three person poly relationship made up of two people who are already dating trying to coax someone with horrific self worth issues into a loving relationship. stray cat style

they’re all laying together in bed and the couple are both thinking to themselves like good, he stayed the night to cuddle and talk when we offered, he should know that we genuinely care for him and want this to be more then a handful of one night stands. and the stray cat guy is like wow this sure is nice i think i’m falling in love with them. it’s really too bad that they don’t actually give a fuck and hate me and probably want to kill me with hammers for no reason

it has been like. two days

Sophie in the Tap Out Job though… that she starts out completely put off by the whole idea of fighting — she’s supposed to understand what people want so she can sell it to them, but we see she has blind spots. she doesn’t understand the appeal of fighting and she doesn’t WANT to understand it. but then when Eliot talks to her about what it means for him and for the guys in the town, the important thing is not just that she listens, but she actually internalizes it so much that she incorporates it into her grifting to sell the con. listening to eliot and being more open minded about it makes her BETTER.

which is a) very sweet how much she really does listen and learn when it comes from someone she cares about and b) very scary that she then takes that vulnerable thing he shared with her and immediately turns around and uses it to manipulate people

I love how Eliot's borderline-paranoid ass went,

Gunshots somewhere in the city + Nate isn't directly in my line of sight → ergo Nate is definitely in trouble and being shot at

and yeah he's right

The Bushwhack Job: Chapter Two

Chapter One

The building wasn’t supposed to explode.

Well, it was, but it wasn’t supposed to explode yet.

Parker had the C4 charges in her bag, ready for her to plant them against the support beams in the basement at the half-constructed LanCast offices. The blast wouldn’t take down the building, just shake the foundation enough that the resulting investigation would find the cheap ash mixture in the concrete, and they’d be able to prove that Stephen Lancaster had embezzled the city grant money that was supposed to go into his new high-rise company building.

The plan had been for her to place the charges an hour ago, but she’d gotten distracted by the candy store down the road and had been late. Now, she stood on the sidewalk across from the burning office, watching their evidence literally go up in flames, listening to the firefighters yell directions as they fought to control the destruction. Normally she enjoyed a good explosion, but this one made her feel the way Hardison said he felt when he jumped off buildings.

She was supposed to be inside.

Leveragetober day 21: dance

Swing yer partner round and round ✨

any time parker has a fancy little hairdo i just imagine her sitting on the ground in front of eliot while he works on it with a mouthful of bobby pins

Does anyone have a spare $144?

Link

I haven't actually played it, but someone on TikTok uploaded all of the books for free to a Google Drive and it seems like it'd be super fun.

Love characters who are so fucking good at using guns but never want to use them like ever

The thing about Eliot Spencer is that, whether or not he chooses to go through with it, he always has an eye to 'what is the most annoying thing I can do in this situation.' He only chooses to do the annoying thing about 15% of the time--usually Hardison or Parker has the "annoy the team members" job on lock, a good 20% of the time it's Sophie or Nate, and the rest of the time he's being a professional on job--but the man is always aware of what he could do which would be the most likely to annoy people.

Poke Nate's ego about Sophie having a team before them? On it. Hug Hardison in an annoyingly back-slapping way when his almost-girlfriend refused him? Of course. Giggle and ignore Sophie when she tells him to kill a cockroach? Abso-friggin-lutely. Dead-pan 'yes, and' Parker when she's asking about conspiracy theories? Sign him up.

The man is a little shit who is (unfortunately) also a professional and he loves messing with people.

(^ man two seconds from raining irritation on an unsuspecting mark)

Rewatching the pilot and watching how, when he sees how much that score made him, Eliot's tucking his head and just staring at that number and laughing - not throw his head back, but like the kind where you're almost fighting it but not quite not really, tight but wide grin that's not really open but still splits your face and makes your cheeks hurt, and almost manic about it, and thinking bout someone kiss this man so I don't have to, and like

I know metatextually they hadn't even STARTED working on that plot yet but like

Knowing what we know later, i can't help but think back to that moment and Eliot staring at that number and thinking holy shit. this is it. this is as free as I'm gonna get.

