![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
treefrogie84Prompt: What the team did while Nate was in prison.
Sophie
Sophie spent the two weeks immediately following the Maltese Falcon job working to clean up her overseas adventure. She made sure the others got off safe and then back to her flat to get things worked out. After Tara’s call, she had been so frantic to get back to Boston she wasn’t even entirely sure the entry and exit stamps on her passports matched up. By the time Annie Kroy arrived on that boat, she’d been 3 different people in 5 different countries. It took her five days to figure out which her had been in which country and another three for her favorite forger to get her passports back to her. It was rank amateurism to allow such a simple thing to get screwed up. But then, Nate always brought out the amateur in her.
By the time she gotten everything she could dealt with on her own, Alec was back from Nana’s and could help her get things straightened out international databases. Once that was all sorted, Sophie settled into one of her smaller American aliases and attended Nate’s trial as a reporter for the Boston Republic. Sarah Jane Baker had plenty of leeway to be noisy and poke around the courthouse.
But that was depressing. So at the end of every day, she stripped off Sarah Jane and wandered over Boston being someone, anyone, else. Most of the time, she didn’t even bother with an ID or anything else. Just picked a name and and accent and went out. The ones that worked or she liked, got put aside to be turned into proper people. The ones that didn’t… got tossed like yesterday’s chip paper.
Parker and Eliot got back after about 3 weeks on the same day from… somewhere and somewhere else with guns. Sophie wasn’t entirely certain where they had been, but Alec wasn’t concerned. Parker was being chipper like she had pulled off a big score, but there was nothing in the news. Eliot was actually relaxed and not growly, the occasional glimpse into the family man he was raised to be. The timing bothered her, but she couldn’t put her finger on it.
Once Parker got back, Sophie starting bringing her along on the evening trips. Parker had the potential to be, if not a world class grifter, something pretty close, and she needed all the practice. It had the added benefit of keeping Sophie out of her own head, which she needed as the summer drew on and the trial just kept dragging on.
It was a particularly bad day in July- the prosecution laying blame for a different crew’s pisspoor job on Nate- before Sophie decided she was sick of the farce and start planning an escape.
Alec
Alec stayed in Boston for precisely 3 hours after all the hullabaloo at the harbor. Long enough to do a preliminary scrub of any security cam footage and set up a couple of search alert algorithms. By the time that was completed, he was on a train to Albany with plane tickets to Nana’s waiting. After watching Eliot terrorize someone by the simple mention of their sister, Alec had no intention of traveling directly to Nana’s ever again and certainly wasn’t going to lead someone there.
He slid seamlessly into the routine at Nana’s. Helping the kids with their homework, teasing the kids who had been there longer, being quietly supportive of the ones that were new. In careful exchanges over coffee, he and Nana discussed what could be done to help the kids whose records wouldn’t be completely expunged when they turned 18. It was never explicit, but if some of the kids woke up on their 20th birthdays to an envelope with a completely new identity, well, Nana couldn’t go to jail (or worse, lose the kids) if she didn’t know anything.
There were rules of course- no violent offenses and nothing that actually hurt anyone. Unarmed breaking and entering was fine, selling meth to children was not. But the kids he could help, Alec did. Shiny new IDs on the morning of their 20th birthday, a contact waiting for them to help settle in, and the expectation they would update Nana twice a year. It wasn’t a perfect system, but Ash had helped him out the same way when they were kids and this was Alec’s way of paying it forward. (He used to nudge the kids who were violent because that’s what life had given them out towards a roadhouse in Nebraska. But it burned the same time Ash had died, so now he didn’t know where to send them.)
By the time he’d finished his vacation with Nana, he had done a full scrub of everything that had happened at the waterfront. Nate may have volunteered to go down with Kadjic, but like hell anyone else would.
Sophie’s attempted to ‘fix’ her passport mess meant it took 3 times longer to actually fix it. How she had ever gotten along solo was beyond him. At any rate, it gave Alec time to find Parker and Eliot in Hong Kong and make sure they weren’t having too much fun. He wasn’t entirely sure what they were up to, but there were some nice shots of Eliot’s bare ass on the security tapes and oop, yeah, that was Parker climbing him like a tree.
By the end of the third week, Alec started playing with the backdoors on the courthouse’s security system between WoW raids (he still didn’t understand why some of his guild insisted only 1 raid per day…). He was bored, and it was time to start figuring out how to get their mastermind back.
Eliot
Three days before everything went to hell, Eliot pulled Parker to the side after the briefing. He had a retrieval job lined up on the side, returning a favor to an old contact, and he wanted someone he could trust along to watch his back. On paper, the job was as easy and as safe as could be… but something about it bothered him and he wanted his own back up.
