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After the studio job, Hardison buys him a guitar.
Or at least, he thinks it’s Hardison who’s responsible for the box that appears in his apartment without warning a week after they get back from Memphis. Nate wouldn’t have done it anonymously, would have wanted to watch Eliot react in real time. Sophie would have marched Eliot into the guitar shop herself and refused to leave until she was satisfied that they’d chosen the right one. Parker’s gifts tend to be more… pocket-sized, but he assumes she’s responsible for smuggling it past his extensive security system such that he stumbles over the package on yet another restless and insomnia-induced trip to the bathroom and is immediately distracted from any ambitions of going back to bed.
There’s a sticky note on the package that says “Not a bomb! :)” in Parker’s spiky handwriting. So, you know, that’s also a clue.
He can tell what it is instantly - it’s a very distinctive shape and size of package - but when he makes it through the wrapping and cracks open the guitar’s case to take a peek, he’s struck by how beautiful the thing is. It’s all dark, rich wood, walnut and redwood in a soft satin finish, with stark stripes of natural grain across its front. The fretboard and bridge are ebony, highlighted with gold frets and a delicate inlay. The rosette around the soundhole has been hand-carved, long twisting flowers and vines that braid together against the black border, matching the binding that weaves its way around the guitar’s outer edge.
Eliot allows himself to drink it in for a minute, breath caught somewhere in the back of his throat, squatting in his moonlit corridor in bare feet and worn pajamas. Then he lets the lid fall gently closed, snaps the clasps shut, and pushes the case away.
Takes a breath. Stands up. Revisits the need for the bathroom trip.
He’s so tired.
In the bathroom, he resolutely ignores the urge to search the mirror for the kid that would have already been kneeling on the floor, guitar balanced on flannel pants like it’s Christmas morning, fingers flying over the opening notes of Backstreet Crush. Relying on muscle memory and hard-won calluses, trying not to mark the guitar when they split open from too many hours of practice. He reminds himself that there’s no chance he can do that anymore, all stiff joints and half-remembered chord shapes that had struggled even with Kaye Lynn’s relatively simple progressions a week ago.
He splashes water on his face, knuckles white on the edge of the sink, and calls Hardison.
“Wassup,” Hardison picks up on the second ring, drawing out the greeting, sounding a whole lot more fresh-faced than Eliot feels is reasonable. He frowns, lowers his phone to check the time. It’s somehow only 1 AM, so Hardison probably hasn’t even thought about going to bed yet.
“–Eliot? Dude? You good? You need me to come over?” Hardison is saying when he presses the phone back to his ear.
“Why is there a guitar in my apartment, Hardison,” Eliot grinds out.
“Aw hey, what’s with the attitude,” Hardison says, all feigned affront. “A man does one nice thing for a friend–”
“It’s not just a nice– that guitar must have cost, what, 10k? 15?”
“You worth it, baby,” Hardison says, which is– not any kind of rebuttal. Eliot can hear his shit-eating grin.
“Dammit, Hardison, that’s not– that’s not reasoning!” he fumes. He’s restless, wants to pace, but he’s still locked in his goddamned bathroom and if he goes back out to the corridor he’s going to have to step over the guitar again.
Hardison is quiet for a moment, and then he says, determinedly, “All right, I’m coming over.”
Eliot reflexively protests, because what the hell, Hardison, it’s the middle of the night and literally nothing of any consequence is going on, it’s fine, it’s just a damn guitar, it can definitely wait until the morning, at least, or even better Hardison can just leave him alone to deal with this at his own speed– but he’s already been hung up on.
Right.
He refuses to still be locked in here when Hardison arrives, so he takes the plunge and steps back into the corridor. The guitar case is lying where he left it, all smooth wine-rich leather and imitation ivory clasps, and he picks his way around it towards the distracting sanctuary of the kitchen. There’s no chance Hardison’s remembered to have dinner, and Eliot’s got most of a ragu in the freezer that he has just enough time to make into real food before company gets here.