Because shit was getting tight, as a freelance retrieval specialist I think. Eliot's name was... starting to collect black marks. Failures.

He couldn't retrieve the monkey. He couldn't retrieve the dagger of Aku Abi. The community talks. Who knows what else had gone wrong in the year between the Rashomon flashback and the Nigerian Job? Nate said he chased them all, at one point or another. For Eliot, since Nate didn't know about the Moreau connection, that would've been in his freelance retrieval phase.

And Nate's good.

How many jobs did Eliot lose to him? How did his reputation fare, after those last couple failures? Did some of the higher ups know about his connection to Moreau? Did Damien have him blacklisted from certain circles, keeping him from taking more lucrative jobs with people who knew his full skillset, leaving him with the penny-ante players paying him well below what he should be getting ("why are you sending second-rate thugs after me?" perhaps because that's the price range you have to work in now, that's the only tax bracket that will hire you, the kind that hires second-rate)?

Had Eliot been considering it, until that moment? The possibility that Damien was right? That he would, inevitably, come crawling back after failing on his own? Maybe he could make it another couple months... a year or two even, if this success could bolster his flagging rep -

(there's a moment in the hospital, when all seems lost. they've been busted. the job that was supposed to save him doomed him. he'd find his way out, but after this colossal failure who's gonna hire him? he resigns himself to it happening sooner rather than later, now. then Parker gets Nate a phone, and he watches the man work a miracle)

- but he could see it looming on the horizon. The encroaching fear of knowing what was at the end of the road for him, the inevitable return to...

Then he opens that envelope. Sees that payout. The Score.

And in one singular fucking moment, one fell swoop, it comes crashing in on him that he'll never have to work for Moreau again.

Hell, he'll never have to take a single job he doesn't want to again. He can pick and choose his clients. Pick and choose his methods. The non-lethality that he was fearing was becoming a liability, just like Damien had said it would, suddenly no longer an issue. He could choose jobs he knew he could handle, instead of jumping at whatever was offered to him and hoping it worked out.

All because of this job. The one he'd hoped would get him by just a little longer. The one that for a moment he feared had ruined him.

Because of this team. This ragtag little group of people he was trying so hard not to enjoy the company of. Not to get attached to, even after such a short amount of time.

Because of Nate Ford.

So when Hardison calls him up later, with a story about another job and vet who needs their help, there's no hesitation in the "yeah, I'll be there."

Eliot had already decided the moment he saw the caller ID.

What's in a name:

The team leveraging Hardison's first name to get him to take them seriously.

It started with the Grave Danger Job. With Parker's panicked "I need you. Do you hear me, Alec? I need you!" It isn't something that's conscious or anything, but all of them lean into it occasionally.

"Alec, just drop it," Nate stares at Hardison, watching the young man realize maybe he'd been pushing Nate too hard on a topic that was a sore subject. Alec nods grimly and backs down.

"Hardison, how long have you been up?" Sophie asks gently, watching the genius wipe the grit from his eyes, his latest forging project laid out around him. When he mumbles something about not remembering, needing to finish, Sophie catches his chin in a manicured hand and holds his attention. "Alec, go to bed." He goes.

"Come on, man, get off the screen for a little while, let's go get some sun," Eliot pokes him after a long job on top of a new World of Warcraft update. Hardison can't even remember what he said back, something glib he's sure, but he remembers the hesitation in Eliot's voice. "Alec, please. You're gonna fuck up your eyesight before you're thirty, staring at blue light a foot away from your face. Please?" Hardison goes with him. They go to an outdoor gun range. Hardison rags Eliot about them both not liking guns, but listens as his best friend talks him through focusing on targets of different distances. He'll never have Eliot's skill, but it's a quick way to help his eyesight and he turns out to be half decent with practice.

