#characterappreciationweek
Sophie Devereaux is both the easiest and most difficult Leverage character for me to write.
Sophie the actress is easy to write. We see a lot of her in the show. This is the Grifter, the actress, the face Sophie chooses to show. As long as I am writing from someone else’s perspective she is not difficult, I can write what people see, I can write what she lets them see. And even from her perspective is not so difficult if the spotlight is on someone else.
But writing her, the real her, is another story. I don’t know where to start with the real Sophie, because even her name is an act. And that is part of her charm, the mystery.
I think that may be why I have very few head canons about her life, compared to all the other characters. Because while for most characters it is what we know that is most intriguing, even when we know very little, with Sophie it is the other way. It is what we don’t know that makes her so interesting.
This is a crossover scene, two scenes technically, that I wrote a while back, between watching Leverage and The Librarian movies and watching The Librarians show, and polished up for Character Appreciation Week. It is not canon compatible for… reasons. If you’ve seen The Librarians you know why. If not I won’t spoil it. (And if you like Eliot enough to be reading fanfiction about him, you should definitely go watch The Librarians, if only for Jake Stone.) Basically it’s anEliot appreciation piece because… actually I think “because he is Eliot” pretty much covers it. There are vague spoilers for both stories here, but nothing overly specific.
(When the rest of the team is in danger, Eliot needs to use Excalibur to save them.)
Eliot stared at the sword lodged in the stone for a long moment. He was the only one of the team that hadn’t tried, and failed, to pull it out earlier.
“The way I see it,” he said finally “you have a personality, at least with Flynn, so I think you got at least some say in who uses you. It didn’t matter before because only the worthy can wield you. I’m sittin’ here bearin’ my soul to a sword so it’s possible I’m crazier than Parker, but I’m not that crazy. I’m not under the delusion that I’m worthy. But the people I’m goin’ to save are. They’re the worthiest part of me and I need… I need your help gettin’ ‘em back. So please,help me save them, just this once.”
He reached out hesitantly and the sword sprung a few inches into his hand of its own volition.
(Later. Team rescued, disaster averted, ancient mummy re-killed, day saved. So probably quite a bit later.)
As soon as they were back in the library, Eliot removed Excalibur from its scabbard and returned it reverently to the stone. He laid it flat and the sword whipped into the air and landed point don, imbedded in the rock.
“You used Cal?!” Flynn asked, sounding impressed. It took a lot to impress someone who retrieved the Spear of Destiny his first week on the job, and has been doing the job for over a decade.
“One time deal,” he said. He could have sworn he heard Parker snort with laughter, but that was Parker, she sometimes laughed at strange things. “It’s not like I can pull the sword from the stone,” he elaborated. “He just agreed to help me save them.” He nodded over his shoulder at Parker, investigating the real Mona Lisa and seamed suspiciously fixated on its frame, and Hardison, who had already put on the jetpack and glanced sheepishly over at Eliot and Flynn when he realized he had been caught.
“Well, don’t stop on my account,” Flynn said to Hardison. He then spun on his heels to speak to Parker. “You, please do stop on my account. That painting is not to be stolen. Well, technically I suppose it’s already been stolen. I’m sure your thiefly skills are to the task, but are you up to the task of not having your life sapped by its hypnotic gaze?”
“You really don’t get it,” Charlene said. “Sometimes Excalibur fights for other people. You should have seen him when the Spider Triad tried to kidnap Flynn. But no matter how important the job, and we’ve had some doozies, he only lets people he considers worthy actually wield him.”
“Apparently that includes you,” Flynn confirmed.
“That’s… I’m sure there’s a mistake,” Eliot insisted.
“See,” Parker said. She had abandoned her investigation into the real Mona Lisa and bounced over to his side. “I keep telling you we aren’t the only ones who like you.”
“But… you couldn’t draw the sword,” Eliot said. “Neither could Hardison.” Hardison hovered over on the jetpack. Flynn stared at him in amazement.
“Oh that,” Parker said dismissively. “I was gonna steal it. I was gonna give it back,” she added quickly. “One of the good guys now and all. But imagine the bragging rights for the thief who managed to steal the sword from thestone. Unfortunately Excalibur has a pretty unbeatable security system.” She sighed and looked a tiny bit pouty.
