Hiatus Challenge - Fic #2
9/9/11 09:05![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
telarynTitle: Balance
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
telaryn
Word Count: 1925
Fandom: Leverage/BTVS
Characters: Nate & Faith/Eliot
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Crippling injury to team member
Disclaimer: No ownership implied, no profit obtained.
Summary: As Eliot struggles to recover from an injury in the field, Faith tries to reach him and remind him that he isn't alone.
Author's Note: Written for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
angst_bingo's Hiatus Challenge, for the prompts "deaf" and "moments lost".
Faith wasn’t really surprised when she got the call, even though she wasn’t completely sure how Pete had gotten her number. “You better get down here.” After a quiet word of explanation to Nate, she’d excused herself from the gathering, and grabbed her bike.
It wasn’t the first time Eliot had gone to Pete’s gym to work out. He had a standing arrangement with the owner to have the place for his private use at least twice a week. Most of the time Pete used the break in his routine to catch up on his paperwork; occasionally Eliot slipped him an extra twenty so he and Faith could enjoy a more violent sort of foreplay than Eliot’s apartment would allow.
Faith hadn’t joined him at the gym since his accident. She hadn’t even known he’d started going back.
Eliot collapsing to his knees behind her, clutching his head and bellowing in pain. They’d all caught some of the feedback that had flashed across the coms that night, but somehow Eliot’s ear bud had taken the worst of it in ways Hardison was only just now starting to understand.
In the end it had taken Faith’s strength and Parker’s dexterity together to pry the device out of Eliot’s ear, and even then Parker had burned the tips of her fingers getting it free. By the time Nate and the others had reached them, Eliot had passed out in Faith’s arms.
Hardison had been nearly incoherent, shifting between techno-babble and tearful protestations that it shouldn’t have happened faster than any of them could follow. Sophie had finally put an arm around his shoulders and steered him away from the group.
“Faith.” Nate’s voice had been gentle as he crouched beside her. “Let me see.” He hadn’t tried to convince her to let Eliot go – sensing in his way that she would have fought him.
Weeks later, Faith was still having nightmares about her first good look at the right side of Eliot’s head. Nate had inspected the ruined flesh with a terrifyingly calm detachment before withdrawing to call an ambulance. All Faith had been able to do was stare in horror at the reddened bloody flesh, streaked with black. Patches of his hair had been burned away; she hadn’t seen flames in those first few confused moments, but the clear evidence they’d been there couldn’t be denied.
Eliot had been six weeks in the hospital recovering, and Faith had visited him every day without fail. He’d been happy to see her, up until the afternoon the specialist Nate had found confirmed that whatever had gone wrong with the ear bud had destroyed the hearing in his right ear beyond any reasonable hope of recovery.
“We’ll have to see how the skin grafts take,” the young woman had said – looking Eliot directly in the eyes as she spoke. “There are some hearing aids on the market that might work, but I’ll be in a better position to advise you once I see what your long term physical condition is likely to be.”
“What about in the short term?” Nate asked – taking some of the practical burden from Eliot’s shoulders. He’d insisted on being present for the meeting, even though they all knew how he felt about hospitals. It was obvious to Faith that having Nate around steadied Eliot, and she was grateful to her father for that.
“In the short term,” the doctor said – still looking at Eliot, “I have the numbers of some agencies who specialize in helping people…transition.” Faith wondered if she was the only one in the room that had felt Eliot tense when the conversation shifted in that particular direction. “We also have occupational therapists here in the hospital that can be a great help to you during this time.”
The meeting had lasted the better part of an hour. Eliot had listened to everything that was said as best he could, but Nate was the one who asked the questions and made all the important points. Faith sat at Eliot’s side – her hand on his thigh – and tried not to look as terrified and lost as she felt.
Finally, Nate had offered to walk the doctor out. Faith knew he was hoping some privacy would encourage Eliot to open up and talk to her, but the truth of it was she had no idea where to even begin trying. It wasn’t the nature of their relationship to push each other, and even though she suspected Eliot needed to talk to somebody, Faith was positive she wasn’t the right person for the job.
