apocalypse never

Hey, so many of you are familiar with fix-it fanfiction, the superglue which holds together the hearts canon has shattered, right? Well, I have a point to make. As of right now (1-28-2020), there are 6,659 fanfictions in the Leverage category on AO3. You know how many of those are fix-it fics? 25. A measly 0.38% of Leverage fanfiction is tagged as fix-it. For comparison, 2.20% of MCU fanfiction and 1.25% of Supernatural fanfiction are fix-its.

So yeah, Leverage is so amazing that hardly anything needs to be fixed. But we already knew that. No, it gets better. Of those 25 fix-it fanfictions, 16 (64%) of them are actually fix-its for OTHER fandoms. Leverage has been used in fix-its for White Collar, The Walking Dead, Coupling (UK), The Flash, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, Kings, Person of Interest, Pacific Rim, Once Upon a Time, The Losers, Merlin, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and the actual 2016 US election (yeah, that).

eliott: i have a tragic history being entangled in the mafia and even now i could kill the most dangerous fighters without firing a gun

You have Parker, who has been designated as bad and wrong since she was a very young child and who has let go of any expectation of being anything else, so that identifying and doing what she thinks is the right thing is consistently an overwhelming and scary experience for her;

Then there's Eliot, who can point to exactly when and how he became irredeemable in his own eyes and whose highest ambition now is to do the wrong thing for the right people this time at least;

Nate, who is clinging to all of these ideas about morality and legality and good and bad that are completely inconsistent both internally and with his behavior, because his very normative view of the world was shattered and he never put the pieces back together in any kind of coherent way;

Sophie, who sees right and wrong as primarily about relationships between people, like she does everything else: right and wrong is in how you engage and who you hurt interpersonally, anything more abstract is irrelevant. But within that, there's also this weight to how she engages, this sense of regret at how she's treated people in the past that we never really see the full scope of;

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

buddie | 13k | dick pics | humor

Eddie has never flipped his phone over so fast. Chris looks up, eyebrows raised.

“Did Buck send you another snake picture?” he asks.

He can't say no, because Buck… Buck did. But not of a rattlesnake mid-strike this time. He sent an entirely different sort of snake. He nods, his throat too dry to speak.

They're nearly done with dinner, Chris pushing a few peas around on his plate like they'll disappear if he just believes hard enough. “Can I see?”

Eddie should've said it wasn't a snake. Of course his kid would want to take a look at whatever freaked him out.

His phone buzzes again.

Buck: I'M SO SORRY

Eddie: Send an actual snake

Eddie: Hurry

His phone vibrates. Buck's sent a picture.

Eddie blanches. It's awful. But he clicks it so Chris won't see any of the surrounding messages or accidentally scroll and flips his phone.

Chris takes it to study it. He zooms in. Tilts his head. Brings the phone up close to his face.

“Do you need new glasses?”

Chris ignores this. He consults his own phone.

Eddie stares desperately at his, because for the first time in his life, it's potentially a bomb. He's never gotten one of… one of those before. Once, in high school, Shannon joked about it, but then she'd peed on a stick, and that was the end of any fun of that sort.

The sound of Chris's phone ringing snaps Eddie out of his reverie. He flinches, which makes Chris laugh. Chris is holding his phone between them on speaker, waiting for Buck to pick up.

He does. Buck never disappoints. “H-hey, Chris.”

“You sent Dad the third result for scary rattlesnake on Google images,” Chris says, his tone deeply accusatory. Eddie is so fond of his kid.

He also takes the opportunity to steal his phone back and shove it in his pocket. Far, far away from a teenager who occasionally decides Eddie's privacy is worth less than nothing. The only reason he doesn't snoop more, Eddie is almost certain, is because he doesn't really care about what his boring old dad has going on.

“Y-yeah,” Buck agrees.

“You and I both know you can be more creative than that.”

“Oh, he's plenty creative.” Eddie stabs one of his own peas.

It's a mistake, because he's chewing when Buck says, “He’s only afraid of big snakes.”

Eddie the Unforgiven. (ya know, like the Metallica song…)

Sorry, y’all know I had to make a sad comic about our new sweetheart.

My stepmother did NOT like the way her Libertarian Viking Neighbor framed pregnancy as the fetus "attacking the woman". She incredulously told him this was extremely disrespectful to expectant mothers to portray pregnancy as so violent and negative.

Libertarian Viking Neighbor's response was that people consensually hurt each other all the time, and "there's like a whole community about that, with the acronym the one that starts with a B" And his reasoning was that if the mother was consenting to bring attacked by the baby, it in fact wasn't violent and negative because there was consent.

unable to sleep, rose has plenty of time to think after that night at the club. | 2151w

rose stares at the ceiling. the champagne from earlier in the night has left her mouth dry and her temples fuzzy. there's water on the bedside, put there by shane before he kissed her shoulder and turned onto his side with the covers pulled up to his ear. drinking the water would mean moving, and moving would mean alerting the man lying next to her that she is awake, and if she alerts him to fact she is awake then he will feel obligated to turn back around and pretend like he hasn't spent the last three hours faking sleep. she can tell. he's too still, like a rabbit caught in a trap. so, rose stares at the ceiling.

there's a cobweb dangling from the lampshade. one lone thread, thick with dust, sways back and forth as if the room itself is breathing in tandem with them. she hasn't taken a full breath since the light clicked off. her chest aches.

that's all it is, she thinks, this constricting feeling. one deep breath, rosie, and you'll feel all better.

she closes her eyes and draws in a long, quiet breath through her nose but all it does is gather prickly heat under her eyes and wall up her throat. she swallows back the tears.

she can still feel all the places he touched her, careful and controlled, and the weight of him bearing down on top of her even as he held himself up politely by the elbows. the hollowed out, used, feeling between her legs stretches to her stomach where it churns against champagne and the three bites of sushi she had before going out to the club.

the night had gone well. right up until it hadn't.