Which explained why two weeks later, after arriving in Hong Kong, he was hanging off the roof of a 30 story building with a frightened 20 year old tethered him while Parker did the actual retrieval. Damn Nate and his honesty and being a decent man. At least Parker was working her magic with the lines and harnesses and would be able to get the statue they were here for.
The job could have gone smoother, but for once, unexpected changes to the plan didn’t send Eliot into a tailspin. Parker had his back, had managed to work out a way to achieve both objectives without him getting hurt (he couldn’t remember the last time he finished a job with fewer bruises than he started it), and it was honestly the most relaxed he’d been on a retrieval job… ever. Having partners again was great. No panicking, just alternative exits and backup when things went south. Like when the daughters of major Party officials walk into an office unexpectedly and ask to be smuggled out of the country in exchange for not calling the cops, or worse, the Triad.
Of course, the buyer had tried to double cross them, deciding that having the Triad’s favor was worth more than the statue. Parker, with her overflow of crazy, took care of everything though. Found an alternate buyer, found passage for the girl, and still had enough time to drag him around looking for interesting food.
The next day, party official’s daughter safely out of the country and drop-off made, Eliot was only a bit surprised when Parker pushed him against the balcony window, stripped them both, and proceeded to climb him like a jungle gym. He was all for some life-affirming sex and Parker was bendy as hell. Better than that yoga instructor back in Indiana. (He did check about Hardison- no agreements or arrangements.)
Parker got it into her head to turn this trip into a proper vacation, complete with museum visits. He knew she mostly just wanted to scout out the security systems, but since she was willing to allow Eliot to visit the Teaware museum, he wasn’t going to complain too much. Behaving like normal tourists for a change, even if it was under fake names, how strange. Of course, it all shattered when he got a call from one of his old bosses, back when he was doing military contractor work. All he heard was weaponized virus in Hong Kong before he said yes.
The terrorists weren’t really that good at being terrorists, but were very good at disappearing. It made him think there was probably more to this than just some germ warfare. Eliot could normally find anyone, regardless of who was protecting them, but not these three. He was tempted to call Alec and see what he could find, but it wasn’t worth the cost of bringing Hardison onto the government’s radar. The threat was stopped and the virus burned itself out in a few days anyway. So it was just an annoyance.
Eliot was surprised when they got back to Boston to find new identities waiting for him, a DVD, and a note in Alec’s handwriting that simply read, “Do you have any idea how hard it is to scrub sex vids from the internet? Close the blinds next time.”
Parker
Parker started working on a way to get Nate back as soon as Eliot herded them onto the helicopter. A twenty hour flight to Hong Kong provided even more time to think about it. And yeah, she slept a bunch of that time, and pestered Eliot for exactly what the plan was while they were in Hong Kong, but there was plenty of time to try to duplicate Nate’s process for pulling together a job. But she was missing pieces. Something about this situation didn’t click, no matter how she rotated the problem. So she put it aside for a few days. If you can’t figure out how to break into one building, break into a similar one first.
In this case, that meant backing up Eliot while he retrieved a statue. Parker wasn’t really sure why he wanted her and not Alec for this, but she made a nest for herself in the air ducts a few hours before Eliot’s meeting. And when she got Eliot, the statue, that crying girl, and herself out when everything went wrong, she thought she had a pretty good bead on how to get Nate out. She even got them all out without Eliot having to break anything or anyone (she worried about him- it hurt to take hits like that- and he did it even when there were other options available).
When they got back to the hotel, after getting everyone safe, Parker thought Eliot still looked let down by how things had gone. So she jumped on him. Sex was almost always a cure for anything that made her unhappy, maybe it would do the same for him. She didn’t understand why he kept asking about her and Alec’s relationship though. Their relationship was the same as always- they were friends with the potential for something more, but it was just potential. Alec would never be able to handle her climbing him for wall sex anyway, so what did it matter? Her body to do what she wanted with it.
After, Parker cajoled Eliot into staying a few extra days- she loved Hong Kong- and do their version of tourism. The Art museum was a bit of a let down- the highest security was on the wrong pieces and the security on the highest value pieces was laughable. Even Eliot looked amused by how easy it would be. Eliot disappeared for a few days after that. He’d gotten a phone call that made him all growly, told her to stay in the hotel room and only eat pre-packaged food and water, and then disappeared into the poor part of the city. He was back in 3 days, so she didn’t think much of it.
But all vacations must come to an end and Parker thought she knew how to break Nate out of jail when his trial was done. She just needed to throw him off the roof of the courthouse and then fake his death. Getting to him was going to be the hard part. It was time to steal their mastermind back.
