Leverageland Heist 7 Challenge One

[theron09]

For this challenge over at leverageland I had to do ten hours worth of Leverage-related work. Here's the masterpost of everything I did. Time totalling ten hours and five minutes. 

Title: In Good Company
Fandom: Leverage
Genre: Gen, fluff, friendship
Word Count: 729
Rating: PG-13
Time Spent: 40 minutes
Summary: Eliot’s in a bad mood and just wants to be left alone. Parker hasn’t received the memo. Set during season two.
A/N: Written for Challenge One at leverageland. For irishjeeper – I tried to take your favourite characters (Eliot and Parker) and combine them with your prompt of ice cream. I really hope you like this – love being on Team Grifter with you!
Fic here


Title: Long Road to Get There
Fandom: Leverage
Pairing: Eliot/Quinn
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Vague season four spoilers, AU from the end of S4
Word Count: 3237
Time Spent: 2hrs 45 minutes
Summary: It takes a while for Quinn and Eliot to get their act together.
A/N: Written as part of challenge one at leverageland. For ishilde, because you’re awesome, Jai, and because it’s Eliot/Quinn and I miss you. Hope you like this.
Fic here


Title: Perception
Fandom: Leverage
Pairing: Nate/Quinn
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 1160
Time Spent: 1 hour 30 minutes
Summary: Quinn can’t work out why Nate keeps glaring at him.
A/N: Written for challenge one at leverageland. For telaryn – I hope you like this; I enjoyed writing the pairing for the first time and I hope it’s something like what you imagined.
Fic here

Title: Left Unspoken
Fandom: Leverage
Pairing: Eliot/Quinn
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 796
Time Spent: 1 hr 30mins.
Summary: Sophie chooses the middle of a storm to talk to Quinn about his intentions towards Eliot. Established Eliot/Quinn.
A/N: Written for challenge one at leverageland and for ishilde.
Fic here

Icons, time spent = 40 mins, including looking for the screencaps.



Assorted drabbles/ ficlets, totalling 2435 words – three hours



Quinn doesn’t regret the circumstances under which he first met Eliot Spencer. Sure, they’d beaten each other up, but there’d been a sort of mutual respect between them that was evident even then, when they had been working on opposite sides. Without that confrontation, Eliot wouldn’t have known he was a good enough hitter to come to for help when they were taking down Latimer and Dubenich and, without that, they’d never have started dating. It’s kind of an odd way for a relationship to get started, he knows, but it was their way and it had worked for them.

~~

Nate Ford’s been chasing Sophie for less than two months when he comes close – closer than he realises, she things to catching her and she’s forced to admit she’s impressed. She’s very good at what she does and the people who try to catch her are usually not very good at all. Nate, though, seems to understand her motives and that, Sophie knows, is dangerous. She understands his motives, too, though, which means she’s managing to stay one step ahead. She’s used to being three or four steps ahead, though, and it unsettles her sometimes, that this man can come so close to catching her, at the same time as it thrills her to have a worthy opponent. Reluctantly, she has to admire him because he’s obviously clever. Sometimes, even, when she’s sitting on a hotel balcony with a glass of wine in her hand and loot on the table in front of her, she wonders what it would be like to work with Nate instead of against him.

~~

It’s four in the morning and Eliot’s in bed, not asleep but resting, eyes closed, hands across his stomach, perfectly still. At one minute past four, he hears a noise and sits up straight, listening. It could have been anything -someone returning to a nearby apartment after a late one, someone shutting a car door out in the street – but there’s a feeling in his gut that’s telling him the noise came from within his own apartment and he learnt very early on in his life never to ignore his instincts. He slips out of bed as quietly as possible, pulling his shoes on quickly and efficiently. There’s no way any of his enemies should have been able to track down where he lived but Eliot knows that even the seemingly impossible is likely to happen in the type of life he leads.

He stands at his bedroom door for a moment, waiting and, sure enough, he hears the unmistakable sound of the floorboard in his living area creaking. As far as he can tell, there is only one intruder and that’s good; it evens up the fight that’s coming and means it’s unlikely any of the various gangs he’s made enemies with over the years have found him. Opening the door, he steps out into the living room and hits the light switch; as much as fighting in the dark would give him the advantage of knowing the rooms layout better than the intruder, he wants to see who he is going to fight.

“I didn’t mean to wake you.”

Eliot swears. Quinn’s sitting on the couch, hand clutching at a bleeding wound on his shoulder, and Eliot hasn’t seen the other hitter since he helped them take down Dubenich but he still feels a stab of worry at the sight of him bleeding.

