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Eliot had a bad feeling about this job from the start, but when they ended up needing an extra grifter and Tara was already double-booked, he wanted to walk away. He even tried to explain to his partners that something was off, but since he couldn't put his finger on it, and the company was screwing over children, and the client was depending on them, they decided to stick with it and try to find someone who would work.
The next day, Hardison came back with great news. A hacker friend of his from Ireland knew a grifter who was happy to help, was available immediately, and also had multiple black belts in case things went bad. Eliot thought this sounded a little too good to be true, kind of like the opportunities they sold to their marks before bringing down their world. But Hardison swore his hacker friend, Charlie, was both trustworthy and knew what he was doing. The crew had worked with Charlie remotely a few times when they needed some extra help and nothing had gone wrong, but something about the situation was raising Eliot’s hackles.
He pushed Hardison to ask for more details. When his partner returned with more information though, it wasn't what Eliot was expecting.
“Well, you were right, Charlie was hiding something about his grifter ‘friend,’” Hardison smiled.
“I knew it. What?”
“She’s not his friend.”
“Does he even know this girl? How’d she find out about us?”
“She’s his little sister,” Hardison revealed, chuckling at the surprise on Eliot’s face. “So I’d say: yes, he does know her; She probably found out about us from Charlie; and your paranoia is maybe going a bit overboard on this one.”
Still, when Charlie and his sister, Claire, arrived, and Hardison revealed they’d be staying in the guest room, Eliot was not very happy. While they mostly acted like normal kids in their early to mid 20s, he noticed very distinctive signs that there was more going on. The siblings alternated perimeter checks every few minutes like clock work, their eyes skimming over their surroundings and out any visible windows. They didn't act like they were nervous about anything in particular, more like it was a lifelong and innocuous habit to which they no longer gave any conscious thought. Eliot asked how they had flown so quickly from Ireland, and the kids laughed and explained that Claire happened to be visiting Charlie where he was attending grad school in the states, which was not too far a drive from their headquarters. Eliot nodded, but thought that was a convenient coincidence. He also noted that they exchanged a humorous look when he mentioned flying.
Then, Sophie wanted to test her new grifting student, and asked her to put on an American accent and play two truths and a lie.
“Which region?” asked Claire.
Sophie laughed and suggested starting with just a standard midwest one.
Claire smiled, looked her in the eyes, and declared in a flat American accent, “When I was 16, I punched a gang leader so hard he immediately passed out. When I was 19, I staged a jail break for a man falsely accused. When I was 20, I succeeded in a one-woman assault to rescue a little girl who’d been kidnapped.
Eliot watched her closely, but he saw not a single tell, and he was usually pretty good at spotting them. The girl was a good liar. Then he looked at Sophie, who looked back at him with a single raised eyebrow. Even Sophie couldn't spot a tell. The girl was a damn good liar.
Sophie got to ask 20 questions about each of the claims, but even after all that, neither Eliot nor she could find anything solid to indicate fact from fiction. They each took a guess, but it was a random one. Sophie guessed the jail break while Eliot went with the kidnap rescue.
“Sophie wins, congratulations! Charlie told me you were good. You might even be better than our da.”
“I have to be honest, it was no more than intuition, I couldn't spot a single tell the whole time.”
Claire beamed at the praise, and then she did something that made Eliot think she must be an imposter even more than her incredible ability to lie: she asked Sophie about her shoe collection. The rest of the team and Charlie backed away quickly lest they get drawn into the ode to high heels.
Eliot knew something was off. Only psychopaths and those with years and years of training could lie that well, and for a 21-year-old, the former was more likely than the latter. But there was more to the story than that, and certainly something was going on with the parents of these two.
Eliot first went to Hardison with his suspicions. Maybe the hacker could find out who they really were and what they were really after. Why they seemed to have the habits of fugitives without the fear, or the training of operatives without the history. He could tell by the distinct way they held themselves that they'd never been military, but the way the siblings, especially the younger one, tracked him through a room, he could see they had great situational awareness. Hardison should have already done a background check on them before allowing them into their home, but he hadn't shared anything this time.
“What? Babe, psh, no! Of course they’re not fugitives, any more than we are, ha! Right? See, you know how it is . . .” Hardison continued to ramble, making it blatantly obvious he was lying. While Hardison had improved leaps and bounds in his ability to grift strangers over the years, he still didn’t like to lie to those closest to him. Eliot loved him for it, but now he had a new question: what made Hardison feel the need to lie even to him and Parker?
