#the way it takes eliot SO long to take his place at the back of the group | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

fablesrose · 6 months

Text

Ch 17 - The Three Strikes Job

Series Rewrite Masterlist

Pairing: Eliot Spencer x Ford!Reader

Description: When Lieutenant Bonanno gets shot, the team goes after a corrupt mayor to get justice.

Words: 4682

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“So, is he going to be okay?” Parker asked.

Nate had just come in and explained the situation. Lieutenant Bonanno from the State Police was in the hospital after a shooting. It was pretty serious and while it was likely he would pull through, it wasn’t a guarantee. He was still in a coma and there were no current suspects.

“They don’t know,” Nate said, pacing the front of the room, clearly upset and drunk.

“Okay, this guy’s a cop,” Tara pointed out. “You’re thieves-”

“I’m not a thief!” Nate declared, but then sat down. “Bonanno, is the cop we tip off when we need to put the cuffs on a mark.”

“You do realize we’re gonna be covering the same ground as the state cops on this one,” Hardison asked. “Hundreds of angry, highly motivated state cops.”

“By the way guys,” Eliot piped up, “whoever shot him up, was using military grade weaponry.”

“Well you know what, I don’t care!” Nate yelled. I flinched back, not expecting him to raise his voice so suddenly. He continued, his voice still raised, “I don’t care about that. This guy dedicated his life to doing the right thing! And this is his payback? I mean, his family’s pain is what he deserves? If we don’t settle the score on this, why do we do this? Do you understand?”

I curled myself into the corner of the couch. I could feel my eyes tearing up, both at the visualization of him and his family suffering and the fact that I didn’t like when people yelled. As far as I could remember there had never been a reason for the discomfort, maybe it’s something natural. And though Nate or my dad very rarely yelled when I was growing up, when they did, it was understandable if not deserved like when I did something stupidly dangerous and it did scare me enough so I never did it again.

There was an ever stretching silence before Eliot leaned forward in the chair next to me and asked Hardison, “What are Bonanno’s active files?”

It didn’t take long at all for Hardison to pull them up on the screen, “According to the State Police database, Bonanno had half a dozen open cases. The most recent one was a protection racket out of Arcadia, but the cops were focusing on an auto theft ring out of Waynesboro. Let’s just say if you’ve jacked a car in Massachusetts in the last year, your head’s gonna be bouncing off a cruiser by dinner time.”

Nate stared at one case on the screen in particular, “What’s that one?”

“That’s public corruption,” Hardison answered, “there’s practically no files on that thing.”

“That’s it,” I blurted out before I could even process the thought. There was something about that case that just felt right. Or more accurately, it felt wrong in a way that mattered in this scenario. A public corruption case with no files on it was fishy on its own, but the fact that it was one of Bonanno’s cases, a guy who seemed to live for justice and from what Nate said, ‘doing the right thing?’ It pushed it over the edge of deniability.

“What? No, no, y/n-” Hardison insisted, “These other two files, they involve violent criminals. This one? It, its-”

“No no no,” Nate cut Hardison off, “she’s right, that’s it. Just… check the shooting, put up the scene.”

Hardison quickly threw the crime scene photos up on the screen. All concrete and blood splatters.

“Okay, so Bonanno goes to a remote location,” Nate talks it out, “alone, no backup. That means he knows his attackers and he’s not expecting any trouble. What did you just say?” He asked Hardison, “No files on it?”

Hardison shook his head.

“So,” Nate continued, “Bonanno, was keeping this investigation, off the books.”

“It explains the secret meeting,” Tara relented. “Off hours, away from any witnesses.”

“Cops are looking in the wrong place,” Eliot said. He then leaned towards me and whispered, “Nice job, sweetheart.”

I couldn’t help the shiver that I felt flow through me at his praise. I smiled softly at him with a nod before turning my attention back to Nate who was pacing in front of the room.

“Absolutely, so,” he muttered, “That leaves, I mean, that leaves us.”

“So who’s the bad guy?” Parker asked.

Hardison looked it up quickly and when it seemed he had the answer, he proposed an alternative, “or, or or, and I’m just spitballing here, we could just let the state cops handle this one. Call in an anonymous tip.”

“Come on Hardison,” Nate said. “How bad could this be?” It didn’t seem like he believed the statement, and looking around, none of us were convinced either.

Our skepticism was warranted when it was revealed that Bonanno was investigating the mayor of Bellbridge, Massachusetts, Brad Culpepper the third. Someone who was surrounded by security, the press, and probably had half of the local cops on his personal payroll. No wonder Bonanno was keeping it off the books.

Nate and Tara attended Culpepper’s re-election fundraiser posing as a real estate developer and a PR rep to gain some insight on him, maybe even getting an in. Parker was casing the mayor’s office, and the rest of us, Hardison, Eliot, and I went over to the Bonannos’ house to see if we could find anything there. One problem, there was a police officer watching the house for the family.

Hardison dug through his box of different jackets, tossing out ones that said FBI, DEA, and others until he grabbed the ones he was looking for: Crime Lab.

“You spend your weekends making these things, don’t ya,” Eliot asked distastefully.

“Yes I do,” Hardison replied, “and does anyone appreciate that?”

“I do,” Parker said on comms. “I like the costumes.”

“I actually helped make these ones,” I said as I shrugged a jacket on. When Eliot gave me a puzzled, unimpressed look I said, “What? You have cooking, I’m still exploring creative, ‘making things’ outlets.”

Eliot muttered something but I couldn’t hear it over Parker saying, “I wish I was there.”

“Parker, we need someone to sweep the mayor’s office while he’s here at the fundraiser,” Nate explained.

“Fine, but I never get to do anything fun,” she reiterated before she jumped off a roof, something I knew she enjoyed an unnecessary amount.

As we approached the house, I had to jog to keep up with the boys’ swift pace. When we got up the front porch where the officer was sitting, Hardison cleared his throat.

“Is this Lieutenant Patrick Bonanno’s place of residence?” he asked the officer. Once he affirmed Hardison continued, “Alright, we’re from the crime lab. Here to collect evidence from the crime scene.”

“Oh, this isn’t a crime scene. We’re just watching th-” the officer tried to say before Eliot cut him off.

“Wait a minute, I’m sorry, he just said this wasn’t a crime scene.”

I stayed on the front step as Eliot and Hardison opened the front door to look in the house.

“I’m just house sitting,” the officer insisted.

“Oh no, he’s right, this isn’t a crime scene,” Hardison said. “Cuz he done walked all over it!”

“I smell soup,” Eliot said seriously. “You smell soup?”

Hardison and I sniffed the air. While Hardison said “I do,” I said, “I’d say tomato and beef, yes.”

ELiot gave me a slightly amused look, lifting the corner of his mouth and an eyebrow before passing Hardison to go into the house.

“What happened, Goldilocks?” Hardison asked the officer. “Get a little hungry and decide to make some lunch in the middle of an active crime scene?”

“I would never do that,” he said, lifting his iced tea in the process, looking between the two of us before lowering his hand, realizing his mistake.

“Eh, uh, mm- Let’s see what you would do, move,” Hardison said.

To the officer’s credit, when he looked at me and saw that I was carrying a camera case he offered to take it in for me. I adopted the boys’ stern demeanor though, scolding him, saying it was delicate equipment and ushered him into the house.

Hardison dropped some yellow crime scene numbers around the living room, next to toys and what not and got the officer started looking for suspicious fibers in the carpet. He instructed us to search the rest of the house for evidence and DNA.

I was searching odd rooms here and there, taking odd pictures mostly for the noise, ones I planned on deleting later. Eliot passed by a doorway where I was when I was taking one of these pictures, fiddling and experimenting with settings.

“That another one of your ‘creative outlets?’” Eliot asked.

“Knowing a little bit of photography was helpful in freelancing every once in a while,” I said offhandedly.“Besides, it’s nice to have good pictures sometimes.” I looked up at him and saw that sunlight was reflecting on him from somewhere I couldn’t quite determine. It seemed to be hitting him just right, he had a slight smile on his face that I wasn’t sure was conscious. It was a moment I wanted to capture. I lifted my camera and was pleased to see that he paused for just enough time for me to take a picture. I looked it over on the screen and then looked up at him in the doorway, “it’s perfect.”

He shook his head, “Come on, you’re gonna delete that right?”

I hugged the camera to my chest when I passed him, walking into the next room, “Never.”

As we searched, Tara coached Parker through convincing the mayor’s secretary that she was pregnant with his baby from a one night stand to avoid her getting kicked out for searching his office. I struggled not to cringe at the awkwardness coming through in waves through the comms. I could only imagine what that secretary was thinking, but I had a pretty good idea.

Eventually Eliot found Bonanno’s investigation notes taped to the bottom of one of his office drawers. The officer proudly came in with a twig from the carpet, delaying us from looking through them until Hardison praised his efforts and encouraged him to keep looking.

“Looks like he was investigating a company called Kirsch Industries,” Eliot said, reading the notebook.

“Seems like Bonanno found out that for the past couple of years, Kirsch industries has been buying up property on the waterfront,” Hardison said.

“Found a file in the mayor’s office for Kirsch Industries,” Parker said. “It’s incorporated in the Cayman Islands.”

“The only industry in the Caymans is scuba diving and tax evasion,” Hardison said.

“It’s a front company for the mayor,” Eliot concluded.

“The mayor did say he wanted to build a park on the waterfront,” Hardison realized.

“So,” I chipped in, “Mayor buys land from his own company with city money, free cash.”

The boys nodded with me before asking Parker what else she had from the mayor’s office.

“Yeah, I mean, there could be a safe in here, but I don’t have time to move all the balls and bats out of here. He could start a baseball team with all the crap he has in his office,” she complained.

We listened as Nate cut off his and Tara’s conversation with Culpepper and told us, “Alright guys, wrap it up. We’re gonna go on a little field trip.”

The three of us shared a look and went to start packing up our stuff. Before we got too far I stopped the boys, “Wait, since I have my camera out, let me take a picture.”

Hardison instantly wrapped his arm around Eliot’s shoulder with a comically large smile and pointed at the evidence in Eliot’s hand. Eliot gave one of the biggest eyerolls I had seen. I quickly took a picture of them like this and smiled at the results.

“Alright, let’s get out of here.”

Turns out our little field trip was to the local minor league ballpark. We were some of the few people in the stands as the team was just practicing in the field.

“I don’t know,” Tara said, looking over the field and then at us, “Culpepper doesn’t strike me aa the type to order a hit. Especially on something like a graft case.What’s the big deal, you know? You get caught, you go on TV with your wife, you cry, you get re-elected.”

“Yeah, it’s the American way,” Parker agreed.

“Exactly.”

“Naw, this guy’s been caught in the middle of a dozen corruption cases,” Hardison said. “Each time he’s walked away and somebody else took the fall. This guy does not get caught.”

“Don’t know, still doesn’t feel right,” Tara insisted quietly. She looked over at Eliot, “What’s that?”

“It’s a page I found out of Bonanno’s notebook,” he replied as he stared at the writing on it.

“The Maltese Falcon,” Tara read. “The book or the movie?”

“It means something,” Eliot insisted. “I just…”

“Okay,” Nate said as he finally joined us. “This is how we’re gonna take down the mayor,” he gestured to the stadium.

“Baseball?” Hardison asked.

“Yeah, we’re gonna steal this ballpark,” Nate nodded happily and started to walk away before he stepped back to us adding, “And the team. Not necessarily in that order.”

Nate and Tara posed on the waterfront to get Culpepper’s attention. The plan was to convince Culpepper that we were gonna build a ballpark there and try to get him to get in on the action with some bribes from his re-election campaign. A federal offense. But first, we needed a team to play in the ballpark.

Eliot snuck into the team, posing as a transfer and a spy for the owner. He started spreading rumors that the team we were just watching practice was going to be moving to our new stadium.

“There’s only one problem,” Eliot said after Hardison explained his fabricated baseball history, including a catchy Japanese energy drink commercial. “I don’t like baseball.”

“What? Everyone likes baseball,” Hardison insisted.

“I don’t like baseball, man,” Eliot reiterated, “Alright? I don’t like sports where you can’t score on defense. Football, hockey, even basketball. But baseball?”

Hardison turned to where I was sitting on the couch, “Back me up here, y/n.”

I glanced up at him from where I was examining my nails, “I mean, don’t get me wrong, it's fun going to a game with your friends on a sunny day, getting to see some home runs…”

“But?” Eliot egged me on.

I dropped my hands to my lap and made full eye contact with them, “It can get boring sometimes, especially on TV. I only watch if I can go to the game.”

Hardison shook his head at the two of us, “I’m not even talking to you.” He then walked away.

Eliot repeated me under his breath, “yeah, it’s boring.” Before Hardison was completely gone he did ask for him to put on the commercial again, to which he obliged.

Later that day, Hardison, Parker, and I were calling into radio stations with different voices and accents, further spreading the rumor that the Beavers baseball team was leaving their town. Hardison and I were equally surprised when Parker angrily burst into Spanish on her call.

“You speak Spanish?” Hardison asked.

Parker just looked between the two of us, “Si.”

On the plus side, the rumors bumped ticket sales to the Beavers’ games by a hefty margin. Once Nate and Tara let Culpepper swipe their fake baseball plans, he was hooked. Luckily, it was game day, so we all went to the baseball game. Hardison, Parker, and I started a protest outside the gates to keep the Beavers from moving, dressing up and making signs. Nate and Tara were meeting with the owner, giving Culpepper the impression that the move was actually happening, and Eliot was playing catcher in the game.

Once the protest was well underway, I set my poster to the side and headed into the stadium to watch the game. Hardison was able to get us seats behind home plate if we wanted them and I happily decided to take advantage of the opportunity.

The game was pretty exciting, quite a few hits and runs by both teams. When the other team got a particularly good hit, the runner was looking to score, but Eliot threw his helmet to the side to catch the ball from second base and body slammed him, getting him out. I could see the smile Eliot had from the stands, clearly being won over. He shook out his hair with some of the most beautiful curls I’d seen before heading to the dugout.

It wasn’t too long before Eliot was up to bat.

“Meet me outside,” Nate said over comms after his brief meeting and agreement with Culpepper. It seemed we had this in the bag.

“What?” Eliot said in disbelief, “I’m three for four. This guy’s throwing great, I’m not going anywhere.”

I whined too, “Nate, I’m sure it can wait until after the game, let me just watch. It’s been ages, and this is a great game.”

Right then Eliot hit a great ball, he’d at least get to second or third base, if not a home run.

“Alright, good news, bad news,” Nate said to the others though I could still hear him through comms.

“Good news?” Tara asked.

“The mayor’s hooked, we’re in the pinch.”

“Bad news?”

“I think we lost Eliot and y/n til the playoffs.”

“Please, Nate,” I replied, “it’s one game. Relax. Not sure about Eliot though.”

Like I had said before, it could have waited until after the game was over. Once Eliot and I got back to McRory’s the team was sitting there still discussing the logistics of framing the mayor. Eliot jumped right into how great the game was and his performance.

“Excuse your rudeness,” Hardison said, “I’m explaining the con. It’s very complicated.”

“Really?” Eliot asked, “the mayor gives us a check and you deposit it in some company and you connect it back to him. Looks like he’s embezzling from his campaign funds.” He then made a shocked face that made me laugh.

“At least you can’t say he isn’t picking up what you do and how all this usually works, Hardison,” I said.

Hardison gave me a bitter nod before cutting Eliot off again when he started gushing again, “but that’s not all there is, alright? There’s the Bonanno thing.”

“What? We give Bonanno’s notes to the newspaper, man? They named a sandwich after me ad T.J. Philbin’s!” Eliot would not be stopped.

The rest of the team was finally very impressed.

“I’ll give it to you, man, the sandwich thing’s pretty cool,” Hardison finally relented. The two of them shared a fancy little handshake in excitement.

Nate’s phone rang, “I’m sorry, this is the mayor, is this an okay time to take the call or…”

Eliot gave him permission and Nate stepped to the side with a “congrats on the sandwich.”

Eliot finally sat down with the rest of us, still excitedly telling the team how the game went and his last time at bat. I couldn’t help but just watch him. His excitement was infectious. I only tore my eyes away when I thought I felt eyes on me. I turned my head slightly to see that Tara was looking at me with a slightly tilted head. I tilted my own back at her in question but was denied an answer when Nate came back over to the table with an address written down, asking Hardison to look it up.

“The address is right in the middle of the Bellbridge waterfront,” Hardison answered.

“It’s a walk away,” Eliot said simply.

“Look, this is even better,” Nate insisted, “because he has partners, so this is our chance to bring them down too.”

“But if the bribe is in cash, the con doesn’t work,” Parker pointed out.

“Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cash we’re gonna get? It had to have come from somewhere. Hardison can track it.”

“Uh, no Hardison can not,” Hardison corrected.

Nate was not giving up, “Look, you kept saying you don’t think the mayor’s the kind of guy to kill a cop, right?” He asked Tara.

“So let’s go meet the kind of guys who kill cops on the waterfront,” Tara repeated condescendingly, “That’s a solid plan.”

“I’m sorry,” Eliot said, “Where are these partners coming from, huh? And why did they just show up?”

“This is such a bad idea,” I said to myself.

“And the Maltese Falcon thing, it’s just weird,” Parker pointed out.

“Okay, enough!” Nate blurted out. “We are talking about bringing down a corrupt mayor and cleaning up a city. I mean, it’s huge. It’s probably the biggest thing we’ve ever done.”

“They’re not handing out trophies for this,” Eliot retorted.

“Why does it matter that it would be the biggest thing we’ve ever done, Nate?” I asked him seriously. “I don’t know if we should put our lives on the line, we don’t know how far this corruption goes!”

“We don’t always win, man,” Hardison said.

“But we never quit,” Nate emphasized.

“Maybe we should,” I said before I could stop myself.

Everyone looked at me, no one agreeing or disagreeing with me.

Nate gave me a hard look, “I never asked you to join the team, y/n. I love you, but you don’t have to be here.”

He waited for me to say something, to stand up and walk away. I didn’t though. I stared him down with a clenched jaw. I wasn’t going anywhere, no matter how manipulative he was going to be. This was my team, if not my family. Whether Nate or anyone else wanted me here or not, I was staying.

“Okay,” Nate said once he saw I wasn’t leaving, “you guys check out security,” he said, gesturing to Eliot and Hardison. He then turned back to me and Parker, “you two do the perimeter, yeah? And we’ll be on the inside,” he finished with himself and Tara. “Look, we’re gonna do this, we can do it. We’re gonna bring this guy down.”

There was no acknowledgement from the rest of us at the table as he walked away. This was dangerous.

