If I Had A Nickel For Every Time A Vaguely Historical Musical About A Morally Gray Male Lead Had The

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.

Your WHAT that Gilgamesh touched to please his heart, Enkidu?

Sophie loves to go dancing, but she rarely goes with Nate. He takes it too seriously, and he always get involved in the dance hall politics. Plus, as technical and detail oriented as he is, he isn't really good at dancing. He can do the steps, but he doesn't understand how to let himself get swept away by the music.

The first time she asked Eliot, he laughed at her. Said there was no way he was going to spend his night off in some dusty ballroom when he could be at home relaxing. She'd shrugged it off, having anticipated his refusal, and had gone by herself, intending to find a partner when she got there.

Except when she showed up, she found Eliot dressed in jeans and a button-down shirt, his hair pulled back in a pony tail, mumbling something about not wanting her to have to go without a partner.

The next time she asked, he complained about how slippery his shoes were and how handsy Mrs. Gunderson had been during the open dance, but he picked Sophie up at 6 and dropped her off at 10 and smiled most of the time between.

A week after that, she found a flyer for a foxtrot competition slipped under her door, with the note "I'm free on Saturday" scrawled across the bottom.

(They won.)

They go several times a month now. Hardison laughs when he finds out, but Eliot says it's good exercise. Parker is very excited about their trophy but loses interest when she finds out it's plastic. Nate comes to watch sometimes, because as much as he dislikes dancing himself, he appreciates the skill involved.

(Maybe he's picking up pointers. He'll never tell.)

Leverage Halloween Headcanons

Parker doesn't really get Halloween. She's not scared of a lot of the things people find scary about the holiday and while she learned to enjoy using fear as a weapon she doesn't really get "deliberately scaring yourself for fun." She loves giving the boys jump scares though. It's a test of her skill to actually alarm Eliot and Hardison always gives the best reactions, squeaky and indignant.

Hardison loves Halloween, it is his jam. He loves Christmas too, but a whole holiday for dressing up and eating candy and getting his heart pumping by watching scary movies and being jump scared by his girlfriend? Classic. He spends weeks between cases making costumes for them all which he gets them to wear with varying success.

Eliot hates Halloween. Everyone's wearing masks and clothes they wouldn't normally wear, the office is filled with Hardison's horrible candy, and he has to be constantly on the alert to catch a falling Parker when she drops into his arms with a "BOO" that could wake the dead. He definitely doesn't have serious opinions on the costumes Hardison makes. Nor would he ever fuel Parker's chocolate addiction by making special chocolates with green and orange fillings that he conveniently forgets to box up. He has no idea what Sophie is talking about, he hates Halloween.

Sophie adores Halloween, when done right. That means a classy vampire princess get up, fake teeth of a really good quality that won't interfere with her eating good food and Eliot's excellent homemade candies. She'd prefer a gala with Nate where everyone is masked to trick-or-treating or handing out candy, but privately her favorite Halloween was when they were all far too tired after a case. They ordered in take out to Nate's apartment and watched movies and all fell asleep in a pile on his couches. There was something about the heat of Parker laying across the back of the couch and having her head tucked into Nate's shoulder with Eliot's legs across her and Hardison's laps that just felt like home.

Nate tries to like Halloween. Trick-or-treating will make him a upset and Hardison only suggested leaving a sign out for the kids in the apartments once. But he likes playing subtle pranks on the others and seeing if they notice. He'll play "two truths and a lie" with them throughout the day, telling one long ridiculous story with a certain amount of truth to it, to see who he can get to believe what. Parker usually believes all of the story and once she figures out the rules of the game has fun playing detective with the truth. Hardison doesn't believe Nate in the way that means he absolutely believes Nate. Eliot it's a fifty/fifty toss up as to whether he'll just scoff and ignore Nate's confident stories about crazy things Nate has done or if he'll shrug and say that sounds like something Nate would do. Sophie never believes Nate and is always blindsided by what the truth is in the story. Overall, Nate enjoys Halloween if he doesn't think to hard.

"We’ve been providing military advisors, internationally, for over forty years."

Leverage S01E02 The Homecoming Job.

it’s criminal eliot and peggy never got to hang out and be food nerds together. bring peggy back in redemption 2k25

Okay, I'm thinking about the Murderbot TV show again, and how I would adapt it, and we're going to be robbed if we get anything less than a cold open to a scene of some obviously cheezy space drama, maybe an Overdramatic Human Woman In Green Facepaint overdramatically sobbing as she confronts a Generic Action Hero like "It's...it's your baby!!!" *cue three different angles of Generic Action Hero's shocked and surprised face* Generic Action Hero opens her mouth to respond, but we don't hear her voice, because her words are drowned out by a sudden roaring sound coming from offscreen. The audience gets jump scared by lashing tentacles that seem to whip across the screen, in front of the window where we were watching the space drama, and the camera zooms out until you see that the window was floating in front of MB's face, as MB stands on the edge of a crater and the survey team pokes around down below. A giant, tentacled space monster is emerging down below, the survey team is screaming, Overse is getting picked up and tossed into the air, on a trajectory heading straight for the monster's gaping jaws...

Everything slows down. The sound mutes. MB swears and launches itself towards the monster. The camera shakes and warnings blare and flash across the screen, but we don't see much of the action, because the camera swings in to focus on the floating window where the space drama (Sanctuary Moon. It's Sanctuary Moon) keeps playing, on mute, while Murderbot's voiceover delivers the line: "I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites..."

worlds slowest fanfic author tries really really hard

I hope fifteen or twenty years after redemption ends we get another reboot of leverage in which Breanna leads a completely new crew who only ever heard of the original leverage team as heros of legends.

And they tell stories of them like they are mythical figures.

They tell stories of Nate Ford and Sophie Devereaux, how they chased each other across the world before joining sides in the middle to bring together the first leverage team. (They have the Old Nate painting in the current headquarters. Everyone in the new team knows without a doubt that is Leverage Founder Nathan Ford.)

They tell stories of Alec Hardison, Eliot Spencer and THE Parker, the trio who can make anything happen, who made this organisation into what it is now, the patron saints of every leverage team. If a job goes really sideways, they will come to save you, you don't even have to call them. They know.

(The stories range from mildly simplified to wildly inaccurate. Breanna finds this whole mystification fascinating to see, she even kinda gets it on some level, but it's also really weeeiiird. that's just his brother and his insane partners. She just gifted them matching plushies the other day. (She does know where they live and how to reach out to them but she never ever in no way would ever call them for a job. She can do this without them dammit) (but of course they'd still come out once or twice in every season sorry breanna i need my cameos dammit))