"Alec, I'm serious!" Parker pleads with him, a picture of some conspiracy theory held up in her hands. "I need to know if this is real or not, please. Because it doesn't seem real and then it does seem real and Eliot won't give me a straight answer and Nate won't give me any answer at all, and I need to know if-" if I'm going crazy, she doesn't say, but he hears it now. He lays a hand over hers and explains that it's not real, explains the joke patiently until she understands and can laugh at it and "yes, and" Eliot when that particular theory comes up again.

"Hey y'all, it's Alec," he says, a gun to his head and a phone in his hand, one chance to get it right, to make them understand that this is serious. He can practically hear them all sitting up in the tones of their voices, in the grimness of the rapid fire questions, and he breathes a sigh of relief. They'll come get him. They know it's serious.

how perfect was that season finale

oh WAIT A MINUTE we've all been getting it wrong. in a magical AU, Eliot Spencer isn't the one with healing powers or immense strength—he's the psychic.

"it's a distinctive____" no the fuck it isn't. he just KNOWS. but people get uneasy when a guy just KNOWS stuff, so eliot learned a line that keeps everybody calm, gives everybody just enough plausible deniability to keep the unease at bay.

he's always got that extra bit of knowledge to help him out. not more than he can handle, not like some kind of savant in more ways than it's possible for one human to be. nothing flashy. it's not that eliot's never lost his keys before. it's just that he always, always knows where to find them.

wait you’re SO right… how else would eliot walk away from the big bang job shootout without a single scratch? even after stepping out and just standing there in the open?

and in the first contact job? “it’s a distinctive static” my ass, static isnt distinctive its fucking static. not to mention all those times eliot conveniently pops up behind bad guys in need of ass kicking. When he meets Mikel in the two live crew job and they don’t fight.

in the bank shot job eliot says to nate while sewing up his bullet wound “you act like you’ve never been shot before,” followed by a slight smirk, and there’s a brief look between nate and sophie— all alluding to the flashbacks in ep1 where nate and sophie shoot each other. of course, they could have just told everyone the story. or. eliot just knew. and maybe nate and sophie each assumed the other mentioned it to him.

by season five Parker probably knows. When they make eye contact in the Rundown job and he knows what’s she’s planning to do?

At first it was “One show only, no encores.” maybe Eliot had a niggling feeling in the back of his head and was protesting against it. Utter lack of reaction to a gun waved in his face- not even to disarm it. Then “You don’t like hospitals.” maybe it’s a bit of an obvious guess, but it’s said with utter conviction and a tense smile within two seconds of nate waking up. almost like the knowledge has been sitting with him like a needle under his skin, like the incessant sound of heart monitors (even though nate’s not hooked up to one), for the half hour or more it took for Nate to wake up. Later, “guy like you can’t be out of the game.” Most people would disagree; a grieving father who’s lost everything? probably needs a break. getting involved with a gang of criminals should be a symptom, not a treatment. So what do you know, Eliot?

and then, many encores after the first: “this was your crusade. now it’s our war,” a simple statement of fact. Then: “till my dying day.” It’s not a vow to his people, or a promise to his family, or an even reassurance to Sophie. It’s nothing more or less than a bone-deep, very distinctive awareness of the way things are.

okay i desperately need to sleep but first of all “eliot learned how to go into a fight already knowing exactly how much it was going to hurt” RUDE i love it 😆

secondly, i was literally just trying to think about what everyone else would have. healing for parker makes SO MUCH SENSE. because of course you can’t give everybody the first superpower you would think of. So if the first thing I would think of for Parker has something to do with mild bending of physics; so for example small vents and openings magically make themselves fit her, or stolen goods fit in a smaller bag than they should. but that’s too obvious! It can’t be the obvious thing, but it still has to fit somehow. healing/impervious is exactly it for her, no wonder she had a horrible time when she had to stay home cause of an injury.