We all loaded into Hardison’s van to go to the waterfront. Hardison and Eliot posed as the Department of Homeland Security to “check out anti terrorism security measures” as a facade to bug the security. What they found instead was no security at all, meaning that the $20 million in federal funds to install high end equipment went missing.

Nate and Tara walked into the suspicious looking warehouse to meet with the mayor and his partners while Parker and I split up to check the perimeter. Parker went under the dock and discovered guys with guns guarding boxes labeled soybeans. The boxes were filled with guns and hand grenades. Probably where that $20 million went. Everything was quiet on my end of the area until six or so black sedans came careening around the corner towards the warehouse where Nate and Tara were with the mayor. They were discussing where the mayor’s partners were when I spoke up to warn them.

Before I could do so, a wicked amount of feedback came through the comms causing me to cringe.

“Someone’s transmitting on our frequency,” Hardison explained.

“Yeah, well, Nate and Tara, you have company from out here, six cars just pulled up surrounding the building,” I rushed out, hoping to give them some time.

“It’s FBI,” Eliot said, “and more than six are coming!”

I looked across the water front to where they were and saw more suvs pull up with sirens blazing. I had already ducked out of sight when the first cars came, but now I started making my way around to the others, staying low. Once I got back to the van, I saw that the others were already there, pulling on FBI jackets with Hardison doing stuff on his computer.

“So the guy who put out a hit on a police detective is an FBI snitch?” Parker asked. “That’s not fair.”

“Of course he’s a snitch,” I sighed in resignation as Eliot handed me a jacket to pull on.

Hardison was able to identify a nearby federal ID cell phone and called it, “you come in and we kill all the hostages. … Oh you thought the mayor was the only one? No, we got a whole Sunday school up in here, we got old folks, we got nuns, and we have explosives. You come in and you make headlines.” He hung up before the agent could respond, back to working on his laptop.

“Scary, but effective,” I commented as I watched the warehouse, the agents not moving in.

“Well now we know why he didn’t go down for any of the corruption cases, cuz he’s a snitch,” Tara said angrily.

“Well, you know, it’s possible that he doesn’t know anything about Bonanno getting shot,” Nate thought out loud.

The mayor in fact did know about it. Nate got as angry as I’d ever heard him, yelling about Bonanno’s family and how he almost died.

“Nate I bought you some time,” Hardison said, “but about now we’ve got a whole army of five-O coming down on us… It’s a big day, big big day for us.”

“You have to let him go,” I heard Tara say.

“No!” Nate said.

“Then kill him now, we have to get out of here!”

“Shit,” I whispered to myself, this was getting worse by the second.

There was a large crash, but it sounded like the mayor was still alive.

“Alright, we’ll deal with him later,” Nate said. He then relayed a plan, a dumb plan, to get him and Tara out of the warehouse. It involved them all walking out of the warehouse as hostages, a sign of good will, releasing one hostage. What would really happen would be that one hostage would come out of the three doors of the warehouse, one for Nate, Tara, and Culpepper.

“No, Nate, man, are you kidding me? That is the worst plan I’ve ever heard!” Hardison said.

“Look, he needs a distraction,” Eliot said.

“I mean, we did just find a box of ammo and explosives,” Parker pointed out. “Boom, I’m just saying.”

“The problem is in the delivery,” Eliot said.

“And the detonator,” Hardison added.

The rest of us looked at the van with some hope and an idea. Hardison was not happy to say the least. He nearly cried when we started to unload the gear to prep it.

“Sorry Hardison, it’s all we got right now. We can get you a new van, I can’t get another uncle Nate,” I said as I pulled one more box out.

“Are you sure you want one?” Eliot asked me.

“Still deciding.”

We got the van rigged up with boxes of grenades and got to work. Right as everyone exited the warehouse, Hardison drove the van via remote control towards the building, and caused it to explode, causing confusion and panic.

Eliot, Parker and I nabbed one of the agent’s cars to use as a getaway vehicle. Eliot was driving, I slid into the passenger seat and was relieved to see that the front had a middle seat so it would fit all of us somewhat comfortably. Eliot picked up Nate first, who shoved me into that newly discovered front middle seat and Tara slid into the back seat easily when we pulled around the building. We finally had to persuade Hardison to get in. He was upset that Nate didn’t listen to us when we said it was a bad idea and the fact it led to ‘Lucielle’s’ death. We peeled out of there once Hardison took the last seat in the back.

What a nightmare. I had a feeling this wasn’t over yet.

A/n: Reblogs and comments are welcome and encouraged! Thank you for reading!

Tags: @instantdinosaurtidalwave @kniselle @technikerin23 @kiwikitty13 @plasticbottleholder @mushycore

#eliot spencer x reader #eliot spencer #leverage #rewrite #slow burn #multichapter #nate ford #sophie devereaux #alec hardison #parker #ford!reader

22 notes · View notes

lokiondisneyplus · 11 months

Text

The first scene filmed for Season 2 of Marvel Studios’ Loki was the one from Episode 6, specifically when Loki time slips back into the Time Variance Authority to speak to Mobius. It’s a mirror of the scene directly pulled from the first episode of the first season, where Mobius has brought Loki to a time theater to interrogate him about some of his past transgressions. Loki, way back when, does not want to partake in any of this and threatens to burn the place to the ground. But now, at the end of Season 2, the scene takes on a different tone as Loki has returned here to ask for help, and essentially say goodbye to his best friend.

While getting ready to film this scene on set on Day 1, in a behind-the-scenes interview, Tom Hiddleston reflected on what a full circle moment it was for him and the character.

“Loki has to go back, right back to the beginning of the story, to see if he can find an answer to a question in his mind,” He explains. “He needs to go back to where it all began. It reminds me of that T. S. Eliot poem, the “Four Quartets,” ‘and the end of all of our, oh no we shall not cease, we shall not cease from exploration and the end of all of our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.’”

All season long, Loki has been on a mission — across the timelines — to try and save the TVA and his friends. It hasn’t worked out in his favor so far. He’s eventually faced with an impossible task and begins to slowly realize what he must do, but not before slipping back to talk to Mobius one last time. He wants to say goodbye.

“I think structurally we felt as soon as Loki gets back into the Temporal Core control room, the story's got to pick up, and you're going to move into this fully different thing. There's no time to stop down and have that sort of goodbye with Mobius,” Executive Producer Kevin Wright explains to Marvel.com. “When you start talking about, OK, we need to carve out some way that we can get somewhere and have a goodbye with Mobius. And Mobius doesn't know it's a goodbye. Literally, in his timeline, he's just meeting this guy. But to Loki, this is the goodbye.”

Head Writer Eric Martin viewed the scene as one last time for these characters to have one of their tried-and-true conversations across a table. “Loki already knows what he's going to do. He already knows what he has to do. So, when you sit down to write that, it's just like, all right, we have to have him express where he is right now and get what he needs out of Mobius, but he's engaging emotionally, too.”

As Wright notes, unlike the scene in Season 1 Episode 1, the script is flipped on the integration this time, as it’s Loki who’s asking Mobius all sorts of questions. It’s at this point that Loki, and viewers, learn Mobius’ own origin story with the TVA and some of the hard choices he’s had to make over the years. Loki, staring down his own hard choice, needs to hear some of these things himself.

“That was always really important, revealing more about Mobius than maybe we ever realized in two seasons, what his past was, and it was sort of then a flip of that season one interrogation, where it was so antagonistic, and this time it's Loki going back to try to get advice on how to handle a really difficult situation,” Wright continues. “This Mobius doesn't even realize that's the conversation he's having.”

The two men talk for a bit, but it can’t last forever. Loki asks about what it’s like to make hard decisions, and eventually, Mobius tells Loki exactly what he needs to hear: “Most purpose is more burden than glory, trust me you never want to be the guy who avoids it because you can’t live with the burden.”

With tears in his eyes, Loki shakes Mobius’ hand and says thank you before he slips away, again. If you’re emotional, know that that emotion you’re seeing between the two men on screen is real.

“It's a special thing, because Tom and Owen, they have a real connection on screen,” Martin adds. “That chemistry is there. It's there in person. They work so well together. I think it's touching for everybody on set because you're just feeling a little bit of magic. It's the last magic that everybody will see.”

Hiddleston knows that what he’s got with Wilson as a scene partner is special, and that’s what makes this goodbye so much harder. “Owen is kind of elevated the whole series, he’s so intelligent and imaginative and witty. Mobius and Loki are kind of an odd couple but, they found a friendship. They make each other better.”

#tom hiddleston #owen wilson #loki #mobius #loki s2

39 notes · View notes

dystopicjumpsuit · 1 year

Text

Stars Beyond Number - Chapter 1

Remember Us

Rating: T (rating varies by chapter; mature content will be tagged; regardless of rating, minors DNI)

Pairings: Echo x Riyo Chuchi; Gregor x OFC Cerra Kilian

Wordcount: 2.8k

Warnings: minor angst

Suggested Listening:

Summary: Soldiers. Heroes. Deserters. Traitors. They've been called many things. As the Galactic Empire rises from the ashes of the Republic, a small group of clone troopers and their allies will find a new identity: Rebels.

Echo, Rex, and Gregor are on a mission to save as many of their brothers as they can. The task is daunting, and their friends are few. But from these small and desperate beginnings will come a spark of resistance that will set the galaxy ablaze.

A/N: This story shares continuity with Martyrs and Kings and "Do It Again," but all three fics can be read as stand-alones.

Next chapter | Masterlist | Sign up for my tag list | Read on AO3

Remember us—if at all—not as lost violent souls, but only as the hollow men.

—T. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”

The Marauder pushed off the landing platform with a roar of thrusters and rose through the underworld portal until it disappeared in the swirl of air speeder and starship traffic. The repair shop where Rex had set up his base of operations was deep in the lower levels of Coruscant, and Echo knew the ship would keep ascending long after he lost sight of it before it reached the surface. His decision to part ways with the Batch had seemed very straightforward and logical as he’d discussed it with Hunter, Wrecker, and Tech, but in the face of Omega’s tearful farewell, his resolve had nearly crumbled.

He knew that the rest of the Batch would never let any harm come to the girl; her safety was their only priority. But Echo needed to do more to help his fellow clones, and with Rex, he would finally be in a position to do so. And so he merely watched as the ship departed, bearing his brothers and sister back to Ord Mantell and Cid’s endlessly questionable jobs.

He turned to rejoin Rex and Senator Chuchi. They had been conversing discreetly, giving him privacy and space as he said his goodbyes. The senator watched him now, her luminous eyes soft.

“It’s very brave of you, Echo, to stay behind and join our network after everything you’ve been through,” she said.

“Thank you, Senator,” he said, “but I’ve never been one to back down from a fight.”

“Please, call me Riyo,” she said.

Echo nodded as Rex clapped him on the shoulder.

“Come on, brother,” his old captain said. “I’ll show you around.”

The tour didn’t take long. The repair shop apparently belonged to Trace Martez, the young thief Echo had encountered on Corellia. Rex had taken over the shop when Coruscant got a little too hot for the Martez sisters’ comfort. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement: Rex needed a home base, and Trace needed someone to make sure the shop didn’t fall victim to the seedier elements of the underworld. Rex had set up a kitchen, a temporary barracks, and a small training gym at the back of the shop. There was a tiny room that served as a makeshift office and command center, and finally a communal refresher with two open shower stalls, an enclosed toilet, and a small sink. The garage contained few creature comforts; mostly they just used crates for furniture, though there was a broken-down old sofa with a holotable set up in front of it.

The accommodations were spare and shabby, which was familiar to Echo, but he was struck by how out-of-place Riyo looked in the shop. With her elegant clothing and elaborate hairstyle, she looked far too delicate and fine for her surroundings. Still, she didn’t display either judgment or discomfort at the sparseness of the shop. Echo stole occasional glances at her, admiring the soft curves of her face, the graceful line of her throat, the way her wide, intelligent eyes took in everything around her, missing not a single detail. He wondered how to describe the exact shade of her hair. Was it mauve? Or maybe violet was more accurate. Her gaze shifted to him, and he looked away quickly.

The unmistakable whine of a speeder bike landing on the platform outside interrupted his train of thought, and soon footsteps echoed through the shop.

“Rex? You here?” a woman’s voice called.

“Back here, Cerra,” Rex replied. “I have someone I want you to meet.”

The woman strode into view, faltering a little when she spotted Echo.

“Echo, I’d like you to meet Cerra Kilian,” Rex said. “She handles logistics. Very good at getting things clones aren’t supposed to have.”

“Nice to meet you, Cerra,” Echo said.

The woman clasped Echo’s hand in a reserved greeting and nodded at Riyo. “A pleasure, Echo. Senator, it’s good to see you again.”

“And you as well, Cerra,” Riyo replied.

The contrast between the two women could not have been more stark. Riyo was lovely, with her wide, golden eyes, azure skin, and glossy lavender—no, lilac—hair. Everything about her was soft and feminine and fragile, almost ethereal. Cerra was taller and more solid, her face more angular, and everything about her spoke of practical decisions, from her buzzed head, to her faded mechanic’s coveralls and sturdy boots. More striking, though, was the difference in their expressions. While Riyo’s face was gentle and easy to read, Cerra’s guarded eyes revealed nothing of her thoughts.

“Got a lead on that electro capsule the clone assassin used,” Cerra said.

“What did you learn?” Rex asked.

“It isn’t underworld tech,” Cerra said. “At least, not as far as any of my contacts could tell. More likely military-grade.”

“Then it probably was Rampart’s work,” Rex said grimly.

“Hard to say,” Cerra said. “We know somebody was pulling Rampart’s strings. I’ll keep looking.”

“I hope I don’t sound selfish, but I can’t help wondering. Do you think I might still be in danger?” Riyo asked.

Cerra looked at Rex, wordlessly deferring to him.

“It’s difficult to say,” Rex said. “For now, it wouldn’t be a bad idea for your guards to take additional precautions.”

“I can take a look at their security protocols and offer a few suggestions, if you’d like,” Echo offered.

“Thank you,” Riyo said, gazing up at him with gratitude in her eyes. “I would imagine that someone as accomplished at infiltration as an ARC Trooper would be the best person to find weaknesses in security.”

“Former ARC Trooper,” Echo said, wondering what else Rex had told her about him.

“I don’t think anyone could forget ARC training,” Rex said with a quiet laugh.

Cerra’s eyes flickered to the front entrance of the repair shop, and Echo turned automatically, preparing for a threat. Instead, he recognized a familiar face.

“Didn’t realize we were having a party,” Gregor said as he strode into the room and clasped Echo’s forearm in greeting. “Good to have you with us, Echo.”

The commando nodded at Rex and Riyo, then draped his arm casually over Cerra’s shoulders and handed her a travel cup. The woman pushed him off with an indistinct grumble, but she took the cup with the barest hint of a smile.

“I got some intel on a clone in the 41st Elite Corps who wants to get out. Name’s Fireball, do you know him?” Gregor asked.

“I’ve met him,” Rex said. “Good man. Good soldier.”

“Is the 41st still on Kashyyyk?” Echo asked. “I was there recently. Rex, it could get ugly.”

“It’ll take some time to plan,” Rex said noncommittally.

“That’s not the only thing we’ll need to plan,” Gregor said. “If we’re going to be extracting clones, we’re going to need a way to get the inhibitor chips out of their heads. AZI took mine out on Ord Mantell, but we don’t have a medical droid of our own.”

“Karthon chop fields,” Cerra said. Riyo and the three clones all turned to her. “I’ve been looking into it. My source says there are at least three downed Venators slated for decommissioning on Karthon. We can pull the surgical pod from one of the med bays and set it up here.”

“It’s risky,” Rex said.

“Not as risky as Lotho Minor or Bracca, now that the Empire has stepped up security after your adventure there last year,” Cerra said. “I can get it, but I’ll need help. Gregor, you in?”

“I’d like Echo to go with you on this one,” Rex interjected.

Cerra didn’t react except to nod. “It’s going to take a few days to get the supplies together.”

Over the next few days, Echo began to get a feel for the small group living in the repair shop. Rex was right: his organization was spread thin. Echo wasn’t exactly sure how many others were involved, but at the moment, the only people besides himself who were at the garage were Rex, Cerra, and Gregor. Any others were either deployed on missions or based elsewhere. The three of them were run ragged. Rex looked even more exhausted than he had during the war. Cerra was quiet and remote, keeping to herself and rarely instigating conversations. Gregor was the only one who still seemed to have a sense of humor.

In addition to running missions with Rex, Gregor was the self-appointed quartermaster and chef of the group. He was a surprisingly good cook, and when Echo complimented the food, the commando grinned.

“It’s nice to be the one in charge of the kitchen instead of just washing dishes,” he said.

“If I start cooking, does that mean I can skip dish duty?” Cerra asked.

“No thanks, I’ve tasted your cooking,” Gregor laughed, his eyes bright.

“Rude, but fair,” Cerra acknowledged.

It was the night before Echo was due to travel to Karthon with Cerra. The group sprawled around the holotable, chatting quietly as they ate Gregor’s spicy yobshrimp stew. Echo was jittery. He wasn’t nervous about the mission itself; he’d completed hundreds of missions. But they were always with his brothers or a Jedi. This was his first time with a civilian. Still, Rex obviously trusted Cerra enough to send her after the surgical pod, so Echo tried to quiet his nerves.

“I can take KP tonight,” Echo offered, looking for a distraction.

“You’re on,” Cerra said immediately.

“Sucker,” Gregor giggled.

The kitchen was a spectacular mess, and it took some time for Echo to finish cleaning up. By the time he did, he could hear music blasting from the training gym, and he went to investigate.

Gregor leaned against the wall, his arms crossed, as he watched Rex spar with Cerra. Her face was flushed with exertion, and beads of sweat speckled her forehead and dripped down her temples. Echo could tell that Rex was holding back, though Cerra had surprisingly good form. She clearly had training, but it wasn’t enough against an opponent who was taller, stronger, heavier, and had been trained literally from birth to be a killing machine. Gregor occasionally tossed out a dispassionate suggestion or command, focusing on techniques specifically for fighting a larger combatant.

“Pull guard, Cerra, just like we practiced,” the commando coached.

Cerra grabbed Rex’s forearm and took him to the ground, locking her legs around his waist. Echo immediately recognized the move; he’d practiced it often enough during ARC training. He hadn’t sparred with anyone in ages, and he wondered if his prosthetic legs were agile enough to do it. He suspected so; though they were not quite as dexterous as his legs had formerly been, they made up for it in durability and strength. A single kick would be strong enough to snap a limb or break a spine.

“That’s better, Cerra,” Rex praised.

