Today In Leverage Headcanons No One Asked For: Do They Have Tattoos And If So, Of What

Nathan "who did you just call baby right then" Ford and Alec "no, i'm with him" Hardison and Eliot "somebody kiss this man so I don't have to" Spencer and Parker "She's hot. Warm? Cold? Why is everyone staring?" Parker

Tips for writing those gala scenes, from someone who goes to them occasionally:

Generally you unbutton and re-button a suit coat when you sit down and stand up.

You’re supposed to hold wine or champagne glasses by the stem to avoid warming up the liquid inside. A character out of their depth might hold the glass around the sides instead.

When rich/important people forget your name and they’re drunk, they usually just tell you that they don’t remember or completely skip over any opportunity to use your name so they don’t look silly.

A good way to indicate you don’t want to shake someone’s hand at an event is to hold a drink in your right hand (and if you’re a woman, a purse in the other so you definitely can’t shift the glass to another hand and then shake)

Americans who still kiss cheeks as a welcome generally don’t press lips to cheeks, it’s more of a touch of cheek to cheek or even a hover (these days, mostly to avoid smudging a woman’s makeup)

The distinctions between dress codes (black tie, cocktail, etc) are very intricate but obvious to those who know how to look. If you wear a short skirt to a black tie event for example, people would clock that instantly even if the dress itself was very formal. Same thing goes for certain articles of men’s clothing.

Open bars / cash bars at events usually carry limited options. They’re meant to serve lots of people very quickly, so nobody is getting a cosmo or a Manhattan etc.

Members of the press generally aren’t allowed to freely circulate at nicer galas/events without a very good reason. When they do, they need to identify themselves before talking with someone.

Leverage: Redemption 3x5- "The Grand Complication Job"

The Weekend in Paris Job (S03E01) LEVERAGE: REDEMPTION (2021—)

Leverage Redemption S03E05 The Grand Complication Job.

What's in a name:

The team leveraging Hardison's first name to get him to take them seriously.

It started with the Grave Danger Job. With Parker's panicked "I need you. Do you hear me, Alec? I need you!" It isn't something that's conscious or anything, but all of them lean into it occasionally.

"Alec, just drop it," Nate stares at Hardison, watching the young man realize maybe he'd been pushing Nate too hard on a topic that was a sore subject. Alec nods grimly and backs down.

"Hardison, how long have you been up?" Sophie asks gently, watching the genius wipe the grit from his eyes, his latest forging project laid out around him. When he mumbles something about not remembering, needing to finish, Sophie catches his chin in a manicured hand and holds his attention. "Alec, go to bed." He goes.

"Come on, man, get off the screen for a little while, let's go get some sun," Eliot pokes him after a long job on top of a new World of Warcraft update. Hardison can't even remember what he said back, something glib he's sure, but he remembers the hesitation in Eliot's voice. "Alec, please. You're gonna fuck up your eyesight before you're thirty, staring at blue light a foot away from your face. Please?" Hardison goes with him. They go to an outdoor gun range. Hardison rags Eliot about them both not liking guns, but listens as his best friend talks him through focusing on targets of different distances. He'll never have Eliot's skill, but it's a quick way to help his eyesight and he turns out to be half decent with practice.

"Alec, I'm serious!" Parker pleads with him, a picture of some conspiracy theory held up in her hands. "I need to know if this is real or not, please. Because it doesn't seem real and then it does seem real and Eliot won't give me a straight answer and Nate won't give me any answer at all, and I need to know if-" if I'm going crazy, she doesn't say, but he hears it now. He lays a hand over hers and explains that it's not real, explains the joke patiently until she understands and can laugh at it and "yes, and" Eliot when that particular theory comes up again.

"Hey y'all, it's Alec," he says, a gun to his head and a phone in his hand, one chance to get it right, to make them understand that this is serious. He can practically hear them all sitting up in the tones of their voices, in the grimness of the rapid fire questions, and he breathes a sigh of relief. They'll come get him. They know it's serious.

A story in three acts:

Leverage 4x10- "The Queen's Gambit Job"

Leverage 1x10 - "The Juror #6 Job"

Leverage: Redemption 2x3 - "The Tournament Job"

Sophie loves to go dancing, but she rarely goes with Nate. He takes it too seriously, and he always get involved in the dance hall politics. Plus, as technical and detail oriented as he is, he isn't really good at dancing. He can do the steps, but he doesn't understand how to let himself get swept away by the music.

The first time she asked Eliot, he laughed at her. Said there was no way he was going to spend his night off in some dusty ballroom when he could be at home relaxing. She'd shrugged it off, having anticipated his refusal, and had gone by herself, intending to find a partner when she got there.

Except when she showed up, she found Eliot dressed in jeans and a button-down shirt, his hair pulled back in a pony tail, mumbling something about not wanting her to have to go without a partner.

The next time she asked, he complained about how slippery his shoes were and how handsy Mrs. Gunderson had been during the open dance, but he picked Sophie up at 6 and dropped her off at 10 and smiled most of the time between.

A week after that, she found a flyer for a foxtrot competition slipped under her door, with the note "I'm free on Saturday" scrawled across the bottom.

(They won.)

They go several times a month now. Hardison laughs when he finds out, but Eliot says it's good exercise. Parker is very excited about their trophy but loses interest when she finds out it's plastic. Nate comes to watch sometimes, because as much as he dislikes dancing himself, he appreciates the skill involved.

(Maybe he's picking up pointers. He'll never tell.)

Okay, I'm thinking about the Murderbot TV show again, and how I would adapt it, and we're going to be robbed if we get anything less than a cold open to a scene of some obviously cheezy space drama, maybe an Overdramatic Human Woman In Green Facepaint overdramatically sobbing as she confronts a Generic Action Hero like "It's...it's your baby!!!" *cue three different angles of Generic Action Hero's shocked and surprised face* Generic Action Hero opens her mouth to respond, but we don't hear her voice, because her words are drowned out by a sudden roaring sound coming from offscreen. The audience gets jump scared by lashing tentacles that seem to whip across the screen, in front of the window where we were watching the space drama, and the camera zooms out until you see that the window was floating in front of MB's face, as MB stands on the edge of a crater and the survey team pokes around down below. A giant, tentacled space monster is emerging down below, the survey team is screaming, Overse is getting picked up and tossed into the air, on a trajectory heading straight for the monster's gaping jaws...

Everything slows down. The sound mutes. MB swears and launches itself towards the monster. The camera shakes and warnings blare and flash across the screen, but we don't see much of the action, because the camera swings in to focus on the floating window where the space drama (Sanctuary Moon. It's Sanctuary Moon) keeps playing, on mute, while Murderbot's voiceover delivers the line: "I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites..."

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))