i am too tired to put to words any half formed ideas for the everyone else but i wanna figure it out

man i wasn't even thinking about the broken wing job when I proposed it, but now that you've said that I have to think that her leg was almost completely torn off, or something, for her to be injured for so long. maybe there's also an element of, she can't feel pain? which would explain why it was so easy for her to hop around even when it should have been agonizing instead of just boring. maybe Archie knew about that and convinced her it was a good thing, a boon, an asset. instead of, you know, wickedly dangerous and liable to let parker do some serious fucking damage to herself, even with the healing factor. archie's a real asshole like that.

meanwhile:

hardison is so hard because EVERYTHING he does is so competent it comes off as magical, but I don't ever want to take away from his character by implying it comes from anything other than skill, hard work, and genius.

and then it hit me: the big bang job. of course. hardison has some kind of aquatic powers. certainly he can breathe underwater, to have survived that long chained up in the pool, but maybe he's also got some aquakenesis going on? he almost never interacts with water in the show so it would, frankly, be nearly irrelevant to the badass work he does. he's smart enough to like it that way; a wild card, an ace up his sleeve, that no one who corners him would ever see coming because it's so contrary to his whole shtick. genre-savy, that's what hardison is.

nate and sophie i'm still mulling over tho. they're harder. and I feel like thematically nate's should be some kind of curse, or something that should have helped him save sam but didn't. just can't put my finger on it yet.

perhaps sophie has some kind of psychometry, a la star wars's quinlan vos? in the same family of eliot's power, which could explain the odd synergy (dare i say sexual tension?) she and eliot have going on in the first season. but still different. she ONLY gets the past, and only in flashes tied to physically touching an object.

the more I think about this the more i like it. the neurolinguistic programing thing she does with objects, like in the car salesman job, is what finalizes the idea for me. sophie deeply understands the emotional significance objects can have, the role they can play, because of the stories she picks up off of them every time she touches. she loves a good prop, she does. she also loves people and their stories, which is something psychometry would feed very, very well.

imagine touching a painting and being able to feel all the way back to the artist that painted it! the connection to the soul of humanity that would forge would be intoxicating, i think.

what got me started on it, though, was thinking about how completely sophie loses it in the King George job, talking about the way people use art smuggling to fuel even worse things. the way people use even worse things to fuel art smuggling, too. sophie would run into that pretty quickly in her line of work, but more than that, every time she touched a piece of art that was involved in some kind of crime financier scheme, she would get the whole sordid wretched backstory dumped into her head.

it would almost be like people who use art theft to hurt people poison the art, for her. makes it nearly impossible to touch, makes it so hard to feel the kinder stories attached to the objects underneath all the darkness.

also this gives her a great reason to get weirdly into feng shui and that's funny to me.

it would be so funny to give nate empathy. he can literally feel exactly what other people are feeling.

crucially he CANNOT psychically alter what people are feeling, only perceive it. still, it's handy to know exactly when you've whipped someone up to the fever pitch of rage and greed you're looking for.

this would make his desire to be physically and emotionally distant from everyone a little more understandable.

it would make his desire to drive everyone he meets who isn't One Of His People absolutely bonkers with annoyance or rage, also very funny, because he can feel what he's causing! literally feel it! and either he enjoys it (like some kind of sicko, works with canon) or it's still actually painful (but he does it anyway and relishes in hurting himself, like some fucking catholic, also works with canon).

not 100% sold on this one because it's not tragic enough, and feels a little too expected. but there's something here. guy on team who hates people the most is best poised to see other people as human beings.

oh hmmmmm it could be that nate ford is just generally lucky, a la x-men's domino. he's got GREAT odds on literally anything he could set his mind to. "that's so crazy it just might work," but only for nathan ford.

lucky enough to live, lucky enough to pull off the heist, lucky enough to find the work-around just in the nick of time!

just not lucky enough to save his son's life.

maybe his son dies and he realizes that his luck is just for him. maybe that's why he's often so eager to throw himself bodily into situations that he really shouldn't. can't leave the bank in the bankshot job before sophie gets out, because nate's physical presence, his skin in the game, is necessary for his probability powers to work. like yeah, sure, he's also passively to actively suicidal depending on the day, but there's also a calculated edge to it.