“Next time, rotate your foot to the outside,” Gregor said, unimpressed. “Unless you want to break your own ankle or get your leg pinned.”

Cerra slapped Rex on the back of the head. “Stop taking it easy on me.”

He grinned down at her. “Sorry, kid. Gotta walk before you can run.”

“First of all, I’m twice your age, and secondly, a real opponent won’t pull their punches,” she said.

“That’s why you have a blaster,” Rex replied calmly. “Want to go again?”

She nodded, but Gregor intervened. “You need to rest up for tomorrow’s mission.”

Cerra released Rex immediately, and he stood to his feet, then extended a hand and pulled her up from the mat. She was breathing hard, and Gregor tossed her a towel to dry off. She spotted Echo and acknowledged him with a jerk of her chin.

“Maybe Echo can teach me some sweet ARC moves while we’re en route to Karthon,” she said.

“Didn’t Fives show you any?” Gregor asked.

Rex winced, but Cerra mopped her face and arms with the towel.

“A few,” she said.

“You knew Fives?” Echo asked, surprised.

“Yeah,” she said. “I’m going to hop in the shower.”

“I can’t believe we’re taking that rust-bucket to Karthon,” Echo said.

The rickety shuttle was practically an antique. The sublight drive rattled alarmingly when it started up, and even the hydraulic struts for the ramp only worked about half the time.

“It’s old, but it still has some tricks thanks to Trace,” Rex said. “It’ll get you there and back. Besides, it’s the only ship we have with a cargo hold big enough to transport the surgical pod.”

“She’ll fly all right,” Cerra said as she joined them. “Not fast. Hopefully she won’t leak like a sieve.”

Rex was holding two travel mugs of caf, and he handed one to Cerra.

“You’re a god among men,” she said, taking a blissful sip.

“Is the other one for me?” Echo asked.

“Kark no,” Rex said, chugging half the liquid in one go. “Get your own.”

Cerra strode up the ramp and flopped into the co-pilot’s seat. “Don’t worry, Echo, we can stop at Starcups on the way out.”

Echo pulled a face. “Starcups barely qualifies as caf. More like syrup and blue milk that once heard a rumor about caf.”

“Still gets the job done,” Cerra shrugged. “Let’s roll.”

In the slow, dilapidated old shuttle, it was a full day’s jump to Karthon. Cerra was mostly silent once they entered hyperspace, tinkering with the electronic guts of a clone armor cuirass that she’d modified heavily. Echo, accustomed to Wrecker and Omega’s raucous banter and Tech’s spontaneous infodumps, found the silence deafening. He wished Gregor had come with them on the mission. The commando’s relaxed attitude and cheerful personality seemed to pull Cerra out of her shell in a way that Echo had not yet figured out how to do. He was no sparkling conversationalist, but he didn’t enjoy silence and solitude—not any more.

It had only been a few days, but he missed the Batch. He missed Tech’s monologues as they copiloted the Marauder on long hyperspace jumps. He missed Omega’s endless questions and cheerful commentary. He thought of the way the tears had welled in her eyes as she hugged him goodbye, and his chest ached at the memory.

The cuirass sparked, and Cerra flinched and cursed.

“Need a hand?” Echo offered.

Cerra sighed and dragged a hand across her eyes. “I think I fried one of the connectors when I heated the plastoid to reshape the chestplate. The control unit fits, but I can’t get it to sync with the HUD.”

She passed the cuirass to Echo, who inspected it closely. She was right; there was a tiny scorch mark on one of the connectors.

“We’ll have to salvage another chestplate to get replacements,” he said. “Decent chance we’ll find some on Karthon.”

“At least it’ll give me some protection for now,” she said. “I’ll just have to go without a helmet until I can get it fixed.”

“I can help with the modifications, if you’d like,” Echo offered. “I have some experience with armor mods.”

“So I see,” she said, eyeing his custom suit. “I figured your armor wasn’t exactly off the rack.”

Echo chuckled. “Not exactly. My squadmate Tech helped me with my first set of armor after Skako Minor, but this set I modified myself. I added some extra features. Aside from the obvious.” He gestured to his scomp.

“What kind of features?” she asked.

“Electrical surge prevention,” he said.

She nodded. “Kix told me you got a hell of a jolt at Anaxes.”

“You knew Kix as well as Fives?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “He’s gone, too.”

Darkness flickered across her face, but she took a deep breath and her usual stoicism slid back into place. Echo reached out to lay his hand on her shoulder, but something about her posture made him think she wouldn’t appreciate the gesture. He faltered and dropped his hand back to his side. After a time, he broke the silence.

“So,” he said. “How well did you know Fives?”

“Pretty well,” she said flatly. “So how about those sweet ARC moves?”

He wanted to push, wanted to know more. Rex had given him the bare-bones account of Fives’s death, but there never seemed to be enough time to actually process it. Cerra was the only person in Echo’s life other than Rex who had known his twin, but her walls seemed to be made of durasteel, reinforced with beskar. And the last thing he wanted to do was scug her off right before he headed into a mission, trusting her to have his back.

“Rex went through ARC training, too, you know,” Echo pointed out. “He knows all those moves. But I can show you a trick or two that I learned from Clone Force 99.”

---

Next chapter | Masterlist | Sign up for my tag list

Tagging: @secondaryrealm @blueink-bluesoul @spicy-clones @wings-and-beskar @523rdrebel @merkitty49 @anxiouspineapple99 @sinfulsalutations @arcsimper5 @starrylothcat @clio3kantarella @cloneloverrrrr @goblininawig @ladytano420 @arctrooper69 @wolffegirlsunite @sunshinesdaydream @mandos-mind-trick @littlemissmanga @stunkbiggu @starqueensthings @clonemedickix @marierg @idontgetanysleep @moonlightwarriorqueen @dudewhynotthis @sleepycreativewriter @tcwmatchmakingau @littlemissbshine

#stars beyond number #tbb echo #tbb gregor #tbb rex #echo x riyo chuchi #tbb fanfic #dystopicjumpsuitwrites #gregor x ofc #captain gregor #captain traitor #captain rex #arc trooper echo #Spotify

67 notes · View notes

somestorythoughts · 6 months

Text

Leverage Immortals - do I need to start Numbering these?

Seriously. Should I be numbering these? At the very least I should probably start picking better titles. Anyway. Have some immortal Nate Ford! :

Nate is. Not in the best head place. Frankly. He is fully aware of that. He just doesn't give a shit.

It's not the first time he's lost someone. He likes being around people, he likes have friends and being a regular at the local bar and staying in a place long enough to have favorite places to eat or walk. And he does that a lot. He's the kind of immortal that tends to stay in one place for two or three decades, and if you do that, and you do it around people instead of in the middle of nowhere, it's easy to form enough of a connection to grieve a death. And Nate's more than a bit of a bastard, but he does make friends. It just takes more than a bit of effort. So it's not the first time he's lost someone he cared about.

But he's never had a son.

Maggie had been perceptive. Not immortal, he would have outlived her just as he'd outlived his family, as he'd outlived his first wife, the woman who hadn't turned away from him when she found out he'd already lived longer than she ever would. He thinks she and Maggie would have liked each other. But he's getting off topic. Maggie was no seer, and she didn't See everything, but she saw more of what people where than was normal. So she'd figured out he was immortal, and accepted it.

And then they had a kid. Nate loves Sam more than anything. And Nate doesn't fully know how immortality works but he knows now it isn't a dominate gene. Sam's death breaks him.

He stops caring, for a long time. A bit of vengeance brings him back, pulls enough of him out of the gutter because how dare a con man use his son to convince Nate to steal. And then Sophie, Hardison, Eliot, Parker, they give him a cause. Take down bad guys via theft.

It's not like Nate hasn't been a figure for justice over all his centuries. He'd just. Lost the drive for it with his son. And this is a new way to do it. But it's something to keep him out of the shit show his head is in.

And then it becomes something more.

#nate ford #leverage #leverage immortals au #leverage au #leverage team #maggie collins

13 notes · View notes

my-beloved-lakes · 1 year

Text

@leveragetober

Leveragetober 2023

Prompt 4: crossover

Parker, Eliot and Hardison take a job in Paris. When it gets interrupted by a con artist who is scamming their mark, they decide to recruit him into Leverage International. (Under the cut.)

Parker eyed the man claiming to be the mark's assistant, tied to the chair in front of her. He was a grifter, No doubt about it now. And he was really good too.

None of them had suspected him of being criminal, not until they had caught him trying to clear out the mark’s bank account at the same time as them, making this simple trip to Paris much more complicated.

So, who was this guy really? A grifter, sure, but why had he chosen the exact same mark as them? Maybe it was just a coincidence, but what were the chances of that?

"Who are you?" Parker asked. "And don’t bother lying. We’ll know if you do.”

Parker heard Eliot crack his knuckles behind her. She knew Eliot wasn't actually going to hurt this guy, since he wasn’t much of a threat, but this guy didn't know that. And yet Parker only caught a brief flash of fear in his eyes before he managed to hide it again.

He’s not gonna talk, is he? Parker shrugged. There were other ways of finding out what they wanted to know.

"Run his face through that thing that tells you who people are." She said turning to Hardison.

"Parker, it’s called...?" Hardison started to say but was interrupted.

"Wait, The Parker!?" The guy asked, astonished.

"The one and only." Parker sighed. She was getting tired of people recognizing her as a world famous thief.

"You stole the Hope Diamond five years ago!"

Parker nodded.

"And then put it back!"

Parker rolled her eyes.

“Yes I did. So, since you know so much about me, why don't you tell us about yourself," Parker glanced at Hardison's computer. "Neal Cafrey."

"Ooh, you were good!" Hardison sounded genuinely impressed as he read from the files that popped up.

"Still am." Neal smirked.

"Huh, says here that you're dead." Hardison said.

"Aww, Your FBI handler wrote a very sweet message for your obituary." Parker added, reading more information from the files that Hardison had found.

Neal ducked his head and looked away.

oops. Parker thought. She hadn't meant to be insensitive, but that seemed to have hit a nerve. Maybe they had been close.

Parker pulled up a swivel chair and sat down in front of Neal.

"Alright, just tell us why you were running The Oklahoma Little Chucky on our mark." She demanded.

"No, it was a John and Mary scam." Eliot corrected. "You need a pit bull and a wedding cake for the Oklahoma Little Chucky.”

"Well, it couldn't've been a John and Mary scam cuz you need a whole fire station for that one." Hardison argued.

"Oh, I had the fire station." Neal said slyly.

"Ooh!" Eliot, Hardison and Parker all said in unison. They were all genuinely impressed.

"And to answer your question; the same reason as you, I'd imagine." Neal continued.

"Because his company was polluting the surrounding areas, making people really sick and killing all the wildlife?" Parker asked.

"Okay, I guess not." Neal looked taken aback. "Alright, you guys have already figured out half of it. I faked my death back in America and I fled here. I needed an easy score that would pay well so I could set myself up with a new life." Neal explained. "You guys are criminals, just like me. You understand, so, one criminal to another, would you be so kind as to let me go?" Neal slipped his hands out of the ropes and stood up without waiting for an answer.

Parker cocked an eyebrow in surprise.

“I'm very good at what I do.” Neal shrugged.

He was good. Anyone who could slip one of Eliot's knots had to be.

Neal grabbed his hat off the table, flipped it in his hand and placed it back on his head before heading for the door.

"What if..." Parker said and spun her chair around to face him, "we offered you a job?"

Neal hesitated at the door.

"It comes with that chance at a new life you were looking for. A chance to run your own crew, long term, right here in Paris." Parker added.

she glanced at Eliot and Hardison who both nodded in agreement. It was the same pitch they had given to Hurley when they had set up the Mexican branch of leverage, and now she got to give it again. They had come to France in the hopes of setting up a new branch of leverage in the first place. She hadn’t been sure how they were going to find someone willing to do it, but then along came Neal Cafrey, an experienced grifter looking for a fresh start. The perfect candidate had fallen right into their lap.

Neal turned around. He was intrigued.

"Let's talk business." Parker said with a sly smile.

#leveragetober #leveragetober 2023 #leverage #eliot spencer #alec hardison #parker #white collar #Neal Cafrey #white collar fanfic #leverage fanfic #leverage/white collar crossover #i am having so much fun with this!

36 notes · View notes

lemissingmask · 1 year

Text

[ID: Greyscale close up sketch of Eliot Spencer driving, with one hand on the wheel, and looking to his right with an unfocused, tired, expression, his eyes partially closed, and his mouth open as if speaking. End ID]

Day 18: Fever

Eliot develops a fever from an infected wound while driving, and Parker and Hardison have to treat him.

Ficlet below the cut

“Hardison.”

There was something wrong with Eliot’s voice. Not in the least like the voice he had used only moments before.

“Hardison.”

More insistent and even more at odds with the mood of moment Hardison had been so enjoying.

A firm pressure on his arm.

A strong hand gripping him tightly and shaking him.

Shaking him awake in a space as dark as the room in his dream, but with Eliot sitting beside him, bright eyes piercing in the dim light and holding an expression nothing like that of the dream Eliot.

They were in Lucille. They had been driving home from a job. Actually, Eliot had been driving while the others slept.

The van was parked up, but looking around to understand what was going on, Hardison saw they were not at home or at a gas station or any sort of place where they might usually have stopped.

“What?” Hardison asked, looking back to Eliot and imagining a dozen different scenarios…enemies in the dark outside, the van broken down (which, seriously, Lucille VI had just been upgraded), a new job they stumbled into…

“You gotta drive,” Eliot said, breathless, hoarse.

Hardison frowned. Usually Eliot insisted on driving these long journeys through. He could go far longer than the rest of them without sleep, and even on short trips they needed Hardison free so he could work on the digital side of things. And Parker driving was…well, that was an emergencies-only last resort.

Not to mention, Eliot sounded seriously rough.

“You okay, man?”

Eliot never answered that question, and he didn’t now.

“Dammit,” he growled, “Just drive.”

Still frowning, Hardison nodded and opened his door at the same time as Eliot.

As he passed the hitter in the illumination of the headlights, he tried to get a better look at his friend.

He saw no blood seeping through his clothes from a wound he had failed to tell them about, but Eliot looked pretty damn pale in a way the bright, white moon couldn’t justify. And the driver’s seat, when he got into it, was a lot warmer than explainable from normal body heat.

“What’s going on?” Parker, ruffled and flushed from her own sleep in the back of the van, poked her head up between them, “We back?”

“Babe, you mind checking Eliot’s temperature?” Hardison asked as he switched the interior lights on but didn’t yet start driving.

“Don’…”

But Parker was already pressing a hand to his forehead and Eliot wasn’t going to shake her off with enough force for it to actually work.

“You have a fever,” she said seriously and with a strength of accusation that made Eliot look away from them both.

“It’s nothin’.”

Parker huffed then reached through to jab her finger at Eliot’s ribs in a move that for literally anyone else would be obscenely dangerous. Eliot growled and pulled away, throwing her a sharp glare that then prompted him to wince and shut his eyes tightly.

Fever, dizziness, extreme pain in an area they knew had been slashed deep with a cleaver only a few days before…

“It’s infected isn’t it,” Parker glared at him.

“And why didn’t you tell us this?” Hardison offered his own glare to join Parker’s.

“It’s no big deal,” Eliot replied in that unsettlingly breathless voice, “It’ll keep til we get home. We’re only three hours off, but I ain’t safe to drive.”

Hardison gave him a doubtful glance, Parker glared and moments later she was in the front with them, taking up the rarely used middle seat.

“Lemme see.”

“No Parker,” Eliot growled, “Can’ do anythin’ til…we’re back anyway. Just leave it.”

“You’re burning up.”

Hardison looked across at him, “I’m with Parker. You don’t look good, man. Sure you’ll be okay another three hours.”

“‘M sure!”

The growl held even less venom than usual, but Hardison started the van anyway.

If Eliot was right and they couldn’t do anything now anyway, the best option was to start driving as soon as possible.

Three hours was plenty of time for an infection to develop and take hold, and it had already reduced Eliot to a state of hazy awareness, shivering in spite of his high temperature.

Parker produced some wet wipes from somewhere and proceeded to slap one on Eliot’s head or neck at irregular intervals, but it didn’t seem to help at all.

Eliot was completely out of it, struck down by the fever, by the time they reached their HQ. Not unconscious, but nowhere near conscious enough to walk or talk or do anything much beyond shiver.

Hardison wordlessly lifted him up, the heat of his body searing in contrast to the cool of the air conditioning and the night outside. With Parker ahead to open doors and unlock their security system, Hardison carried their hitter inside, ignoring the mumbled incoherent growls and dammits.

He took him to the downstairs bedroom. Technically this was Eliot’s, being the first that anyone would need to pass to reach the others, but it didn’t get much apparent use. More often Eliot took his short periods of sleep on the couch or in Parker and Hardison’s bed when at least one of the others was awake.

The room was stark and tidy, devoid of anything personal. His gym equipment was all in the main areas, and the few items Eliot held sentiment for tended to live in those places too - the katana from Nate and Sophie was on a stand beside the free weights, his guitar lived in Hardison’s room, and his box of training weapons had a hidden compartment known to contain a few photos.

Parker pulled back the sheets so Hardison could lay Eliot on the bed, which he really tried to do carefully, but the bed was pretty low and he sort of half dropped him onto it without much ceremony. The hitter took in a sharp breath, curling slightly towards his infected injury.

“Eliot?” Parker knelt beside him, leaning over his head and peering down at him.

She got no reply, and then nothing more than another sharpening of breath and flinch when she poked the wound.

“Guess we’re on our own,” Hardison laughed nervously, feeling not at all confident.

But over confidence was bad.

So that was okay.

“I’ll get the first aid kit,” Parker hopped over Eliot onto the floor.

“While I Google how the hell to treat an infected cleaver wound without a medical degree.”

To be fair, TV and fanfiction had given him a pretty good idea of what it would involve, but he wasn’t about to trust Eliot’s life to the accuracy of research carried out for either medium.

By the time Parker had returned with the very well stocked first aid kit Eliot kept, he had found a guide with reliable citations and that tallied well with other guides and his background knowledge…seemed legit and made sense.

He set his tablet down with the instructions open and began to unfasten Eliot’s shirt.

At the contact, the hitter growled weakly and reached out to knock his hand away, delivering a strike with the heel of his palm that had unexpected strength to it.

“Hey!” Hardison soothed, withdrawing his hand, “It’s me an’ Parker. It’s just us, El. We’re gonna take care of this wound now.”

Blue eyes opened, just slightly. Bright blue visible within the reddened surround.

“You with us?”

Slowly, Eliot nodded. He kept watching, eyes met with Hardison’s as Parker worked on the task of removing Eliot’s shirt and undershirt, eventually deciding to cut the latter off.

