more comfortable talking about her secret in return. It's not a surprise she took a while to realise, because people are always underestimating Eliot. Nate tells him it's his superpower, but Eliot got depressed when he said that because Nate's superpower is so much more awesome. Nate wins, like, every board game he ever plays. The pieces, the random draw cards, it's like he can control them at will, even when he plays like a maniac. Eliot's considered on more than one occasion pimping Nate as a professional Monopoly player because Monopoly boards, like, bend themselves to his every manic machination. And he's thinking about Nate again. Argh.
"If it's because I'm a student that you don't want to talk to me," Eliot says, "I'll transfer from your class or something. I'm pretty sure I could get you Alec Hardison from Irina's seminar group. He actually does the readings."
Cora takes a deep, shaky, shuddery breath in and says, "That's very kind of you, Eliot, but it's not necessary; I won't be taking your seminar group anymore."
"But-" Eliot's brain whirs and he turns to face her. "But I'll do the reading! I'll make everyone do the reading. We'll be the bestest seminar group in the world, you don't have to ditch us-"
Cora laughs a little. The sound is muffled by the tears still running down her face. "Again, that's really kind of you. But pointless. The university board fired me."
"The university board what now?" Cora opens her mouth to tell him again, but Eliot holds up his hand. He got it the first time. "Sorry, I heard you, it's just fucking ridiculous. Seriously?"
"Seriously," Cora repeats. "Apparently Victor Dubenich provided them with proof that I had stolen his Bakhtin paper. Somehow he'd gotten hold of all my research, I have no idea, and he presented it as his own. I got into my office, checked my safe, and it was gone. The President summoned me, and..." She shakes her head. "You know the rules about plagiarism, how hot the university is on it. I was out on my arse within five minutes. So I thought. Well. Might as well get hopelessly drunk."
"Well, believe me, it's not the answer. Unless you like being on YouTube." Eliot reaches over and pulls the bottle from her hands. She doesn't even put up a fight—she knows he's right.
"Get rid of that for me, will you?" Cora's voice is barely a whisper, and Eliot's proud of her, because she's a grown up and has learned the vital lesson he hasn't about alcohol not really being good for you. He knows if he dumps the bottle she'll be tempted, so he unscrews the lid and downs the whole half-bottle at once and pushes the empty bottle into the bin next to him. His throat burns and his stomach is already protesting, but it's totally for the greater good, so whatever.
Cora stares at him like he's grown an extra head. "I thought you'd tip it down the drain right there or something."
"Oh," Eliot says. "Um. Oops. It's okay. I've ruined my body totally. It takes way more than this to get me drunk."
She blinks at him, all four eyes going at once. Ah, Eliot thinks, shit.
"You... do you have friends? Someone to call?" Eliot says, while his brain is still just about functioning. "Because you should. Right now. You shouldn't be alone."
Cora opens her mouth to protest, and Eliot's impatient when he's drunk, and he's feeling the burn of being drunk now. His brain feels a little like wool stuffed into a plastic bag too tight for it, and he's really not sure where that simile came from. He leans over Cora and yanks her phone out of her bag. "Hey," she protests, and Eliot bats her half-hearted attempt to get it back away.
He scrolls through the contacts. "Tell me who to call or I'm calling-" Eliot squints. "Your dad."
"He's in Ireland!" Cora squeaks.
"Well, then," Eliot says, as reasonably as he can manage. "So I guess you'd better tell me who to call or he's going to have to fly over here and that's going to cost a bunch of airmiles, right?"
"Fine. My housemate's name is Mikel Dayan."
"Thank you." Eliot finds Mikel's name and hits the green button. He waits for Mikel to pick up.
"Ford is right. You're an irritating ass," Cora grumps.
"I am," Eliot agrees, and then his brain makes him pay more attention. "Wait, Nate talks about me?"
"All the time," Cora says. "I'm his project tutor. Not your relationship counsellor, by the way."
Eliot wants to say something in return, but the line connects and a female voice with a hot accent says, "Hello?"
"Hi, my name is Eliot Spencer, I'm one of Cora's students. She's pretty drunk on a bench outside of the carpet shop at the end of Cardigan Road in Winton, can you come and fetch her please? She's pretty upset."
"I'll be down in three minutes," the voice says, and cuts the line.
Three minutes later, this gorgeous girl slips out of one of the buildings opposite, looking hugely worried, and she goes straight for Cora, helping her to her feet, putting her arms around her waist and her face really close to Cora's and woah, apparently Cora's gay too, which is something Eliot's definitely adding to his mental fapping folder for later. He wonders idly how long is polite before wanking over the idea of your heartbroken tutor with her lesbian roommate, and he's not so drunk he doesn't know that's the most inappropriate question ever.
