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Parker pulls out the microwave popcorn, only to have it snatched from her hand by a glaring Eliot, who pulls out the bag of popcorn kernels instead.
“No, why do you even still get that stuff?” Eliot asks. It’s a bad question – he knows why, at this point, but it’s as much a part of the routine of making popcorn as it is for Parker to make for the microwaved stuff.
“For when you’re not here and I need salted butter,” Parker replies with a smirk.
Eliot shakes his head and mutters, “Crazy,” before pulling out the rest of the things he needs for popcorn.
That’s Parker’s cue to hop onto the island counter, and chatter about things, or for Hardison to poke his head in and ask what movie they’re going to watch.
Tonight’s a little different, though. They know exactly what they’re going to watch, and Parker is quiet as Eliot works, pouring kernels and salt and melted butter and uses magic to get it tasting better than any other popcorn she’s ever had. It’s always better, every time, and it’s not quite as good as money, but she would pay Eliot to make it all the time if she had to, but she doesn’t and that might be part of what makes it better.
“Alright, guys, it’s starting!” Hardison calls from the den.
Parker snags the first bowl Eliot’s put aside and wanders over to the sofa, piled high with cushions and fluffy blankets for their special movie night.
Eliot follows her with another container of popcorn, although this stuff is in a bucket.
Catching Parker’s eye, he shrugs. “You won’t like it if you eat it, but it’s for throwing at him. Thought you might like that.”
Parker beams. “Yessssss.”
She then proceeds to hoard the bucket, curling around it like it’s a teddy bear, or a precious dragon egg made of money.
“Lady and gentleman,” Hardison says from where he’s finishing plugging things in to the plasma TV, “I present to you the first full length, interactive and completed feature film by Leverage Productions. Staring our least favorite hacker, Chaos.”
Hardison then stands and sweeps into a bow, while pushing the input button on the control, and switching over to the live stream of Chaos’ current “secret” apartment.
The TV shows a dark room, lit by various computer screens, where a hacker sits, hard at work muttering to himself.
“If you would do the honors.” Hardison offers Parker the remote.
She takes it and presses the first button, which starts up the chanting.
“Ie Iesu dormine, dorma ei es requiem. Ie Iesu dormine, dorma ei es requiem. Ie Iesu dormine, dorma ei es requiem..”
It starts softly, emanating from the walls, as if the person on the other apartment might be mutter to themselves. Chaos blinks around the room for a minute before shaking his head and going back to work.
But the chanting continues.
“Ie Iesu dormine, dorma ei es requiem. Ie Iesu dormine, dorma ei es requiem. Ie Iesu dormine, dorma ei es requiem. Ie Iesu dormine, dorma ei es requiem. Ie Iesu dormine, dorma ei es requiem.”
Parker enjoys watching him twitch, but it’s nothing more than a mild discomfort, and she wants him to be more than a little uncomfortable.
She presses the next button.
From Chaos’s stereo system, conveniently with its volume put to max, blasts, “THIS IS HALLOWEEN! THIS IS HALLOWEEN! THIS IS HALLOWEEN! THIS IS HALLOWEEN! THIS IS HALLOWEEN!”
Chaos jumps.
“I think that was a good six inches,” Hardison comments.
“I think it was eight,” disagrees Parker.
“Eh, we can check later. Do you think we can get him to jump higher?”
Eliot snorts. “Yeah, he’ll definitely be jumping later.”
Hardison eyes him. “What did you do?”
Eliot smiles, and not one of his nice charming ones, either. “Oh, I left him a present.”
Parker nods. “It’s a good present.”
Meanwhile, the person next door to Chaos has started banging on the wall, shouting at him to “TURN DOWN THE DAMN MUSIC!”
Chaos starts cussing violently when he realizes that the stereo system has been melted, leaving the only option to either get close enough to take out the batteries without earplugs, or throw something at it and hope it breaks.
Chaos ineffectively decided to throw his mouse.
