by daybreak

Gasp! i did it! cute crime babies hanging out at the park <3 eliot packed a picnic, alec brought a brew, parker’s… shenaniganing, everything is great!

is there a ship name? a tag for them??

also. is eliot just small or also smol? *rubs chin thoughtfully*

Send me a ship and a fic title, and I’ll post a summary of the fic with that title I won’t write.

Hm.  I think in this crossover ‘verse, the “Let’s Go Steal A Cannibal’s Swiss Bank Account” plan is probably something like:

- Send Parker in as a new patient for Hannibal.  No cover story, no lies, just straight-up send Parker in and let her spend an hour gleefully telling Hannibal about her childhood and her life.  He would absolutely keep her and at least consider taking her on as a Murder Intern instead of a regular patient.  Parker’s kind of into it; therapy is high on her Things I Hate list, but she thinks being a Murder Intern might be kind of fun.  Not that she wants to actually murder anyone, but Hannibal seems to know some very interesting torture techniques, and that’s the kind of thing a girl sometimes finds handy in a difficult situation.

- Meanwhile, send Sophie into the opera / fine arts circles of Baltimore society to keep an eye on his activities that way.  She doesn’t find much there but collects lots of potential future clients, a few pieces of stolen jewelry, and she gets to buy a really great pair of shoes for the gala, so she’s a happy woman.

- Hardison tries to do his genius hacker thing but finds it intensely frustrating because Hannibal basically never touches electronics. You can’t hack a Rolodex, an encoded hand-written set of patient notes, or an erotic drawing. Hardison getting increasingly irritated. Maybe we can let make friends with Team Sassy Science, and they can all talk tech together while the rest of this plays out. I bet Zeller has a secret D&D group that Hardison can join.  

- Eliot’s assigned to be Will’s bodyguard (since I’m assuming Will makes the call in this scenario, or maybe Alana on Will’s behalf), which actually works out great.  Will and Eliot spend a lot of time being gruff and untalkative at each other, but in a comfortable mutually enjoyable “hanging out drinking beer on the porch with dogs” kind of way.  Their only source of friction as friends is that despite himself, Eliot’s occasionally sort of impressed with Hannibal’s cooking.  Like, yes it’s people, and yes it’s way too goddamn fussy, BUT damn if that’s not some incredibly distinctive technique.  Good knifework. Fresh, interesting ingredients (the ones that aren’t people).  Eliot can appreciate a thing done well, even when it’s a really terrible thing.

- Nate, well.  I kind of want to see Nate and Jack go a few rounds.  I have no idea who comes out of that conversation the winner, I just want to see it happen.

I do think that eventually the gang figures out enough to realize that, wow, this is really not their area.  Corporate takedown is one thing, takedown of one rich asshole with maybe one or two murders under his belt is still sort of that thing, but psychopath who has killed his way across decades and continents is really kind of out of their mandate.  So they pull up stakes and get way the hell out of town.

But I’m pretty sure that once they’re all safely out of murder range, Hardison plants enough faked-up evidence to get Hannibal caught.  Parker breaks into Hannibal’s office just before Hardison sets the capture in motion and steals back her patient record so it doesn’t end up in evidence, and maybe she kindly steals Will’s while she’s there.  Eliot takes care of mailing it back to Will, they strike up a correspondence, and once a year or so they get together to go fishing.

Everyone lives happily ever after except Hannibal, but even he has a tiny silver lining in the form of a very nice letter from Parker thanking him for being her favorite therapist she ever had.  

In case you’re wondering, I woke up this morning realizing there’s an alternate variant of “Leverage 2.0 try to steal an afterlife” in which Parker is the one who goes down.

I’m pretty sure in that version Hardison becomes the most adept technomancer the world’s ever seen. He believes so firmly that given enough time, enough zeroes and ones in the right order, he can crack the world open and remake it in the shape of Parker.

Eliot wants to believe, of course he does, and god knows he would trust Hardison to defend his own life any day armed with nothing more than a cell phone and the crackle of magic under his skin. But he’s a practical man and he’s seen a lot of dead people and ain’t none of them ever got up again. He can’t let himself believe that’s even a possibility. He’s trying so hard to find the new shape of a world without Parker in it.

They fight a lot. They make up a lot, desperately and knowing every time the cracks go a little deeper and get a little harder to repair because Parker was always the glue, wasn’t she? The sun they both orbited around. They’re unbalanced, without her.

I’m not sure how this version ends, though. Maybe it’s a choose your own adventure. Maybe Hardison finally finds the right words and brings Parker back and she brings some pretty fucking weird new powers with her and Leverage 3.0 is off and running. Maybe Eliot and Hardison can’t keep it together anymore and go their separate ways and Hardison goes a little crazy without Eliot to tether him.