"Thanks, Eliot," Mikel says, dragging Cora away.
"Bye," Eliot says to their disappearing backs. He checks his watch. The Co-op closes in five minutes. "Shit!"
He legs it around the corner. It's just Co-op Perry on duty, too, which is irritating, as Perry doesn't like selling things with five minutes until closing time, but Eliot does his scary face and Perry sells him a box of matches and a bag of marshmallows without too much hassle. Perry doesn't give him a bag, but that's normal. Eliot vows to ask Cora later, when he's reinstated her back at the university, how to extract bags from Perry, because it's an impossible task.
It's when he's walking back to the house that he realises where his thoughts went—directly to the assumption he's going to help Cora clear her name. Huh. Apparently he does have a helpful streak in him after all. But he doesn't have a clue on how to start.
He quickens his pace. He's buzzed from the whiskey and clutching marshmallows to his chest like a crazy man, but he has a mission, and he has possibly more sober and definitely cleverer people waiting at home, and maybe they'll have a clue.
Maybe they can save Cora McRory's reputation.
- - - -
When Eliot ran back to the house, marshmallows and matchsticks in his hands, all four of his housemates were hunched over the fire. But as soon as he started blurting about Cora's dismissal, Nate stalked back inside, and Eliot doesn't blame him—he's probably off-put about the stench of whiskey on Eliot's breath, which makes him sound crazier than normal (an achievement!)
Eliot's confused by the move - what he's saying isn't crazy at all. It's not fair that Cora has been fired, Dubenich is an arse, and the idea that Nate isn't taking him seriously is more than irritating, Eliot's angry.
So he does an unwise thing. He is still drunk, after all.
He goes inside and barges into Nate's room without knocking.
Nate's just lying on his bed, reading a textbook, like nothing is wrong at all.
"Dude," Eliot says, "why did you walk out? I need you."
Nate's back tenses a little at the last three words. He doesn't turn around, though. "I had work to do. And what did I say about barging into my room unannounced?"
"That it's fucking manly and impulsive, and yes I'm quoting Firefly, and you can't start complaining now when you let me sleep in here naked last night," Eliot says.
"You guys know the window's open and we can hear you, right?" Sophie's voice floats in from outside. Eliot makes a strangled sound and crosses Nate's tidy room and shoves the window closed and closes the curtains for good measure. Nate sits up then, looking from him to the closed curtains nervously, although Eliot can't figure out why Nate would be nervous.
"You're the one person I thought would definitely help me," Eliot says. "I need your brain."
"My brain," Nate says. "Right." His voice goes a little quieter at the end, like he's disappointed, which Eliot thinks would make no sense even to his sober brain, because it's a compliment, so why's Nate disappointed, because it's not like Nate wants Eliot to need anything else of him. Eliot wants Nate's arse; that's a completely different thing.
"Cora was nice," Eliot says, pacing so he has that to think about. If he's worrying about staying upright he can't be worrying about Nate's odd mood swings. "Cora was- is awesome. Fucking awesome. She knew I never did the reading and still didn't get me in trouble. Dude, we have to find out who did this and punch them in the face. I know Dubenich is sleazy scum. He has to have framed her. There's no way that Bakhtin piece is Dubenich's, no way. Cora's the Queen of Bakhtin. We-"
"Eliot," Nate says, in this desperate, quiet tone which sounds too much like a refusal, so Eliot keeps going, in the hope that maybe he can babble Nate into submission.
"-have to do this, she would do it for us, and we all have such good skills, there's got to be something we could all do together, and Parker's got some crazy thing about beating the security guards so we could do it tonight-"
"Eliot," Nate says, presumably to chide him for even mentioning doing something that might break some rules or maybe an unimportant law or two.
"-and then we'd get her back and I would really study if we had her back, I would totally do the reading and I'd take your next session too, and-"
"Eliot."
Eliot finally shuts up, and looks at Nate. Nate's looking lost, and that floors Eliot into silence. Nate takes a deep breath, and tenses his shoulders, like he's about to rip a plaster off or something. Eliot's about to break the silence again, ask if Nate's okay, when Nate speaks.
"If you're going to punch out anyone, you're going to have to punch out me," Nate says.
Eliot stares. Nate's words don't make sense. He blinks, and thinks them through again, and they still don't make much sense. He searches Nate's face for clues. He thinks he's memorised Nate's face so much it might even be imprinted in relief on his inner eyelids. Nate looks pale, too pale, and his fists are clenched and hanging loose at his side, and he looks tired, like he hasn't slept for a hundred years.
