today in Leverage Thoughts That Make Me Sad- it's canon that eliot has a much better than average memory, and we see this in a few ways:
- the extensive and minute knowledge he has of things like helicopter and bullet sounds, and what different groups of military look like based on haircuts and stances, always brushed off with "it's a very distinctive ___"
- the knowledge he gathers from women he dates, paying attention to things like what's currently fashionable, what flight attendants prefer to be called, etc; again brushed off with "what? i dated a ___"
- the speech in the experimental job about him remembering everyone he's ever killed, up to and including their names, what they wore, and what food was on their breath
if you've rewatched the show at all or pay attention to eliot specifically in any scene, you'll notice that he observes people very closely. i think this goes back to a hyper-vigilance he's cultivated through his days in the military and doing wetwork- probably especially in working with moreau. if your circumstances are that difficult to navigate, and if you can only really depend on yourself, of course you're going to notice and remember details about people. you'd have to develop that skill, to have the knowledge to give yourself options if you ever needed to escape suddenly.
also, for eliot's job in retrieval, he had to be a successful grifter somewhat often, so it makes sense that he'd find it important to both notice and remember small details about other people in that setting as well. cultivating that skill with people, with lying and charming, was a survival instinct.
all of this is to say- eliot has always done this, remembered little things about people, in service of his own survival (he's loaned out the skill to others, but you can argue that work is based in a survival instinct too... anyway). during the course of leverage we start to see him using these skills not only to protect other people, but to make them happy too. while he's risking his life every day to protect the team, he's also using his excellent memory to do things like buy parker a fucking plant that does something and say it's from hardison!
he wants to go beyond simply protecting them, he loves them and wants to show it- but he won't take the credit. eliot doesn't believe he's worth loving. he doesn't believe he'll ever be actually loved back, let alone loudly, by parker and hardison.
so he lets the credit be on hardison, he talks to them both and gives them advice about each other, he tells them in the rundown job to get on a plane out of d.c. so he can take whatever's coming himself. he pushes them away, towards each other, because he wants them to be happy and he thinks they will be happiest not knowing him that deeply.
but he also couldn't bear not being in their lives, not standing with them every day and protecting them from harm- so he puts his body, his memory, his mind in service of them, every single day. just... always from a distance. and he thinks he's doing it for them, to protect them, but he's doing it for himself out of fear of rejection. because he doesn't think he's good enough, worthy enough, of love. and that's so fucking sad.