“What did you mean to do?” Crossing over to the cupboard where he keeps the first aid kit, Eliot shakes his head. “Break into my apartment and sit there bleeding until morning?”

“I figured – rightly so – that you’d have a first aid kit. I was just resting for a moment before-”

“Before you looked through my things to find it?”

“That’s about right, yeah.”

Crouching down in front of Quinn, Eliot frowns when he sees how pale the guy is. “Okay, well I’ll chalk that stupid idea up to loss of blood. Any other injuries apart from the shoulder?”

Quinn shrugs then winces when the movement jars his shoulder. “Cracked rib, maybe? Nothing more serious than that.”

Eliot chooses to ignore the relief that floods through him at that for now in favour of addressing something he does know how to deal with. Pulling the things he’ll need out of the first aid kit, he meets Quinn’s eyes. “This is going to hurt a little.”

“It’ll hurt less than if I was trying to do it myself.”

Nodding, he wonders when he’d managed to become someone that Quinn trusts enough to go to when injured. Probably, he realises, at around the same time he trusted Quinn to help his team. Getting to work on patching up the wound, he decides any further analysis of why he’d felt more worry than anger upon seeing Quinn sitting in his apartment can wait.

~~

Two months after they go from casually dating to admitting they’re serious about each other, Eliot tells Quinn about Damien Moreau. It’s different with Quinn than with any of the others, or any of his past partners; Quinn understands what it’s like to hurt, really hurt, someone, what it’s like to go from being innocent to something else entirely. But Eliot’s still unsure of how Quinn will react when he brings up Moreau because even with everything Quinn has done in his life, it’s Moreau and everyone knows his reputation, knows the reputation of the people who work for him. So Eliot expects to see disappointment, anger in his partner but, instead, Quinn just listens as he talks, as he tells him everything he’s never told anyone else. He’s half been expecting Quinn to walk away when he finds out but he’s been expecting wrong because, when he’s done, Quinn moves closer, covers Eliot’s hand with his own and, suddenly, Eliot understands that Quinn isn’t planning on going anywhere. The strangest, best thing is, the concept of spending the rest of his life with Quinn doesn’t scare him.

~~

Whenever they’re in the same room, Nate watches the way Eliot is with Maggie. After the first time, that uncomfortable moment where Eliot had found out just who Maggie was, Nate knows that the hitter has been careful to make sure he knows there’s nothing there, not wanting to upset him. Now, it’s a good couple of years since that first meeting and a lot has changed. For one, he’s absolutely sure that Maggie and Eliot are never going to be anything more than friends. That knowledge, however, doesn’t do anything to stop the pang of jealousy that always hits him when he first sees them interacting. For another, he and Sophie are friends again, rather than lovers, and looking at Maggie reminds him of yet more failed relationships. Something, though, always draws Nate’s attention to them, despite the hurt he knows it’ll cause.

It’s not until Maggie throws her head back and laughs, hand squeezing Eliot’s bicep that he realises the jealousy is still there. Only, now, he’s jealous of Maggie, not Eliot. Taking a chance, he walks over to join them; it’s time to stop watching and make himself part of the scene instead.

~~

They haven’t seen each other since before Eliot started working with Nate and the team when Clint turns up on Eliot’s doorstep and he’s forced to admit what he’s known all along. There isn’t a place in the country that Eliot can run to where Clint can’t find him. It bugs him, a bit, that the agent can always get one over on him in that respect until he reminds himself that Clint works for SHIELD and therefore has ridiculous amounts of resources at his disposal. It’s not like Eliot really minds Clint knowing where he is, they’re sort of friends, after all. It’s the reminder of a life he could have had that bugs him. Every time he sees Barton, he recalls the offer that was made to him and he wonders what it would have been like if he’d said yes. This time, though, he invites Clint in and they make small talk and he’s starting to imagine that other life when his phone goes off, Hardison texting him with a job, and Eliot smiles. Maybe he’s not a SHIELD agent, taking down super villains, but what he does now is just as important.