Hardison laughs, “Man, he just disrespected his equipment, the hacker community is going to love laughing about this for years.”
Especially because another neighbor starts banging on the wall, and then the person below him must have found their broom, and the person above him starts stomping to voice their displeasure, which causes Chaos to yell back, “I’M WORKING ON IT! SOMEONE PLAYED A PRANK ON ME!”
Somehow, that’s also the moment he seems to connect the fact that some of the only people good enough to “prank” him, also want revenge on him.
(It’s been a good nine weeks, Hardison almost can’t fault him for not thinking of them immedietly, given that the current thief he’s working with acts all of 12 and has the same kind of humor.)
He makes the most beautiful face, when he realizes it’s them.
“Alright, that’s what I’m talking about! Parker, what’d you think of that as the new screen saver for this week?”
“Yes, definitely.”
On the screen, Chaos takes up the EMP canon he’d made specifically for the second time they’d run into each other, conveniently placed near his computer, and starts shooting it at the stereo, which fizzles to a stop.
The chanting, which had been growing incrementally louder, is finally clearly audible from every corner of the room.
“Marcus!” an elderly lady’s voice cuts through the Latin chanting, while Hardison snorts. Marcus.
“Marcus, I thought you said you weren’t religious when I stopped by with cookies! You don’t have to be embarrassed about it, but please stop the chanting – my dogs are all worked up!”
“Mrs. Walters, my friends are playing a prank on me! I’ll try and get the chanting to stop!”
Chaos starts looking a little wild in the eyes at this point, and starts shooting the EMP cannon everywhere…including his precious computer.
(Hardison had been particularly proud of that particular speaker.)
“No, damnit!” Chaos yells. “No, no, no, no – HARDISON I KNOW YOU’RE WATCHING!”
Hardison and Parker both have to laugh at that, while Eliot shakes his head. Of course they’re watching.
“Stop it, stop it all! I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry, I won’t do it again!”
“I didn’t know Satan was named Hardison,” Mrs. Walters mutter is just barely audible from the doorway.
Hardison shrugs. “Up to you, girl.”
Parker frowns, and presses a button.
The chanting stops.
“Oh, thank God,” Chaos mutters, only to jerk out of his seat as “THIS IS HALLOWEEN!” starts blaring from all the working speakers left in the walls, the ceiling, and the floor.
“God damnit!” Chaos screams, and starts shooting with the EMP cannon again, just in time to pass the closet, and allow Parker to press the final button.
A black blur streaks out of the closet, yowling wildly and spitting mad, ready to take it’s anger out on the nearest living being, which just so happens to be Chaos.
Eliot smirks and trades a high five with Parker.
Hardison is stunned.
“Did you know he has a mild allergy to cats?” Eliot says off hand. “And that this particular one has been on the streets for a bit and has what appear to be some really nasty fleas?”
Parker cackles.
~IiI~
Chaos is harassed by his neighbors, gets a talking to by the manager, and even the landlord, and then told to find a better place for him to stay if he’s going to be this disruptive. He has a week to move.
Sure, this place was a safe house, of sorts, but he’d been in the same place for the last month, and actually unpacked a little, so now Chaos had to deal with paying for the damages and finding a new place in the city to move to, so he could finish this con.
Somehow, in the midst of hiring movers, and researching, and hacking, and looking at apartments, he manages to miss some stolen goods ending up mixed in with his limited cooking supplies.
When the cops show up, he’s just climbing into his car, ready to follow the moving van to his new condo, and therefore gets arrested in front of all of his former neighbors.
(To add insult to injury, Hardison makes sure that a basic hack gets fumbled and traced back to Chaos and giving the feds his current whereabouts, and it’s the stolen goods in his moving van that just makes everything worse.)
Parker starts smiling again.
~IiI~
Interpol is beginning to think that this Leverage crew case is cursed.
Sterling did alright, but now he’s chasing people who retired from the team, and he also had worked with one of them – wasn’t that some kind of conflict of interest?
