People Who Dont Experience It Cannot Comprehend How Awful Executive Dysfunction Is. I WANT To Do The

okay you know what other random crossover I've been chewing on? leverage x six of crows.

the parallels between Parker and Inej - both in that they have the same skill set of climbing and acrobatics and so on, but also how they're both healing from being used. and how they both have been known to stab creeps. I could see Parker taking Inej under her wing the way she kind of adopted Josie.

Kaz and Nate together could mastermind so hard. but then also... how would the crew, especially Eliot, look at this kid who's so much harder than he should be at that age? what would Nate think of this literal teenager who can mastermind on the same level as him?

Eliot would also see himself in Matthias. being loyal to your country with everything you've got until you're not. the guilt. questioning the beliefs you grew up with. feeling like you've become a monster.

Nina meeting Sophie. they're both so very good at pretending to be other people. Nina learning tricks from Sophie... or can you imagine Sophie if she had tailoring in her arsenal...

Jesper & Wylan mirror Hardison as the heart of the team, so to speak. they'd bond over fabrication and chemistry and caring about people who have been through some shit. also the combined adhd energy of Jesper and Hardison could probably wipe out an entire city.

and then can you imagine both teams on a heist together??

Leverage 3x16 - "The San Lorenzo Job"

i need the ao3 tag wranglers to tag wrangle so it's easier to find the united healthcare shooter fic (there are 23 fics about him currently) (i did manually count) (i don't know what to tell you the internet is a bizarre and hilarious place sometimes)

The Swipe Right Job (S03E06) LEVERAGE: REDEMPTION (2021—)

I hope fifteen or twenty years after redemption ends we get another reboot of leverage in which Breanna leads a completely new crew who only ever heard of the original leverage team as heros of legends.

And they tell stories of them like they are mythical figures.

They tell stories of Nate Ford and Sophie Devereaux, how they chased each other across the world before joining sides in the middle to bring together the first leverage team. (They have the Old Nate painting in the current headquarters. Everyone in the new team knows without a doubt that is Leverage Founder Nathan Ford.)

They tell stories of Alec Hardison, Eliot Spencer and THE Parker, the trio who can make anything happen, who made this organisation into what it is now, the patron saints of every leverage team. If a job goes really sideways, they will come to save you, you don't even have to call them. They know.

(The stories range from mildly simplified to wildly inaccurate. Breanna finds this whole mystification fascinating to see, she even kinda gets it on some level, but it's also really weeeiiird. that's just his brother and his insane partners. She just gifted them matching plushies the other day. (She does know where they live and how to reach out to them but she never ever in no way would ever call them for a job. She can do this without them dammit) (but of course they'd still come out once or twice in every season sorry breanna i need my cameos dammit))

this post was made unrebloggable, so im stealing it

listen I do understand that by and large Leverage is a very lighthearted show and also that they are limited in the havoc they can wreak on the lives of clear real-world analogues without being accused of endorsing violence or something. so i'm not saying that this is necessarily a good move from a showrunner's perspective but I DO think that i would rescind every criticism i've ever had of leverage's political outlook if they have an episode in L:R where they introduce an antagonist like 'this is mr. Ethan Tusk whose wealth came from exploitative gem mines and now he makes exploding cars and sets nazi frat boys loose on the federal government for bragging rights of how cozy he is with the dictator in charge' and then the resolution is 'parker pushes him off a building.' or i'm not picky on the specifics they can even have it be a more ambiguous thing where she plants a bug in his car so they can spy on him but then two days later the autopilot drives him off a cliff and nobody's ever really sure whether parker sabotaged it somehow or it was just his own shitty tech. i just think that if you're going to keep teasing the idea that parker is Unpredictable and Violent and needs to be kept under close watch she should get to kill at least ONE evil-guy stand in at some point. she's earned it. free her.

did no one else think Mr. Romance Novel Heartthrob was a little too perfect? he’s a vet and a fire captain and runs the bnb and is the only good one on the town council and is hot and kind and- like no one’s actually LIKE that in real life. this is the kind of character eliot would play in a con. I get that this is sophie’s little hallmark fantasy but I did spend the entire episode waiting for the other shoe to drop with this guy.

God I love the episodes of Leverage that are like “yes Eliot is working class. yes he grew up surrounded by trades people and “menial” labourers. yes he knows so much about those jobs and will ALWAYS support those workers and their job choices.”

Because it’s something that really does set Eliot apart from the other characters. Like, Sophie is all about the finer things in life, and even if she did ever grow up poor or around labourers, she doesn’t exactly respect that life style. She’s all about getting away from that, if she ever was that lower class, which I don’t think she ever really was. Nate is Office Worker tm, just in vibes. That man has never seen a shovel. And while Parker and Hardison both went through the system, they’re both very city centric. And I mean, Parker has never once thought about real jobs or anything, ever. And Hardison definitely has a bit of a thing about age of the geek, and def starts out looking down on “menial” jobs.

But Eliot, throughout the entire show, is very much all about that. The mining episode in particular is such a favourite just because of the respect and care for these workers that Eliot shows. And I really like how different all of the leverage characters are, not just in skills but also in backgrounds, and how those backgrounds affect how they treat people. Eliot comes from a family of workers and a community of workers, and he holds those people in such high respect.

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 happening sooner rather than later, now. 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. The Score.

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 hoped 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.