#sterling leverage

i wanna know what was going on at IYS back in pre-leverage days when nate was working there, because the 2 employees we get to know are james "hid in a trunk for five days" sterling and nathan "became a robin hood-esque mastermind thief" ford. is this just their standard employee - does the job ad ask for people who enjoy hijinks and have "become a trickster god" in their five year plan? or were all nate and sterling’s coworkers watching them in utter confusion? like HR is getting complaints about them, starting discussions with "look we have a problem with your whole homoerotic rivalry thing but it’s NOT because of the homoerotic part, okay? we decorate for pride month. and i don’t care about the ‘allusion to the high noon standoff trope of cowboy/western movies’, you can’t just be blocking off the hallways to have a dramatic conversation. you stacked chairs in front of the emergency exit door to keep the corridor clear. that’s a fire safety hazard."

Sterling! My boy! He's an ass but I love him. Even if he's just a hallucination

sterling saying he met sophie as "jenny" and nate clearly not knowing that alias is kind of funny to me, cause it implies nate and sterling didn’t share (pretty crucial!) information while working for the same company and chasing the same woman who was doing the same type of crimes for years. i guess their weird frenemy dynamic incidentally made sophie’s life a bit easier lol.

i think it’s fair to assume that hardison is always doing his best to keep the team safe by destroying any information on them, so i’d like to see him mess with government files over the course of years until they’re useless. especially interpol files… interpol files that sterling reads. and no one but sterling really knows enough about the team to realize that the files are wrong, and there’s no proof that they’ve been tampered with because hardison is so good at what he does, so his colleagues are like "maybe you’re just misremembering? doesn’t that seem more likely than interpol being hacked without a trace?". there’s no decent records but sterling KNOWS that everyone’s age is off by a decade, half the crimes they’re accused of never happened, and their pictures get more and more photoshopped over time. hardison would definitely sprinkle in silly anecdotes and doctor who references. it’s infuriating. one interpol file contains a coded message that turns out to say like "hi sterling, we still hate you and all, but please tell olivia we said happy birthday". obviously it’s gone from the file as soon as sterling cracks the code. if he tells his daughter that some old friends sent their best… well, he’s just trying to be a nice father.