He also disarms the alarms on the external door, begrudgingly, because he doesn’t want to wake up his neighbours in the middle of the night. Begrudgingly.
Hardison arrives heralded by the usual thudding noise of a two-litre bottle of orange soda being pinned against the front door with one hip as he juggles his keys and a laptop in his hands. Eliot goes to open the door before he can unlock it, because he needs an offensive victory after that phone call, and Hardison tumbles through. Eliot catches the soda before it hits the floor.
“Heyyy,” Hardison says. He takes the bottle from Eliot’s hand. “Look at you, protecting my soda.”
“Protecting my carpet, more like,” Eliot snipes.
“You talk a big game but you can’t fool– ooh, is that her?”
Hardison deposits his pile of crap on the floor and beelines for the guitar case, just barely visible poking out around the corner of the laundry cupboard that borders the corridor to the bedroom. Eliot would much rather Hardison move it than have to do it himself, so he picks up the soda and the laptop and takes them through to the living area. He puts some pasta on to go with the ragu.
“I figured you know way more about what to check than I do,” Hardison says, all professionalism as he comes back and opens the case on the coffee table, “So I haven’t actually seen her. But, wow. The Petros really came through, huh?”
“It’s– it’s a really nice guitar, Hardison,” Eliot says, because he’s not ungrateful, exactly, it’s just– he’s rusty, definitely not good enough for a guitar this nice, and there’s no shot that the kid who had been that good could ever afford something like this, and– it’s a lot, is all he’s saying.
It’s a lot, to just be handed something that he would have killed to own twenty years ago, back when that was something he could say earnestly and not even flinch at the implications. Instead, now, he’s spent the best part of twenty years doing some much-less-figurative killing that was supposed to be a much safer choice for his future, a much safer bet at making it out of Oklahoma, than carrying on with his hand-me-down guitar on the occasional Monday nights that didn’t clash with football practice, trying to establish himself in bars full of narrow-minded locals where he wasn’t even old enough to drink yet.
Eliot swallows, and goes to check on the pasta.
When he looks up from the stove, Hardison’s gotten distracted by the intricate embellishment on the guitar, running long fingers across the carved rosette to feel the textures of the weaving vines. Which, fine. But then Hardison looks up and goes to pick the guitar up out of the case, and Eliot–
“Hey,” he says, sharp as he can manage. “This is– uh. It’s not just about the guitar. For me.”
Hardison freezes. Puts the guitar back, settles back against the sofa in a way that Eliot realises means that this is what Hardison drove over here at 1 AM for. Not to admire the guitar, but to figure out what had Eliot so worked up. Eliot doesn’t know whether he’s enraged by this or absurdly, unexpectedly grateful.
“Right,” Hardison says. “And would it happen to be about ‘the road not travelled’?”
Eliot just nods, once, and heads over to the half of the sofa not occupied by Hardison. He inhales, squares his shoulders, and lifts the guitar out of its case, reverently, settling it across one knee. Fiddles with the tuning pegs as he checks over the action and the intonation. It’s good, it’s all so good, and even just picking at the strings he can tell the body’s built for the kind of warmth and depth to its sound that marks out a real quality instrument. Hardison watches him carefully.
“I’m just tired,” Eliot says, trying for a laugh that comes out sounding very half-hearted even to his own ears. “It’s not that big of a deal, I swear, I just–”
“Hey, don’t talk like that,” Hardison says seriously, turning around on the sofa to face him. “Stuff’s allowed to be important, even when it’s not life or death. Especially when it’s not life or death.”
Eliot mulls that over, has a go at internalising it, meets resistance of some shadowy nature in his mind that shrinks back when he tries to examine it. He places the guitar carefully to one side and gets up again to serve dinner.
“Nate got me a violin after Scheherezade,” Hardison says to fill the silence. “Out of nowhere, the guy was all ‘sorry I hypnotised you’, and ‘you’ve got potential, kid’ - I think Sophie must have talked to him - and he just gave me this wonderful old violin. I stopped playing when I was 14, man, I’m nowhere near good enough for that kind of instrument, but damn does it feel good to play.”
