A/N: I swear I haven't forgotten my other fics and am actively working on continuing them. But when whimseyrhodes PMd me asking me to write this, I just couldn't refuse and it turned into something of a fic exchange between us because we are both such huge admirers of each other's work. Interestingly, both of our fics have titles with the word 'angels' in them...great minds, as they say. But seriously, whimseyrhodes is amazing, my fic hero, and does hurt/comfort like no one else. If you like to see Eliot put through hell for no reason other than our own amusement and see it done well you should look her up. It's unbeated, but I tried to catch all the mistakes. Enjoy! -pj

whimseyrhodes - This one's for you! For writing fantastic fics and being my kindred spirit. For making me laugh out loud one minute, fight tears the next and scream at my computer screen throughout it all. I'm honored you asked me. Luvya!

Chapter One – Wreck of the Day

Eliot swallowed a scream of pain as tears sprang to his eyes.

~Eliot? You okay?~

A concerned voice came across the coms and he gasped a few times as the pain subsided. Maybe he hadn't done as good a job at hiding it as he thought.

~Oh yeah. He's just buried under a building and ten tons of rock and debris, Hardison. I'm sure he's great.~ Someone answered for him, Eliot was too hazy to know for sure who, but he was glad they had. He was too busy trying to clear white spots from his vision and make his stomach stay put to try and talk anyway.

~Eliot? What are you doing?~ He assumed that was Sophie by the delicate English cadence of the voice. ~It…it sounds like you're moving.~

Eliot grunted, pulling himself forward another fraction of an inch, and more white hot pain shot up his leg and flared across his back. He drew in a few harsh breaths of dusty air that made him cough, ratcheting up the pain from his back to his chest and stomach.

"I can see light," Eliot rasped, ignoring how weak his voice sounded and the way his heart was pounding in his head, "tryin' ta get to it," he coughed and gasped as the thick air tickled his lungs and the back of his throat.

~No!~ Nate exclaimed in his ear, causing Eliot to groan audibly.

"Dammit Nate," he muttered, closing his eyes and resting his forehead on a cool piece of bent steal wedged beneath him.

~Wait, does he mean like 'a light' or 'THE light'?~ That was definitely Hardison. ~Yo, Eliot, stay away from the light man. All of 'em.~

~Eliot Eliot, listen to me. Don't. Move. Okay?~ Nate interrupted, using that loud, 'I'm on the com' voice again. If Eliot's body hadn't been aching so badly he would have been irritated at him for it. ~You're injured and the beams holding most of that building off of you aren't stable. You'll only make things worse if you try to get yourself out, okay?~

Eliot couldn't even find the energy to argue, because suddenly it was requiring all his focus just to keep the world from getting black around the edges.

~Eliot? Eliot! Answer me!~

"I'll be here, Nate," Eliot mumbled and he lost the battle with unconsciousness before he could be sure he'd been heard.

~We're coming, Eliot. We're coming.~

oooOOOooo

"Eliot answer me," Nate's voice was nearly hoarse from talking. This hitter hadn't responded in nearly twenty minutes and Nate had only paused in calling out to him in that time long enough to allow Hardison to update the team or walk Sophie through the details of the con.

The grifter and Parker were out in the mess of what used to be a busy LA street, wearing a couple official looking windbreakers, trying to speed up the rescue effort for Eliot.

In front of him Hardison had three laptops were spread out on the hotel table and the TV was tuned to the local news. The hacker was busy giving Sophie and Parker the creds they would need to direct a team to Eliot's position while keeping tabs on all the emergency frequencies in the area and trying to get a more accurate read on Eliot's location.

"Eliot are you there? Talk to me Eliot," Nate continued pacing the length of the hotel room, one eye on the TV for news updates, the other on the steady pulsing green dot on Hardison's laptop that indicated the hitter's position.

~Okay, we're here.~ Parker's voice came through the com.

Hardison switched to another computer, ignoring his now warm bottle of Orange Soda, leaving it untouched.

"The guy you're looking for is Roman Martinez. He's in charge of dispatching rescue crews, um," he pulled up a photo and bio, "mid fifties. Glasses, ex-military and recently divorced."