He doesn't want to know what Nate means. He doesn't want to know the thing that could make Nate so unhappy. But he has to know, so he can fix it. So he can get his Nate back. "What do you mean?"
Nate draws in a long, shuddering breath and tilts his head up slightly—Nate's I'm being brave gesture. "It was me," Nate says. "I'm the one who got Cora fired."
- - - -
Nate outlines what happened as briefly as he can. Eliot perches on the edge of Nate's desk and listens; it's what friends do, although Nate keeps flinching, like he's waiting for the punch.
Apparently Dubenich came to Nate in The Warehouse and asked him—with the threat of expulsion if he refused—to go to Cora's office and steal the notes. Nate's reputation as the most honest guy on campus was like having a free-for-all key card to the place. One of the secretaries even opened Cora's safe for him.
Nate's so torn about it, Eliot can't be mad at all, which is kind of frustrating and leaves him wondering what Nate would have to do to piss him off. Probably something like... betray him, and all the guys in the Tower. That would do it. Eliot can't stand seeing Nate like this, so he crosses the floor and sits down on the edge of Nate's bed so it's harder to stare at him.
Not that it really ever stops Eliot from staring at Nate.
"Why would Dubenich come to you? And what could he threaten you with?" Eliot's torn between wanting to hare off and punch Dubenich in the face several times, which would be nice and soothe the short-term itch, but it won't do Nate much good in the long term. Thankfully his other urge is easier to assuage—he leans in and tugs Nate against him. Nate fights it for a second, but then relaxes against Eliot's shoulder, pushing his nose into the fabric of Eliot's shirt.
"He... knows my past," Nate says, his voice muffled a little. "He knows who my dad is, and he tried to use it against me, and he fucking succeeded. Eliot, he used my family against me."
"Your dad..." Eliot squints. "How could who your dad is be used against you?"
Nate pulls away. His eyes look swollen red and raw, and he tilts his head defiantly, like he's on the attack, and Eliot wants to blurt out that it's okay, that he doesn't have to know, but Nate's too fast for him. "My dad's Jim Ford. Jim Ford of Boston."
"Jim Ford..." Eliot's forehead crumples like tissue. The name rings a bell. "As in the mafia King of America? The dude who got jailed a few years ago for every crime under the sun apart from incest and petty theft?"
It might be the cloud drifting in front of the sun outside the window, or maybe Nate's done it to himself somehow, but suddenly Nate looks decades older, like a huge weight is pressing down on him from somewhere. "Yes," Nate says, in a small tight voice. "My dad still owns, like, every major media production company in the world."
"But... that means you could work anywhere, for anyone," Eliot stares at Nate, aware his mouth is dropping open a little, but unable to hold it back. "Your dad, evil though he might be, is the holy grail of every wannabe Media worker in the whole wide world."
"Yeah, well... I wanted to prove I could make it on my own," Nate says. "I know I could walk into anywhere and demand a job and within 24 hours it would be mine. But it would be a lie. And everyone who bent over backwards to arrange it would know it was a lie, and they would know my jailed dad was behind it, and I would never know if it was my own ability doing it, my talent, or the fact my dad could have them shot within 3 hours for not using my stuff. Plus... I guess... If it ended up being Dubenich versus my word, who are they going to believe? Dubenich, a lecturer, or the son of the mafia King of America."
Eliot wishes he could take that sour note out of Nate's voice.
"Mostly it was the other stuff he blustered about threatening me with," Nate says. "If he started saying it, spreading the idea of nepotism, every media company in Britain and America would have to ban me on principle to assuage their shareholders. I would never be able to work in our field. Ever."
"Dubenich took advantage of you." Eliot's voice is high-pitched with outrage. "I wish I could legally punch him, because I totally would."
Nate manages a half-smile, and Eliot's not too unhappy it's not a full smile, because there's so much genuineness in it, through the huge vulnerability Nate's showing in every muscle in his body, that it gives Eliot reassurance his friend's going to be okay, and that's at the crux of everything for Eliot. Crush aside, Eliot'll do whatever he has to in order to keep Nate that way. "Thanks, man."
"No problem. And I won't babble about it as much as I can help it, I promise."
"That means a lot."
"I guess Dubenich overheard us in the lecture hall," Eliot blurts, remembering 'My name is Nathan Ford and I am a thief' with sadness and self-loathing and fuck his lack of brain-to-mouth filter
"It's not your fault." Nate's smile is tight, mirroring some of that self-loathing Eliot's feeling.