Eliot thought about just trusting Hardison on this; believing that he had a good reason and letting it go at that. But it was also possible that the strange kids or some people they worked for were forcing or manipulating Hardison into lying for them, so Eliot decided to dig deeper. The girl was careful, but he managed to get the boy’s fingerprints and had a friend run them secretly by utilizing a training program. They came back with a match. Charlie O’Donnell’s fingerprints matched those taken from a 3 year old boy during a custody case. The case file ended a few months later when the three year old and his grandmother who had been seeking custody died in a violent explosion. Enough of the grandmother’s body had been found to positively identify her, and the small boy was presumed dead as well. Apparently, he had lived. Eliot pondered different theories about what might have happened as he flipped back through the file. Could it be the biological mother trying to take her son back? Some other relative or interested party? Then, he found a page in the custody papers listing known relatives, and he stared in horror.
What he found made his blood run cold. He no longer had any doubt who was ultimately responsible for that explosion, even if it still shocked him that the man might do that to his own mother. But he had read the burn notice file. All those images, all that suffering, all those bodies flashed through his head at the name, dredged from beyond a well-earned grave: Michael Westen.
If Eliot knew one thing in his life, it was that he was going to hell for all the things he’d done. Sure he was different now. Sure he had a crew of people whom he kept safe and who even loved him. Sure he had helped hundreds and hundreds of people over the years, perhaps even, finally, more than he’d killed; but some things couldn't be made up for. Some things were past forgiveness, deserved to be past forgiveness. Eliot believed he was damned for all the things he’d done, but some of the atrocities under Michael Westen's name were even worse.
And now, Eliot had not only proof that Westen survived the explosion that should have killed him, but also the living, breathing children raised by that monster and presumably his bomb-making, arms dealing, terrorist partner. The boy was the nephew who supposedly died with Westen’s mother. They didn't even change his first name; it was still Charlie. The girl was even more worrying. Now that he knew, there was no denying the uneasy familiarity. She had to be the child of Westen and Glenanne, and God only knew what she was capable of. Sophie had already admitted the girl could lie practically as well as her. Charlie had claimed she could play the role of grifter or hitter equally well. When Eliot had first seen her slight stature he’d doubted that. Knowing what he does now, his doubts have evaporated to gnawing dread.
Eliot didn’t normally hold the sins of the father against a child. Eliot normally acknowledged the potential for nurtured monstrosity, but liked to make his own conclusions. Eliot normally made sure he had a chance to make those conclusions far away from his team. Eliot normally didn't have not one but two potential psychopaths sitting in the middle of his crew, making his partner lie to him, and eating his goddamn gourmet chili.
He needed a plan, but if the girl was as good as Sophie said she was (and when was the last time Sophie was wrong?), then she’d see through most attempts to get her and her cousin in a separate location, and if she did, then things could get ugly and bloody far too quickly.
She was sitting right between Sophie (their softest target) and Parker (their leader) like something right out of a spy playbook. Sophie was enraptured because she finally had someone to gush with about shoes, but Parker was also taking an interest because the girl was explaining the best shoes to conceal knives and lockpicks, which just figured.
Before he could make any move, Hardison spotted him and waved him over. “Eliot! Come on, man. As usual, your chili was excelente, mon ami.”
However, instead of his usual grumbled reply that “that doesn't even make any sense, Hardison!” Eliot just moved silently into the room, making sure to keep both Westens in his line of sight. Hardison immediately knew something was wrong with him, but it looked like the girls were still absorbed in shoe (with weapon modification) talk, while Charlie was doing a decent Hardison-on-a-research-binge impression behind his computer. Even so, Eliot couldn't afford to underestimate these two. These weren't trained soldiers; they were worse: they were trained by spies.
As Hardison moved closer to him, Eliot pivoted until he was between at least one of his partners and the two threats in the room. Now he just needed to get the two women behind him.
“I made green tea and hot chocolate,” Eliot announced, trusting Parker would forgive him for the lie if it was for their safety, though he might have to put up with her trying to jump out and scare him for a few days.
The ladies looked around for where he had the drinks, but Eliot rolled his eyes, put on his best gruff, and chided, “I’m not your serving boy. They’re in the kitchen, go get ‘em yourselves.” Sophie rolled her eyes at Eliot’s always incongruous acts of kindness, but Parker just barely narrowed her eyes at him, and wasn't that a reversal of roles. It seemed they’d been together long enough that Parker could read him better than Sophie could, but that was a thought for later.