Eliot is in the process of ladling pasta and ragu into two bowls, but he stops what he’s doing to level an unimpressed glare at Hardison.
“You’re definitely good enough, man,” he says. “I think people in that audience were actually crying. We had a moment of– of collective revelation down in the basement, and that was just hearing it over your shitty earpiece.”
Hardison raises one eyebrow at the slight against his earpieces, but otherwise doesn’t rise to the challenge, which immediately sets alarm bells ringing. Instead he slides his gaze, deliberately, towards the beautiful guitar abandoned on the sofa.
“Dammit,” Eliot says, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Don’t–”
“Teenage girls literally ran in front of cars for you, E,” Hardison smirks. “How you think they’d feel, if they hear you don’t think you deserve this?”
He hasn’t verbalised any sentiment of the sort, but it’s painfully accurate, and that’s the kind of gut punch that requires motion in response. Eliot strides across the room to deposit a bowl of pasta in front of Hardison in the hope that he’ll eat it and shut up for just a second. Hardison seems to detect that he needs a moment, or maybe he’s just that hungry, because he gamely picks up the bowl and begins the process of shovelling it down his throat too fast to taste. Eliot leaves his own on the side, destined for the fridge once it cools, because he actually eats his meals on a structured schedule like a sane person.
He sits back in his place on the sofa, allowing himself to get comfortable this time and tucking one leg up to better support the guitar. There used to be a mindset he could reach, when he held a guitar, that let him listen closer, let him process things easier. Let him channel all of his desperate teenage frustrations into creation rather than destruction.
With Kaye Lynn, he was doing something different. He wasn’t creating, he was mourning. He doesn’t know if he can get there again, but he’s starting to want to try.
He runs his left hand up and down the neck, listens to his fingertips scratch the metal winding on the strings, just as covered in calluses as they used to be but built up in all the wrong places. He floats his right hand down to pick at the strings, and then curiosity gets the better of him and he goes for a couple of full-energy strums that make the body resonate happily against his chest before remembering his neighbours and damping the sound.
“Woah,” he chuckles, “That’s pretty damn good.”
“Yeah?” Hardison says around a mouthful of pasta. “Okay, cool, because I don’t know anything about guitars, man, I was out flying by the seat of my pants here.”
“Yeah,” Eliot says. “I mean, I don’t either, really. I just needed something to sing with, y’know, so I taught myself some– chord shapes, rhythms, that kind of thing. Basics. But you can tell, right, when it sounds right?”
“You never had lessons?” Hardison says. “Damn, man. I don’t know anyone who learned a violin like that. That crap’s regimented, might as well be bootcamp, the way string teachers have you doing these string-crossing drills, hand positions, articulation, all that nonsense.”
“The guitar teacher wasn’t hot,” Eliot says, deadpan. “Didn’t have an excuse.”
There actually hadn’t been any kind of guitar teacher to speak of when Eliot was growing up, much less any violinists. There were only sad old guys who frequented open mic nights or haunted street corners and would occasionally let kids take a turn strumming guitars almost the same size as them. They had a habit of telling anyone who would listen about how music was the only part of their life that hadn’t left them in the dust, but then the only things they ever sang about were those missing parts, their catalog of regrets.
Eliot hadn’t much wanted to learn from them.
There wasn’t really money for music lessons, anyway, and he would have had to skip shifts at the hardware store to cram it into his schedule while somehow convincing the guys on the football team that singing and home ec hadn’t turned him soft. So, self-taught it was.
“Are you one of those people who can just pick stuff up by ear?” Hardison says, something crafty creeping into his expression. When Eliot shrugs, he continues, “Because I’ve got something we could play together. If you want.”
Eliot sits up, interested despite himself.
“Am I going to hate it,” he asks, because he knows he’ll regret not asking.