“Y’ gotta…th’ stitches…” Eliot was barely audible, as Hardison helped sit him up for Parker to unwrap the bandages.

“I know,” Hardison brushed some hair from his face, “Undo the stitches, drain the wound, wash it out, give antibiotics.”

“Y’ use…G’gle?”

“No!” Hardison feigned offence, and Eliot smirked tiredly.

“Check see if…foreign body…in it.”

“What?” Parker paused and looked up at him.

“I think,” Hardison ventured, “See if you can find part of the blade or maybe some fabric from his clothes in the wound. Could be what caused the infection.”

Eliot nodded.

“Okay…” Parker pursed her lips, “I’m gonna have to dig around in there.”

“It’s gonna hurt.”

Eliot’s eyes drifted shut, “I know.”

“Guess you’ve been through this a few times before, huh.”

No answer.

Eliot’s eyes were shut, his body still shivered convulsively, but his brief lucidity gone.

With the bandages and clothes removed, Hardison lay Eliot back and looked across to Parker, who fixed him with a set look of determination.

“Let’s do this.”

Hardison nodded and they set to work.

Hands washed, gloves on, sleeves rolled up since they didn’t exactly have scrubs to hand.

The wound, neatly sewn up by Eliot at first, was swollen and red and generally pretty damn gross.

Parker didn’t seem to mind so much, and set to work nimbly following the Internet-found guide and undoing the sutures, releasing some of the reddening pressure of the wound, discarding the bloody thread onto a plastic sheet to the left of her.

Hardison mostly focused on Eliot’s face through this. On the tightening of his features in pain, from either Parker’s ministrations or just the wound more generally, or maybe from the fire of the fever itself. His erratic breathing seemed to stop for a brief, terrifying moment, but otherwise it hardly changed

So at least it didn’t seem to be getting worse. Maybe. Probably.

Hardison wished he’d have spent more time watching medical dramas. Might help now.

Or maybe played some doctor simulators. Operation.

Next came draining the wound.

The source didn’t exactly specify how, but Parker had once drained Eliot’s ear when it had started to cauliflower, and was holding up the same type of syringe used for that. Thick needle, enough to make Hardison grimace just looking at it.

Horrible to look at, but it should do the job.

Some of the pus building up was already released by the removal of stitches alone, and she washed this away with saline solution while Hardison held Eliot still, expecting more than the tensing and slight flinch that they got.

The rest, Parker used the syringe to drain, drawing off the excess built up fluid, enough to fill the large syringe.

Then more cleaning with saline and alcohol, and finally, he had no choice but to be more directly involved in their makeshift surgery.

Parker needed both hands free to search for foreign bodies in the wound. It had been a long slice, spanning across three ribs. Not going very deep all the way, but then there was rib that had luckily stopped it going deeper.

The infection could just be from the cleaver having been dirty, but then Eliot was diligent about cleaning his injuries, so the theory of something caught in there was sound.

Hardison left his place by Eliot’s head, grabbed up his phone, and shone the torch into the cut to give Parker some light.

“Swab away blood when I tell you,” she passed him a sterile roll of gauze, “Okay?”

He only nodded. Opening his mouth right now might just make him throw up.

It was very difficult to fight that or just straight up fainting, watching Parker deliberately probe carefully inside Eliot, pulling out two objects, fragments of cloth, one pretty large but right up in the upper edge where Eliot wouldn’t have found it. Parker continued a little longer, but seemed satisfied and sat back, looked at him, and frowned.

“Hardison, go sit down,” she said with an edge of concern to her voice.

He shook his head shakily.

“You look like you’re about to faint! Sit down! I’ve got this.”

Hardison didn’t argue again.

He did feel faint, and dizzy, and like maybe he had just caught Eliot’s fever. Except he wasn’t unresponsive, fitfully unconscious and feverish. He just needed to not see all that blood and the rib exposed and the smell of the blood…

He stumbled to the nearest bathroom and threw up.

He hated blood when he was younger, got a bit more used to it, especially being around Eliot. But the deliberate opening and poking around and…

Maybe there was a reason he didn’t watch hospital dramas.

He washed his hands, washed his face, washed his mouth out, and hurried back to Parker and Eliot, angry at himself for being unable to help more.

When he got back, Parker had already dressed the wound with some gauze and tape.

No stitches in case they needed to repeat the process.

She was bundling up the bloody gauze and instruments and thread into the plastic sheet when he walked in.

“You okay?” she asked without the least hint of judgement or disapproval, in that alone reminding him that it was alright not to be good at this.

“Yeah, all good,” he replied, forcing a smile and looking back to Eliot. All through this, he had been almost unresponsive, caught up in the fever and at the edge of delirium.

“We need to get some antibiotics,” Hardison said, kneeling and taking a wet wipe to try and offer Eliot a bit of gentle cooling, “I’ll look into where we can at this time.”

He got a hold of some, with the help of a medic they had met on a job a while back, who vouched for them as the best first choice in this case.

It took both Parker and Hardison to help Eliot, in a moment of moderate lucidity, to swallow the pills.

For all his stubbornness and usual refusal to let them help with his wounds at all, Eliot was a surprisingly compliant patient.

He did throw up ten minutes after the pill and water, and he did remove the cold compress Parker made for him twice, but Hardison decided to give Eliot benefit of the doubt and blame that solely on the fever and the infection.

With the antibiotics, which he mostly managed to keep down after the first, fluids given by an IV, and regular cleaning, the fever cleared in 48 hours.

Eliot was out of bed just a couple of hours later, albeit with Hardison helping him, and only to the bathroom so he could shower and make himself feel more human.

Hardison sat on the toilet and Parker in the sink while Eliot washed, as they had done a few times before when their hitter was injured enough that there was legitimate concern for him passing out in the shower. Eliot had argued the first two times, before giving up because, really, there wasn’t a lock he could put on the door that would keep them out.

This time, he even obliged their insistence on redressing the wound before they helped him into clean clothes, and finally back out and to the main comfy living area.

He dropped tiredly into his preferred seat, at an angle to the couch and with sight lines towards the entrance to their HQ, but a clear view of the TV as well.

“You didn’t do any delirious rambling,” Parker complained after they’d been sitting in silence for a while, a film on the screen, volume low.

Eliot frowned at her.

“People with fevers are supposed to be delirious and reveal dramatic secrets.”

The hitter’s expression of mild confusion didn’t change, “Sorry about that. I’ll try to remember next time.”

“Next time,” Hardison glared up from his laptop and the game he had been playing, “You’re gonna tell us as soon as you think a wound’s infected so we can avoid all this nastiness.”

Eliot looked over to him softly and lowered his head, an apology or agreement, or probably both.

They accepted the wordless response, and with it, the matter was dropped. Eliot wouldn't risk putting them through this again, and they would be more alert to the possibility in the future, so nothing more needed to be said.

Except, Eliot did speak, after a long pause.

“Thank you. Both of you,” he spoke almost as quietly as the film, fixing them earnestly, “You did a good job.”

And because a pure, genuine expression of sentiment like that hung uneasily between them in anything but the most dire situation, he added with a smirk, “Even if you did use Google.”

#ailesswhumptober2023 #Day 18: Fever #leverage #parker #alec hardison #eliot spencer #masks whump art

53 notes · View notes

theladyragnell · 2 years

Note

Oh for the prompts!!!!! If you feel like it! Leverage OT3 with Parker and Eliot welcoming Hardison back from some time away?

(A quiet established relationship moment.)

Hardison always comes home the long way.

Eliot never had to teach him that, whatever he thinks of the ways Hardison does and doesn’t keep himself safe. Hardison skips from airport to airport for days at a time, sometimes, never less than three hops even if it could be a quick domestic flight. And when he’s coming home to them, wherever home is, he takes it even more seriously, so he always comes to them tired, jet-lagged, smelling like canned air and hopped up on whatever food he thinks to buy on his endless flights.

Tonight, Eliot picks him up at the New Orleans airport at two in the morning and doesn’t bitch about it. Hardison left Armenia two days ago, and Eliot doesn’t know how many flights he’s been on since then, though he’s pretty sure from one of the tags on Hardison’s suitcase that he broke up his flight path with a train trip somewhere in Europe.

“I think if I uploaded my brain to the cloud,” Hardison says as they pull away, slurring his words a little with exhaustion, “I would probably go evil, but in the time before I did, I could exist in all time zones at once and never have to deal with this again.”

“I don’t want to have to fight the evil robot version of you, man. There’s tea in the cupholder. Drink it.”

“I’m not taking your devil drinks.”

“Just drink it, Hardison.”

Hardison snorts, but he drinks, and even takes a second sip after making sure Eliot sees the elaborate series of disgusted faces that he makes over the nicest small-company chamomile tea he could find in the city. Even Sophie likes it, and she thinks herbal tea is heresy against the Queen or whatever. “Everything fine?” he asks as Eliot gets into another lane.

“Harry and Breanna are playing some nerd game together. Sophie’s out of town. Parker’s fine, waiting for you at home.”

Hardison lets out a long breath. “Good to know. Anything going on with you?”

“Tried a new gumbo place the other day. It’s pretty good, but not as good as the place we tried last time you were around.”

“Tell me all about it,” says Hardison, and Eliot does, in between navigating the city traffic that persists even at night, especially around the airport. It took them a long time to get to this point, where they can talk on their way home from the airport without a job on their minds and not needle each other. Eliot likes the peace, much as he hates to admit it.

Home this time is a place Hardison hasn’t been yet. They all switch apartments often, and this one has Parker’s alias on the lease, but Eliot stays at it most often, because it’s upstairs from a place that does good chili and has some actual cupboard space. He and Parker have been staying there together since Hardison took off on his flight home and as they park and Eliot takes Hardison’s bag for the last few steps as he stumbles his way around, Eliot can see the light on upstairs that says she’s there, or maybe on the roof watching them come, though Eliot doesn’t see the flash of movement that would give that away.

The second they’re upstairs, the apartment door opens and Parker flings her arms around Hardison’s neck, and Eliot moves on past them to put the bag down and give them a minute of privacy. The food he left is still keeping warm in the oven, and Parker must have gone out at some point, because there’s a six-pack of orange soda on the counter. Hopefully Hardison doesn’t see that before he sleeps.

The two of them come in together, Parker draped over Hardison’s shoulder. She beckons Eliot in, and he rolls his eyes but he goes, lets her give him a quick kiss and loop them into their hug, where Hardison leans in far enough to rest their foreheads together, weird as the angle has to be. They’ve figured out ways to fit three bodies together, over the years, but they’re all too tired to care about that right now.

“You should get some sleep,” says Eliot, because it’s true. “Need to eat first?”

“You should eat and then sleep,” says Parker. “Otherwise you’ll be cranky when you wake up.”

Hardison groans, but he doesn’t argue. Eliot breaks away from the hug to put things together, shoving the soda into an inhospitable corner of the counter while he goes and taking Hardison’s food out to plate and shove at him. This late, he’ll just eat standing over the kitchen island, and normally Eliot would complain that his food isn’t being appreciated, but Hardison could use a break. Tomorrow is soon enough to demand appreciation for being the only one of them who knows how to make a balanced meal.

“You’ll tell us all about how the job went tomorrow, right?” says Parker when he puts his fork down, a sign for Eliot to get back in action and put whatever is left away for them to eat the next day. “It sounded like you were having fun.”

“Only you could call sneaking through government buildings hiding from security fun,” says Hardison, but he’s smiling, so probably the calls weren’t too close. Eliot will make sure they talk about security evasion before he leaves again, that’s all. “But fun or not, it’s good to be back.”

“Welcome home,” says Eliot, and when Hardison gives him a dangerously misty smile, he rolls his eyes. “Now get to bed before you fall down, you know you’re going to wake up a million times tonight so you may as well get started.”

“Yeah, yeah, Eliot, love you too,” says Hardison, always so much easier with those words than Parker or Eliot ever can be, but he lets the two of them push him into the bedroom and into some sweatpants before climbing in beside him, taking the time together while they have it.

#answered asks #booksnchocolate #sometimes i write stories #ot3: i don't have to search anymore

83 notes · View notes

innytoes · 6 months

Note

Gilmore Girls x Leverage x JATP crossover

I'm pretty sure I've asked you about some combination of those, but not all three at once lololol

Oooh Katie you have no idea what you have unleashed.

So @hawkguyhasstarbucks and I have this long-running joke that everyone everywhere should somehow be connected to Stars Hollow.

-Eliot is related to Luke Danes and you cannot tell me otherwise.

-TJ may or may not be Reggie's Uncle. Just based on vibes. (Also in a more canon universe he'd be like: Oh yeah my nephew's playing the Orpheum. No you don't know him, he died 25 years ago but I guess he's back now.)

-Sophie and Nate retire to Stars Hollow because they once got stuck there between jobs and Eliot couldn't help but introduce them to his cousin because Hardison already Knew and else Parker would have broken into his place.

-You know Sophie and Miss Patty know each other from Way Back When.

-Can you imagine how fucking annoying Nate would be at Town Meetings if he wanted to be.

-Luke's parents don't want him to end up like the Town Troubadour while Luke is like: um actually that was my backup plan if the whole rock star thing doesn't work out.

-Reggie's back up plan is for Luke Danes to make him his apprentice. He will not take 'diners don't do apprenticeships' as an answer. HE ALREADY WEARS PLAID HE CAN PUT ON A BASEBALL CAP IF IT HELPS LUKE.

-Parker vs Kirk: ultimate showdown. Either that or she LOVES his movies and like, loudly cheers at the screening when everyone else is silent.

-Alex' parents and Mrs Kim go to the same church. When they kick Alex out for being gay Mrs Kim is like: dancing and rock and roll may get you sent to hell but not loving your child for who they love is worse.

-Congrats Lane you have a white brother now.

-DRUMMER SIBLINGS. DRUMMER SIBLINGS. Lane shows Alex her secret closet and Alex is like: =/ I just came out of the closet thanks.

-Hep Alien vs Julie and the Phantoms friendly rivalry 4ever.

#julie and the phantoms #leverage #gilmore girls #this isn't even the worst of our sprawling au #it's just one big YES AND and I love it with all my heart #the jatp leverage gg au #I guess #AUs are awesome #I wrote a thing #I blame hawkguyhasstarbucks

9 notes · View notes

heroofshield · 10 months

Text

Whumpcember Day 26- Collapse (Fable 3 Hero/Ben Finn)

@whumpcember

Carolina felt her feet start to slip, the sand underneath it giving way. She tried to keep her balance but couldn't, so she slid down the dune-rolling to a stop at the base. Closing her eyes against the sun, she lay there for who knows how long, ever since arriving in Aurora she's lost track of time.

"I have to get help. For Walter." she dimly thought, feeling a stab of guilt at having to leave him back at the ruins. Even if he had ordered her to...

Taking a breath, Carolina slowly pushed herself up-standing and mustered up the energy to start walking again. The sun beat down relentlessly and she wished for night so she could at least get a break from the heat. The sun had started to angle downwards when she heard a shout. Pausing, she raised her sun-burned arm to shade her eyes so she could see whoever it was better.

"Princess!"

Confused, she squinted at the waving figure-taking a few halting steps forwards.

"Carolina!"

The figure became clearer and Carolina wasn't sure what to think. Lowering her arm she watched Eliot walk towards her with his trademark smile. "Elliot?" she whispered when he was closer. "But...how? You're dead."

"You killed me. It's your fault." Eliot said, his voice distorting into the Crawler's as his body twisted and contorted into smoke, winding itself around Carolina. Turning into shadow demons, the Crawler grew until he blotted out the sun.

Carolina let out a frustrated howl, she'd thought that she'd gotten away from the cursed demon. Pulling out her sword, she swung it at the demons, jumping away as they tried to attack her. Tapping into her Will, she let loose a whirlwind and ice spell- to confuse and then freeze them in order to keep them from overwhelming her.

As she fought, the Crawler kept taunting her; how she'd left Walter to his death back at the ruins, how she'd sent Eliot and Swift to their own deaths by letting them believe that she could overthrow Logan.

Eventually she drove her sword through the last shadow demon and the Crawler disappeared, the sudden light of the setting sun making Carolina near blind after so long in the dark. Blinking rapidly, she kept her sword out- letting it drag in the sand as she started her trek again.

Ben Finn raised the spyglass to his eye, slowly sweeping it across the sand. "She has to be out here somewhere." he thought, trying not to let the knot of worry in his stomach get to him. "I know the Princess and she's a fighter."

"Ben." Kalin said while placing a hand on his arm, her voice neutral but sad at the same time. "We need to start heading back.

"Just a few more kilos. We'll still have time to get back before dark." Ben replied without tearing his gaze from the spyglass.

Kalin gave Ben a sympathetic look, she knew the hope that he still held all to well. But at the same time they needed to get back to the temple before dark. Before the Crawler came to the city. Letting a slight sigh escape, she turned to the small party that had accompanied them-giving a slight nod to signal that they'd continue.

Ben led the group, his white head covering helping to block the worst of the sun, but he could still feel the tan that he was getting. Climbing the top of the dune, he lift the spyglass to his eye again and started the search all over again.

Still not seeing anything, he was about to give up for the day when he spotted movement out of the corner of the glass. Pausing he turned towards the movement and felt his breath catch.

Carolina.

"There." Ben said, pointing before lowering the glass and handing it to Kalin so she could verify it herself. "I'd know that sword anywhere."

Kalin was silent for a few seconds before lowering the glass and collapsing it before handing it back to Ben. Turning towards the rest of the party, she spoke in her native tongue sharply. Everyone sprung into action, racing down the dune and in the direction she had pointed.

Ben skidded down the dune, the hope in his chest exploding as he shouted, "Princess!"

Carolina paused at the shout, knowing that the voice sounded familiar but didn't want to believe it. "It could be another trick." she told herself, trying to draw the strength to fight the mirage, but was struggling. Fighting the Crawler so much had drained her of her Will.

Then the mirage sharpened and Ben Finn, still in his Royal Army uniform, can running towards her. "Ben." she whispered, wavering as her legs felt weak.

"Aren't you a sight for sore eyes." Ben laughed, glad that he had finally found them. Then he realized that Carolina was alone and his joy turned to confusion. "Where's Wally?"

Carolina closed her eyes as a wave of dizziness washed over her and she pitched forwards.

Ben was close enough that he lept towards Carolina as she collapsed and gently lowered her to the ground, getting on his knees so she didn't have to lay in the sand. "It's okay, I've got you."

"Walter...ruins." Carolina whispered, eyes fluttering closed again.

"Ruins? What ruins? Where are they?" Ben asked while looking up at Kalin, who had quietly moved to the side.