there's also the fact that he let the doctors push him out of sam's room the day he died, and nate still wonders, if he'd been six feet closer, if it would have helped. if sam would have lived. if he's just been that much closer.

then again, empathy would make nate's scenes with the clients a lot more poingant. like yeah, fuck you tara, these ARE his lost sheep. they're lost. they're in pain. and i, nathan ford, alone, am here to help.

hmm maybe Hardison has some kind of general enhanced stamina or something- which could lead, among other things, to increased lung capacity. it would have almost nothing to do with his work… except for big bang job and grave danger.

but it would also be funny if he has something completely random that he’s just never discovered. he can fly. he can control the weather. maybe he can talk to animals. and he’s just never had an opportunity to find out so one day all of a sudden… boom! laser eyes or something. he’s already that talented AND then there’s this other thing.

Sophie having a connection to objects is amazing i adore it, especially with the added curse. but i came up with another idea and now i don’t know which is better.

what if Sophie has LITERALLY forgotten who she was. she’s able to embody new roles so completely, become this other person so entirely, and erase what was there before. but the more she does it the further away from herself she becomes. Maybe she keeps some vague memories- now that she knows it’s happening she can work to commit something to memory- but if she doesn’t care to remember at the time then she looses it forever. She has to leave to go around the world to retrace the steps she’s taken to jump from one life to the next. do some archaeology on her own past to find out where she’s from and what her name even is. she buries herself because she’s been dead for years already.

she can act- when it’s an act. she embodies a chocolatier and she has that talent for taste. in the blue line job she embodies her character so well the mark fully backs off. the hot potato job she gets the janitor to confess to crimes they didn’t have any idea he committed.

idk i think the object empathy is more emotionally poignant for her but i had to at least get this idea out of my head

The frozen horror on Nate's face when Eliot gets shot in the Beantown Bailout Job... And Eliot just looks slowly up at him... After having just said "I hope you know what you're doing"...

That wasn't a shoulder or leg wound either, that would have been a gut shot. If it had been real, Eliot would have had seconds left, max.

I think that's the moment that radicalized Nate (again). That moment of realizing it doesn't matter how they die, if this team dies, that will always be on him now. For changing them, for making them better. I think that was when he scrapped any and all "Plan M"s, if he'd ever had them.

And then what a relief to turn and see the smoking gun in Sophie's hand. Because there's no way she would have allowed any harm to come to them either. So there must be a plan. He doesn't need to know the plan. He just needs to know them. He can wait to ask how they did it.

(But do you think he maybe checked Eliot for a pulse? While he was fishing out the phone? Just to be sure?)

Breanna once said:

Leverage 10 min prompt responses:

Leverage S02E06 The Studio Job.

@original-missif: #i love how much work leverage puts into humanizing their more recluse characters#how much eliot and parker especially get to step away from everything they're good at and become whole#and how much loving fun is poked at eliot throughout the series to soften the knife sharp edges of his personality#so much love is shown in giving the thief hacker and hitter talents outside their criminal specialties#the dichotomy of how eliot is with the team vs how he is with anything related to Moreau 🤌🤌

@laser-tripwires: #of COURSE he's nervous#stage fright!#plus. y'know. the Horrors.#this is the worst half a year of eliot's time with the team#he's counting down the days til he has to confront the worst demons anyone can have AND NOW he has to sing

@lemissingmask: #but imagine if Moreau saw THAT#it might bewilder Moreau into retirement#his most lethal former employee now sings stunningly well#and then he goes to San Lorenzo and cuddles a puppy#leverage#I love Parker’s 😱 you ARE nervous!#turning the knife in the wound of his embarrassment#with that perfection of shocked expression

@trash-nerd: #love that parker is just. scandalized by this info as well like.#meanwhile eliot is and has been having A Very Bad Time bc yknow. the whole. moreau thing. kinda fair.#plus i like that its one of the v v few things eliot does privately and is just That Nervous abt doing it in front of An Audience