Work Text:
Hardison nearly stopped as the team ran from the explosion, as a flicker of something different suddenly pierced the gray waves in his peripheral vision. He shook his head, re-focusing on running, but even though he was still feeling the panic from realizing that Dubenich had meant to kill them and hearing the sudden booms of the explosion, he felt his spirits soar. Nana had told him, and some of his older foster siblings had shared their own stories, about what it’d been like to start to see color, and most of the time it started with a flicker. He found himself hoping absurdly that Dubenich wasn’t done with them yet, if only because it would give him a reason to stick around these people for long enough to find out which of them might be the reason for the change.
Parker distantly registered the flickery sensation in her periphery as she ran from the fire, cataloging it for future reference, but she had run from enough close calls by now to not be distracted by it. It had seemed to, if anything, make her sight clearer at least, so at least she was fairly sure it wasn’t blindness induced by the explosion. Once she got somewhere safe and made sure none of these people could find her again, if the sensation was still there, maybe she’d ask Archie about it.
The flicker lingered at the edges of Hardison’s vision. Sometimes he thought that the sensation was getting stronger and more frequent, but it was hard to tell, until they tried to steal the David. Hardison spluttered when Parker suggested how they should cover their tracks, and his breath caught as she leaned into him, but then her lips were on his and they were wonderful and then the whole world shifted, the flicker ballooning to encompass his whole vision, faint and soft but very clearly colorful where before it had been gray. He stared at her in wonder as they broke apart. “Did you…can we talk about…?” he began, but Parker wasn’t looking at him, already through the door and tugging him along, and he resigned himself to simply drinking in the new view.
The flickers in Parker’s vision danced, growing and shrinking and moving around, until they took the Vioplex job. Archie had looked at her curiously when she’d asked him about it, but had said only that “it could happen to some people, but it will only help you see more clearly, so don’t worry about it.” Parker had shrugged and nodded, and gotten used to the sensation. Sometimes, if they weren’t moving too much, she could even tilt her head to bring certain things into the spot of focus, and she found that Archie was right.
The flickers seemed to react to this particular client, growing into huge starbursts as Parker watched her talk with Hardison. It was only after the job finished, and the client had left, leaving her alone at the bar with him, that they expanded to fill her whole vision for the first time, and seemed to settle, as though they were done flickering and were now here to stay, the faint blanket of color driving out the gray for good.
“You have to tell him how you feel,” Sophie had told her, and Parker didn’t know how she had known about what was happening with her vision, or why Hardison might be able to help, but she trusted her.
“I’ve been having weird feelings,” she told Hardison, and the way he looked at her, the way his eyes shone in their new shade, made her heart do something almost as weird as what her vision had been doing, and she wondered vaguely if they were connected. She wanted to say more, tried to say more, but she couldn’t. “For pretzels,” she said quickly, retreating, focusing on analyzing the tones of the pretzels on the bar in front of her instead of the tones of Hardison’s skin.
Hardison’s expression was curious, but he didn’t press her, and the new brightness to her vision seemed to pulse at his assurance that the pretzels would be there when she wanted them.
It was dark, with only the faint light of the flip phone to light the small space, but something about it seemed to intensify as he began to breathe deeply alongside Parker’s coaching. When the bullets tore through the coffin, he gasped for breath and blinked as the bright light streamed through, and when the lid popped open, the color overwhelmed him. Maybe it was the time he’d spent in the dark of the coffin that made everything look brighter, but maybe, he thought, it was that the woman standing there with a gun, the woman he couldn’t have survived this job without, who had just told him that she needed him, had gained one more piece of his heart.
Parker was trying to learn the weighted boots for the chess tournament job when the colors flared in intensity again. She blinked, staring at the new brightness in Hardison’s face, in his eyes, as he held her, telling her that he had her, that she wasn’t alone anymore. She tried to focus on the rest of what he was saying, about dancing and shifting her weight, but the world was so vivid and his arms were around her. She shut her eyes, trying to focus on his voice instead, on the feel of his boots underneath hers, walking her through the steps she needed to fool the pressure sensors. Dimly she felt him shift her weight off his feet, back onto the pressure pad, but he was still humming, and she walked the steps again, feeling lighter and freer than she had since putting on the boots. She opened her eyes to see that the brightness was still there, but it was softer somehow, as though her eyes had adjusted to it even while they’d been closed, and Hardison was beaming at her, proud and elated and…loving, she thought, her heart racing a little as she realized it, and she knew that he was right, that she wasn’t alone anymore. Her new sense of clarity seemed to pulse slightly, and she knew that not being alone anymore, if it meant being with Hardison, would only make the world easier to see.