"I know of what she speaks. Fortunately it's not far from here, we'll be coming close to it but we can make it there and get back just as darkness falls." Kalin said before turning towards half of the group and ordering them towards the ruins. "We need to get your friends inside the temple, our healers can tend to them there."

"I've got you love." Ben whispered, gently brushing some hair off of Carolina's face. "I've got you."

Squeeze my hand if you can hear me.

Carolina dimly heard Ben's voice and after a few seconds pause, gave his hand a light squeeze. There was muffled cursing that roused her enough to crack open an eye. Shutting it again, what felt like a few seconds more, she slowly opened both eyes.

Staring at an unfamiliar ceiling, she tried to sit up to see where she was but found that she couldn't.

"Easy there, Princess." Ben said, all but jumping off his chair to help Carolina sit up. Once she was comfortable, he sat back down. "Am I glad to see you awake. You have no idea the fright you gave me."

"Oh?" Carolina said, her voice harsh from unuse. Clearing it, she tried again. "I couldn't have been out for that long."

"Trust me you were." Ben moved the chair closer so he didn't have to lean forwards so much.

Carolina gave Ben a slight smile, "I guess I should thank you, for finding me."

"You remember that? I'm flattered." Ben tried to pass it off as a joke, but he was suddenly overwhelmed with the relief that he'd been keeping at bay while Carolina recovered. "I'm just glad that you're going to be okay."

Carolina took Ben's hand and gave it a squeeze, "With you having my back I know I will."

#whumpcember2023 #fable 3 #ben finn #hero of brightwall #fable!verse carolina

14 notes · View notes

possibly-god · 7 months

Text

The Stand-Up Job, a.k.a. Leverage's Bizarre Adventure

Time for a crossover AU maybe 2 people will care about! Because you know what the JoJoverse's trademark uniquely skilled ensemble casts and "I outsmarted your outsmarting" remind me of? Heists.

February 2011, 2 months out from the San Lorenzo job. With the heat finally dying down to Nate's liking, the Leverage crew has had enough of laying low - they're ready to start taking clients again, get back to stealing the world a better place. So when the Horsell family shows up at McRory's, it couldn't be more perfect.

Good old boy Holden spins them a yarn about hostile workplaces and head wounds that still trouble him 20 years later. His wife Mariah tells of a road accident that left her paralyzed and of massive hospital bills when company insurance refused to pay out. Their son Benji recounts losing his older brother to a work accident. Lives full of pain on account of the place meant to provide for them - the Speedwagon Foundation.

Sure, maybe the Horsells' story doesn't quite add up (Sophie's grifter sense is tingling from the jump), but neither does the Foundation's - a privately-owned multi-million dollar "environmental research institute" with no notable output or major publications, ties to the oil industry, international paramilitary operations, and organized crime, and seemingly only answerable to some old-money family (what kind of name is Joestar anyway)? That ticks a lot of Leverage's boxes - definitely something to look into.

Meanwhile in their hotel room, Hol Horse, Mariah, and Boingo celebrate the incoming payout, plus a little long-coming revenge on those damned Joestars, not realizing that, once again, they've underestimated their marks.

Not that the Speedwagon Foundation doesn't give Leverage trouble. Getting into their New York offices, digging around in their files, that's small potatoes - hell, it's weird how little security the place seems to have. But then a manager taps Sophie on the shoulder and she literally can't lie. The others try to bail her out, and then their earpieces are just gone. Guards are called and Eliot starts taking hits from something he can't even see. They have to go all the way to Plan J to escape (too close to Plan M for Hardison's liking), and when they blow the wall of the lab Parker gets hit with some shrapnel. Only it's not concrete or plaster they pull from her shoulder - it's antique bronze, a shard of an old arrowhead. Still plenty sharp too, no one can touch it without getting cut...

They regroup. Nate and Hardison start going through anything they can find of the Foundation with a fine-tooth comb, finding more and more bizarre details with each sweep. Sophie and Eliot start sniffing around the Horsells, poking their shoddy story into a veritable fishing net of holes. Parker starts coming down with something, starts worrying when the rest of the team does too, worrying about secret bioweapons, about viral hallucinogens when she starts seeing things.

It's almost a relief when they come back to a strange man in their office - this is familiar, this they can handle. This "Dr. Kujo's" explanation sounds like bull, but it's hard to deny when a ghostly figure lunges out from him - and when Eliot does the same thing right back. The next several hours are full of discussions, and of discovery -

Nate - 「Rock of Ages」

An ornate doorknob which can be inserted into any solid surface to create a door through to the other side. Once placed, anyone can see and use the door until Nate calls the knob back to him.

Sophie - 「Like a Prayer」

An elegant jeweled cameo choker which allows perfect vocal mimicry of any target whose name she knows - she doesn't have to know their voice, and the cameo changes to show the subject even if she's never seen them. She can give the necklace to another person to wear, but she can only change the target while wearing it herself, and she can call it back to herself at any time.

Parker - 「Free Bird」

A feathered suit stand which reverses gravity for the user. Any person she touches directly matches her gravity, returning to normal when released, while inanimate objects retain normal direction.

Eliot - 「Red Right Hand」

Come on, you know this boy has a punching ghost. Beyond simple melee utility, a touch (or punch) from the eponymous hand to any part of the body deadens sensation in that area. Eliot throws off regular combatants with invisible backup and other stand users by fighting in tandem with his stand instead of letting it have all the fun.

Hardison - 「Fools Gold」

Typically a small humanoid made of gold computer parts, it can morph into any electronic device it touches, copying the data and capabilities therein. However, it can only hold one device in memory at a time. These mimicked devices can be passed to and used by other stand users and do not require a charge to function, but do require WiFi/data/etc. to do any tasks that would ordinarily require such things.

After much deliberation, it's decided that both sides will be allowed to continue as before - the crew may call upon the Foundation if need be and vice versa, but they'll be keeping their noses out of each other's business. Of course, things change around Leverage - Parker spends days finding new hiding spots and new ways to use her gear, Sophie pranks the others with their voices over the comms, Hardison calibrates face and voice recognition to work with LaP, Eliot discovers the best sous chef he's ever had, and Nate incorporates a new dimension of skills and contingencies into their plans. New abilities also mean new scrapes to get into, new crimes to bust, and general shenanigans -

Their immediate job is going after the idiots who tried to con the con men and got them into this mess - Hardison gets got trying to plug his laptop into Bast (he just about goes insane with the magnetism wiping every electronic he touches until he figures out Fools Gold is immune) and Eliot hates Emperor with a burning passion (not only is it a gun, it's a gun that *cheats*), but in the end the "Horsells" are still just a cut-rate cut-and runner, an egotistical knife pervert, and an utterly useless comic book junkie (Hardison berates him for "giving nerds a bad name").

Hardison calls home to catch up with his Nana and siblings, and while reminiscing he realizes "hey that wasn't normal" and that he showed Hamon potential as a child. Not that it really affects him after 20 years without any further incidents or training - but it sounds like little Breanna might be following in his footsteps in more ways than one...

They call Tara in on a con and, at the vehement behest of the Speedwagon Foundation, do their damnedest to keep Stands and the paranormal a secret from her... and in the end she knew about it long before they did (perks of an FBI background)

Conversely, Sterling is perpetually on the verge of an aneurysm as the bane of his existence has somehow become even banier - before this he could at least catch up with the con after the fact, but now?

A job busting a drug ring in Italy runs the team afoul of Passione, and after shots fired on both sides and the intervention of the Foundation, the two organizations come to an uneasy understanding - Giorno and Nate each see the other as naive in method but admirable in ambition.

Come October, Dr. Kujo returns to personally hire the team as "expert consultants" in the matter of his daughter being sent to prison - their intervention perhaps brings about a happier end to Part 6.

Idk how I came up with this, or why I spent so much time on it - ultimately, I guess I just want to give the Leverage team some new gadgets to play with :)

#leverage #jojo's bizarre adventure #jojo no kimyou na bouken #jjba #crossover au

7 notes · View notes

fablesrose · 11 months

Text

Ch 9 - The Top Hat Job

Series Rewrite Masterlist

Pairing: Eliot Spencer x Ford!Reader

Description: The team has to play as magicians to get into a food company that has contaminated food on the shelves. *Disclaimer: I know next to nothing about magic, so don't come for me*

Words: 5377

A/n: So I've burned through my stock of chapters after this and I've been having a bit of a tough time for the next couple of weeks. I've got final weeks and then surgery to fix my wrecked knee, I want to get back to this as soon as possible, but I'm not sure when that will be. Thank you all for reading this far, it means so much to me!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

While Nate and Sophie were downstairs in the pub meeting with the client. I was watching as Eliot, Hardison, and Parker were starting recon on the target: Lillian foods. From what brief background we already had, their frozen food was contaminated, but one of the higher-ups calculated the risk and said that the amount of deaths was acceptable relative to cost in lawsuits vs pulling the food off the shelves. So, a real dirtbag, like all the rest of them.

Hardison and I were in Nate’s apartment monitoring all of the tech stuff while Eliot and Parker were doing the leg work. Eliot was posing as a pizza delivery man with comms and a button cam, going into the heart of the beast. We watched as he approached the front desk where a pretty brunette sat taking phone calls.

“Her name is Katie,” Hardison told him as he balanced a tennis ball on his forehead casually, “Likes wild horses, dislikes vanilla toothpaste.”

“Please stop talking,” Eliot responded.

I laughed a bit, “The fact you can find those things is wild.”

“Hey,” Eliot greeted the receptionist, and I could hear the smile in his voice, “How ya doin’?”

She didn’t respond to him, only lifting a finger signaling for him to wait a moment.

He turned away from her in a way that I could visualize him leaning against the counter. “Oh, I’m so in,” he said a bit cockily.

My smile soured a bit, remembering just how much of an eye for pretty chicks Eliot had.

“Hey Eliot, what’s that blocking your button cam?” Hardison asked him. I furrowed my brow, as while it was a bit warped because of how small it was, it wasn’t too bad. That was until Hardison finished his thought, “Oh yeah, it’s your ego!”

That made me smile a bit again before moving it along, “Parker? Whatcha got?”

“First ten floors are free climbing heaven, but after that, it's a slip and slide,” she responded easily before a random person started to vaguely harass her, saying she had pretty hair.

“Uh, Parker, maybe don’t stay next to that person.”

I didn’t get a response from her as Nate and Sophie walked in bickering.

“When was the last time you had a date?” Sophie asked him which caught my attention. “A real date… with food?”

“Stop,” Nate responded before his attention turned to us, “Hardison…”

“I don’t think that counts,” Sophie commented before turning to me to answer her question.

I only shook my head to indicate that it had been a long time.

“Are you running recon on Lillian Foods?” he asked us.

“Uh, yeah?” Hardison responded for the both of us.

“Don’t you think you should consult with me first?”

“Did he just…?”

“We do this all the time, Nate,” Sophie defended.

“Hey, look man, where do you think all my intel comes from? For the last time, there is no blueprint fairy.”

“Yeah, well, I want you to pull them out. Do it now,” Nate told him as he poured himself a cup of coffee.

“Why? What’s up?” I asked him. He seemed a bit more strict than a usual job.

“Look, we know what we’re doing, man. It’s a food company,” Hardison rebuffed.

“No, you don’t. No. Not with a place like this. You don’t know what you’re doing,” Nate insisted.

I watched on the screen as Eliot started to get escorted away, “Eliot?”

“Give it exactly two seconds before this becomes a train wreck.”

And just like that Eliot responded, “Hardison, we’ve got a problem.”

“What kind of problem?” He asked.

“They’re MRI-ing my pizza and their stance says ex-CIA.”

“You could tell somebody worked for the CIA just from how they stand?” Hardison asked before I could.

“It’s a very distinctive stance,” he whispered back.

I watched anxiously as a bunch of red flags and alerts popped up on Hardison’s screens. Hardison started to hack back with a vengeance to try and take back some control. I had faith in him, but the beeping and buzzing and flashing lights really didn’t make me feel better. Suddenly it took a turn for the worse where the screens said system lock out.

“Uh, Eliot, I think you should get out of there,” I said into the comms before the power in Nate’s apartment went out.

“Right now,” Hardison added on.

I glanced back to where Nate was sitting at the kitchen table with his hands raised as if to say, ‘see? This is what happens.’

“I’m working on it,” Eliot responded, accompanied with the sounds of fighting. “Parker, I’m comin’ out hot.”

“Okay, all clear out here. Just me-” she started to respond before the same person from earlier’s voice came through.

“Copy that, I think I got one out here, too.”

“Parker, did you stay next to that guy? That doesn’t sound good,” I commented, partially to her, but mostly myself.

It sounded like Eliot got through the worst of his escape as he whispered, supposedly to the receptionist, “I’ll call ya.”

I rolled my eyes to myself, of course he would do that.

“You know when I said you had pretty hair?” the guy next to Parker asked, “I was lying.”

I gagged, what a creep.

“Yeah, well, so was I when I said you didn’t… wait, damn it.” Parker responded before it sounded like she made her escape.

“Hardison?” Nate asked him after a little bit.

“Wait for it,” he said as he typed on his keyboard before the lights came back on. “See? There wasn’t no problem. I mean, I had it under control.”

He rambled on for a little bit longer, clearly flustered, as I laid my head back against the chair I was sitting in, letting out a sigh of relief that it was okay.

Later, when Eliot and Parker were able to make it back to the apartment, we sat around the kitchen table as Nate talked to us. I was still trying to figure out if he was going to chew us out or be nice and just explain what went wrong.

“So, pizza delivery guy was your big plan?”

“You know what man?” Hardison said, “It was recon, okay? Information gathering has historically been a very safe and peaceful business. It was a food company! Wasn’t like they were making weapons.”

I glanced at Eliot as he shifted an ice pack he was holding to his arm.

“Listen,” Nate said, “I’ve worked insurance for companies like this. Anyone gets their hands on the company’s food patents could cost them billions. And by the way? The guard that stuff better than defense contractors.” Nate explained.

Hardison looked at me in disbelief, but I shook my head, “Hey, I didn’t know that.”

Parker poked at Eliot’s arm, “does that hurt?”

“Yeah.”

“Well that explains all the ex-spooks hanging around the lobby then,” Sophie commented.

“You know what?” Hardison said a bit aggressively, “Ya live and ya learn.”

“No. I lived, alright,” Eliot cut in, “You sat behind a computer and acted like Kool Moe Dee.”

“What’d you call me? Kool Moe Dee? Like you even know anything about Kool Moe Dee. I was gathering very crucial information.”

“Does that hurt?” Parker poked Eliot again.

“Yeah.”

“How about now?”

“Alright!” I stood from my seat and smacked my hands on the table, a little overstimulated with all the arguing, which stopped it. “Parker, please stop poking Eliot, assume that it hurts. Eliot, we are very glad you lived, and Hardison…” I sighed, the little bit of adrenaline that I had worn off already, “what crucial information did you happen to gather in this train wreck?”

“Yes,” Nate said, backing me up a bit as I slowly sat back down, “How about you share that crucial information with the rest of us.”

I glanced up at Eliot who was looking at me with a softer expression, but I looked back down at the table, my hands in my hair.

“You know what?” Hardison answered Nate, “You ain’t said nothin’ but a word.” He pulled a remote out of his pocket, starting up the screens.

We all started to make our way to the living room to hear what Hardison had gathered.

“Hey, you heard y/n, stop it,” Eliot said to Parker after she poked him one more time.

“Eliot, what are you doing?” Nate asked, walking around the table towards him.

“She’s poking me,” he replied, watching as he came closer. “Don’t man…” He said, shrugging him off as Nate grabbed his hurt arm too, rubbing it in a little more.

I chuckled, “Come on Eliot, I’ll protect you from the meanies.” I walked ahead of him and was pleasantly surprised when he sat down so I was next to his injured arm.

He tapped his knee to mine, “you better.”

I tried to fight the smile that was growing a bit too wide as Hardison began the briefing.

“Lillian Foods is the third largest food company in the world. Last year it made 12 billion dollars,” Hardison started. “This is the vice president of the frozen food division, Erik Casten. Erik with a K, Casten with a C.”

“How is that relevant?” Nate asked.

“Oh,” Parker answered, “Eric with a C, nice and friendly. Erik with a K, evil.”

“I mean, she has a point,” I corroborated.

“I didn’t know that,” Sophie commented.

“Everybody knows that,” Parker replied.

“According to Dr. Jameson,” Hardison continued, “Erik with a K is trying to cover up salmonella in the frozen dinners so his division doesn’t have to pay out for the recall.”

“That’s why I grow my own food,” Eliot said next to me.

“How do you find the time?” Sophie asked.

“You make time. I only sleep 90 minutes a day.”

“I didn’t know that,” I whispered to him, “The growing your own food part. That’s super cool. I only have a basil plant on my window sill. But I don’t think that that little sleep is good for you.”

“The basil’s a good start,” he whispered back, not addressing my sleep comment.

I could never tell what the next thing I was going to learn about him was. I’ve started to seriously wonder what this man couldn’t do. I already knew that failing to steal my attention was not on that seemingly shorter list.

“So what we have to do is, we have to get a hold of Casten’s report and make it public,” Nate said. “It’s on the servers. How do we get into the building?”

“I think pizza delivery guy is off the table, for the record,” I commented, nudging my knee against Eliot’s, purposefully avoiding his gaze, but I heard him huff a laugh anyway.

“I am so far ahead of you, man, it’s scary,” Hardison told Nate. “Look, I can’t hack their system from the outside, so I sent a Trojan phone. It’s hacker 101.”

I pulled out my phone, “Oh, if this is a course, should I be taking notes?”

“You might as well be,” Hardison answered before continuing, “What I did was messenger a smartphone with an extended battery to an employee that’s on vacation. The package sits in the mail room. It scans for wireless and bluetooth access points. Unfortunately, even their internal servers are locked down like the CIA. So all I was able to get was employee emails.”

“Oh, anything useful there?” Sophie asked.

“Oh yeah, you know what?” Hardison sat on the edge of his seat, leaning towards her, “Marie from Payroll has a crush on Steve from Accounts Receivable.”

She and I were more invested in this gossip then we probably should have been.

Hardison pulled up a picture of a shirtless below average guy, “Look, that’s Steve right there on his vacation in Florida from a month ago.”

“She likes him? Really?” Parker asked half-heartedly, voicing my own thoughts as well.

“Oh yeah. That man is a sexy man-beast right there” Hardison half insisted before moving onto the next piece of gossip. “Now, Shannon and Chris from Marketing, they got a little fight going on with Lauren from Ads.”