~Got him.~ Sophie switched her com to 'mute' as she approached the mark, not wanting her voice to be needlessly filling the frequency if Eliot responded.

A moment later Hardison turned to Nate, switching off his own com so as not to be overheard.

"It's been nearly an hour since the quake, Nate. You really think he could still be…" Hardison trailed off, looking both hopeful and uncertain.

Nate sighed, bringing a tumbler of whiskey to his lips.

"Eliot can you hear me?"

oooOOOooo

Eliot awoke from the inside out. He was aware first of the pain. It hit him like a punch to the solar plexus as soon as his brain began firing normally again and he drew in a heaving breath, only to cough it back up when the dusty air hit his lungs.

The spasm of coughing was a vicious, cruelly ironic cycle of pain the likes of which he honestly couldn't remember dealing with before. The harder he coughed, the more debris laden air he pulled in and the more dust he inhaled the more he coughed. Each spasm caused pain to explode across his chest and up into his head, sweat broke out on his brow and bright spots danced across his eyes.

Finally, after what felt like millennia, he managed to stop coughing long enough to get his breath back under control. He took a few moments to rest but found that all too quickly the pain of pulsating lungs and grinding ribs faded into the background and the rest of his injuries came into dizzying clarity.

His attention was first pulled to his legs. They both hurt, but one hurt like hell. Unable to resist, Eliot pried open his eyes, not remembering having closed them, and looked down. The sight that met him was the closest to an out of body experience that he'd ever had.

While his left leg throbbed in time with his rapid - more rapid by the moment - heartbeat, that pain paled in comparison to what his right felt like.

Or should have felt like.

Almost his entire pant leg and part of his untucked flannel shirt were stained reddish brown. Even in his concussed, look-at-the-pretty-colors haze, Eliot had no doubt that it was blood. A lot of it. Movement caught his eye and he glanced down to the puddle of matching reddish brown liquid forming below him. It happened again and Eliot saw that the blood was dripping like a leaky faucet from his jeans, creating slow, eerie ripples in the pool of blood every few seconds.

He wondered why the blood was dripping down instead of simply soaking through his jeans.

And that was when he realized that long metal pole he'd been ignoring, trying to see around to get a better look at his injury, wasn't next to his leg.

It was speared straight through it.

The three foot piece of metal held the limb suspended off the ground in a position that history would undoubtedly call 'the human shish kabob'.

If Eliot hadn't been so tired he might have laughed.

Distantly, he knew the sight of his impaled and still bleeding thigh ought to worry him more than it did. Or at the very least it ought to hurt more.

But the fact that it was completely numb, almost like it wasn't his leg at all, was a welcome realization. One less thing to worry about. Because between the constantly floating, the almost-too-thick-to-see air and the incessant buzzing coming from his right ear, Eliot figured he had plenty to worry about already.

That and the fact that he was cold. So very fucking cold. He hadn't been this cold since that damn prison in Serbia where the guards took all his clothes and put him in a concrete cell with no insulation to speak of. Damn guards.

His teeth started to chatter and his eyes felt heavy. But still there was that annoying, insistent buzzing from somewhere inside his head. There was something important about that buzzing...

Eliot felt a tickle on his cheek and tried to reach up to swipe at it. He frowned when his left hand did not respond to the command and enough pain shot up his arm enough at the thought of movement to make him gasp and nearly start another coughing fit.

Fine, he thought petulantly, though he wasn't sure if the words actually made it through his lips. He switched the command to his other arm and was satisfied that his right hand complied. He found a trail of warm, slick something was the culprit of the annoying tickle and he followed it up from his cheek to his hairline and into his hair, only to yank his hand away again when his fingers touched a tender spot.

He looked curiously at his red stained fingers, wondering where that blood had come from, before deciding it hurt his head too much to think about right now.

Maybe later.

Eliot's eyelids started to grow heavy again and he wrapped his functioning arm around his torso, still trying to get warm.

The comforting blackness of oblivion tugged at the edges of his mind and he so wanted to follow, but was snatched back from the brink again when he thought he heard his name being called. Only from close. Very close.

Inside his head.

Damn guards and their damn mind games, Eliot thought. This time he didn't fight it when the darkness tried to claim him and he relished in the silence.

TBC