“I kinda tried to hack the system,” Hardison admitted. “There’s a pair of Arthur’s gloves a few rows over. I thought I could trick the sword into thinking I was him, like a magic fingerprint scanner. I mean, its Excalibur. That’s like the Holy Grail for anybody who grew up on Monty Python and the… Holy…” he trailed off with an unabashed grin. “That analogy got away from me.”
“That analogy was never yours to begin with,” Eliot pointed out.
“You know what man, you know what I mean,” Hardison insisted. “I mean, it’s freakin’ Excalibur. How was I supposed to resist at least tryin to hack the system? How’d you do it? Get it to like you or whatever?”
“I didn’t. I’m not. I just asked it… him… for help. Felt like a damn fool talkin’ to a sword but apparently I convince him that the mission was more important than whether or not I was worthy.”
Parker looked between the sword and Eliot, cocking her head to one side in thought. “That’s why you’re worthy,” she said. “Because it wasn’t about you. It was about saving people. And not just this time. In general. And that is what the sword likes.”
“I’m no King Arthur,” Eliot said.
“King Arthur, or Arturus as the name is often rendered in Latin,” Flynn said, “there is a lot of fascinating debate over that actually, the name commonly rendered Arthur may derive from either a Roman or a Welsh name. According to the eighteen eighty-two version of the Historia Brittonum…” he must have noticed their eyes glazing over because he reigned in some of the heavy flights of academia, “anyway, he took over much of Britain at the direction of a magician and a sword. He also tried to have his wife burned at the stake for adultery, which was a huge double standard was given that he had a kid with his half-sister. All of which is to say, it’s probably for the best that you aren’t King Arthur, because most of us probably wouldn’t be very happy with him if he were to suddenly turn up.”
“The man’s got a point,” Hardison said.
“I thought King Arthur brought peace to England,” Parker said.
“He did,” Eliot said. “But that is just a ‘winner writes the history’ way of sayin’ he swept through killin’ people until everybody left decided it was better to go along with what he said.” He frowned, considering whether perhaps he had more in common with King Arthur than he had at first thought, and not liking the idea one bit.
“The sword must judge by some other criteria then,” Hardison said. “I mean, technically we did sort of help take over that country that time, but not all of us are worthy, and I don’t think Flynn has taken over any countries. Have you?”
“I’vestoppeda few people from taking over countries, but I have never actually taken one over myself. You have?” Flynn asked.
“We didn’t take it over, we stole it. And gave it back,” Eliot said. “That’s kinda what we do.”
“You’re trying to distract us,” Parker said, poking Eliot in the shoulder. “Because you don’t think the sword will accept you, but you know we aren’t going to let it drop until you try again.”
“You aren’t?” Eliot asked. He thought for sure he had gotten them off on enough of a different track for them to let it go. He knew he wasn’t worthy of the sword. He didn’t need or want proof of it.
“No. We aren’t.” She took one arm and half dragged Eliot back over to the stone. Hardison followed along in the jetpack and Flynn trailed on foot.
“Don’t you want to know?” Flynn asked, in a tone that suggested that anyone not wanting to know, about anything, was entire incomprehensible.
Eliot sighed. “Fine. All of the rest of you tried,” he pointed out. “If it’ll get y’all off my back.”
He reached out and seized the sword’s hilt and drew it smoothly from the stone. He almost dropped it in surprise.
In honor of Character Appreciation Week, (because all my original posts are Leverage related,) I have finally organize my pages so I have a place for all my metas and all my fics in convenient places.
Hardison and Parker don’t get married. Well, not in the usual sense of the word. Like everything they do, it is slightly illegal and highly unusual.
Hardison asked. He took her night repelling at the Eiffel Tower and popped the question (with a stolen ring of course, because he pays attention.) She said yes while trying to untangle Hardison from his ropes.
Parker had already watched Sophie planning her wedding and decided that it was like Sophie’s obsession with shoes; fine for other people but not something she could understand or wanted to do herself. Uninterested in planning a wedding of her own, Parker stole one. Well, technically it wasn’t a wedding. She stole a marriage license from a mark. From Hardison’s research before the job she knew the mark was getting a divorce anyway, so she figured he didn’t need it anyway.
She handed Hardison the data she retrieved from the office.
“You know how you asked me to marry you? Well, I got us a marriage license. That makes us married, right?” She handed him the license and he choked on his orange soda.
