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asimaiyatSo right now I am trying to organize my fic over here on DW, as it Seems Like The Thing To Do. And I thought I would start with the one I just wrote, for oxoniensis's Make It Better fest.
Title: The Birthday Party Job
Fandom: Leverage
Pairing: was going to be gen, but the Parker/Alec disabled my firewall and slipped in through the AC vent...
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Just because they went their separate ways, doesn't mean they aren't still family.
AN: written forsloth's prompt "leverage: family" in the Make It Better fest. The subject matter is kind of close to my heart, so apologies for getting the schmoop all over everyone...
Alec imagines the five scattering figures as dots on a GPS map, just bookin' it in five separate directions on paths that, theoretically, will never intersect.
For the first couple of months, he keeps tabs on them all. It's not easy -- there are secret identities, fake passports, new scars in Eliot's case and a new hair color in Sophie's. But if it were easy, it probably wouldn't be a job for Alec Hardison, now would it? It's not an obsession or anything; he has a life, after all. But every once in a while he fires up the laptop with the fastest internet connection (okay, the second fastest, next to the one he only uses for MMOs) and checks on his old friends and their new names.
Eliot -- after finding out that most of his old contacts were, in one way or another, compromised, he got a steady job as a bodyguard for some shady gambling character. In the odd security photo that turned up, he looked well, steadily recuperating from having to hit the ground stop, drop and rolling. The new job meant a lot of traveling, apparently, but most of it revolved around Vegas, Monte Carlo and Dubai, and between the three locations, it looked like the hitter actually had a decent social life going.
A casino in Dubai picked up grainy green-tinted photos of this high-roller dude and his entourage, and they ended up on a pro poker fansite. Unmistakable: everyone's favorite retrieval specialist, his hand lazy in the hair of a lady bodyguard with ripped arms and dark, laughing eyes. Alec smiled. He couldn't help it -- he'd used a lot of words to describe Eliot, but until now, "smitten" had never exactly been one of them.
Sophie was still trying to be an actress, with a new stage name -- Theda Desperaux -- and the same old, er, "talent." Even without pictures, she'd be unmistakable just from the reviews. Really, who else gets described as "possessed of the unique combination of soap opera melodrama and infomercial sincerity"? At least everyone made sure to mention that she was pretty. And in a snapshot from her one-night run in The Glass Menagerie, Alec zoomed in on the eye-catching diamond-and-ruby cascades hanging from her ears.
Those couldn't be... yep, reported stolen two weeks ago from the Musee D'Orsay in Paris. Alec wasn't sure what to make of that, but eventually decided that the moral of the story was, girls will be girls.
Nate... Nate was still Nate. He had checked himself in for a few days to one of those fancy spas that everyone knows are secretly rehab clinics. Under a false name, of course, but really? Did he think "Alec Spencer" was going to fool anyone? Since then, he seemed to be lying low, spending his revenge money in a sleepy town in the Florida Keys. Alec found his address, and he wanted to send a postcard, ask if he was okay... but he just wasn't sure. They'd agreed to split up. No contact. No means no. So he just closed the window and rolled his eyes a little, deciding that the whole "scattering" thing was pointlessly overdramatic, overly final, but in the end, he had agreed to it.
And then there was Parker. Or well... there wasn't Parker. The girl was too good to get her picture taken, but there was certainly a series of burglaries and mysterious missing objects that left a definitively Parker-shaped impression in the, shall we say, negative space.
At first it was just here and there, stories that suggested to the educated observer that only one person would have been able to pull them off. But the trickle turned into more of a stream, and then maybe something like a waterfall. The search terms Alec had figured out to track down tales of the thief's exploits pulled in something every night, sometimes a few things. Different cities, different countries even, but always the same MO. Always perfectly silent, perfectly clean.
Until she started getting less clean. The police blotters picked up on details -- an A/C vent left propped open, a smudged-out fingerprint, the very edge of a sneaker print on the wall.
That was when Alec stopped caring about what he had and hadn't agreed to. The girl clearly needed help. And it wasn't hard to track down her cell phone number, or to shoot her a text reading R U OK? -- Alec .
Okay, it was hard to press "send." But he did. And it took her a few hours to text back Yeah. I miss you guys. And then he had to call, and they had to spend three hours on an encrypted line catching up even though it hadn't really been that long, and it was just like old times, which just made both of them miss it even more.
Parker said she was worried about how Eliot was doing without her. She asked for his contact info in that sweet, weedling way she had, and it was no use arguing so Alec gave her his email address.
After that, there was really no point holding back. He went ahead and wrote a letter to Nate. The boss wrote back, all old-school handwriting on heavy paper, saying that he was doing better but starting to get bored, trying to think of a new racket to get into.
Of course, he wanted to know how to get in touch with Sophie.
