“In the script, it started out she had a falcon and it would be on her arm or on its perch. Then we were able to find— we couldn’t afford a falcon, we were able to find a local owl. But then we would have to pay it like, days and days of training. So it ended up being a turtle in a fishbowl.” - Chris Downey, The Blue Line Job DVD Commentary
someone help I want to make a series out of the goons that blog about the leverage ot3 on the dark web but I can’t find all the posts I made goon headcanons in the tags
I have come to the decision that I need to read more Leverage fics where Eliot goes on a rampage and just absolutely obliterates a bunch of people for taking/hurting Parker or Hardison. This could mean him slipping back into Murder Eliot mode, ruthless and calculating and efficient no one who gets in his way is left alive or this could mean him going off script; Nate, Sophie and Parker or hardison (whoever wasn’t taken ofc) try to make a plan and figure it out but when they finally look up to ask Eliot his input he’s just fuckin gone, and they’re all like shit fuck Eliot’s about to kill people, but Eliot only knocks everybody out and comes back in later with whoever was taken/hurt cradled in his arms and he’s just whispering reassurances and comfort to them and maybe he’s injured bc he couldn’t care less about being hurt he just had to get them back and eventually he’ll tend to himself but right now parker/hardison is the priority and besides, he’s always had worse and is well equipped to handle a “little” pain (depending on how much you like whump) and just aidbsbsndjxj
Lots of protective!Eliot and ot3 vibes
Anyway hit me up with links if ya know anything like that pls or maybe I should write smth like this myself
i will never get over how parker & hardisons venn diagram when it comes to thieving has safe-cracking right in the center and then eliot is their little safe that they break together
You kids stop fighting or we will turn this van around
My favorite thing about this is that everyone Knows™️ what Eliot is capable of, but they tease him anyway because they know it’s safe for them to do so. They know that not only will Eliot never hurt them, but they can safely test that in a way that shows how deeply they trust him to never cause them harm.
It’s like… how do I say this. They poke him with a stick to show him that they know he won’t bite, he isn’t violence incarnate. He’s family, and family gets on each other’s nerves and they tease each other, and they’re showing him he’s family.
Parker first, because she’s the one who runs into danger with glee. Eliot snitchesinformsthe team dad Nate about it, expecting him to reprimand her. Instead, Nate also pokes Eliot. On the surface, it says “you’re our trusted teammate, we get have fun with you.” But on a deeper level, it says “She’s right, you’re not dangerous to us. We trust you, and you’re family.”
Nate and Parker are always very in sinc when it comes to pushing people the right way (it’s The Mastermind in them), and their love language is pushing people in a way that brings them closer, in a way that reveals how close they’ve already gotten.
Because there’s only a handful of people Eliot will let touch his bruises, his most tender spots, and walk away with their hands intact. And those people are all in the room with him.
My other favorite thing about this is how childish it is. They’re like kids in kindergarten, with Parker being a little shit and Eliot telling on her to the teacher Nate. These two, the ones with the darkest pasts and most unspeakable traumas in the crew.
Where else could they have acted like this? We’ve seen Eliot with the men he considers his friends: with them it’s all macho posturing, war stories, serious professionalism, or some combination of all three. He hasn’t been a kid in a long, long time, in a way that’s measured by more than just years.
And Parker, as far as we know, never had anyone for very long. She lost her brother young, was betrayed by those kids who taught her to steal cars, and she was moved around too much in the foster care system to make lasting friends. She would not have been like this with Archie. She even called him “sir.” There was love in that relationship, but not much room for playfulness.
The way that they are with each other, the way that they are with this team, is indescribably precious. When they poke and prod at each other, when they tease Hardison, when all three of them get so deep into fun but impractical plans like the Batcave that Nate and Sophie have to step in, they’re getting a little bit of their childhood back. They’re losing a little bit of the weight they carry. And I’m glad we get to see it.
I can’t believe Eliot was married for over nine years and didn’t notice.
Anyone want to elaborate on that?? Orr??
Eliot Spencer is the king of denial.
He has spent the last eight years after the end of Leverage with Parker and Hardison, have gone on to run a brewpub (that Hardison bought for him), they have a “gigantic house that they all share” (per John Rogers), the food trucks are basically Eliot AND Hardison’s combined babies, is ridiculously domestic with both Hardison and Parker in every scene the share together (the OT3 as well as Hardison + Eliot / Parker + Eliot), is quite hesitant to pursue a relationship (The Double Edged Sword Job) and only “seems happy” (Eliot’s description of Parker’s assessment) (The Hurricane Job) when he is in that other relationship.
Dude is fucking MARRIED in everything but name to Hardison and Parker and does not realize it.