He needs you. Awareness of how damaged Eliot was had kept her in the room and trying that fateful afternoon. “Sounds like you have options,” she offered after a few painful moments of silence.
She’d already lost him. When Faith turned back towards him, Eliot was already sliding down in bed – turning his back on her. ”I’m really tired.”
It started a trend that would continue well past his release from the hospital. Eliot never shunned the others’ attempts to help him settle into his new life, but he started actively avoiding being around them any more than he absolutely had to. Hardison had been relieved; the hacker’s guilt over what had happened was growing virtually unchecked. Faith knew Sophie and Nate were arguing privately about the wisdom of sending him to a professional.
None of them knew how much of what was going on Parker understood, but whether somebody had spoken to her or not, the thief seemed to sense Eliot’s need for distance. That left Faith watching helplessly as Eliot drew further and further away, and Nate and Sophie waited for her to figure out a way to bridge the gulf.
“He’ll reach out eventually,” Sophie had said one night. “And when he does, it’s going to be you he turns to, Faith.”
Eliot was in the ring when she finally walked into Pete’s a half hour after getting the owner’s call. Faith watched, transfixed, as he went through his footwork exercises. His movements were slow and almost painfully precise – and completely lacking in the grace and power that was so much a part of Eliot’s fighting style.
“He started easing up right after I called you.” Pete – the gym’s owner – was standing nearby, watching Eliot from the shadows. “But he fell twice, Faith. It’s not good.”
“I didn’t even know he’d been released to start training again,” she said, watching Eliot stumble half-way through a simple pivot. “How long’s he been back?”
Pete clearly wasn’t comfortable with the question, but finally admitted, “A couple weeks.”
Thanking him, Faith arranged with the man to lock up, then walked across the floor towards Eliot and the ring.
Eliot saw her before he heard her approach – the irony of it wasn’t lost on either of them. “What are you doing here?” he asked, wincing slightly. It was something Faith had first noticed him doing in the hospital; in addition to all the other issues Eliot was grappling with, loss of his hearing on only one side seemed to have changed how his voice sounded to him. He kept pausing at odd points during conversations, as if his brain still expected to be able to fix whatever was wrong.
“Pete called,” Faith said, looking up at him. “He was worried about you.”
The scowl hasn’t changed, she noted in the split second before Eliot turned his back on her and resumed his footwork exercises. “He shouldn’t have bothered,” he said – almost as if answering her had been an after-thought.
Sometime in the previous few weeks, Sophie had compared Eliot’s behavior to that of a wounded animal – choosing isolation in order to compensate for an increased vulnerability during the healing process. One problem with that, Faith thought, quickly toeing off her shoes and swinging herself up into the ring. The animal eventually returns to their former healthy state or dies. Eliot was trapped somewhere between those two states of being, and Faith finally understood with a clarity she couldn’t verbalize that he wasn’t going to be able to escape without help.
“Find your fucking balance!” she snapped as he wobbled again.
She’d startled him. “What the fuck do you think I’ve been doing?” he growled, glaring at her over his shoulder.
“I think you’re trying to act like nothing’s changed – like if you push yourself hard enough you can magically get back to where you were before.”
That did it. Eliot rounded on her, and Faith automatically dropped into a light defensive stance. “Don’t worry,” he snarled, his hands clenching into fists. “I know I’m never going to be what I was.” He gestured angrily at the right side of his head. “It’s not exactly something I’m ever going to be able to forget.”
He’d moved too quickly; Faith’s heart broke as she saw him struggle against the vertigo threatening to drop him on his ass. “And if you start learning how to compensate for your injury, you’ll have to really face what happened and how you feel about it.”
His answering laugh was sharp and bitter. “Don’t try to psycho-analyze me, Faith. You’ve said it yourself – you’re no good at the touchy-feely stuff.”