“You’ll love it,” Hardison says firmly. “Well, maybe. It’s good, though! It’s like, nearly country, you’ll get to do all your southern vowels and moody noodling around on the strings, it’ll be a great time. And I’ve wanted to learn that violin solo pretty much since I first saw– I mean, since I first heard it. So.”
“Right,” Eliot says. “Send me a– I don’t know, a YouTube video or something, I guess.”
Hardison’s face lights up, and Eliot capitalises on the opportunity to kick him out of his apartment without feeling too much guilt.
They agree to spend the week learning their own parts and try to find some time to play together once they’ve got that nailed down. Hardison sends over the clip seemingly as soon as he gets home that night, and Eliot settles down the next day with his nice headphones and a notepad to start figuring it out. The guitar hasn’t moved from its place on the sofa, but it looks a lot less intimidating in the daylight, where the brightness of the apartment softens its colours a little.
The song Hardison wants him to learn is unexpectedly short, less than a minute long, and Eliot wonders briefly if he’s being eased into things. It’s pretty simple, mainly chords, but there’s plenty of room to deconstruct them and play around with rhythms in the second verse. He’s starting to relax into it, recapture some of the magic of playing as a kid. Reclaiming the process of having feelings in his head and being able to externalise them without having to find the right words.
It reminds him of learning to cook.
There’s a bit more than just a guitar and a violin going on, including a single bar of prominent banjo (which Eliot immediately deems to be a problem for Hardison) and some kind of dull metallic percussion in the background, but it should sound mostly complete with just the two of them. He’s going to have to think about other songs to recommend they learn next, after this. Maybe something more upbeat would be good, hoedown or whatever.
Then there’s the singing. Kaye Lynn told him he needed to feel the weight of the lyrics, but these lyrics are themed around a type of resiliently optimistic yearning for freedom that Eliot has never really mastered, the kind that can withstand material disaster through the power of mental discipline and determination. He can yearn to yearn, though, and he figures it’s the same difference, so that’s what he tries to channel when he sings.
When he arrives at Hardison’s apartment a week later, new guitar slung across one shoulder, he’s feeling slightly more resilient than he has in a while. Resilient enough, in fact, that when Parker is the one to respond to the doorbell, he doesn’t immediately turn on his heel and get the hell outta Dodge.
“What–” he says as her face appears through the crack in the door before she opens it fully. He can’t tell what she’s thinking.
“Hey,” she says, sounding a little on edge, which sure makes two of them. “Hardison, he’s here!” Then she turns around and disappears off inside, leaving him to follow her because somebody’s got to lock the front door behind them. When he arrives in the living area, he discovers that Hardison has a fancy-looking violin propped on its own stand, and Parker is sitting on top of some sort of wooden box with a… saucepan? upside down by her feet.
“Since when do you own a saucepan?” Eliot asks incredulously.
“Oh, that,” Hardison says, head popping up from behind the sofa, and Eliot is just now noticing the audio cables running around the room across the floor. “I stole it from Nate’s kitchen yesterday. He won’t notice.”
“I don’t think that’s how you’re supposed to use them,” Eliot says, because he apparently asked the wrong question the first time, and clearly nobody is going to throw him a bone.
“I’m going to hit it,” Parker says with a feigned confidence that means she’s reciting something Hardison told her. “Look.” And she holds up two drumsticks.
“You spent fifteen thousand dollars on a guitar for me,” Eliot says to Hardison, forcibly unclenching his jaw to do so, “And Parker’s gonna hit a saucepan?”
“Hey,” Hardison says sharply, and points a microphone threateningly at Eliot. “She’s also sitting on a $300 cajón. You thought your music education was lacking, just wait ‘til you hear about Parker’s. We all gotta start somewhere, man.”
Eliot glances sideways at where Parker is perched on her wildly expensive box, knees drawn up to her chest and looking a little lost, buried in a knitted hoodie that he’s almost certain was in his closet two days ago.
“Right,” he says. “Fine.”
And he sets down his case and starts setting up.
