#ps i got permission to post I did not rando share someone’s fic we gucci

[jamiesfootball]

i am the leverage anon and i choose to reveal myself to you! as a token, i present to you the first scene of my leverage au!

•••

“Here you are, sir,” said Mae, passing two pints over the bar.

“Oh, I don’t know about any ‘sir’. You can call me Ted, Miss Mae,” Ted replied with a smile as he took the pints. Mae smiled back, and Ted turned back to the corner table where Beard was already sitting.

Beard took his pint, and they tapped their drinks on the table, then cheersed. Ted let the man get a solid quarter of the way into his drink in silence before asking.

“C’mon, now. Penny for your thoughts?” he asked, tilting his head. Beard took another long sip of his drink, eyes fixed on a point in midair, unseeing.

“We need a bigger team,” he said finally. Ted had long since learned to not be surprised at his friend’s ponderings. If he let himself do that, he would never get anything done. He’d just spend the whole day gasping and asking “Really?”. Not ideal for either of them.

“Expound,” he said, gesturing towards Beard with his beer.

“Stateside, I was fine with just myself. Ran the smaller cons, got the smaller rewards. When you came onboard, we got to up the stakes a little, and we knew the territory. Here, we’re flying blind. We need a bigger team to help us acclimate, and locals would make us less conspicuous.” Ted nodded slowly, absently watching the bartender.

“Those are quite a few good points,” he said. “If I could make an assumption, I’d say you’ve already got someone, or a few someones, in mind?” Beard nodded, setting down his pint.

“Grifter,” he said. He unzipped his jacket to reach into an inner pocket and remove a few photos. “Anya Graham,” he said, setting down a picture of a tall woman with shoulder-length blonde hair, wearing a long cream-colored coat and not looking at the camera as she exited a car. “Gwendolyn Chalice,” he said, setting down a different picture of a tall woman with long, curled blonde hair, wearing a black, sequined gown with a long slit in the side, smiling at a man with a hand on his chest. “And Jordan Kelly,” he said, setting down a picture of a tall woman with short, spiky blonde hair, wearing a leather jacket and spiked choker, sneering at someone out of frame.

“Huh,” said Ted, peering closely between the images. He could feel Beard’s gaze on him, and looked up to meet the man’s eyes. “So, which one’s her real name?”

Beard’s mouth quirked up on the left side, which was the Beard-quivalent of raucous laughter. Ted took it as a win. Sure, Beard had been in the business longer than he had, but he knew when he was looking at three pictures of the same woman. It would take a little more work than that to trick him.

“No one knows for sure. Most recent, and most well-known, was Rebecca Mannion. Or Welton. She just got divorced.”

“Mannion?” Ted asked. “She used to be with ol’ Rupert over here?”

“You know Rupert Mannion?” Beard asked.

“Well, we never dated, if that’s what you’re asking,” Ted replied with a smile. “But the name just rang a bell. I remember Nate used to talk about working on his accounts when I went across the pond. That was a good kid.” Beard hummed. “She any good?”

“I’m going to pretend you didn’t ask me that,” he said. “She was one of the best, before she got married the first time. But Rupert might be the last time. He’s not the most… upstanding of men.” Ted nodded understandingly. The type of fella he understood Rupert to be wasn’t ordinarily overly concerned with things such as morality. Or monogamy, for that matter.

“You think she’s back in?” 

“She’s already hit a couple marks. Right before we got to London, as Ms. Anya Graham and Lady Chalice,” Beard said, tapping the respective pictures. “Successfully. Sources say she’s on a job right now.”

“Sources?” asked Ted. Beard pulled one of his phones out - Ted never could tell the difference between them, but the man had at least seven - and brought something up, sliding it across the table to Ted.

“The CCTV footage,” he said. True enough, the video on the screen showed Ms. Rebecca - dressed in the leather getup shown in the picture of Jordan Kelly - in the midst of an intense conversation.

“When were you thinking we should talk to her?” Ted asked.

“Tomorrow morning, at 6:30 AM, she’ll go to a very specific coffee shop in Central London. We’ll say hi, introduce ourselves, and give her the rundown.”

“And by ‘we’ll say hi’, you mean I’ll say hi and you will watch from a few yards away.”

“Precisely,” said Beard. “But they say metres here.”

“Right, right,” said Ted. “Meters. It’s spelled weird, too, right?”

“T-R-E, not T-E-R,” Beard replied, not missing a beat.

“Hoo, boy, England is gonna be a challenge!” Ted said with a grin.

“But we love challenges,” Beard reminded him.

“Everything worth doing is a challenge, ain’t it?”

AIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!

wHERE do i start?

I mean, Rebecca in a choker with spiky hair and a leather jacket. I'll start there. That's. This makes me happy. This makes me so happy.

"Well we never dated" <- Ted I cannot even with you and I can hear him in my head this is so-

"They say metres here" that's my Beard!

And Mae! Mae from the get-go!

The banter!

The antics!

I LOVE IIIIIIT