Rewatching the pilot and watching how, when he sees how much that score made him, Eliot’s tucking his head and just staring at that number and laughing - not throw his head back, but like the kind where you’re almost fighting it but not quite not really, tight but wide grin that’s not really open but still splits your face and makes your cheeks hurt, and almost manic about it, and thinking bout someone kiss this man so I don’t have to, and like
I know metatextually they hadn’t even STARTED working on that plot yet but like
Knowing what we know later, i can’t help but think back to that moment and Eliot staring at that number and thinking holy shit. this is it. this is as free as I’m gonna get.
Because shit was getting tight, as a freelance retrieval specialist I think. Eliot’s name was… starting to collect black marks. Failures.
He couldn’t retrieve the monkey. He couldn’t retrieve the dagger of Aku Abi. The community talks. Who knows what else had gone wrong in the year between the Rashomon flashback and the Nigerian Job? Nate said he chased them all, at one point or another. For Eliot, since Nate didn’t know about the Moreau connection, that would’ve been in his freelance retrieval phase.
And Nate’s good.
How many jobs did Eliot lose to him? How did his reputation fare, after those last couple failures? Did some of the higher ups know about his connection to Moreau? Did Damien have him blacklisted from certain circles, keeping him from taking more lucrative jobs with people who knew his full skillset, leaving him with the penny-ante players paying him well below what he should be getting (“why are you sending second-rate thugs after me?” perhaps because that’s the price range you have to work in now, that’s the only tax bracket that will hire you, the kind that hires second-rate)?
Had Eliot been considering it, until that moment? The possibility that Damien was right? That he would, inevitably, come crawling back after failing on his own? Maybe he could make it another couple months… a year or two even, if this success could bolster his flagging rep -
(there’s a moment in the hospital, when all seems lost. they’ve been busted. the job that was supposed to save him doomed him. he’d find his way out, but after this colossal failure who’s gonna hire him? he resigns himself to it happen sooner rather than later. then Parker gets Nate a phone, and he watches the man work a miracle)
- but he could see it looming on the horizon. The encroaching fear of knowing what was at the end of the road for him, the inevitable return to…
Then he opens that envelope. Sees that payout. TheScore.
And in one singular fucking moment, one fell swoop, it comes crashing in on him that he’ll never have to work for Moreau again.
Hell, he’ll never have to take a single job he doesn’t want to again. He can pick and choose his clients. Pick and choose his methods. The non-lethality that he was fearing was becoming a liability, just like Damien had said it would, suddenly no longer an issue. He could choose jobs he knew he could handle, instead of jumping at whatever was offered to him and hoping it worked out.
All because of this job. The one he’d hope would get him by just a little longer. The one that for a moment he feared had ruined him.
Because of this team. This ragtag little group of people he was trying so hard not to enjoy the company of. Not to get attached to, even after such a short amount of time.
Because of Nate Ford.
So when Hardison calls him up later, with a story about another job and vet who needs their help, there’s no hesitation in the “yeah, I’ll be there.”
Eliot had already decided the moment he saw the caller ID.
Can you imagine, if Archie’s daughter had access to AITA-reddit in 2012, after the Last Dam Job?
“AITA for ignoring my father after I found out he has a secret daughter and he disappered on me for days?
I (F, 42) recently visited my father (M, 72) with my husband and daughter. The relationship between me and my father has been a bit strained lately, ever since my mother passed about 6 months ago. Since he’d retired from his job as an accountant a few years ago, he doesn’t really have anything to do. I had been worried he was getting lonely by himself in his old house, and suggested several solutions such as moving closer to me and my family, or even residential care (he uses a cane, and can barely walk at all on bad days) but he always shot me down, telling me he was fine. He’s always been a bit distant, and can be really stubborn, so I didn’t think anything of it, but I live out of state and can’t exactly take care of him like this.
During the recent visit, my daughter, my father and me went for a walk in the neighbourhood, where I raised the topic again. However, we were interrupted, when a strange blond woman (F, early 30s?) bumped into us. My father turned around and called out to her, and asked she return his wallet, my wallet and my daughters candy! She must have pickpocketed us without me noticing, but my father seemed strangely happy about it. I asked whether they knew each other and my father just hooked his arm around the woman, said "That’s my daughter!” and walked off with her. I was too shocked to follow, and by the time I had caught myself I couldn’t find them. We returned to my father’s place and tried to call him several times, but he didn’t pick up. My husband is far more patient than I am, and told me my father would surely be back and that this must be a misunderstanding, but when he still wasn’t back by several hours later, we got worried. We asked around the neighbourhood, but no one had ever seen the blond woman before. We contacted the police but they told us they couldn’t help. The next morning I’d gotten a message from my father, telling me he’d be dealing with some “important family business” for a few days and that we shouldn’t worry about him. I tried calling him again, but couldn’t reach him.
