thinkin about the long way down job and parker and eliot as a unit and -
parker and eliot’s “it makes us us” was about hardison.
so, moreau/the bomb/etc. parker tells hardison she’s ready for pretzels. they spent the next week getting a little closer, but she’s not quite there yet.
in the cave, parker doesn’t just want them to do the right thing. she wants them to do what hardison would do. but you see, it’s not just that she wants to do it. she wants them to do it. yeah, logistically she would need eliot’s help, but it’s more than that. parker sees eliot’s love for hardison. because in a way, eliot looks at hardison the same way she does. she knows that this thing her and hardison are drifting towards will never be complete without eliot.
nate and sophie know how to play dirty, they know how to make hard decisions (conning your own team, leaving the team, etc) they would have saved themselves. hardison is the one who might have laid down in that cave and died next to a stranger, solely because his heart is too big.
“does that make us bad?” eliot doesn’t say no. him and parker share this bond, this, i know the weight you are carrying because i carry some of that pain too.
“it makes us… us” he’s giving parker permission to be herself (to reconcile with her past) and still deserve hardison.
then he spends a few weeks/months grappling with the question and how it applies to his own relationship with hardison. when he pulls hardison out of the grave he finally admits to himself that it isn’t just parker who loves hardison, it isn’t just parker that needs to understand that she is good enough for hardison, it’s him too.