"Well, I kind of disagree right now. But-" Eliot squints at Nate. "With these daddy issues, couldn't you have chosen a career that wouldn't clash with your father's, uh, career ventures so much? Like. I don't know. Insurance?"
"Me? In insurance?" Nate turns away from Eliot to stare out into the car park. "Either me, or someone close to me, would die. I'm pretty sure."
"Insurance is dire," Eliot agrees. "Still, it's kind of obvious what we have to do."
"It is?" Nate laughs that self-loathing laugh again, and it just strengthens Eliot's resolve.
"Yeah," Eliot says, and he gets to his feet, and holds out his hand. "Come on. Let's go to the garden. We need the others."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. We're going to get revenge for Dubenich making you steal those research notes by getting them back and somehow implicating him, thus providing a neat circle of closure for you and hopefully in the process redeeming your honest image amongst the media staff," Eliot says, without pausing to take a breath.
Nate squints at him and Eliot's outstretched hand.
"Something wrong?" Eliot asks.
"Yeah. Couldn't you have been... a bit more dramatic?"
"Like how?"
"I dunno. Like.... Let's go steal the notes back."
"You're so whiny when you're like this," Eliot tells him. "Now take my fucking hand and we're going to fucking go and fucking steal the fucking notes back."
"Uh-" Nate begins.
"Don't even say it," Eliot grinds out from between clenched teeth. "Let's just go and do whatever it is we're doing before your arse fuses to your mattress."
Nate takes Eliot's hand and lets him pull him up, except Eliot pulls too hard, and Nate nearly stumbles. Nate puts his hand out to stop himself, and ends up having his right palm flat on Eliot's chest. Eliot looks down at it, at the warmth spreading out from it, then at Nate's face, and Nate just smiles at him easily. "Thanks, Eliot," Nate says, and his voice is warm again, without that tone of despair or anger. Eliot could so overly over think this, so he lets his mind clear and just enjoys the moment. He just smiles back. There's time for thinking later. Right now, they've got work to do.
- - - - -
"...and if we don't save Cora's reputation, then I'll fail my First Year and have to repeat it and you know what the First Year is like. It's not as much work as Second Year, and I'll be off having fun while you all are studying really hard for your Second Year essays, and I'll come back hung over and whiny while you're all working. Think about it."
Eliot had all their attention at the beginning of his impassioned plea to recruit his housemates to this evil wily scheme to regain Cora's reputation and boot Dubenich out on his hairy behind, but he's not so sure he still has it. In any case it's proof he's the King of Babble, and seriously, seriously, he's going to have to fight to stay on topic, stupid alcohol still whirring around in his bloodstream.
"Oh god, my liver," Eliot finishes his speech suddenly and sits down on the coffee table with a thump, dislodging a pile of spam post no one wanted to open, three cereal bowls which may have been cultivating new life forms and a broken hair straightener that Eliot is never copping to being the owner of. Nate shoots him a worried look. "Pre-emptive apology for the damage I've done to it today and yesterday," Eliot explains. "And over the whole last five months. And my whole life."
Nate obviously relaxes, but only just a little.
"So?" Eliot says hopefully, fixing the other three with a look.
"Dude," Hardison says, "you had me from let's save Cora. She's the nicest lecturer on campus. Foxy, too."
Parker fixes Hardison with a glare that could melt ice, and Hardison twitches.
"In a beast-like way, I mean," Hardison quickly backtracks. "She has teeth, and... a tail..." He winces, side-glances at Sophie who shakes her head with a clear 'Not even the Pope is buying that' expression, and tries, "And orange hair?"
Parker's deathly expression subsides. Eliot just stares, because he hadn't realised there was a thing between Parker and Hardison, and also because if he starts talking he might start babbling again and Eliot isn't sure if they could stop him from talking this time.
"You had me at the part of the plan involving the security guards," Parker says, and Hardison lets out this noisy exhale of relief which just gets him a frosty glare from Parker again. He swallows audibly and hides his head in his laptop, typing noisily.
"Sophie?" Eliot prompts. She looks at him, her expression inscrutable, and Eliot's stomach sinks a little, because she's an important part of the plan.
"Of course I will," Sophie says, grinning widely as Eliot turns a little violet from holding his breath in anticipation. She gets to her feet. "You had me from I get to practice my acting."
Eliot watches her go out of the room, muttering about needing to find the perfect outfit, and he stares at the open door for a good minute. He doesn't stop staring even when Nate's hands find his shoulders and press down a little. "We either just unleashed the part of the plan that won't work," he says, still staring. "Or we unleashed a monster."