It was a calculated jab, designed to push her away. So be it, Faith thought. “I don’t need to be a shrink to recognize a fucking temper tantrum when I see it,“ she countered. “You ain’t that deep Sport – not about this.”
“Get out!” he yelled – as close to truly angry as she’d ever seen him. Faith slowly and deliberately folded her arms across her chest and stood her ground.
“Make me.”
Eliot’s face was suddenly full of more emotions than Faith could have parsed in a lifetime. His shoulders tensed, as if he was going to engage with her, but relaxed almost as quickly as he remembered his chances of doing anything but ending up flat on the mat were almost non-existent. After an impossibly long silence he bowed his head. “Please go, Faith. I can’t do this with you. Not now.”
Faith exhaled softly, tamping down some of her own temper in the process. “You invited me in, Eliot. You told me it was okay to be here, and that it was safe to care about you.” She swallowed hard against the suddenly painful lump in her throat. “I’ll be damned if I lose one more moment of what we have together because you’re too much of a coward to accept that your life has changed.”
She was half-convinced he was going to swing at her and damn the consequences. Instead, some of the rage and tension gripping his body seemed to suddenly be bleeding out of him. “I have accepted that my life has changed,” he said finally – his voice calmer, and more reasonable than she’d heard it in weeks. “I just don’t know what I’m supposed to do about it.”
Heart pounding in her chest, Faith walked forward until she was in arm’s reach. “You ask for help,” she said, reaching out to cover his hand with her own. “And when people offer, you accept that it’s because they care about what happens to you – not because they feel sorry for you. Or guilty.” She paused, shrugging. “Okay, in Hardison’s case it might be because he feels guilty.”
The shadow of a smile ghosted across Eliot’s lips at last. “I can live with that.”
"All right then," Faith said. "Let's start by figuring out where your center of balance is." Without waiting for an answer, she dropped crossed-legged to the mat and looked up at him. "Come on - you know how this works."
Shaking his head, Eliot lowered himself into a position mirroring hers. "You are the damndest female I have ever met," he said.
Faith grinned at him. "Lucky you."
Author:
telarynWord Count: 1925
Fandom: Leverage/BTVS
Characters: Nate & Faith/Eliot
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Crippling injury to team member
Disclaimer: No ownership implied, no profit obtained.
Summary: As Eliot struggles to recover from an injury in the field, Faith tries to reach him and remind him that he isn't alone.
Author's Note: Written for
angst_bingo's Hiatus Challenge, for the prompts "deaf" and "moments lost".Faith wasn’t really surprised when she got the call, even though she wasn’t completely sure how Pete had gotten her number. “You better get down here.” After a quiet word of explanation to Nate, she’d excused herself from the gathering, and grabbed her bike.
It wasn’t the first time Eliot had gone to Pete’s gym to work out. He had a standing arrangement with the owner to have the place for his private use at least twice a week. Most of the time Pete used the break in his routine to catch up on his paperwork; occasionally Eliot slipped him an extra twenty so he and Faith could enjoy a more violent sort of foreplay than Eliot’s apartment would allow.
Faith hadn’t joined him at the gym since his accident. She hadn’t even known he’d started going back.
Eliot collapsing to his knees behind her, clutching his head and bellowing in pain. They’d all caught some of the feedback that had flashed across the coms that night, but somehow Eliot’s ear bud had taken the worst of it in ways Hardison was only just now starting to understand.
In the end it had taken Faith’s strength and Parker’s dexterity together to pry the device out of Eliot’s ear, and even then Parker had burned the tips of her fingers getting it free. By the time Nate and the others had reached them, Eliot had passed out in Faith’s arms.
Hardison had been nearly incoherent, shifting between techno-babble and tearful protestations that it shouldn’t have happened faster than any of them could follow. Sophie had finally put an arm around his shoulders and steered him away from the group.
“Faith.” Nate’s voice had been gentle as he crouched beside her. “Let me see.” He hadn’t tried to convince her to let Eliot go – sensing in his way that she would have fought him.