Hardison had Parker call Nate and Sophie. He was glad, if a little disoriented, to be so suddenly married but he definitely didn’t want to be the one to break it to Sophie that she wouldn't be able to help plan the wedding. He also hacked the county records to make it, well, legal wasn’t exactly the right word, but semi-official at least.
Nate and Sophie flew in for a very impromptu reception which consisted of just the five of them and a cake Eliot made.
From that point on they were married. Sure, it wasn’t technically legally binding, but neither of them held to the letter of the law anyway so that didn’t matter. And sure, their marriage license didn’t have their names on it, but neither did their driver’s licenses so neither of them were inclined to quibble over that particular detail.
For their honeymoon they planned and carried out a heist to steal themselves wedding rings.
Hardison didn’t come up with his catchphrase. He heard it, liked it, and claimed it.
He was not the most popular kid in school. He was a very much a geek, arguably over the line into being a nerd, well-liked by his teachers and not many others. He made up for that somewhat with his naturally friendly temperament, but even so he wasn’t most of the students’ favorite.
The other geeks were nice enough most of the time but he didn’t fit the image of what a geeky high school kid should look like. He was black and in the minds of most of his very white fellow geeks that automatically made him a jock at best and a gangbanger at worst. He wore backwards baseball caps with Star Wars t-shirts. It didn’t match their image. And on top of that he was smarter than most of them, so they were a bit jealous too. The jocks didn’t want him because they could tell right away that he was a geek to his very core. Even so, he almost never got straight up picked on because he was tall and strong and nobody wanted to test whether he was a total nerd or not.
He didn’t go to his first prom. He didn’t have anyone to go with anyway, and told himself it was really because Nana couldn’t really afford a tux rental. He could always hack in somewhere, get himself on a prepaid list, but there the whole idea circled back around to not having a date.
“What you doin’ hidin’ out up here instead of goin’ to your prom?” Nana asked.
He shrugged, glancing up briefly, then back down at his computer screen.
“I know that shrug young man. Don’t you gi’me that shrug. If you don’t want to talk about it tha’s ok, but you can use your words to say so.”
“Stacy’s goin’ with the quarterback,” he said, just catching himself in time to keep from giving another shrug. Nana notices and smiled.
“You’ll get the last laugh and no mistake.”
“How?” Hardison asked a little petulantly. “He’s team captain. He’s got the girl.”
“And he’s got maybe a one in a million shot at any of that mattering for the rest of his life. What you’re good at don’t go ‘way after school. Don’t you know it’s the age of the geek?” Nana asked. “Well it is and don’t you forget it.
The next year he also didn’t go to prom but that time it didn’t bother him at all. He was busy hacking the Bank of Iceland. Age of the geek indeed.
My headcanon is that Hardison has a pretty solid idea what the worst thing Eliot did was because he was curious (remember, this is a guy who canonically cracked the Pentagon servers at twelve and hacked the White House emails because he was bored between S1 and S2,) and poked around the internet and less legal channels to get an idea for what Damien Moreau was up to at that time and worked from there. It doesn’t change anything as far as he is concerned. The only reason he doesn’t say that to Eliot is because he figures Eliot would probably not be thrilled that he was hacking into Eliot’s past behind his back.
There is one emergency contact that Olivia Sterling is never supposed to call. He is the backup to the backups. He is only to be called if she can’t get ahold of her father or any of his friends or associates from INTERPOL. Or if the nine-one-one system has entirely collapsed. Her father wanted to make sure that she had someone unconnected to him just in case. However, she is never supposed to actually call Nate Ford.
And she doesn’t, not for a long time.But she wants a rematch for their botched chess game too badly to hold off forever.
I have a lot of feelings about this quote. But beyond all the obvious ones about the whole his father would be proud of him for murder thing, which is a serious but obvious issue, the bit about the ice cream says a lot about Nate’s relationship to his father.
Now, I’m not sure how it goes in other families, but in mine, ice cream stopped being a standard way for my parents to show they were proud of me long before I was an adult living on my own. That’s just not something that comes to mind for parents wishing to express pride in their grown up kid. Ice cream is something used to reward young children. And that is exactly why its mention here is so interesting.
It could indicate a kind of child-like lost feeling in Nate at that point. The line is meant to draw a link to his childhood because of how he feels at having lost his last remaining parent. And we don’t know when his mother died, but if it was when he was young, and I tend to think it was, then this could draw a link to how Nate felt at that point.