“Office politics,” Sophie concluded, “God. It’s lucky we don’t have that.”

Eliot and I shared a look that showed we were both skeptical of that. It was just different kinds of politics.

“Everybody’s up in there complaining about this state of the company thing tomorrow,” Hardison continued, “And Brian from IT-”

“That’s it right there,” Nate cut in, “That’s our way in.”

“Brian from IT?” Hardison asked, “No, he is not a team player.”

“No no no no no,” Nate responded, “That’s our way in… yeah. Yeah yeah. That’s it. The state of the company meeting. Here we go.”

“What is that?” Eliot asked, “I don’t know what that is.”

“Me neither,” Parker said.

“It’s like State of the Union?” Hardison offered.

“What is that?” Sophie asked as well.

“Nate,” I said, “You’re the only one here who’s had like a traditional corporate job. Even with me, the places I worked never did that.”

“Oh right, right,” Nate said, finally understanding, “You guys have never had real jobs.”

The rest answered in the affirmative while I gave him a pointed look. He nodded apologetically as if to say, ‘I know you did, but yeah.’

“Alright,” Nate began to explain, “so when I used to work for IYS we would do this all the time. The company, big companies, they make their employees sit for an entire day listening to these boring speeches, lame entertainment, bad food. It’s…”

Parker huffed a sigh, “I’m so glad I don’t live in the real world.”

I nodded in agreement.

“It’s mandatory,” Nate added. “It’s the only time that all the employees are away from their desks at the same time.”

“Alright, so we go in as caterers. We download the report while everyone’s chucking back the mini quiches. Easy,” Sophie concluded.

“No,” Hadison contradicts, “see, it’s a food company. All the catering is in house. The only outsiders involved in the whole big operation are the entertainment.”

“And who would that be?” Nate asked.

“Oh, you gonna love this… It’s a magician.”

Nate perked up, looking at me, “ah…”

I, in turn, deflated, “no…”

The now former entertainment was a magician, and from what Hardison told us, he was pretty slimy. A couple of sexual harassment charges didn’t help. It didn’t take much for Hardison and Parker to dismantle his show and get him arrested for punching Hardison in the face.

The next day Sophie called Lillian Foods to explain the problem and give us an in to replace ‘Chronos the Magnificent.’ Nate went in first as ‘head magician’ talking to the head of security.

“Harry Turner,” he said, handing the security guard a business card.

“The magician, I know.”

“Illusionist,” Nate corrected, “Magicians do kid’s parties. I do Fortune 500 companies.” He waved us over, “Uh, right this way gang.”

“Woah, and who are these people?” The security guard asked.

“Oh, this is my team, I believe you spoke with my manager, this is Nell Carver,” he waved towards Sophie who was rolling in a cart of supplies before introducing the rest of us, “my illusions designer, Frank Brunner, my lovely assistant Clea, and of course my beloved apprentice Miss Birdie.”

I fought to not roll my eyes at Nate introducing me as such, hoping we could get past security without me blowing it.

Hardison stepped forward towards the guard, “Hey man, I hope you have a doctor in the house, because this man right here is gonna blow your mind.”

“Alright, come on, we’re on a very tight schedule,” Nate said as he started to walk forward.

“Nothing gets in or out of this building without being scanned,” the guard said, stopping him.

“These crates contain my illusions, my life. I’m not gonna reveal my secrets. Come on.”

“That’s not my problem, is it?”

“I’ll take care of this,” Sophie said, stopping Nate from continuing, “Mr. Markland, I’m sure we can figure something out. It’s not possible-”

“Let’s pull up the van, Frank, and let's get out of here,” Nate said.

“Harry, are you sure?”

“Yeah.”

Then an older man walked up to the commotion we were making, “what is going on here?”

“Mr. Price, sir, this is…” the guard started.

Nate turned and introduced himself with a business card, “Harry Turner, illusionist extraordinaire, you are Mr. Price, CEO of this company?”

“I am, what’s going on here?”

“I would like very much, sir, to give your people a wonderful show, but your doorman here would like to look at our boxes of illusions and destroy the illusion.”

I bit my lip to try not to laugh at the obvious manipulation that Nate was pulling, particularly with the context of us being magicians. I never would have dreamed of us being in a situation like this.

“Markland, just lighten up, will ya?” the CEO asked. “It’s a magic show for Pete’s sake.”

Nate repeated him as he followed Mr. Price and led us through security into the building.

Once we were on stage Nate said, “Okay, we’re clear, let him out.”

Harison opened the giant upright box to let Eliot out. He was dressed in his black stealth related outfit with a beanie on his head that I liked a little too much. He held a classic white rabbit and hat in his arms and carefully stepped around a bird cage at his feet when getting out.

“It’s a good job you’re not claustrophobic Eliot.” Sophie commented.

“I was when I was a kid,” Eliot said, shoving the rabbit into Nate’s hands, “take this damn thing.”

“Really? How’d you get over it?” Parker asked while taking the rabbit as Nate handed it to her.

“I locked myself in a woodshed behind my house for a couple nights. After that I was fine.”

I looked at him in disbelief, pausing my task of unpacking the bird cage and checking on the birds inside, “That is the worst form of exposure therapy I have ever heard of… Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“That is so funny,” Parker said, “I was scared of the dark and did the exact same thing.” She then relayed a story of how her friends buried her alive in a wood chest when she was a kid.

“That is not the same thing,” Eliot responded. “What’s wrong with you?”

“I take it back Eliot, Parker’s is worse.” There were moments like this where I questioned where my life path has taken me to get to the point where my friends are these people. Then I remember that it is my own damn fault for willingly following Nate’s hard left turn in life. I shrugged to myself before continuing to prepare.

“So, you’re actually enjoying this,” Sophie said to Nate.

“You know, being a magician, it’s the next best thing to being a con artist, you know? It’s all about misdirection and control.”

“So no one actually told you that you can’t control life. You see, this is why you’re not in a relationship.”

“No, Sophie, I’m just very focused on my work right now. You know, I was out of control before. Now I’m in control, it's a good thing.”

Hardison turned to me, “You do not seem very pleased about this, but you are kinda confident right now, so I’m confused.”

I glanced at him as I kept unpacking stuff, “Uh, yeah, because when I was in middle school, Nate and I went through a magic phase where we worked together and learned a lot of this stuff. We got pretty good at it, not gonna lie…” I then pointedly said, “Though I don’t understand why I have to go by Miss Birdie like I did when I was like 12 and Nate can’t go by Monsieur Kitty!”

“Do you hear yourself right now, y/n?” Nate asked.

“Yes, and I can be petty when I want to be, you’re using my childhood nickname against me.”

“So you know how to do all this magic stuff?” Eliot asked.

“Absolutely,” Nate answered, “Positively, yeah. It’s all about the rabbit. You know having… by the way, where’s the rabbit,” he asked, turning around before shrugging it off. “Hardison, let’s go over the plan.”

We all gathered around Hardison as he started to outline the plan. As he did so, I couldn’t help but notice how my heart was beating faster than it should be. I knew I was nervous about this, the stage, performance, how much the team was relying on this distraction, and every little thing that had to go right, but I maybe didn’t realize how much until we were here and I took the moment to stop.

“Okay, the show opens with our friend Erik Casten delivering the state of the company speech,” Hardison said. “The speech is scheduled to last an hour, giving myself, Eliot, and Parker enough time to go down to the server room, hack the servers, download the report, and get back downstairs.”

“So, massively there will be no magic show,” Sophie said.

This helped calm my nerves a little bit, but something in my gut told me something was going to go wrong.

“Oh no, there might be a magic show. Absolutely,” Nate said which counteracted Sophie’s statement and its effects. “We might want to treat these people to the illusionist extraordinaire!”

Eliot and Nate laughed a bit as Nate bowed to the empty auditorium. I tried to laugh with them, but all that came out was a shaky breath. To counteract this, I turned my attention back to the props, including the birds, and pantomimed the motions of making them appear and disappear. I vaguely heard Sophie say something about Nate getting a girlfriend, but I was too focused on practicing the few tricks that I remembered.

My gut turned out to be right, unfortunately. Instead of giving an hour long speech, Erik Casten’s speech was barely five, keeping it ‘short and sweet.’

“...and let’s give a warm welcome to… Harry Turner, illusionist extraordinaire,” Erik finished.

“Shit,” I said, mostly to myself.

“That’s you,” Sophie realized. “Hey, you’re on.”

“Parker, I need my assistant,” Nate said into the comms, as the other three were somewhere in the building going to hack the servers.

“How come Parker gets to be the assistant?” she asked.

“How come Nate gets to be the magician?” Hardison asked. “I do card tricks too. I do great card tricks.”

The rest of them were bickering over comms, asking about doing each other's jobs, while the stage was sitting empty. I eventually shoved past Sophie and Nate to get on stage, ignoring the nerves and my rapidly beating heart. I approached the center of the stage and looked at the crowd of people sitting in the previously empty auditorium.

“Hello Lillian Foods!” I said, trying to decide if the waver in my voice was noticeable to anyone else. “As you might suspect, I don’t quite fit the name ‘Harry Turner.’”

To my relief, the crowd laughed a bit which drowned out the bickering still going on in my ear.

“To everyone’s relief, as well as my own, that is not my name. I am Harry’s apprentice. You may call me Miss Birdie.” The thought of changing my stage name crossed my mind, but I thought it was easier this way. As some people in the crowd said hi to me, using the name, it made me smile. “I think I am on the same page as most of you when expecting a big long speech from your vice-president. And while you may all have been relieved…”

The crowd cheered and laughed as they could see where this was going.

“My mentor was not as prepared as he should have been to be on stage this soon, that is where I come in. I’m sure any interns in the audience know the feeling.”

That got a particularly large roar from the crowd. I glanced off stage where Nate and Sophie were arguing still, though not as much as before. Nate gave a pointed eyeroll and shrug at me which encouraged me to continue.

“I must apologize as I am a little more familiar with close up magic, so let me know if you can’t see anything and I’ll try to make it work. Do you see what is in my hand?” I raised my hand to show some quarters pinched between my fingers.

The crowd responded in the affirmative before I continued. I did some subtle disappearing tricks before making them reappear with the exception of one.

“Hmm, it seems I lost a quarter somewhere… Any ideas?”

The crowd booed a bit with the skeptics yelling out where the quarter could be. ‘In your hand! In your pocket!’ etc etc.

“In my pocket?” I asked, I pulled out my pockets inside out and a few coins came out. “There's some coins, but they look like pennies to me, how about my coat pockets?” I took my blazer jacket off and shook it upside down. A comically large amount of pennies fell out of it. “I need some help examining all these coins… Is there a Dave Bickle in the audience today?”

There was some cheering in one corner as he stood up.

“Dave, do you mind coming up here and helping me?” He started to walk over before I added, “Bring your coffee, I know you can’t live without it.”

The crowd chuckled as he came up, coffee in hand. I asked him if he saw my missing quarter anywhere in the spread coins, which he said no. When he wasn’t paying attention, I was able to slip the ‘missing’ quarter in his coffee mug. I was glad it was a mug rather than a covered cup or tumbler, which made it easier. I made sure there was no splash and that it was out of sight for most of the audience.

“Well, I guess I’m too good at making things disappear, but not great at making them come back… You know something about that, especially with coffee, huh, Dave?” I knew I was milking this bit, but Mr. Price didn’t give us much to work with for crowd work. When Dave laughed and took a sip of his coffee he came out with the quarter in his mouth. I held up my handkerchief to take it back from him, “Oh! You found it, thanks, that’s my bus money for later!”

The crowd laughed and gave a little applause as Dave went back to his seat. I glanced over to Nate to see Parker had joined him and Sophie backstage. I took this as an okay for me to finish up since they seemed a bit more prepared now.

I quickly introduced Nate as Harry Turner and had him come on stage for his performance. He graciously brought me a broom to sweep up all of my pennies so they wouldn’t interfere later.

“That was really good, y/n! You have all the skills of a pickpocket with sleight of hand, why didn’t you mention it earlier?” Sophie congratulated me once I got off stage.

“I have blocked out those memories up until yesterday and to be completely honest, I can only half hear you over the blood pumping in my ears right now, how is everything else going?” I kind of laughed to myself, I couldn’t believe I had done that. As I picked up the coins from the floor I could see that my hands were still shaking.

“That’s natural after being in front of a lot of people, we’ll get you trained up as a grifter and thief in no time!”

I smiled at her sentiment, but didn’t encourage it. As I slowly calmed down I could hear that things were not going great upstairs; Erik had the same idea as we did: accessing the server room while everyone was downstairs. Except he was deleting the files we were trying to access.

Hardison and Eliot were able to make it up to a higher level to gain access to the computers but they needed higher clearance authorization to gain access. Nate was able to gain Mr. Price’s fingerprints by simulating a trick on stage, but then Hardison said we needed him for retina scanners as well. Nate caused Mr. Price to ‘disappear’ in a magic box by switching it out for an empty one. Sophie and I pushed the box Mr. Price was in to the elevator and shipped him up to Eliot and Hardison.

It wasn’t long after Sophie and I returned to the backstage that Hardison gave an ‘uh oh’ in addition to the fact that Erik had deleted all of the files before he could get to them.

“Uh oh? What do you mean uh oh?” Eliot asked.

I heard a security guard demand that he get out of the elevator.

“Oh. That uh oh.”

Sophie and I looked at each other in worry and returned to the elevator as we heard Eliot beat up some guards.

The elevator opened and Eliot stepped out over the guards, “Show’s over. We’re blown.”

“Nate, bring down the curtain,” Sophie said.

“We’ve got to go!” I added.

The three of us made our escape and listened for the others to do so. We all made it out with the exception of Hardison who had been caught in the locked junction room where he accessed the servers. They had brought Hardison out of the building to try and find the rest of us when Parker swiped Erik’s phone.

Nate proceeded to call one of the guards and talk to Erik on his own cell phone and blackmail him into removing the frozen food line that was contaminated off the shelves. He did so by planting the company’s patents on Erik’s phone. The client was there to stick the final nail in the coffin by informing Mr. Price and getting Erik fired.

When we rendezvoused at Nate’s apartment, the rest of us were unwinding and eating dinner while Nate continued to research clients… Working.

Sophie voiced her concern about him.

Eliot shrugged her off saying that he’s fine. The fact that we pulled this one off proof that he’s at the top of his game.

“Well that’s the problem. He keeps winning.” Sophie said, “And everytime he wins he believes a little bit more that he can control… life.”

“It’s what gets him through the day,” he replied.

“What happens when he loses? The last time he lost, it broke him. He breaks again… I don’t think even we can pick up the pieces.”

I didn’t know what to say to that since I thought she might be right. Instead, I stood and moved to the fridge behind Eliot to see if there was anything there that tickled my fancy. Eliot followed me with his box of takeout, leaning against the counter beside me.

“Do you want some of this Kung Pao?”

I looked at it for a second before grabbing some chopsticks off the counter and grabbing a bite.

“So, you really know some of that magic stuff, huh? I heard it over comms, the crowd was digging it,” Eliot said between bites.

I laughed, “Yeah, a little bit.” I took another bite before saying, “I didn’t get to do my signature trick though.”

“Oh yeah?” He smiled, “show me.”

I thought about it for a second before obliging him. I moved to tuck some hair behind his ear, a slight misdirection. He watched me closely, eyebrow raising slightly at my movement. When my hand was slightly out of his sight, I flipped my wrist and released the dove that was sleeping comfortably in my sleeve. It made a louder rustling noise than I had anticipated, but he didn’t even flinch. I pulled my hand back so I could show him the bird sitting on my finger.

He smiled as he looked at it. He then looked between me and Nate, “birdie.”

I nodded, “Birdie, but he’s the only one that can call me that.”

He laughed and stroked the bird, “That’s alright. I’ll stick to sweetheart.”

A/n: Reblogs and comments are welcome and encouraged! Thank you for reading!

Tags: @isoldeahlstrom @kniselle @technikerin23

#eliot spencer x reader #eliot spencer #leverage #rewrite #slow burn #multichapter #nate ford #sophie devereaux #alec hardison #parker #ford!reader

35 notes · View notes

prerodinu · 1 year

Text

⸻ Alpha's and the Kings @kinglyisms

Hiroki is bent over the desk, writing out some orders that needed to be carried out for repairs in town. He hasn’t slept much, trying to work his way through his paperwork, and feels himself nodding slightly off. Only to flinch at the sound of a knock on his door. He snaps his head up, blinks a couple times and then breathes softly out when it’s just Toshiro. He stepped inside, followed by a few friends, and moved to stand beside Hiroki’s desk. “Your Highness, this is Artem the Alpha of a visiting pack, and his two pack mates.” A soft blink and then Hiroki dragged his gaze across the three strangers in his office. Two Werewolves, his magic tells him, and a Vampire. Interesting. Vampires aren’t part of the local Pack in Abarith, but then again Abarith’s Vampire Coven was currently having some issues. The moment they all find a way to execute John Reid the easier their lives will be. For now though, he stands from the table and smiles gently to his guests. “Hello. Welcome to Abarith. I’m Hiroki Nakamura, the King.” He tilts his head slightly, glancing between them all. “Are they staying with you, Toshiro?” “For now, Luka seems to be—busy with their Pack Mate they came to collect.” Busy. He might need to make a phone call later. Shaking his head slightly he turns back to the guests. “You’re welcome to stay as long as you want. If you need anything at all, my office is always open.” If he’s in it or not is entirely debatable.

There is a bit of out-of-body experience in knowing that he was in a different place that he had never seen before. There were different laws and lays of the land that Artem and his pack mates just weren't sure about. So they huddled close to their Alpha not for his protection but so that they don't do something stupid.

Artem's hair had been braided, bits of wild wavy hair and braids throughout, white outfit was different from the day before having packed a couple just to play it safe. Aurel was wearing a darker outfit this time, not wanting to wear white outside and hoping to see his pack mate. Only Radovan seemed to be busy so he would have to hang out with Eliot which wasn't that big deal.

Dacian was leaning against Artem, being sulky that he was forced to leave Elijah and Silas but Artem gave a quick pat to Dacian's head before smiling at the King.

"Hello King Hiroki. It is a pleasure to meet you." Artem offered him the same respect that he did Toshiro, bowing slightly and baring his neck. Still, he found a spot to sit, Dacian standing behind him and Aurel moving over to Toshiro and standing next to him. He smelled like Eliot and Aurel just wanted to go back to the pack house.