Weeks later, Faith was still having nightmares about her first good look at the right side of Eliot’s head. Nate had inspected the ruined flesh with a terrifyingly calm detachment before withdrawing to call an ambulance. All Faith had been able to do was stare in horror at the reddened bloody flesh, streaked with black. Patches of his hair had been burned away; she hadn’t seen flames in those first few confused moments, but the clear evidence they’d been there couldn’t be denied.
Eliot had been six weeks in the hospital recovering, and Faith had visited him every day without fail. He’d been happy to see her, up until the afternoon the specialist Nate had found confirmed that whatever had gone wrong with the ear bud had destroyed the hearing in his right ear beyond any reasonable hope of recovery.
“We’ll have to see how the skin grafts take,” the young woman had said – looking Eliot directly in the eyes as she spoke. “There are some hearing aids on the market that might work, but I’ll be in a better position to advise you once I see what your long term physical condition is likely to be.”
“What about in the short term?” Nate asked – taking some of the practical burden from Eliot’s shoulders. He’d insisted on being present for the meeting, even though they all knew how he felt about hospitals. It was obvious to Faith that having Nate around steadied Eliot, and she was grateful to her father for that.
“In the short term,” the doctor said – still looking at Eliot, “I have the numbers of some agencies who specialize in helping people…transition.” Faith wondered if she was the only one in the room that had felt Eliot tense when the conversation shifted in that particular direction. “We also have occupational therapists here in the hospital that can be a great help to you during this time.”
The meeting had lasted the better part of an hour. Eliot had listened to everything that was said as best he could, but Nate was the one who asked the questions and made all the important points. Faith sat at Eliot’s side – her hand on his thigh – and tried not to look as terrified and lost as she felt.
Finally, Nate had offered to walk the doctor out. Faith knew he was hoping some privacy would encourage Eliot to open up and talk to her, but the truth of it was she had no idea where to even begin trying. It wasn’t the nature of their relationship to push each other, and even though she suspected Eliot needed to talk to somebody, Faith was positive she wasn’t the right person for the job.
He needs you. Awareness of how damaged Eliot was had kept her in the room and trying that fateful afternoon. “Sounds like you have options,” she offered after a few painful moments of silence.
She’d already lost him. When Faith turned back towards him, Eliot was already sliding down in bed – turning his back on her. ”I’m really tired.”
It started a trend that would continue well past his release from the hospital. Eliot never shunned the others’ attempts to help him settle into his new life, but he started actively avoiding being around them any more than he absolutely had to. Hardison had been relieved; the hacker’s guilt over what had happened was growing virtually unchecked. Faith knew Sophie and Nate were arguing privately about the wisdom of sending him to a professional.
None of them knew how much of what was going on Parker understood, but whether somebody had spoken to her or not, the thief seemed to sense Eliot’s need for distance. That left Faith watching helplessly as Eliot drew further and further away, and Nate and Sophie waited for her to figure out a way to bridge the gulf.
“He’ll reach out eventually,” Sophie had said one night. “And when he does, it’s going to be you he turns to, Faith.”
Eliot was in the ring when she finally walked into Pete’s a half hour after getting the owner’s call. Faith watched, transfixed, as he went through his footwork exercises. His movements were slow and almost painfully precise – and completely lacking in the grace and power that was so much a part of Eliot’s fighting style.
“He started easing up right after I called you.” Pete – the gym’s owner – was standing nearby, watching Eliot from the shadows. “But he fell twice, Faith. It’s not good.”
“I didn’t even know he’d been released to start training again,” she said, watching Eliot stumble half-way through a simple pivot. “How long’s he been back?”
Pete clearly wasn’t comfortable with the question, but finally admitted, “A couple weeks.”
Thanking him, Faith arranged with the man to lock up, then walked across the floor towards Eliot and the ring.
Eliot saw her before he heard her approach – the irony of it wasn’t lost on either of them. “What are you doing here?” he asked, wincing slightly. It was something Faith had first noticed him doing in the hospital; in addition to all the other issues Eliot was grappling with, loss of his hearing on only one side seemed to have changed how his voice sounded to him. He kept pausing at odd points during conversations, as if his brain still expected to be able to fix whatever was wrong.