It could also imply that, true or not, the last time Nate actually felt like his father was proud of him was when he was young enough that ice cream would have been usual reward. Given their interaction in The Three Card Monte Job, I think this may be accurate. So to Nate, ice cream is synonymous with parental approval, even though at that point Jimmy Ford would have been more likely to buy Nate whiskey than ice cream.
#see this meta is surreal to me because i never received anything for parental approval ever#i mean like. for a specific act/event#but this sounds like a reasonable meta conclusion#and like. knowing what we know of jimmy ford from Three Card Monte#i feel like nate ford at ice-cream-age wouldn’t be getting much parental approval#because that’s the age that’s between#‘he’s a baby so i wont be hard on him’#and a point where you’re actually old enough to do what your demanding parent asks of you#esp b/c nate’s dad treated kid!nate as someone who should be cunning in a way little kids can’t usually do#so there’d be more of 'u are terrible if u cannot see through my card trick’ than ice cream#parents like that (in my experience) treat kids 7-12 like they have the physical/mental skills of young teens#so maybe the ice cream is tied to a particular remembered event?#given the circumstances. likely kid nate getting into a fight#i just. have feelings all over the place#that flashback scene reminds me more of my father than anything i’ve ever seen#so if u want an estimation of jimmy ford as a parent u can ask me (tags via @darkmetiknight)
That makes a lot of sense. I like the idea of ice cream as a show of approval tied to a particular event because it fits even better with the flashbacks to Nate’s childhood in The Three Card Monte Job, and getting into a fight makes a lot of sense for that event. It even ties in further to the line from The Last Dam Job because it ties Jimmy Ford’s approval to Nate committing violence. So Nate here is not guessing that his father would buy him ice cream for committing violence; he is recalling a specific time this happened.
There are two different ways people view Mastermind!Parker.
Some people, and these are usually the marks who don’t know Thief!Parker by reputation, think she is too fill-in-the-blank to be any threat (too young, too pretty, too crazy…) They learn better when their business blows up in their faces. Occasionally literally; after all, this is “Everything Blows Up, Silly” Parker making the calls now.
And then there are the people who are terrified. Even under Nate this was considered the nastiest crew this side of the Atlantic. And that was under an honest man. (People in the business don’t understand Nate very well so they don’t understand that he was the most ruthless of the lot.) They are terrified to find out what the crew has become under the control of the crazy thief.
It turns out both groups are wrong. Parker isn’t too any of those things to make a good mastermind. She always does things young, like being a getaway driver, but she is always good at it. And maybe she is a little crazy, but that helps when masterminding. As for ruthlessness, she isn’t nearly as ruthless as Nate. In fact, just the opposite. She is far more likely to see the potential for something better, even in her marks, far more likely to give second chances because she is living her second chance. She goes out of her way to help the random people who are in trouble, not just her client. And she isn’t willing to place her team in as much risk as Nate was because winning isn’t everything to her, family is.
A series of scenes from the Nate’s life, as seen by Sophie. Written for Mastermind Monday in Character Appreciation Week on Tumblr because no is better at appreciating Nate than Sophie.
The first time Sophie Devereaux met Nathan Ford she shot him in the shoulder and he shot her in the back. Even for an experienced Grifter, this was an inauspicious beginning.
The next time he didn’t mention it. Admittedly it had been two years but still she found absolutely infuriating. The man had bloody shot her. True, she shot him too, but a gentleman should at least apologize.
“Fancy running into you here,” Nate said with a smile, stepping up beside her.
“Oh, it’s you.” she said, perhaps not as icily as it should have been when greeting someone who shot her. “Sophie Deveraux, art aficionado.”
“Nathan Ford, art insurance investigator. I’m sure it’s a coincidence, you being here, three days before the auction.”
“There’s an art auction coming up?” She didn’t bother putting any effort whatsoever in her denial.
“Like I said, I’m sure it’s a coincidence and you will be taking the next flight out of town.”
“You really aren’t going to address the gunfire from last time?” she asked.
“I wasn’t planning on it. You shot me. I shot you. The way I see it that’s fair and we’re all squared up on that account.”
It was one of the things she liked earliest about him, that sense of fair play. It wasn’t the same thing as playing by the rules, not exactly. It wasn’t the same thing as a moral compass even, not exactly. And it wasn’t anything near the same thing as being nice. Sometimes fair play meant pulling the trigger. Sometimes it meant stealing as far as Sophie was concerned.