But then when Sterling left, someone had to take over Leverage’s cases.
(Not that most of the younger agents – and even a fair number of the older ones – wanted to, because looking at the kind of work that they did was pretty impressive, and only hurt the 1%, even if it did sometimes also hurt the government. That was the problem.)
Most of the ambitious greenies got sucked into working on the Leverage case.
The first was returned covered in goop and party streamers, traumatized, and with a note that said, “He’s stupid and nearly got Eliot killed by snipers.”
(The man still hasn’t recovered from his fear of blondes or of electricity.)
The next one was returned, in semi-working condition, with the sticky note saying “Too slow.”
The third actually lasted multiple cases, only to come back with a frowny-faced sticky-note and being thoroughly worked over (multiple cracked ribs, two broken, broken fingers, broken toes, and taser burns).
The fourth one still can’t look at a computer without bursting into tears.
The fifth one ended up accidently stealing the painting for the team, after having chased them for nearly ten months on various interconnected cases. The painting had the note, “Train your minions better, Evil Nate,” scrawled upon it. She was quickly demoted.
The sixth one…they don’t talk about her. Apparently there was something about flirting with one of them, and then Parker got involved, and it was a major embarrassment to the entire division.
So, for Gatling, being the seventh, there was actually some hope in the department that, as the seventh, he’d be luckier than his predecessors.
For a while, that seemed to be the case. He never managed to catch any of them, but he was able to find them on their cons, figure out the reasoning for why they hit certain people, throw up obstacles.
And then he started to flesh out the files, to find the Achilles heel for the team.
(As any veteran Interpol agent could have told him, going after criminals in a personal way almost never ends well – instead, it usually ends in blood, tears, and a lot of regrets.
(One of the eldest agents decides that this is the case he needs to ensure that the upper division will force the newbies to watch The Godfather trilogy, just so they can get a (albeit fake) glimpse at just how badly doing things like this can ruin you, if you set yourself up as the Godfather.))
With that, the newest batch of greenies has started taking bets.
“Twenty says he’s going to piss of Spencer,” Peck says, sorting through a folder full of papers.
“Nah, that’s pretty easy. Thirty says he’ll piss off the hacker and we’ll see compromising photos leaked.” Kittender has a thing for technology, and in shows in not only what she cases she works, but how she bets on all of the criminals.
“Are you kidding? The way he’s going he’s going to piss off the mastermind, and then all three of them will rain hell on him. That’s my bet, fifty.” Denbury, likewise, always went for the worst case scenario, which, more often than not, has made them quite a bit of money in the year and a half they’ve been at Interpol.
Gatling just passes the newbies and the bookie and snorts. The amount of faith his fellow agents have in him is astounding, but he’ll show them just what needs to be done to take down a group like Leverage.
~IiI~
Sterling calls the ambulance and the police, even as he lets agents into to start taking pictures of the crime scene, so they can assess Gatling’s health.
“Ah, and Denbury?”
Their head pops up from the gaggle of newbies. “Yes, Agent Sterling?”
“Tell the bookie you won, would you?”
Denbury wants to grin, clearly, because the corners of their mouth are twitching, but one of their own agents has been hurt (for a good reason, it seems, given the note), so now isn’t the time.
(It doesn’t mean the Denbury won’t be using the money they won to take their group out for drinks and laughs and theories on how exactly the whole con went down, because stealing people’s stuffed animals? That just isn’t right, especially when they’re not that bad, for criminals, and there aren’t drugs, or relics, or something illegal hidden in the bunny.)
Good riddance, Denbury thinks with relief.
~IiI~
“Agent Denbury, you’re being promoted.”
“Yes, sir,” they gulp.
“Your first case is the one Gatling had been working on….”
And that's a wrap.
Thank you to everyone who's stuck with me in some way, shape, matter, or form over this past month. I hope you all enjoyed the various fics you read, and that I'll see you with future fics!
Kudos, comments, concrit welcome. Poke me on tumblr, I'm fins-illusion
~Fins