"I did want to ask you something, King. Since of course, I don't want to take up much more of your time. My, Radovan is his name, Pack mate seems to be enamored with Luka, forgive me if I don't know his last name, mated pairs don't do well talking for the first couple weeks of being mated in my experience, obviously they can't be separated and so Radovan is going to stay here." He glanced over at Aurel and then Dacian, throwing a wink at Toshiro before leaning over the desk towards the King. "And if we are being honest more of my pack members seem to be enamored with your people here so I can bet more are going to be lost to the mating than just the one." He leaned back and crossed his ankle over his knee smiling just a little bit.

"So I am formally requesting if that's how it's done. To purchase a piece of land so that I may have a house built, or purchase a piece of land with a house so that I could have some of my pack stationed here or that I can come to visit, with Toshiro and yours approval when I wish to visit my pack."

#(Threads: Artem)#(Asks // Artem)#◜ ╱ Asks ⟩⟩ talk tot he pack. ◞#(Verse // Howl at the Moon)#kinglyisms

12 notes · View notes

winterfable · 9 months

Text

Chrysalis: Am I really?

Then Sunrise kissed my Chrysalis— And I stood up—and lived— —Emily Dickinson.

I was three years old when I made the most important psychological discovery of my life. I discovered that a living creature, obeying its own inner laws, moves through cycles of growth, dies, and is reborn as a new creation.

One day I was smoking my corncob bubblepipe helping my father in the garden. I always enjoyed helping him because he understood bugs, and flowers, and where the wind came from. I found a lump stuck to a branch, and Father explained that Catherine Caterpillar had made a chrysalis for herself. We would take it inside and pin it on the kitchen curtain. One day a butterfly would emerge from that lump.

Well, I had seen magic in my father's garden, but this stretched even my imagination. However, we carefully stuck the big pins through the curtain, and every morning I grabbed my doll and pipe and ran downstairs to show them the butterfly. No butterfly! My father said I had to be patient. The chrysalis only looked dead. Remarkable changes were happening inside. A caterpillar's life was very different from a butterfly's, and they needed very different bodies. A caterpillar chewed solid leaves; a butterfly drank liquid nectar. A caterpillar was sexless, almost sightless, and landlocked; a butterfly laid eggs, could see and fly. Most of the caterpillar's organs would dissolve, and those fluids would help the tiny wings, eyes, muscles and brain of the developing butterfly to grow. But that was very hard work, so hard that the creature could accomplish nothing else so long as it was going on. It had to stay in that protective shell.

I waited for that sluggish glutton of a caterpillar to change into a delicate butterfly, but I secretly figured my father had made a mistake. Then one morning my doll and I were eating our shredded wheat when I sensed I was not alone in the kitchen. I stayed still. I felt a presence on the curtain. There it was, its wings still expanding, shimmering with translucent light—an angel who could fly. Its chrysalis was empty. That mystery on the kitchen curtain was my first encounter with death and rebirth.

Years later I discovered that the butterfly is a symbol of the human soul. I also discovered that in its first moments out of the chrysalis the butterfly voids a drop of excreta that has been accumulating during pupation. This drop is frequently red and sometimes voided during first flight. Consequently, a shower of butterflies may produce a shower of blood, a phenomenon that released terror and suspicion in earlier cultures, sometimes resulting in massacres. Symbolically, if we are to release our own butterfly, we too will sacrifice a drop of blood, let the past go and turn to the future.

It is the twilight zone between past and future that is the precarious world of transformation within the chrysalis. Part of us is looking back, yearning for the magic we have lost; part is glad to say goodbye to our chaotic past; part looks ahead with whatever courage we can muster; part is excited by the changing potential; part sits stonestill not daring to look either way. Individuals who consciously accept the chrysalis, whether in analysis or in life's experience, have accepted a life/death paradox, a paradox which returns in a different form at each new spiral of growth. In T.S. Eliot's "Journey of the Magi," one of the kings, having returned to his own

country, describes his experience in Bethlehem:

....so we continued And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory. All this was a long time ago, I remember, And I would do it again, but set down This set down This: were we led all that way for Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly, We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death, But had thought they were different; this Birth was Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death. We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, With an alien people clutching their gods. I should be glad of another death.

If we accept this paradox, we are not torn to pieces by what seems to be intolerable contradiction. Birth is the death of the life we have known; death is the birth of the life we have yet to live. We need to hold the tensions and allow our circuit to give way to a larger circumference.

People splayed in a perpetual chrysalis, those who find life "weary, stale, flat and unprofitable"2

or, to use the modern jargon, "boring," are in trouble. Stuck in a state of stasis, they clutch their childhood toys, divorce themselves from the reality of their present circumstances, and sit hoping for some magic that will release them from their pain into a world that is "just and good," a make-believe world of childhood innocence. Fearful of getting out of relationships that are stultifying their growth, fearful of confronting parents, partners or children who are maintaining infantile attitudes, they sink into chronic illness and/or psychic death. Life becomes a network of illusions and lies. Rather than take responsibility for what is happening, rather than accept the challenge of growth, they cling to the rigid framework that they have constructed or that has been assigned to them from birth. They attempt to stay "fixed." Such an attitude is against life, for change is a law of life. To remain fixed is to rot, particularly if it be in the Garden of Eden.

Why are we so afraid of change? Why, when we are so desperate for change, do we become even more desperate when transformation begins? Why do we lose our childhood faith in growing? Why do we cling to old attachments instead of submitting ourselves to new possibilities—to the undiscovered worlds in our own bodies, minds and souls? We plant our fat amaryllis bulb. We water it, give it sunlight, watch the first green shoot, the rapidly growing stock, the buds, and then marvel at the great bell flowers tolling their hallelujahs to the snow outside. Why should we have more faith in an amaryllis bulb than in ourselves? Is it because we know that the amaryllis is living by some inner law—a law that we have lost touch with in ourselves? If we can allow ourselves time to listen to the amaryllis, we can resonate with its silence. We can experience its eternal stillness. We can find ourselves at the heart of the mystery. And in that place, the place of the Goddess, we can accept birth and death. The exquisite blossom will die, but if the bulb is given rest and darkness, another bloom will come next year.

Insecurity lies at the heart of the fear of change. Individuals who recognize their own worth among those they love can leave and return without fear of separation. They know they are valued for themselves. Our computerized society, fascinating and efficient as it is, is making deeper and deeper inroads into genuine human values. A machine, however intricate, has no soul, nor does it move with the rhythms of instinct. A computer may be able to vomit out the facts of my existence, but it cannot fathom the subterranean corridors of my aloneness, nor can it hear my silence, nor can it respond to the shadow that passes over my eyes. It cannot compute the depth and breadth and height of the human soul. When society deliberately programs itself to a set of norms that has very little to do with instinct, love or privacy, then people who set out to become individuals, trusting in the dignity of their own soul and the creativity of their own imagination, have good reason to be afraid. They are outcasts, cut off from society and to a greater or lesser degree from their own instincts. As they work in the silence of their cocoon, they often think they are crazy. They also think they would be crazier if they gave up their faith in their own journey. Like the chrysalis pinned to the kitchen curtain, Blake's proverb is pinned to their study wall: "If a fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise."

Courage to stand alone, to wear the "white plume" of freedom, has been the mark of the hero in any society. Standing alone today demands even more courage and strength than it did in former cultures. From infancy, children have been programmed to perform. Rather than living from their own needs and feelings, they learn to assess situations in order to please others. Without an inner core of certainty grounded in their own musculature, they lack the inner resources to stand alone. Pummelled by mass media and peer group pressures, their identity may be utterly absorbed by collective stereotypes. In the absence of adequate rites of passage, ad[1]men become the high priests of an initiation into the addictions of consumerism. Everywhere the ceremony of innocence is exploited.

Without recognized rites, members of a society are not sure who they are within the structure. Children who have fumbled their way through puberty find themselves in adolescence raging for independence, at the same time furious when asked to take responsibility. Boys who have never been separated from their mothers and are fearful of their fathers cannot make the step into adult manhood. Girls who have lived in the service of their driving masculine energies are not going to forsake their P.P.F.F. (Prestige, Power, Fame and Fortune) for a sense of harmony with the cosmos. Even the rites of marriage are confusing. Unwed couples who have lived together for years may eventually believe that "marriage isn't going to make any difference," and then be genuinely confused when sexual difficulties do develop after the vows are spoken. Arriving at middle age is agony for those who cannot accept the mature beauty of autumn. They see their wrinkles hardening into lines, and new liver spots appearing every day, without the compensating mellowing in their soul. Without the rites of the elders, they cannot look forward to holding a position of honor in their society, nor in most cases will they treasure their own wisdom. For some, even the dignity of death dare not be contemplated.

The undercurrent of despair in our society is epitomized in a German word that first appeared in English in 1963, and is now incorporated into the Oxford English Dictionary (Supplement, 1985). It is torschlusspanik, (pronounced tor¬shluss-panic), defined as "panic at the thought that a door between oneself and life's opportunities has shut." Words enter a language when they are needed, and torschlusspanik has arrived. The doors that were once opened through initiation rites are still crucial thresholds in the human psyche, and when those doors do not open, or when they are not recognized for what they are, life shrinks into a series of rejections fraught with torschlusspanik: the graduation formal to which the girl was not invited; the marriage that did not take place; the baby that was never born; the job that never materialized. Looking back, we recognize that it was often not our choice that determined which door opened and which door shut. We were chosen for this, rejected for that.

Torschlusspanik is now a part of our culture because there are so few rites to which individuals will submit in order to transcend their own selfish drives. Without the broader perspective, they see no meaning in the rejection. The door thuds, leaving them bitter or resigned. If, instead, they could temper themselves to a point of total concentration, a bursting point where they could either pass over or fall back as in a rite of passage, then they could test who they are. Their passion would be spent in an allout positive effort, instead of deteriorating into disillusionment and despair. The terror behind that word torschlusspanik is what drives many people into analysis—the last door has shut, the last rejection has taken place. No door will ever open again. Nothing means anything.

Another reason for fearing the chrysalis lies in our cultural loss of containers. Our society's emphasis on linear growth and achievement alienates us from the cyclic pattern of death and rebirth, so that when we experience ourselves dying, or dream that we are, we fear annihilation. Primitive societies are close enough to the natural cycles of their lives to provide the containers through which the members of the tribe can experience death and rebirth as they pass through the difficult transitions. To quote from the classic Rites of Passage by Arnold van Gannep:

In such societies every change in a person's life involves actions and reactions between sacred and profane—actions and reactions to be regulated and guarded so that society as a whole will suffer no discomfort or injury. Transitions from group to group and from one social situation to the next are looked on as implicit in the very fact of existence, so that a man's life comes to be made up of a succession of stages with similar ends and beginnings: birth, social puberty, marriage, fatherhood, advancement to a higher class, occupational specialization, and death. For every one of these events there are ceremonies whose essential purpose is to enable the individual to pass from one defined position to another which is equally well defined.... In this respect man's life resembles nature, from which neither the individual nor the society stands independent.

Through their initiation, for example, boys are recognized as responsible adult men. They are cut off from their mothers, trained as warriors, instructed in the culture of their tribe.

For girls, the meaning of puberty rites is somewhat different. Here I quote from Bruce Lincoln's Emerging from the Chrysalis:

Rather than changing women's status, initiation changes their fundamental being, addressing ontological concerns rather than hierarchical ones.

A woman does not become more powerful or authoritative, but more creative, more alive, more ontologically real. ... The pattern of female initiation is thus one of growth or magnification, an expansion of powers, capabilities, experiences. This magnification is accomplished by gradually endowing the initiand with symbolic items that make of her woman, and beyond this a cosmic being. These items can be concrete, such as clothing or jewelry, or they can be nonmaterial in nature, such as songs chanted for the woman-to be, myths repeated in her presence, scars or paintings placed upon her body.

The scarification is meant to provide an experience of intense pain and an enduring record of that pain. The person is rendered unique. Through this magnification, the woman "steps into the cosmic arena: she is given the water of life, with which she nourishes the cosmic tree."

Such primitive rituals did not change the way people lived. They gave meaning to life. By means of ritual, relationship to the unchanging, archetypal aspects of existence was affirmed and renewed. What would otherwise have been boring drudgery or torschlusspanik was invested with a meaning that transcended animal survival. Through ritual, human activity was connected to the divine.

In more sophisticated societies, the church and the theater became ritual containers. Within the safety and the confines of the Mass, for instance, the individual could surrender to God and experience dismemberment and death, descent into Hell and resurrection of the spirit on the third day. One could experience the magnification of one's own spirit by experiencing oneself as sacrificer and sacrificed. Like the primitive, the participant left the ritual with enhanced meaning, with a profound sense of belonging to a cosmos and to a community that respected that cosmos.

The theater also provided a ritual container, a public chrysalis. The plays dealt with archetypal realities. On the stage, men and women saw their own psychological depths enacted and were thus encouraged to reflect on their own human situation.

We have lost our containers; chaos threatens. Without rituals to make a firm demarcation between the profane and the sacred, between what is us and what is not us, we tend to identify with archetypal patterns of being—hero, Father, Mother, etc. We forget that we are individual human beings; we allow ourselves to be inflated by the power of the unconscious and usurp it for our own. And we do this not knowing what we do and that we do it. Liberated from the "superstitious" belief in gods and demons, we claim for ourselves the power once attributed to them. We do not realize we have usurped or stolen it. How then do we explain our anxiety and dissatisfaction? Power makes us fearful; lack of it makes us anxious. Few are satisfied with what they have. Despite our socalled liberation from gods and demons, few can live without them. Their absence makes nothing better. It may even make everything worse.

If, for example, a child has acted as buffer between his parents, he may fear his home will disintegrate if he ceases to act as intermediary. Without realizing it, he has assumed the power of the savior in his small world. When as an adult his boundaries are widened, he will tend to take on that archetypal role wherever he goes. He will also suffer guilt when he fails. He may even suffer guilt for being unable to make it snow when his family has planned a skiing weekend. Such hubris is seen as ludicrous once it is brought to consciousness, but, without consciousness, depression and despair fester inside. "I should have been able to do something. I failed," Instead of leaving other people's destiny to them and accepting his own, he attempts to take responsibility for Fate and feels inadequate when the door thuds. The resulting guilt can quickly switch to rage, rage that resonates back to the powerless childhood. "What do you expect of me? I can't do it. Get off my back. Carry your own load. LEAVE ME ALONE."

Many people, for example, think life is a meaningless merry-go-round if they are not being transported by love like Prince Charles and Lady Diana, or living for a cause like Mother Theresa, or dying for a dream like Martin Luther King. They measure their standard of behavior by comparison with figures who carry immense archetypal projections—Marilyn Monroe, John F. Kennedy, Michael Jackson. A mask ceases to be a mask. Instead, with the help of dyes and surgery, the mask becomes the face. Cosmetics are identity or character or Fate. By identifying with an archetype instead of remaining detached from it, they turn life into theater and themselves into actors on a stage, thus falling prey to demonic as well as angelic inflation. Without the container, they confuse the sacred and profane worlds.

We are the descendants of Freud and Jung, and while poets and madmen had free access to their unconscious before those two giants, the world of the archetype is now an open market for the general populace without any ritual containment. If we are blindly living out an archetype, we are not containing our own life. We are possessed, and possession acts as a magnet on unconscious people in our environment. Everyday life becomes a dangerous world where illusion and reality can be fatally confused.

A life that is being truly lived is constantly burning away the veils of illusion, gradually revealing the essence of the individual. Psychoanalysis can speed up that process. Sometimes people experience themselves as caterpillars crawling along. Externally, everything seems fine. Some deep intuitive voice, however, may be whispering, "It's not worth it. There's nobody here. I need a cocoon. I need to go back and find myself." Now, they may not quite realize that when caterpillars go into cocoons, they do not emerge as high-class caterpillars, and they may not be prepared for the agony of the transformation that goes on inside the chrysalis. Nor are they quite prepared for the winged beauty that slowly and painfully emerges, that lives by a very different set of laws than a caterpillar. Even more confounding is the fact that friends and relations who may be quite happy caterpillars have no patience with a silent, hard-edged chrysalis that is all turned in on itself—"selfish, lazy, self indulgent." And they have even less patience with a confused butterfly who hasn't adjusted to the laws of aerodynamics.

Still, it is amazing how often other caterpillars, inspired by butterflies, sacrifice their landlubber condition, make their own chrysalis and find their own wings. Jung writes that coming to consciousness is "the sacrifice of the merely natural man, of the unconscious, ingenuous being whose tragic career began with the eating of the apple in Paradise.

The chrysalis is essential if we are to find ourselves. Yet very little in our extroverted society supports introverted withdrawal. We are supposed to be doers, taking care of others, supporting good causes, unselfish, energetic, doing our social duty. If we choose to simply be, our loved ones may automatically assume we are doing nothing, and at first we may feel that way ourselves. We begin to look at our primeval muck as it surfaces in dreams. All hell starts to break loose inside, and we wonder what's the point of dredging up all this stuff. We argue with ourselves: "I should be out there doing something useful. But the truth is I can't do anything useful if there's no I to do it. I can't love anyone else, if there's no I to do the loving. If I don't know myself, I cannot love myself, and if I do not love myself, my love of others is probably my projected need of their acceptance. I am putting on a performance in order to be loved. I fear rejection. If nobody loves me, I won't exist. But who are they loving? Who am I?"

That is what going into the chrysalis is all about—undergoing a metamorphosis in order one day to be able to stand up and say I am. The gnawing hunger, the incessant yearning at the core of many lives, began at birth, or perhaps even in utero. In order to survive in a demanding environment where one or both parents projected their unlived dreams (or nightmares) onto their children, the infants gave up trying to live their own lives. As little human beings with needs and feelings of their own, they were rejected. Their mystery was never considered, and so they grew up automatically thinking in terms of other people's response. In other words, they developed a charming persona, a mask they created with infinite care—a mask that, as adults, may be at once their greatest blessing and greatest curse. Outwardly they may be brilliantly successful, but inwardly empty. They cannot understand why their intimate relationships repeatedly end in disaster, a pattern they recognize but can do nothing to stop. They dream they are actors, the spotlight is on them, but they cannot remember what play they are in, let alone what their lines are. If their ego is barely formed, they may not even appear in their own dreams, or may recognize themselves as objects or little animals.

It is important to point out, however, that we all need several personas, that is, the right mask for the right occasion. Jung was once lecturing on the topic when a student accused him of being hypocritical if he used a persona. Jung said that he had just had a fight with his wife, and he was still angry, but that anger had nothing to do with the students, nor with their reason for getting themselves to the Institute that morning. It was neither fair to himself nor to them to show that anger there. However, he said, he intended to finish the fight when he went home. The point is that we must be conscious enough to know when we are using a persona and for what reason. Otherwise we easily identify with a particular persona, which obliges us to repress our genuine feelings and prevents us from acting on them at the right time and place. The persona is necessary because people at different levels of consciousness respond to a situation with very different antennae. Naively or deliberately, making oneself vulnerable to psychic wounding without good reason is foolish. To be wary of casting pearls before swine is not conceit but plain common sense.

