eliot’s wrist is killing him in the toy joy, and nate doesn’t include any risk of eliot punching someone, which is why eliot’s out as super sensitive blogger dad. right at the end, nate realizing how to, yknow, work in eliot’s pain to the plan.
I still think it’s absolutely unconscionable to have Eliot explicitly not be in a relationship with Parker and Hardison in Redemption but I am so so into the idea bounced about in tags between @eliot-wolfgirl-spencer and myself that Eliot was not, in fact, even a little bit lonely and sad that whole time. Why would he be?
He has a nice home with his best friends, the people he loves and trusts more than anything in the world. They live together, they eat together, they bicker and laugh and cry together, they share a space; they fall asleep on the sofa together in front of one of Hardison’s favourite movies, and Parker teaches him all the things she loves to do and teaches him how to be safe, and Hardison works together with him on making a small army of vigilante food trucks, and Eliot cooks all his love for them into three meals a day, ones that pair well with orange soda and cereal, and they see one another in all states of undress and tiredness and sleeplessness and it’s safe, its domestic, its everything he needs and everything he wants, save his own hand or a fling from a bar every so often. It’s never occurred to him to be sad or lonely. He’s perfectly, completely content.
It also, unfortunately, has never occurred to him that he’s basically common-law married to Parker and Hardison.
It’s only when Hardison leaves, and new people start to live with them, new colleagues, a team, family, yeah, but it’s different - it’s only then, when everyone is telling Parker or Bre they’re sorry Hardison is gone, acknowledging you must miss him, that Eliot begins to feel that heartsick, longing, loneliness. It knocks him for six - he dates a cop, man - and he doesn’t realise, because he doesn’t have the language to articulate it and the others don’t know to offer him sympathy, that he’s not yearning for a new relationship. His loneliness isn’t because he’s not dating someone. It’s because for the first time in a decade he doesn’t have that home life. It’s not the wish for something that he never had - it’s the sudden loss of something he didn’t realise he did.
Rewatching the pilot and watching how, when he sees how much that score made him, Eliot’s tucking his head and just staring at that number and laughing - not throw his head back, but like the kind where you’re almost fighting it but not quite not really, tight but wide grin that’s not really open but still splits your face and makes your cheeks hurt, and almost manic about it, and thinking bout someone kiss this man so I don’t have to, and like
I know metatextually they hadn’t even STARTED working on that plot yet but like
Knowing what we know later, i can’t help but think back to that moment and Eliot staring at that number and thinking holy shit. this is it. this is as free as I’m gonna get.
Because shit was getting tight, as a freelance retrieval specialist I think. Eliot’s name was… starting to collect black marks. Failures.
He couldn’t retrieve the monkey. He couldn’t retrieve the dagger of Aku Abi. The community talks. Who knows what else had gone wrong in the year between the Rashomon flashback and the Nigerian Job? Nate said he chased them all, at one point or another. For Eliot, since Nate didn’t know about the Moreau connection, that would’ve been in his freelance retrieval phase.
And Nate’s good.
How many jobs did Eliot lose to him? How did his reputation fare, after those last couple failures? Did some of the higher ups know about his connection to Moreau? Did Damien have him blacklisted from certain circles, keeping him from taking more lucrative jobs with people who knew his full skillset, leaving him with the penny-ante players paying him well below what he should be getting (“why are you sending second-rate thugs after me?” perhaps because that’s the price range you have to work in now, that’s the only tax bracket that will hire you, the kind that hires second-rate)?
Had Eliot been considering it, until that moment? The possibility that Damien was right? That he would, inevitably, come crawling back after failing on his own? Maybe he could make it another couple months… a year or two even, if this success could bolster his flagging rep -
(there’s a moment in the hospital, when all seems lost. they’ve been busted. the job that was supposed to save him doomed him. he’d find his way out, but after this colossal failure who’s gonna hire him? he resigns himself to it happen sooner rather than later. then Parker gets Nate a phone, and he watches the man work a miracle)
- but he could see it looming on the horizon. The encroaching fear of knowing what was at the end of the road for him, the inevitable return to…
Then he opens that envelope. Sees that payout. TheScore.
And in one singular fucking moment, one fell swoop, it comes crashing in on him that he’ll never have to work for Moreau again.
Hell, he’ll never have to take a single job he doesn’t want to again. He can pick and choose his clients. Pick and choose his methods. The non-lethality that he was fearing was becoming a liability, just like Damien had said it would, suddenly no longer an issue. He could choose jobs he knew he could handle, instead of jumping at whatever was offered to him and hoping it worked out.
All because of this job. The one he’d hope would get him by just a little longer. The one that for a moment he feared had ruined him.
Because of this team. This ragtag little group of people he was trying so hard not to enjoy the company of. Not to get attached to, even after such a short amount of time.
Because of Nate Ford.
So when Hardison calls him up later, with a story about another job and vet who needs their help, there’s no hesitation in the “yeah, I’ll be there.”
Eliot had already decided the moment he saw the caller ID.