That was the moment she decided he had it in him to be an amazing criminal. Because right now, the world had always dealt fairly with him and he responded in kind. But heaven help anyone who decided to screw over Nathan Ford.
For a little while she avoided stealing anything insured by IYS. Nate was just too good at his job. It was just too big of a risk, especially since he knew her. Then there was a piece of art that was just too big of a temptation and she decided to ignore her rule. It was more of a challenge with Nate hunting her at every turn, but she was surprised to find that she didn’t mind. She had never had someone that interested in finding her before. Sure, there were sometimes people looking for her characters, but Nate wanted to find the real her, the art thief. Soon she found herself stealing IYS insured items more often, to make sure he was following her.
It was almost a year of this cat and mouse game, and it was definitely a game, and one they were both starting to enjoy, before he learned about her acting.
“You can’t prove any of this,” she said defiantly when he caught up to her trying to steal van Gogh’s Starry Night Over the Rhone.
“You’ve never mentioned proof before,” Nate pointed out. “What changed?”
“You noticed.” She smiled. If he hadn’t noticed, she wouldn’t have said anything else. “I’m an actress,” she admitted. “When I’m not… you know,” she waved a hand at the art around them. “I play Lady Macduff in three hours and don’t want you to show up with the cops.”
“Oh,” he said. “You don’t want me to show up with the cops? Or you don’t want me to show up?”
She smiled at him. “You’re a smart man.” She leaned in closer to him. “Figure it out.”
Someone slid a postcard under the door to her dressing room after the show. The front showed van Gogh’s Starry Night. They don’t tend to make postcards of Starry Night Over the Rhone. The back of the postcard simply read “To the brightest star on the stage.” She never told him that she kept that card for a long time. Years later, when she had to leave in a hurry and couldn’t go back for her things, it was the only thing she really minded losing, the only thing she couldn’t replace.
She loved Carnevale. She always was more comfortable wearing a mask. It did not surprise her that Nate showed up to stop her wearing his ordinary suit and no mask. She objected on principle. He really was failing to get into the spirit of the thing but it hardly surprised her. An honest man didn’t need a mask.
Sophie changed masks eight times that night, trying to stay ahead of Nate, but he managed to spot her through each change. She didn’t know whether it was her voice, her walk, something else. It was infuriating… and flattering, that he could so easily pick her out of a crowd.
She heard what happened to Sam. Of course she did. Most of the people in the business heard. She left a job half done to go to the funeral. It was the only time she abandoned a job when she was at no risk of getting caught. She claimed to work with Nate, only half a lie really.
She pulled a lot of cons to steal IYS insured items after that. There were a couple of reasons. Partly because they were easier marks now that Nate was out of the game, and partly as her own quiet revenge for her… whatever Nate was to her. She had never contented herself with one identity, she certainly wasn’t going to stop at one motive.
But the game lost some of its charm knowing he wouldn’t be there, following after her. She hadn’t realized just how much she enjoyed knowing he would be there until he wasn’t. That’s why, by the time her went to get her help with Dubenich, she was mostly an honest citizen. And maybe it was no coincidence that she settled in his town, where he could find her if he ever decided to look.
And when he came to her for help, there was never any question of whether or not to do it. It would be nice to be on the same side. Black king or white knight, it didn’t matter to Sophie; she looked forward to playing the queen.
I have a lot of feelings about this quote. But beyond all the obvious ones about the whole his father would be proud of him for murder thing, which is a serious but obvious issue, the bit about the ice cream says a lot about Nate’s relationship to his father.
Now, I’m not sure how it goes in other families, but in mine, ice cream stopped being a standard way for my parents to show they were proud of me long before I was an adult living on my own. That’s just not something that comes to mind for parents wishing to express pride in their grown up kid. Ice cream is something used to reward young children. And that is exactly why its mention here is so interesting.
It could indicate a kind of child-like lost feeling in Nate at that point. The line is meant to draw a link to his childhood because of how he feels at having lost his last remaining parent. And we don’t know when his mother died, but if it was when he was young, and I tend to think it was, then this could draw a link to how Nate felt at that point.
It could also imply that, true or not, the last time Nate actually felt like his father was proud of him was when he was young enough that ice cream would have been usual reward. Given their interaction in The Three Card Monte Job, I think this may be accurate. So to Nate, ice cream is synonymous with parental approval, even though at that point Jimmy Ford would have been more likely to buy Nate whiskey than ice cream.