"Come on, Dr. Frankenstein. Let's prep." Eliot turns and smiles at Nate, who smiles back automatically, and Eliot's stomach twinges again, and maybe it's all the alcohol on a practically empty stomach making him feel so weird. Or maybe it's Nate, who's standing a little closer than he normally does. Eliot wants to say something but he doesn't know what to say. He opens his mouth at the same time as Nate does, and Nate leans in a little, and Eliot has the stupidest, strangest thought again that maybe Nate's going to kiss him, but that's ridiculous, and then Hardison interrupts them.
"Look at this," Hardison calls across.
Nate jumps back as if he's been scalded, smoothing down his shirt even though there's nothing wrong with it, and Eliot gets to his feet, crossing the carpet with Nate to crouch around Hardison's laptop screen. The screen is blank.
"Uh," Eliot says, "Hardison, are you aware your laptop's not really on?"
"Behind you, I hooked it up to the TV; I just haven't paralleled the display to my notebook screen yet," Hardison says very slowly, as if everyone should know it.
Eliot turns to glance up at the widescreen TV on the wall that none of them are sure who it belongs to. There was a crap TV in one week, and then one day the giant TV just appeared. The common Tower consensus is Parker, but Eliot has a sneaking suspicion it's Sophie's, because she was in a commercial for half a second, and she wasn't visible on the small TV screen but you can make her out on the larger screen. He keeps the theory to himself; if it is Sophie, she's liable to take it down or break it if someone calls her out on her screen vanity.
"So I cracked into Dubenich's bank account and checked out his credit card outgoings. The guy's in a lot of debt, but he did make one large purchase at IYS security. So I checked their website to find out what the payment can be, and including delivery I guess he's got this one." Hardison brings up a window to show a large safe, the kind that could be hidden behind furniture.
"Yeah," Nate says, "when I was in Dubenich's office earlier this evening giving him the papers, I noticed one section of carpet had an indent, like he moved his bookcase over to the other wall."
"You noticed one section of carpet had an indent," Eliot mutters, forgetting entirely about his crush on Nate and the idea that he should be nice to the guy he wants to do naked things with. "Who are you, Miss. Marple?"
"I was feeling guilty so I was staring at the floor," Nate says. "And if I was a detective, I'd be Ellery Queen."
"Ooh, I can see that."
"I thought I might dress up as him for Halloween."
"Yeah. You look good in red."
"When you two have stopped flirting," Hardison says crossly. Eliot makes a sound of outrage, but settles his attention back on Hardison. There's some text scrolling up on the screen which doesn't make a lot of sense. There's a lot of semicolons in it for a start. "I've tagged a proxy into his account and hitched it to my mobile... Eliot, are you even listening?"
"Yeah," Eliot says defensively, even though he blatantly wasn't. (He was sort of counting the numbers of hairs on the base of Nate's neck although he will deny this to his grave.)
"Well," Hardison says, "what'd I say?"
"You were explaining how you're still a virgin."
Hardison leaps at Eliot, and Nate has to stand bodily in the way. "This is not the time," Nate says, pushing Hardison back down onto the armchair. "You can beat up Eliot later."
"Hey," Eliot protests, but without much heat, because he really does deserve it.
"Anyway," Hardison says heavily, "we'll get a text message if Dubenich buys anything else, but from what I'm guessing, he only had enough so far to buy the one safe. Which sounds like is in his office."
"Which is the safe we have to get to," Sophie says from the doorway. They all turn to her. She has her mobile in one hand. "I just spoke to Tara Cole. She works part time on the university administration staff, and overheard Dubenich's meeting with the president. Cora said her notes were handwritten, but she couldn't produce them. Dubenich mentioned his notes—which were pitiful—were all typewritten. But Tara checked Dubenich's requisitions over the last year. He has an OCR scanner that has to stay in his office."
"So that's why he kept the notes in his safe," Nate says. "So he can finish scanning them and then destroy the notes. That means we have to go with the plan."
"So... we're sneaking past security guards," Eliot says. "Awesome. I mean, what could go wrong?"
"They'll probably shoot Nate in the face," Parker says, cheerfully.
Nate exhales through closed teeth. "I'm standing right here."
Parker just shrugs. Nate opens his mouth to say something.
"All right, people!" Eliot claps his hands. "Let's uh, go... um..." His voice trails off. He looks at Nate. "Guys, this moment is epic. It needs to be dramatic. So I'm stealing a quote from someone I admire greatly."
"And who would that be?" Nate prompts.
"Joss Whedon, of course," Eliot says, and starts to stride out of the door. "Let's be bad guys!"
Part 4