~~

Nate knows that Peter Burke is a good man so when Burke calls in a favour from long ago, it doesn’t seem like a big deal when he agrees to house Neal Caffrey for a little while. He chased Caffrey for a while himself and he thinks it’ll be interesting to meet the guy. The conman shows up at McRory’s less than two hours later and Nate wonders what Peter would have done if he’d said no. Caffrey is even more charming that Nate had imagined when he was chasing him. It doesn’t take him long to impress Hardison with computer knowledge and to get on Eliot’s good side by complimenting his fighting skill. Caffrey wins Parker over immediately and, when Neal smiles at Sophie and Sophie smiles right back, Nate starts to realise what he’s done, bringing two of the best grifters in the country together. He really hopes Peter gives the all clear for Caffrey to head back to New York soon because, as much as he likes Caffrey, he really doesn’t need another grifter in his crew.

~~

Walking away from Nate in the graveyard is one of the hardest things Sophie has ever had to do. She needs to do it, needs time and space to think, but being away from the team is going to be hard, she knows. She’s become fond of them, close to them but, until she can be sure of herself again, being apart from them is the best thing she can do. It still surprises her how much the first phone call from Parker gets to her, how it makes her want to reach out. When Hardison gets into trouble, the feeling only intensifies and it takes every sensible bone in her body to fight against the impulse to just return home to Boston where she can keep an eye on them. She sends Tara in her place because she can’t bring herself to just do nothing, not when it comes to her family.

~~

Since he first met Nate Ford, Patrick Bonano knows he’s changed. There was a time when he knew straight away what was wrong and what was right, quantified by his morals and by the limits of the law. There’d been injustices, he knew; big time CEOs with enough money to be able to hurt people and get away with it, bullies who were able to commit their crimes and not go to jail because there wasn’t enough evidence against them. But that had just been life, disappointments that were aggravating and wrong and completely unavoidable.

Then Nate Ford and his team had come onto his radar and the lines had become a little more blurred. They’d done good things by breaking the law and Bonano just hopes they never leave enough evidence behind to mean he has to arrest them because he wants them to be able to continue. He looks the other way, turns a blind eye to their crimes, because the reasons for what they do are good and he knows they can do more to change people’s lives than he ever can.

They put him in awkward situations sometimes, like playing cards with a man who claims he’s called Shelley or asking him for information he really shouldn’t give them. It makes him worry about his job, about what would happen to his family if he got caught being involved with these people. But they’ve gone out of their way to help him in the past and, even if they aren’t legal, he knows that the things he does for them are the right things to do. He knows that, constrained by the law as he is, he can at least make some sort of a difference.

~~

The first time Shelley meets Eliot Spencer, they’re both pretty wet behind the ears. Eager, strong but inexperienced, they somehow become fighters. Even after they are no longer working together, they stay in touch over the years when it’s possible. Shelley doesn’t ask questions about what Eliot does and Eliot doesn’t ask any in return and that suits the both of them just fine. He hears about Eliot settling down in Boston and it interests him but he doesn’t press for information, just waits until Eliot is ready to tell him. The friendship between them is one that has lasted over the years, lack of seeing each other not doing anything to harm the comradeship between them when they are in each other’s presence. When Eliot invites him to Boston for a poker night, Shelley wants to ask questions, wants to dig a little and find out how Eliot ended up working with Nate, doing something illegal but good enough that Bonano accepts it. Instead, he helps out where he’s needed and trusts that Eliot will talk eventually because they’re friends, and that’s what friends do.

~~

Damien has a lot of time to think in his cell on San Lorenzo. So much time on his hands to plan what he’s going to do to Eliot, to Ford, when he gets out. Because the thought of not getting out is something he won’t consider. He won’t let them win. He won’t lose. In hindsight, he’d underestimated them. On his own, Eliot was a threat. With a team behind him, he was a threat that he should have taken more seriously than he had. Damien knows now, though, that they are dangerous and next time he won’t make the same mistakes. Waiting for a rescue he really hopes is coming, Damien plots and Damien smiles.

~~

Archie is a gentleman so he doesn’t voice what he thinks of Chaos out loud, although he thinks he’s made it pretty clear by his actions. The hacker underestimates traditional methods, preferring to rely on technology and sheer luck. As far as Archie can tell Alec Hardison, however, is a hacker who appreciates the old as well as the new so, when he tells Parker he approves of her choice, Archie means it. It doesn’t mean he won’t make Hardison regret it if he hurts Parker but it does mean that he thinks it won’t ever come to that. Alec Hardison makes Parker happy and that earns him Archie’s respect any day of the week.

Comments

[jesco0307.livejournal.com]

So much pretty and awesomeness...you made my Saturday afternoon very enjoyable! By the way, I love the idea of Quinn breaking into Eliot's apartment!!

[theron09.livejournal.com]

Ah, thank you :) I'm really glad you liked everything (I liked that idea too *g*)