#they keep the painting of their esteemed founder harlan leverage iii obviously.

[words-writ-in-starlight]

I just saw your one leverage headcanons post (with the pub bets and such) and you mention Leverage Mark II which is A+++, do you have a specific tag for these headcanons, or is this stuff posted elsewhere, I need it injected into my blood

HA okay it’s funny you ask this because somehow despite that post’s popularity I have never posted, written, or otherwise publicized any further thoughts.  I do, however, have a bunch of stuff that I copy-pasted out of Skype literally years ago in the event that I ever had the excuse to say more, so here’s some broad stroke stuff:

Olivia Sterling, to her father’s eternally mixed feelings, is the heir to the mastermind throne.  She’s not the oldest of the second generation, but she is the only one who finished college (two years early and at her father’s behest), and she keeps up her reputation as a force to be reckoned with in the chess world.  She doesn’t compete regularly anymore, but sometimes when she needs to unwind she enters competitions and wipes the floor with some people and then vanishes into the ether again.

Josie, the elder sister of the gang and still the thief, is two years older than Olivia and cruising for a stress ulcer with how much she worries about all her friends.  She worked the landscaping gig through high school but couldn’t afford college, so she’s been bouncing between increasingly excellent thief jobs (hey listen it pays, and she vets the people who hire her exhaustively) and food service ever since.  She still has an extremely complete knowledge of cars and plant life, plus a lot of other miscellaneous junk because she likes to read.  She’s the “It’s a very distinctive [thing]” person in the second generation.  She’s also somehow the most normal functional person of the group, which confuses and upsets her.

Matt used to be Molly, he’s their hitter, and he’s trans because I vibe with an angry trans kid getting to punch people.  Eliot has been Matt’s idol since the whole kidnapping-at-a-carnival debacle, and so he’s been taking five-times-a-week martial arts classes anywhere that will take him.  After his father got sucked into another black market scheme and Matt went into the foster system, his social worker said it was at least keeping him out of trouble.  Matt finds this statement extremely funny, in retrospect.

Mark Fowler, previously Widmark but he learned to punch people specifically for calling him that, is the grifter.  His mom moved him to New York City after the whole mess with his stepdad, and he--gently conned her into putting him into public school where he could blend and not be noticed.  After Matt got bounced to another group home, he wound up in Mark’s school at the start of senior year, and they accidentally bonded over mutual stories of how “one time some crazy shit happened to me”, which turned into comparing notes on the Leverage team once they realized they were the same people.  They’ve been tight ever since.

Trevor was already good with computers when he accidentally sat in on the Great Potato Heist, but afterward he went out and got extremely good with them.  His parents are well off and hands off in equal measure, so he has a lot of time to kill and he is, in case you’re curious, completely fine about that and has no idea why you would think anything else.  He’s kind of a thrill-seeker, so when he stumbles across a call for help very obviously intended to reach Leverage or anyone else who can find them, he’s very game to give it his best.

Luka got adopted by his foster parents and actually things went great for a while!  They did well for themselves and came into some money, and Luka got some therapy, and then his parents adopted another kid.  Luka absolutely loves his little sister, he thinks she’s great, so--you can understand why he panics a little after she’s kidnapped and his parents get a ransom note.  He’s a little shocked when someone not Hardison answers his plea for help, even more shocked that it’s two someones, a teenager in high school offering to try and find the team for him, and--

Well.  Olivia is twenty years old and she’s been in that kid’s shoes and she’s not having it.

Getting the others together is half an accident--Trevor and Olivia get in touch with a whole host of people, looking to find any ex-clients who still have current contact information for Leverage International.  But hey, what do you know, three of these people are right here in their neighborhood, the greater New York area, and--and they want to help.

It’s kind of a mess, that first time, nothing like the mechanical precision of the real Leverage, but the real deal is in Cuba on a job (Olivia stole her father’s access codes to get this information, finally), but also...it works.  Josie hands the kid back to Luka’s sobbing parents, and Luka hugs Olivia, who bears it with stony good grace but looks visibly relieved when he lets go, and then--

Well, then Leverage gets back from their job, lightly sunburned on Parker’s part and complaining steadily about sand on Hardison’s, and Eliot gets a neutral-stressed call from a contact asking who the hell the toddlers namedropping them last week were.

Eliot “Real World Skills Matter” Spencer puts his foot down hard when Trevor, Matt, and Mark all offer to drop out of high school for training, but they do get to learn stuff like safecracking on weekends when Leverage is on the East Coast and Josie has only broken into Sterling’s apartment and stolen his expensive wine once.  He had a moment of panic when he came in to find a twenty-something woman sitting on his floor with a bottle of chardonnay and a doleful expression, and he did seriously consider arresting her for being a terrible influence on his daughter (he is aware of Olivia’s activities thankyouverymuch and he does not want to talk about it), but then she gestured vaguely with the bottle and said “I just worry about them so much, what if Trevor fails his driving test.”

At which point Sterling decided that, actually, no, this is not his problem, and he told her that as long as she replaced the wine they could pretend this never happened.  She beat him at poker and mailed him a bottle of wine and, as promised, they have not spoken since.  It was one of the weirder nights of his life and he’s had some weird ones.  Josie collected handsomely on the bet that she couldn’t get in and out without getting caught and arrested, on the technicality that she was only caught, and managed to lie her way out.  Sophie is.  So proud.