Maybe they find Parker but she’s at peace, in the halls of the dead, where the rules of physics don’t apply, and she loves them but she has a place now and needs to be there. Maybe it turns out you can’t bring people back, but you can join them in those quiet, cool halls. Maybe the portals only work one way. Do you think Eliot and Hardison would hesitate? I think they’d jump, all the way down, and trust Parker to catch them and show them around their new home.

And I know it makes sense from a writing standpoint, but I also wonder if it comes from somewhere else. If that’s just the first, most common human response to hearing that magic is possible.

 If I’m gonna write the thing at your behest I’m gonna transpose it to your fandom, obviously, which actually works pretty well, so let’s talk about this. Let’s talk about: 

 - five times Eliot Spencer defied death to save the other two legs of his OT3 and the horrible final time he didn’t, and how he had a little time to KNOW death had finally caught up, but maybe it was okay because Parker and Hardison are gonna be okay, except who’s gonna look out for them now? Because that’s the last thing Eliot has time to think before he blacks out.

- Parker losing her shit because this is not okay, none of this is okay, there’s no amount of twisting this or turning this problem that makes it make sense. Nothing she can steal that will bring Eliot back. No building high enough to jump off to buy herself more than a few seconds of blessed blankness before it all comes rushing back. 

 - Hardison going a little crazy on the security systems and the plans and the backup plans to protect Parker because goddamn if he is going to let Eliot’s sacrifice be in vain, Nothing, fucking NOTHING, is going to hurt Parker if he has to hack into every damn top secret database in the world to erase her records. And if one of the side effects is that he’s too tired and fried to face his own grief, even better. 

 - Parker’s quest for bigger buildings, faster falls, tighter spaces, wilder adventures. anything and everything to blank her mind, leading her to fucking MAGIC. Which actually doesn’t surprise her much because how else does Santa get things done? What does surprise her is how much sense it makes when she starts to learn it. How the words and tones and gestures feel right in her mouth and fingertips almost from the first day, without all the tedious rote learning and pointless social cues that talking to normal people requires. Magic doesn’t care if you’re polite or blunt when you talk to it. Magic doesn’t care if you don’t understand why people lie. Magic doesn’t care if you can’t hide your feelings - actually Magic kind of LIKES it when your sorrow spirals out and gets all mixed up in the spell. Magic doesn’t mind if you want to try to find a way around its few hard rules. It might make you pay, but sure, go on and try. Magic likes spirit. 

 I’m just saying, if anyone in the world can speak Magic’s strange slippery language and convince it to break its own rules just this once, just because if anyone deserves a second chance isn’t it Eliot Spencer? That person is probably Parker. 

But I’m also saying sometimes if people do come back, they might not come back quite like you remember them. Time with the dead changes a body, especially if he put a lot of the dead where they are. 

Or maybe I’m saying the person comes back okay but the spell caster pays a price. 

Or maybe I’m saying even for Parker, even with Hardison throwing more technology at Magic than has ever been tried before, maybe a rule is a rule and not even Leverage 2.0 can steal an afterlife. And what happens then? 

Oh man, so, this is basically my second favorite fic that I’m working on! The basic premise is that Eliot was once on a gate team, and he retires, leaves the program, but they keep calling him in for “one last mission.” After a particularly horrifying one last mission, he chucks his phone into the river and quits for good. And then…

It was almost three years later and they’d been on their own, just him and Parker and Hardison, for almost six months when his phone rang and it was an unknown number. He knew who it was.

He ignored it, but it kept ringing, going to voicemail and then starting all over again. “No,” he snapped when he finally gave in and answered.

It was General Landry himself on the line.

Your country needs you, son, he said, and Eliot said no.

These are boys you’ve worked with, he said, and Eliot said no.

The SGC will owe you one, he said, and Eliot said no.

I, personally, will owe you one, he said, and Eliot-

Eliot remembered the close call they’d had last week, the three of them ending up in a cell in some podunk town on the Washington border. Parker managed to get them out before fingerprints were taken and identities were uncovered, but Eliot couldn’t help but think what if. He thought about Parker, trapped in a cell for the rest of her life. About Hardison, in prison and without access to the network he was plugged into 24/7.

Eliot said okay.

So he goes back for one last one last mission, things go horribly wrong, and it’s six months before he manages to get back to Earth, never mind Portland. Parker and Hardison are… less than pleased? Super freaked out? Have spent six months thinking he was dead but traveling the world on the barest hint that he was alive? Yeah, those things.