Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Trust

Eliot didn't trust anybody anymore. Yeah, people were predictable most of the time, but most of the time didn't mean all of the time, and the difference between the two wasn't something he could ignore. When you trusted people, you got hurt, and it didn't tend to be the kind of hurt that a couple of ibuprofen could make go away.
He'd thought he'd never work with a team again. Working with a team meant trusting them, to do their jobs if nothing else, and it had a tendency to force you to get close to them. The only kind of close he wanted to get to people these days was physical- fighting and sex. Anything else was too risky. But the offer had been too good for him to refuse working with a crew for one job, and one job wasn't enough to make him let his guard down.

One job became two, then more. It was hard to see how this team could make him drop his guard. Parker was insane- completely untrustable. Sophie was a grifter- she could lie and he'd never know the difference. Nate was an honest man, and he made a point of never trusting those, especially since he'd been forcibly reminded that sometimes they weren't as honest as they seemed. The drinking only made it worse. Hardison was probably the most trustworthy of all of them, and who knew what he did with those computers? Why would he ever trust people like those four? Even a citizen would know not to trust them.

His distrust slipped away so silently that he never noticed it leaving until it was too late. First it was trusting them on the job, to work together and get them all out and not just themselves. Hardison might snoop (Eliot had no proof, but it's what he would do if he was a hacker), but whatever he found out he kept to himself, and what could he find out about Eliot online, anyway? Parker was crazy, but at least her unpredictability was predictable; she didn't lull him into a sense of false security. Nate and Sophie at least seemed to be on the same side as him, and even if he kept telling himself it was stupid to trust them, he couldn't help it.

All this trust was going to come back and bite him in the ass someday, he just knew it.

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