As the transformation process goes on, pregnancies and newborn babies frequently appear in dreams. When the conscious ego is able to release repressed psychic energy, or reconnects with unconscious body energy, or makes a decision on its own behalf, that new energy is symbolized as new life. When the psyche is preparing to move onto a new level of awareness, or one's conscious attitude has made a new connection with the unconscious, then dreams may appear where the dream ego, the shadow or the anima is pregnant. Nine months later, so long as the process has not been aborted, there are often dreams of crossing borders, passing over into a new country, moving through subterranean tunnels or actually giving birth (see below, page 158). If the ego maintains the connection, the newborn child is nurtured with soul food. If the ego falters and fails to act on the new energy, the baby may appear mutilated, starving or dead. Or it may simply disappear.

I have found that individuals tend to repeat the pattern of their own actual birth every time life requires them to move onto a new level of awareness. As they entered the world, so they continue to reenter at each new spiral of growth. If, for example, their birth was straightforward, they tend to handle passovers with courage and natural trust. If their birth was difficult, they become extremely fearful, manifest symptoms of suffocating, become claustrophobic (psychically and physically). If they were premature, they tend to be always a little ahead of themselves. If they were held back, the rebirth process may be very slow. If they were breechbirth, they tend to go through life "assbackwards." If they were born by Caesarian section, they may avoid confrontations. If their mother was heavily drugged, they may come up to the point of passover with lots of energy, then suddenly, for no apparent reason, stop, or move into a regression, and wait for someone else to do something. Often this is the point where addictions reappear—binging, starving, drinking, sleeping, overworking—anything to avoid facing the reality of moving out into a challenging world.

Many delightful babies appear in dreams, and just as many little tyrants who need firm and loving discipline. One child, however, is noticeably different from the others. This is the abandoned one, who may appear in bullrushes, in straw in a barn, in a tree, almost always in some forgotten or out-of-the-way place. This child will be radiant with light, robust, intelligent, sensitive. Often it is able to talk minutes after it is born. It has Presence. It is the Divine Child, bringing with it the "hard and bitter agony" of the new dispensation—the agony of Eliot's Magi. With its birth, the old gods have to go.

Since the natural gradient of the psyche is toward wholeness, the Self will attempt to push the neglected part forward for recognition. It contains energy of the highest value, the gold in the dung. In the Bible it is the stone that was rejected that becomes the cornerstone. It manifests either in a sudden or subtle change in personality, or, conversely, in a fanaticism which the existing ego adopts in order to try to keep the new and threatening energy out. If the ego fails to go through the psychic birth canal, neurotic symptoms manifest physically and psychically. The suffering may be intense, but it is based on worshipping false gods. It is not the genuine suffering that accompanies efforts to incorporate the new life. The neurotic is always one phase behind where his reality is. When he should be outgrowing childish behavior, he hangs onto it. When he should be moving into maturity, he hangs onto youthful folly. Never congruent with himself or others, he is never where he seems to be. What he cannot do is live in the now.

Many people are being dragged toward wholeness in their daily lives, but because they do not understand initiation rites, they cannot make sense of what is happening to them. They put on a happy face all day, and return to their apartment and cry all night. Perhaps their beloved has gone off with someone else; perhaps their business has failed; perhaps they have lost interest in their work; perhaps they are coping with a fatal illness; perhaps a loved one has died. Perhaps, and this is worst of all, everything has begun to go wrong for no apparent reason. If they have no concept of rites of passage, they experience themselves as victims, powerless to resist an overwhelming Fate. Their meaningless suffering drives them to escape through food, alcohol, drugs, sex. Or they take up arms against the gods and cry out, "Why me?"

They are being presented with the possibility of rebirth into a different life. Through failures, symptoms, inferiority feelings and overwhelming problems, they are being prodded to renounce life attachments that have become redundant. The possibility of rebirth constellates with the breakdown of what has gone before. That is why Jung emphasized the positive purpose of neurosis. But because they do not understand, people cling to the familiar, refuse to make the necessary sacrifices, resist their own growth. Unable to give up their habitual lives, they are unable to receive new life.

Unless cultural rituals support the leap from one level of consciousness to another, there are no containing walls within which the process can happen. Without an understanding of myth or religion, without an understanding of the relationship between destruction and creation, death and rebirth, the individual suffers the mysteries of life as meaningless mayhem—alone. To ease the meaningless suffering, addictions may develop that are an attempt to repress the confusing demands of the growth process which cultural structures no longer clarify or contain.

The burning question when one enters analysis is "Who am I?" The immediate problem, however, as soon as powerful emotions begin to surface, is often a psyche/soma split. While women tend to talk about their bodies more than men, both sexes in our culture are grievously unrelated to their own body experience. Women say, "I don't like this body"; men say, "It hurts." Their use of the third-person neuter pronoun in referring to their body makes quite clear their sense of alienation. They may talk about "my heart,'' "my kidneys," "my feet," but their body as a whole is depersonalized. Repeatedly they say, "I don't feel anything below the neck. I experience feelings in my head, but nothing in my heart." Their lack of emotional response to a powerful dream image reflects the split. And yet, when they engage in active imagination with that dream image located in their body, their muscles release undulations of repressed grief. The body has become the whipping post. If the person is anxious, the body is starved, gorged, drugged, intoxicated, forced to vomit, driven into exhaustion or driven to frenzied reaction against self-destruction. When this magnificent animal attempts to send up warning signals, it is silenced with pills.

Many people can listen to their cat more intelligently than they can listen to their own despised body. Because they attend to their pet in a cherishing way, it returns their love. Their body, however, may have to let out an earth-shattering scream in order to be heard at all. Before symptoms manifest, quieter screams appear in dreams: a forsaken baby elephant, a starving kitten, a dog with a leg ripped out. Almost always the wounded animal is either gently or fiercely attempting to attract the attention of the dreamer, who may or may not respond. In fairytales it is the friendly animal who often carries the hero or heroine to the goal because the animal is the instinct that knows how to obey the Goddess when reason fails.

It is possible that the scream that comes from the forsaken body, the scream that manifests in a symptom, is the cry of the soul that can find no other way to be heard. If we have lived behind a mask all our lives, sooner or later—if we are lucky—that mask will be smashed. Then we will have to look in our own mirror at our own reality. Perhaps we will be appalled. Perhaps we will look into the terrified eyes of our own tiny child, that child who has never known love and who now beseeches us to respond. This child is alone, forsaken before we left the womb, or at birth, or when we began to please our parents and learned to put on our best performance in order to be accepted. As life progresses, we may continue to abandon our child by pleasing others—teachers, professors, bosses, friends and partners, even analysts. That child who is our very soul cries out from underneath the rubble of our lives, often from the core of our worst complex, begging us to say, "You are not alone. I love you."

We dare not drop the tensions. In order to widen consciousness, we have to hold both arms on the cross. If we reject one part of ourselves, we give up our past; if we reject the other part, we give up our future. We must hold onto our roots and build from there. Those roots often appear as a psychic home sometimes a summer cottage that the dreamer loves, or the country of his origin, or his ancestors' origin. The longing to go Home must certainly be looked at symbolically, for it is often more than a regressive longing for the security of the womb. It can be the one solid root that goes right through one's life, becoming the point of genuine nurturance for spiritual growth.

Whether we like it or not, one of our tasks on this earth is to work with the opposites through different levels of consciousness until body, soul and spirit resonate together. Initiation rites, experienced at the appropriate times in our lives, burn off what is no longer relevant, opening our eyes to new possibilities of our own uniqueness. They tear off the protective veils of illusion until at last we are strong enough to stand in our own naked truth.

The process is mirrored in dreams, often in images of cooking, cars, cupboards and clothes. The Cinderella work is accomplished in the kitchen. Having brought the wild things of nature in, taken off their feathers, cleaned out their entrails, cooked them and made them accessible to consciousness, the ego stands firm. Mother and Father no longer drive the car. The incessant sorting through actual cupboards and drawers has ceased, and the sorting in dreams has reached a finely differentiated level of detail. What clothes to wear is no longer a constant frustration, and the incongruous shoe combinations have at last settled into pairs that are the same color with the same size heel. Or maybe no shoes at all—just good solid feet on good solid ground. Usually the Self allows the ego time to enjoy this period of experiencing its new strength—perhaps months, perhaps years. Each process in unique, moving at its own appointed pace.

The existence and continuity of the ego is essential to our lives. It is necessary that we experience the person who wakes up in the morning as the same person who fell asleep last night, despite the fact that what took place during the hours of sleep may appear so unrelated to the waking state that it never enters consciousness. One way in which the ego maintains its integrity is to remove from itself everything that does not directly offer it support. It simply excludes or suppresses everything which does not coincide with its conscious understanding of itself.

The danger in such a limited view is that the ego may harden and dry up, just as the earth will harden and dry up if it is not continually replenished with water. The ego needs the nourishment of underground springs. It requires the compensatory life of dreams if its continuity is to move beyond mere survival and perpetuation. In addition to these, it requires direction and purpose. As soon as it gives itself up to a higher goal, however, it is threatened, not only by the fear that it may not be able to achieve it, but by a dawning sense that that higher goal, because of the demands it makes, is the enemy of the ego. In some sense, the ego feels that it may be working against itself. Ultimately, of course, it is, but for a better good.

The goal of human striving in the individuation process is the recognition of the Self, the regulating center of the psyche. That recognition relativizes the ego's position in the psychic structure, and initiates a dialogue between conscious and unconscious. "The only way the Self can manifest is through conflict," writes MarieLouise von Franz. "To meet one's insoluble and eternal conflict is to meet God, which would be the end of the ego with all its blather."

If the ego rejects that conflict, then the goal is contaminated by the ego's desire for more and more power, or wealth, or happiness. The result is ego inflation. According to Jung:

An inflated consciousness is always egocentric and conscious of nothing but its own existence. It is incapable of learning from the past, incapable of understanding contemporary events, and incapable of drawing right conclusions about the future. It is hypnotized by itself and therefore cannot be argued with. It inevitably dooms itself to calamities that must strike it dead.

Paradoxically enough, inflation is a regression of consciousness into unconsciousness. This always happens when consciousness takes too many unconscious contents upon itself and loses the faculty of discrimination, the sine qua non of all consciousness.

The inflated ego tends to idolatry. It focuses on a single image, fashions it and worships it. Determined to create that image, it is trapped in profane ritual.

Religiously speaking, all such profane rituals are contained in the worship of the Golden Calf. A fat woman's body image, for example, may be her Golden Calf. No matter how much she thinks she hates it, her rituals are taking place around it. It is this thralldom before her own body image that she may be called upon to sacrifice. The profane worship must be sacrificed to make way for the sacred. The withdrawal from the one operates simultaneously with the entrance into the other. We withdraw as we enter. Withdrawing is entering. Whether we stress the withdrawing or the entering, we are stressing the same thing.

When this process begins, it may be reflected in the dreams by a bell tolling, an alarm sounding or lightning striking. It can also be heralded by physical symptoms. It can be brought on by loss of faith, loss of relationship or the imminence of death. Something almost imperceptible begins to happen. For people watching their dreams, the bell usually tolls some weeks before the actual events occur. In real life we seem to be carrying on as usual, but a very clear inner voice may begin to comment, hinting that things are not as they seem to be. We may find ourselves singing songs that put a very ironic twist on our conscious actions. Our inner clown may be singing, "Put your sweet lips a little closer," to the tune of "Please release me and let me go." If the ego has not sufficient strength and flexibility, it will panic and either regress to its former terrors of annihilation, or regress to its former rigid framework—in either case, refusing to go through the birth canal.

The ego now has to be strong enough to remain concentrated in stillness, so that it can mediate what is happening both positively and negatively. It must hold a detached position, relying now on its differentiated femininity in order to submit, now on its discriminating masculinity in order to question and cut away. Something immense begins to happen in the very foundation of the personality, while consciousness experiences the conflict as crucifixion. Ego desires are no longer relevant. The old questions no longer have any meaning, and there are no answers. There may be a few stricken "why's," but they belong to the order of logic and discipline, and what is taking place is irrational, beyond ego control. The ego on some level knows. It knows that what is happening has to happen. It knows that its personal desires have to be sacrificed to the transpersonal. It knows it is confronting death.

It is a period of throbbing pain. It is King Lear howling on the heath, brought to submission and reunited with the daughter whose truth was her dowry. At last, he says,

Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia,

The Gods themselves throw incense.

It is Job covered with boils, moving from "Do not condemn me; shew me wherefore thou contendest with me" to "I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee."

It is Jesus in Gethsemane, sweating blood, moving from "Let this cup pass from me" to "Thy will be done."

A woman during such a period of withdrawal and entry had the following vision:

I was walking by the St. Lawrence one sunny, summer day. I thought I was going Home. Instantly the sky darkened; the earth grew cold. I could not see with my eyes, nor hear with my ears. I was seeing inside, hearing inside. Then I realized I was on ice, floating, suddenly not floating, but being thrust by the power of the current. The ice began to crack. I leaped from one floe to another, the ice cracking in front, behind, beside. I thought I might die in the ice-cold water, or be ground by the grating blocks. And all the time I knew I was being propelled toward the ocean. I just kept jumping and screaming, "Please, God, don't kill me. Not yet. Not this time."

At times like this, Rilke's words can be very reassuring:

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and... try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

These situations, whether in analysis or in life, or both, can raise profound religious questions. Is this God confronting me? Was I on the wrong track? Am I being forcibly turned around? Is there some almighty plan that is different from mine? Am I being forced to submit? Should I accept Fate? Do I, in fact, have any free will? Is this God burning away the veils of illusion, or am I facing the devil? Is he making one last stand to cheat me out of my own life?

Psychologically, the questions are equally blistering. Is this the Self demanding a sacrifice? Or is this the real face of the complex that has crippled me all my life? Just when I thought I could be free, there it is to destroy me. Everything I have fought so hard to bring to consciousness is now in question. Why do I suddenly wake up every night at the same time? Why do I feel this searing pain? Why are my hands so weak? Am I really alone? I'm worse off now than I ever was. I'm back in the old pattern. I'm back in the matrix—back in the Garden recognizing the place for the first time. Is this who I really am? Is this who I have been running away from all my life?

Psychologically, the ego, like Lear, Job and Jesus, is penetrating and being penetrated by the archetypal Ground of Being in an effort to bring to consciousness whatever it can of that vast unknown. It experiences another law operating from within, a dawning realization that it has a destiny of its own which must be obeyed. It knows that something new is being born; it has to breathe into the pain and let it be.

Many people in our culture are attempting to suffer these transformations alone, without any ritual container and without any group to support the influx of transcendent power. Like Eliot's Magi, they experience the birth as "hard and bitter agony . . . like Death, our death." They are "no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,/With an alien people clutching their gods."

Without the container and without the group, the aloneness is almost intolerable. The individual ego has to be strong enough to build its own chrysalis in order to create a loving communication with its own inner symbols. Their numinosity brings the confidence and integrity, humor and illumination without which the ego could not survive, let alone expand. A childish ego, primitive and unconscious, cannot maintain a living chrysalis; it wants to project everything, and, tuned to a natural order, it explains what happens by magic. The chrysalis becomes too precious in itself, shellacked with sentimentality. A childlike ego can hold the tension, pull in the projections and ponder the inner mystery. At the transpersonal level, the symbols are simultaneously individual and universal. At that level, none of us is alone. New relationships, bypassing the world of transitory disguise, begin at that depth, and from there relate back to the world in a totally new way.

Hours before he died, Thomas Merton, author of The Seven Storey Mountain, gave a lecture which concluded with a plea for openness to the "painfulness of inner change":

What is essential... is not embedded in buildings, is not embedded in clothing, is not necessarily embedded even in a rule. It is somewhere along the line of something deeper than a rule. It is concerned with this business of total inner transformation.

According to his own account, Merton completed his inner transformation on his Asian journey standing barefoot in the presence of the giant Buddhas of Polonnaruwa in Ceylon. "I know and have seen what I was obscurely looking for," he wrote. "I don't know what else remains but I have now seen and have pierced through the surface and have got beyond the shadow and the disguise."

When Merton asked a Buddhist abbot, "What is the 'knowledge of freedom'?" the abbot replied, "One must ascend all the steps, but then when there are no more steps one must make the leap. Knowledge of freedom is the knowledge, the experience, of this leap."

Voices from the Chrysalis

It's hard for me to trust life. I like to take hold of it, grab it by the neck and put my teeth into it, just to be sure it doesn't get away on me.

I try to see how far I've come, rather than how far I have to go.

Now that I'm contacting my own inner clock, I am so slow. My life is on top of me. The collision of values overwhelms me. Am I wasting my time? I don't know.... I don't know.... this terrible aloneness.

I've always identified with what I'm not. But who am I? My guilt and shame and fear are making me human.

I was always waiting until all the responsibilities were completed, then there would be time for me. How? I never thought about that. I've been so busy doing, I've missed something very important to me. I don't think I was ever a child. I have no recollection at all of being a very young child with any sense of being ME.

I wonder if it takes a holocaust, outer or inner, to help us to realize what is really essential in life.

I lived a smileandgrin, smileandgrin existence. I was dying.

I rage for life. I want so much to be free.

I'm trying to have faith—faith that I will be born.

I'm so off balance. I pray for daily guidance to avoid tripping over things. I can go to sleep when I orient myself to the stars.

The spirit is in the volcano inside. My relationships aren't very good right now, so I go back to work. I'm safe there. But even that isn't perfect.

I'll explode if I have to react to one more thing. I'm pulling back. I'm overwhelmed by the pressures of the outside world and the mounting pressures of the interior world are making me feel actually sick.

Used to feel capable, used to speak and write well. Now I never feel secure because I can't find words.

Am I fighting my destiny or does my destiny require I take a stand?

When I touch into that essence and recognize myself as what I've been running away from, I am humbled.

I'm Miss Compassion, Miss Humanity. I'm a missing piece. I'm also a child of God.

To get rid of one's past one has to forgive—confront and forgive—and move into the present. Forgive oneself too, and God.

I hated my father. I imitated hated myself.

--Marion Woodman en "The pregnant virgin"

#emily dickinson #william blake #carl jung #freud #psychology #archetype #the pregnant virgin #marion woodman #Marie-Louise von Franz #rainer maria rilke #lear #Job #jesus christ #T.S. Eliot #journey of the magi #thomas merton #the seven storey mountain

7 notes · View notes