I didn’t know what to do by then, so I started searching through his bedroom and his office. I don’t even know what I was looking for anymore, but after a while I found some hidden compartment behind one of his book shelves, with a box of fake ID’s and newspaper clippings, mostly about robberies all over the world. This on its own wouldn’t be too worrisome, as my father is a an art enthusiast and most of the articles seem to be about art robberies, I’d chalk it up to a weird part of his hobby. But for example one of the newspaper articles is from a french paper about a men dying in a car crash about 10 years ago, which matches one of the fake ID’s. I still don’t know what to think, but there’s clearly more going on. I couldn’t find anything on the woman, however.
By then, my husband suggested we should go home the next day, as the end of our planned stay was coming up anyway and I was clearly shaken. However, the next morning, my father returned, happy and acting as if nothing had happened, and I snapped. I yelled at him about how worried we were, and that I had found his secret stash of ID’s in his office. He got mad in turn, told me that I had no business snooping through his stuff. We said some pretty hurtful things to each other, but in the end he confirmed the woman’s name, and that she was “his daughter”. He told me in no uncertain terms that he would not discuss anything about her, as it wasn’t my business and that we should just “trust him”, but he ensured me that he had never cheated on my mother. I don’t know how he thinks that works, since the woman was clearly younger than me and my brother.
Still fuming I packed up my family and went home. He tried calling me several times in the following week, but I was so pissed I blocked his number and his facebook. My husband suggested I
should attempt to talk to my father again, and that I should try to calm down and try to salvage the situation, as there was clearly more to the story than we knew. But I have a right to be mad and frankly, since my father is making no effort, I want nothing to do with this mess anymore. Am I overreacting?
Edit: Thank you for the many supportive messages, it feels good to know I wasn’t overreacting. In the end, I informed my brother about the situation, like some of you suggested. He also had no idea what to make of any of this. In the end, however, my father came to visit (unannounced) and we had a long conversation I’m still a bit overwhelmed from. My father told us he met the woman when she had been a homeless teenager. She tried to rob him, and he caught her and decided to help her out, so over the next few years he gave her financial support. Her recent visit was because she ran into some kind of legal trouble (he remained cagey on what exactly, but assured us the situation was resolved) and reached out to him for help. He said he never told us about her because he knew how it would look if a man like him suddenly came home with a strange child. Our family is fairly wealthy, but at least that would explain all the extra work shifts he used to take on. When we asked why he didn’t put her into foster care, he said that she had had severe behavioural issues back then, and would have just ended up on the street regardless, at least by providing her with money and shelter, he knew she would be fine. There’s still some things I don’t understand and I’m still reeling, but I really hope he’s telling the truth and that he was a misguided philanthrope instead of cheating on my mother. I never would have expected anything like that from him. I still feel like I’m missing something, and he is far from forgiven, but at least some of the situation seems to be resolved.
Edit²: So it has been a while, but I guess you people deserve an update because a lot has happened since then. Since my father refused to give out any information on the woman, I kind of dropped the subject and our weekly calls, because I was still mad at him from keeping such a big secret. However, since my brother and I both felt like we were missing information, he ended up badgering my father about the woman’s contact information, and my father eventually caved. We managed to contact her, and she essentially confirmed what my father had told me about her. She used to be a homeless orphan until my father caught her pickpocketing. They hadn’t had much contact over the past few years anymore, and he had explicitely forbidden her from interacting with us the entire time they knew each other. I don’t think she felt too comfortable interacting with us, but I felt kind of bad and extended the offer that we could keep in contact… She really didn’t seem like she was lying, and if anything, the whole situation isn’t her fault anyway.
Long story short, we called each other a few times since then, and I ended up asking her about the fake ID’s and some other weird things she mentioned. She went really quiet and said that this was my father’s secret to tell.
Fed up, my brother and I joined forces to get all of the answers out of my father once and for all. It was a very intense conversation, but here is the gist of it: Apparently, my father was faking being an accountant for our entire lifes. He used to be a successfull international art thief up until about ten years ago, when he “retired from the business” by faking his death in a car accident, which was about the time he found the pickpocketing woman. He let her stay in a warehouse (?!) and trained her up to be his successor as a thief, although my father claims she also got out of that business recently and is now running a restaurant with her boyfriend. My mother never found out about any of this. Also, his cane doubles as some sort of taser, which I found out because my daughter almost zapped herself with it.
Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought anything like this could be real, and I really hope this is the last surprise in this particular mess. Thank you for your support and all the comments. I’m still mad at my father, but the entire situation has become so absurd I really don’t know what to think anymore.“