~~~
And that was how it started. They'd been like a family before, and now they were just a different kind of family -- the kind that spreads out across the world but manages to keep in touch, emailing corny jokes and sending care packages (that was mostly Sophie) and even getting in a webcam chat here and there. They all had their own lives, their own interests to pursue, but at the end of the day Alec liked to think that all of them checked their email -- their special almost-impossible-to-trace email addresses that he'd made up for them -- one last time before going to bed.
For a few months, it worked out just fine. And then it was Parker's birthday, and on one of their Skype sessions, Alec cheekily asked her what she wanted.
"I don't know if it's something I can have."
"Aw, baby. I'll give you whatever you want. What, you think I can't track it down for you?"
"No, it's not that. I want everybody back together for my birthday party. The way we used to be."
"Oh."
"Yeah."
"You do know that Eliot's supposed to be in Monaco for the rest of the year, right? And I'm basically stuck in Atlanta until this beta test is over..."
"Okay. I just thought, you know... we used to be able to do anything. Pretty much. So I thought we could do this."
"Huh." Alec thought about it for maybe half a second. "Okay. The Birthday Party Job. Let's do it."
"Oh... and I want a pinata."
"Sure thing, babe."
~~~
It turned out they couldn't have the birthday party exactly on Parker's birthday. Sophie had landed a role that nobody in their right mind would have ever offered her, and if she missed opening night she'd probably never have the opportunity again. But the day after Parker's birthday, five little dots on a GPS map converged at the baggage claim area of LaGuardia Airport.
They all grinned, even Eliot, and none of them had changed so much that they didn't instantly recognize each other. But still, it was a little awkward. Alec went in to hug Parker, forgetting for a moment how she felt about touching. Eliot punched Alec on the shoulder, forgetting how he felt about being hit very very hard. Nate was a little sheepish about how little he'd been up to, and Sophie was clearly trying hard not to gloat over her successes.
In other words, it was exactly how it's supposed to be when a family gets reunited. Even if it's just for one day, Alec reminded himself, as Parker edged closer to him until they might as well have been touching. One day is... well, it's a start.
Title: The Birthday Party Job
Fandom: Leverage
Pairing: was going to be gen, but the Parker/Alec disabled my firewall and slipped in through the AC vent...
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Just because they went their separate ways, doesn't mean they aren't still family.
AN: written for
sloth's prompt "leverage: family" in the Make It Better fest. The subject matter is kind of close to my heart, so apologies for getting the schmoop all over everyone...Alec imagines the five scattering figures as dots on a GPS map, just bookin' it in five separate directions on paths that, theoretically, will never intersect.
For the first couple of months, he keeps tabs on them all. It's not easy -- there are secret identities, fake passports, new scars in Eliot's case and a new hair color in Sophie's. But if it were easy, it probably wouldn't be a job for Alec Hardison, now would it? It's not an obsession or anything; he has a life, after all. But every once in a while he fires up the laptop with the fastest internet connection (okay, the second fastest, next to the one he only uses for MMOs) and checks on his old friends and their new names.
Eliot -- after finding out that most of his old contacts were, in one way or another, compromised, he got a steady job as a bodyguard for some shady gambling character. In the odd security photo that turned up, he looked well, steadily recuperating from having to hit the ground stop, drop and rolling. The new job meant a lot of traveling, apparently, but most of it revolved around Vegas, Monte Carlo and Dubai, and between the three locations, it looked like the hitter actually had a decent social life going.
A casino in Dubai picked up grainy green-tinted photos of this high-roller dude and his entourage, and they ended up on a pro poker fansite. Unmistakable: everyone's favorite retrieval specialist, his hand lazy in the hair of a lady bodyguard with ripped arms and dark, laughing eyes. Alec smiled. He couldn't help it -- he'd used a lot of words to describe Eliot, but until now, "smitten" had never exactly been one of them.
Sophie was still trying to be an actress, with a new stage name -- Theda Desperaux -- and the same old, er, "talent." Even without pictures, she'd be unmistakable just from the reviews. Really, who else gets described as "possessed of the unique combination of soap opera melodrama and infomercial sincerity"? At least everyone made sure to mention that she was pretty. And in a snapshot from her one-night run in The Glass Menagerie, Alec zoomed in on the eye-catching diamond-and-ruby cascades hanging from her ears.
Those couldn't be... yep, reported stolen two weeks ago from the Musee D'Orsay in Paris. Alec wasn't sure what to make of that, but eventually decided that the moral of the story was, girls will be girls.
Nate... Nate was still Nate. He had checked himself in for a few days to one of those fancy spas that everyone knows are secretly rehab clinics. Under a false name, of course, but really? Did he think "Alec Spencer" was going to fool anyone? Since then, he seemed to be lying low, spending his revenge money in a sleepy town in the Florida Keys. Alec found his address, and he wanted to send a postcard, ask if he was okay... but he just wasn't sure. They'd agreed to split up. No contact. No means no. So he just closed the window and rolled his eyes a little, deciding that the whole "scattering" thing was pointlessly overdramatic, overly final, but in the end, he had agreed to it.
