@pscentral​ Event 36: Trios Alec Hardison & Eliot Spencer & Parker

when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail. and when you have a favourite character everything looks like . The Character

Leverage 1x8 - "The Bank Shot Job"

Leverage 3x16 - "The San Lorenzo Job"

Leverage: Redemption 1x2 - "The Panamanian Monkeys Job"

Leverage: Redemption 3x7 - "The Shakedown in Clone-Town Job"

Sophie: We can't leave. The Crown is still in the museum.

Eliot: No, Sophie. We gotta get you to safety.

Sophie: No. We know Wilde wants to take me down, but he wants to humiliate me by putting me in prison without the Crown ever having left the museum.

Parker: But if we find the Crown...

Sophie: We put it back. We turn Wilde's humiliation back on himself.

Eliot: Mm-hmm. Does anybody else think this sounds like a trap?

Harry: I do. I hate this idea. Sophie, let's go home. Let's regroup. Let's live to fight Wilde another day.

Sophie: No. We are taking Arthur Wilde down today.

L:R S2E13 The Crowning Achievement Job

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))

What's in a name:

The team leveraging Hardison's first name to get him to take them seriously.

It started with the Grave Danger Job. With Parker's panicked "I need you. Do you hear me, Alec? I need you!" It isn't something that's conscious or anything, but all of them lean into it occasionally.

"Alec, just drop it," Nate stares at Hardison, watching the young man realize maybe he'd been pushing Nate too hard on a topic that was a sore subject. Alec nods grimly and backs down.

"Hardison, how long have you been up?" Sophie asks gently, watching the genius wipe the grit from his eyes, his latest forging project laid out around him. When he mumbles something about not remembering, needing to finish, Sophie catches his chin in a manicured hand and holds his attention. "Alec, go to bed." He goes.

"Come on, man, get off the screen for a little while, let's go get some sun," Eliot pokes him after a long job on top of a new World of Warcraft update. Hardison can't even remember what he said back, something glib he's sure, but he remembers the hesitation in Eliot's voice. "Alec, please. You're gonna fuck up your eyesight before you're thirty, staring at blue light a foot away from your face. Please?" Hardison goes with him. They go to an outdoor gun range. Hardison rags Eliot about them both not liking guns, but listens as his best friend talks him through focusing on targets of different distances. He'll never have Eliot's skill, but it's a quick way to help his eyesight and he turns out to be half decent with practice.

"Alec, I'm serious!" Parker pleads with him, a picture of some conspiracy theory held up in her hands. "I need to know if this is real or not, please. Because it doesn't seem real and then it does seem real and Eliot won't give me a straight answer and Nate won't give me any answer at all, and I need to know if-" if I'm going crazy, she doesn't say, but he hears it now. He lays a hand over hers and explains that it's not real, explains the joke patiently until she understands and can laugh at it and "yes, and" Eliot when that particular theory comes up again.

"Hey y'all, it's Alec," he says, a gun to his head and a phone in his hand, one chance to get it right, to make them understand that this is serious. He can practically hear them all sitting up in the tones of their voices, in the grimness of the rapid fire questions, and he breathes a sigh of relief. They'll come get him. They know it's serious.

people who dont experience it cannot comprehend how awful executive dysfunction is. I WANT to do the task, i have the resources TO do the task, i will feel better having DONE the task

but i cant fucking do the task

can't believe the plot of leverage is literally 'man gets hired to be a project manager for Crime and then is forcefully adopted by the employees he doesn't want'

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

Leverage S01E02 The Homecoming Job.

okay no but now I'm really thinking about it, right

it's canon that Maggie had no idea IYS denied Sam's cancer treatment, that's the only reason she stayed friendly with Blackpoole. So au where instead of letting his life fall apart, putting together the team, and then taking down Blackpoole, Nate decides to echo current events and just. Fucking shoots his boss.

and Maggie has no clue why.

maybe he succeeds, maybe he doesn't, either way he goes to jail for this (he was not planning to get away with it). And Maggie's just lost her son, now her husband's an (attempted) murderer and in prison, she's on her own and has no answers for any of this.

So she goes looking.

she might not directly have Nate's contacts and experience, but he had to have talked about these cases, she knows who a few of these people are through him. But she also has her own connections through the art world - like, Parker and Sophie at least have to be talked about by appraisers, collectors, people who work with the things they steal. And she has Sterling, who while still probably not helpful for breaking the law at least likes her more than he likes Nate and might be able to get her some more information. Like why the fuck Nate did what he did.

And she's not a mastermind, she's not Nate's level of manipulative and three steps ahead of everyone else, but she doesn't need to be. She's smart and charismatic and quick to put pieces together (the fucking button camera scene). So. She figures it out.

And then she has to decide what to do about it.

She's not going to be able to exonerate Nate - he shot a man in broad daylight and fully admitted it. She might be able to break him out of prison if he's up for being on the run, but that's a matter of hot debate between the two of them right now. (She could totally do it, especially with the team, she and Sophie are just waiting for him to stop being overprotective.)

(side note: nate's face when he finds out his ex wife and international criminal not-technically-an-ex are running a team together while he's stuck in prison? priceless)

but what she can do is protect other kids like Sam. Seek out corruption, find the people being hurt, and with her team, stop the people responsible from ever doing it again.

she just needs to create a little bit of leverage.

It's so over (got stranded on Mars) we're so back (I can grow food here) it's so over (we left a guy on Mars) we're so back (we've established communication) it's so over (the airlock exploded and the crops froze) we're so back (we've cut down the launch window for a resupply) it's so over (the probe exploded) we're so back (the space program in China has been working on their own probe that can launch in the correct window to get him supplies) it's so over (we didn't tell the hermes crew about a separate possible mission) we're so back (the hermes crew committed mutiny and are now on the way to save Watney) it's so over (we have to remove the front of his spacecraft to get him into space) we're so back (we can cover the hole with a tarp) it's so over (the tarp ripped off during launch and the distance between the hermes and the mav is too wide) we're so back (we can use remaining thruster fuel to course correct) it's so over (if we do this we'll be going too fast) we're so back (we can build a bomb and blow up part of the station to slow us down) it's so over (there's still too much distance between the Hermes and Watney) we're so back (he poked a hole in his suit and flew to us like iron man)