They have a few false starts, bickering over who has to play the banjo line, but eventually settle into something that feels easy. They’re moving together and anticipating each other’s rhythm, the way they stretch and pull at the notes and lyrics, taking breaths to give space and diving into each new line. Eliot, who has never played music with anyone else before, is having something of an out-of-body experience, like half his brain is dedicated to predicting Hardison’s movements and meeting him there. It’s a dance, in the same way that fighting can be.
Hardison is thinking too hard, at the start, his classical training evident in his poise and precision. Eliot has to step in and coax some mess out of him, make him lean into the strings until their intonation warps, just slightly, under the pressure. Add weight to the movements between the notes so that his hands are just slightly out of sync with each other. Play pitchier, if you will. Once Hardison gets it, though, he’s unstoppable, sawing and soaring through the shapes of the phrases like he’s been playing bluegrass his whole life.
Parker spends the first ten minutes sitting stock still, just tracking their every move with watchful eyes, and Eliot cannot work out what she’s gaining from the experience. But then she starts to soften, swaying a little with their music, and once they’ve played it through a few times she starts tapping away at the box, which turns out to have a very warm timbre and an impressive range in tone. It’s not– she’s mostly managing not to throw the others off, even with the occasional saucepan hit, and that was honestly Eliot’s main concern, so given that she seems to be enjoying herself he’s not about to try to change anything she’s doing. It’s not exactly polished like you might expect a classical performance to be, but Eliot’s type of music has never really been much for polish, anyway.
He thinks back to the original clip Hardison had sent, the clanking in the background evoking some kind of incessant industrial churn, and he thinks he gets it now. She’s adding something that he and Hardison can’t generate, a sense of motion that carries the tuned instruments atop it and pushes them forwards.
They play this damned minute-long song for nearly an hour, to the point where Eliot is getting sick of it and keeps trailing off into improv at the end of every run through, sweeping Parker along for the ride. Hardison occasionally tries to join in, but he’s not confident in the way he needs to be for it to sound convincing, and he’s using the source material as too much of a crutch so that it’s holding him back from coming up with anything new. But they can work on it, together.
They record a couple of the last takes, and Eliot’s not perfectly happy with any of them, but he thinks that might be sort of the point. He’s allowed to go home only once he promises to find them some new material to work on in the coming weeks.
He wouldn’t have it any other way.
Parker follows him out to the front door but doesn’t seem to be intending to leave, which he’s not going to think too hard about right now.
“Thank you,” she says as he’s loading his guitar, now broken in and familiar, into the trunk of his car. He shoots her a confused glance.
“What for?” he asks.
“I liked how that made me feel,” she says, no longer needing to feign the confidence that she’d greeted him with. She’s not reciting, anymore. “It was like we connected all our minds into this one big hivemind and all knew what each other were feeling. And I was just hitting stuff but it seemed right.”
“People make an entire profession out of ‘just hitting stuff’,” Eliot says. “It’s a fine art. You just have to do it more until it’s not something you have to think about.”
“Is that what you did?” she asks.
“Sure,” he says. “Lost it for a bit in the middle there, but maybe this time I’ll learn it a bit different. Take a different route back to the top, maybe the road not travelled.”
“Good,” she grins, “because I like learning with you and Hardison.”
The image of her smile accompanies him the whole way back to his apartment, seared into his brain as he wonders if he’d looked like that, once. Maybe the first time his dad had put that old beat-up guitar in his hands and ruffled his hair like he trusted Eliot to make something good out of it. Or maybe lying in the bed of his highschool-era pickup truck, late in the last fall before he joined up, learning that Aimee could sing just as well as he could. Better, even, and the two of them layering harmonies over each other like blankets to protect from the chill.
Or, maybe– just now, in Hardison’s apartment, notes falling into place alongside people he never dreamed he’d have this kind of relationship with.
“Wait,” Hardison says the next day, and he sounds scandalised. “Eliot. E. My man. You telling me you learned to play guitar and sing like that, all on your pimply teenage lonesome, before the Internet?”