And then there was Parker. Or well... there wasn't Parker. The girl was too good to get her picture taken, but there was certainly a series of burglaries and mysterious missing objects that left a definitively Parker-shaped impression in the, shall we say, negative space.
At first it was just here and there, stories that suggested to the educated observer that only one person would have been able to pull them off. But the trickle turned into more of a stream, and then maybe something like a waterfall. The search terms Alec had figured out to track down tales of the thief's exploits pulled in something every night, sometimes a few things. Different cities, different countries even, but always the same MO. Always perfectly silent, perfectly clean.
Until she started getting less clean. The police blotters picked up on details -- an A/C vent left propped open, a smudged-out fingerprint, the very edge of a sneaker print on the wall.
That was when Alec stopped caring about what he had and hadn't agreed to. The girl clearly needed help. And it wasn't hard to track down her cell phone number, or to shoot her a text reading R U OK? -- Alec .
Okay, it was hard to press "send." But he did. And it took her a few hours to text back Yeah. I miss you guys. And then he had to call, and they had to spend three hours on an encrypted line catching up even though it hadn't really been that long, and it was just like old times, which just made both of them miss it even more.
Parker said she was worried about how Eliot was doing without her. She asked for his contact info in that sweet, weedling way she had, and it was no use arguing so Alec gave her his email address.
After that, there was really no point holding back. He went ahead and wrote a letter to Nate. The boss wrote back, all old-school handwriting on heavy paper, saying that he was doing better but starting to get bored, trying to think of a new racket to get into.
Of course, he wanted to know how to get in touch with Sophie.
~~~
And that was how it started. They'd been like a family before, and now they were just a different kind of family -- the kind that spreads out across the world but manages to keep in touch, emailing corny jokes and sending care packages (that was mostly Sophie) and even getting in a webcam chat here and there. They all had their own lives, their own interests to pursue, but at the end of the day Alec liked to think that all of them checked their email -- their special almost-impossible-to-trace email addresses that he'd made up for them -- one last time before going to bed.
For a few months, it worked out just fine. And then it was Parker's birthday, and on one of their Skype sessions, Alec cheekily asked her what she wanted.
"I don't know if it's something I can have."
"Aw, baby. I'll give you whatever you want. What, you think I can't track it down for you?"
"No, it's not that. I want everybody back together for my birthday party. The way we used to be."
"Oh."
"Yeah."
"You do know that Eliot's supposed to be in Monaco for the rest of the year, right? And I'm basically stuck in Atlanta until this beta test is over..."
"Okay. I just thought, you know... we used to be able to do anything. Pretty much. So I thought we could do this."
"Huh." Alec thought about it for maybe half a second. "Okay. The Birthday Party Job. Let's do it."
"Oh... and I want a pinata."
"Sure thing, babe."
~~~
It turned out they couldn't have the birthday party exactly on Parker's birthday. Sophie had landed a role that nobody in their right mind would have ever offered her, and if she missed opening night she'd probably never have the opportunity again. But the day after Parker's birthday, five little dots on a GPS map converged at the baggage claim area of LaGuardia Airport.
They all grinned, even Eliot, and none of them had changed so much that they didn't instantly recognize each other. But still, it was a little awkward. Alec went in to hug Parker, forgetting for a moment how she felt about touching. Eliot punched Alec on the shoulder, forgetting how he felt about being hit very very hard. Nate was a little sheepish about how little he'd been up to, and Sophie was clearly trying hard not to gloat over her successes.
In other words, it was exactly how it's supposed to be when a family gets reunited. Even if it's just for one day, Alec reminded himself, as Parker edged closer to him until they might as well have been touching. One day is... well, it's a start.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-05-17 05:55 am (UTC)Write more "Leverage"/"White Collar" crossovers, okay? The Neal/Alec one was fun, but I'd love to see more, with all the characters!
(no subject)
Date: 2010-05-18 01:26 am (UTC)I have been planning a longer WC/Leverage crossover for ages, but it's taking forever because it requires more plot than my usual. So we'll see if it ever materializes. In the meantime, thanks so much for subscribing. <3
(no subject)
Date: 2010-05-19 01:48 am (UTC)Makes sense... Both shows favor complicated capers, and putting them together would exacerbate that...
My main problem with writing such crossovers is that I haven't yet seen "Leverage" Season 2 (except for the last aired ep, which "hooked" me when I was channel-surfing), and got S.1 via NetFlix (i.e.: only seen 1x each) so I feel rather ignorant of show "canon" and character back-story. I'm hoping TNT will re-run the S.2 eps soon...