“Pete called,” Faith said, looking up at him. “He was worried about you.”
The scowl hasn’t changed, she noted in the split second before Eliot turned his back on her and resumed his footwork exercises. “He shouldn’t have bothered,” he said – almost as if answering her had been an after-thought.
Sometime in the previous few weeks, Sophie had compared Eliot’s behavior to that of a wounded animal – choosing isolation in order to compensate for an increased vulnerability during the healing process. One problem with that, Faith thought, quickly toeing off her shoes and swinging herself up into the ring. The animal eventually returns to their former healthy state or dies. Eliot was trapped somewhere between those two states of being, and Faith finally understood with a clarity she couldn’t verbalize that he wasn’t going to be able to escape without help.
“Find your fucking balance!” she snapped as he wobbled again.
She’d startled him. “What the fuck do you think I’ve been doing?” he growled, glaring at her over his shoulder.
“I think you’re trying to act like nothing’s changed – like if you push yourself hard enough you can magically get back to where you were before.”
That did it. Eliot rounded on her, and Faith automatically dropped into a light defensive stance. “Don’t worry,” he snarled, his hands clenching into fists. “I know I’m never going to be what I was.” He gestured angrily at the right side of his head. “It’s not exactly something I’m ever going to be able to forget.”
He’d moved too quickly; Faith’s heart broke as she saw him struggle against the vertigo threatening to drop him on his ass. “And if you start learning how to compensate for your injury, you’ll have to really face what happened and how you feel about it.”
His answering laugh was sharp and bitter. “Don’t try to psycho-analyze me, Faith. You’ve said it yourself – you’re no good at the touchy-feely stuff.”
It was a calculated jab, designed to push her away. So be it, Faith thought. “I don’t need to be a shrink to recognize a fucking temper tantrum when I see it,“ she countered. “You ain’t that deep Sport – not about this.”
“Get out!” he yelled – as close to truly angry as she’d ever seen him. Faith slowly and deliberately folded her arms across her chest and stood her ground.
“Make me.”
Eliot’s face was suddenly full of more emotions than Faith could have parsed in a lifetime. His shoulders tensed, as if he was going to engage with her, but relaxed almost as quickly as he remembered his chances of doing anything but ending up flat on the mat were almost non-existent. After an impossibly long silence he bowed his head. “Please go, Faith. I can’t do this with you. Not now.”
Faith exhaled softly, tamping down some of her own temper in the process. “You invited me in, Eliot. You told me it was okay to be here, and that it was safe to care about you.” She swallowed hard against the suddenly painful lump in her throat. “I’ll be damned if I lose one more moment of what we have together because you’re too much of a coward to accept that your life has changed.”
She was half-convinced he was going to swing at her and damn the consequences. Instead, some of the rage and tension gripping his body seemed to suddenly be bleeding out of him. “I have accepted that my life has changed,” he said finally – his voice calmer, and more reasonable than she’d heard it in weeks. “I just don’t know what I’m supposed to do about it.”
Heart pounding in her chest, Faith walked forward until she was in arm’s reach. “You ask for help,” she said, reaching out to cover his hand with her own. “And when people offer, you accept that it’s because they care about what happens to you – not because they feel sorry for you. Or guilty.” She paused, shrugging. “Okay, in Hardison’s case it might be because he feels guilty.”
The shadow of a smile ghosted across Eliot’s lips at last. “I can live with that.”
"All right then," Faith said. "Let's start by figuring out where your center of balance is." Without waiting for an answer, she dropped crossed-legged to the mat and looked up at him. "Come on - you know how this works."
Shaking his head, Eliot lowered himself into a position mirroring hers. "You are the damndest female I have ever met," he said.
Faith grinned at him. "Lucky you."
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9/9/11 13:48 (UTC)Woah, this hiatus thing really has you hurting them even more than usually...can't wait to see what else you come up with :).