As the women got up, Sophie invited the Westen girl to come with them and pick out a tea. While not Eliot’s plan A, he had foreseen this possibility and had an idea for what to try next. As the ladies moved past him, he gently grabbed the Westen girl’s shoulder and asked, “is your brother okay? He’s been hunched like that for quite a while. Should we check on him?”
Considering his own habits of worrying about Hardison, he figured this would be a reasonable enough excuse to hold her back, but maybe in this family concern for little things like posture or well-being was suspicious. Maybe it didn't compute in light of all the harm they caused, because instead of her eyes even flickering towards the young man she claimed was family, they narrowed at Eliot for a fraction of a second before her hand grabbed where his was still on her shoulder and tried to twist him into a thumb hold. He managed to spin away before she subdued him and attempted to grab onto her so he could use his weight to his advantage and take her down. She very nearly slipped through his grasp, and probably would have if he didn't have so many years of experience sparring with Parker who would make an eel seem easy to catch by comparison. Unfortunately, she managed to keep her arms out and brought her elbows together to slam into a pressure point on his shoulder, loosening one of his arms for just a moment. A moment was all she needed though, and she twirled out of his hold and moved to sweep his legs out from under him. Thankfully, this is where his larger mass helped him, and he was able to keep his balance. No longer trying to take her down gently, and worried about the safety of his crew, his family, Eliot feinted left then aimed a punch straight at her temple, but she dodged that too and aimed a roundhouse kick at his side. Her foot hit with a surprising force, but before he could counter, Hardison’s face popped in front of his vision, hands up in a calming gesture, saying, “whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, it’s okay, just one big misunderstanding is what this is.”
Eliot frantically tried to get Hardison back behind him before the girl attacked again, but then he noticed that her cousin was doing the same thing as Hardison, but on her side. She was glaring at Eliot and breathing hard, but she wasn’t attacking and had even relaxed the fighter’s stance she held.
Eliot looked between her and Hardison. “Right. Just a misunderstanding about how the daughter and nephew of a supposedly dead war criminal and his also supposedly dead terrorist girlfriend grifted their way into our home by offering us exactly what we wanted in a way that seemed too good to be true!” During his rant, Eliot kept an eye on both the Westen kids, but also on Hardison’s face. He needed to know how much the man knew. Eliot didn't know if he was more relieved or hurt at the total lack of surprise he saw.
Unfortunately, his rant did provoke emotions in the girl, who lunged towards him shouting, “you do not get to talk about our parents that way!” The boy held her back, though, and she seemed unwilling to hurt him to get past.
After observing silently from the doorway, Parker finally inserted herself into the situation. “Charlie, Claire, sit on the couch,” she ordered. Then, with a glance at Sophie, “please.” She gathered them all so that Eliot was between the kids and their crew, but the two sides were no longer glaring across at each other down. Then, she turned to the man standing in front of them and instructed, “Hardison, explain please.”
Hardison glanced at Charlie, who glanced at Claire, before both of them nodded minutely, which made Eliot narrow his eyes and look between them and Hardison, still wary that they were manipulating the hacker. Parker stared Eliot down until he relaxed back again, then turned her full attention back to Hardison, who was finally ready to explain a long story.
“So, see, it all started with World of Warcraft.”
“Hardison!” both Sophie and Eliot exclaimed.
“No, no, no, this is important. We have to start here. I met this player and we teamed up, and this player was Charlie, so if y’all want the whole story, it had better well start at World of Warcraft. Now, as I was saying, I met this player . . .”
Over the next hour, Hardison, and eventually Charlie, filled in everyone on how they had met, become friends, tried to ‘research’ each other through hacking, met dead end after dead end, each becoming obsessed with the mystery, until eventually they figured out who the other was, and Charlie confided the family secret for the first time to anyone outside his family, with pleas that Hardison keep it a secret from everyone so his parents and little sister could stay safe. He explained how Michael had been framed by an organization trying to recruit him, and he and Fiona, along with their friends, had taken that organization down, along with several other international conspiracies. Charlie told a much-condensed version of Michael’s time in Miami, and how Michael and Fiona had ended up on the run from the CIA until they faked their deaths and moved to Ireland with Charlie, and how Claire had come along about a year later.
Hardison and Charlie had figured out that they were both in a similar line of work, namely helping people with nowhere else to turn. Leverage just tended to deal with more white collar crime than the O’Donnells, formerly Westens. That’s when they started to team up on bigger jobs and consult for each other. Eventually Charlie had met the rest of the crew, and when he heard they needed an extra grifter for this job, and their usual stand-in wasn't available, Charlie knew his sister would be happy to help.
“And yes, Eliot,” Hardison pre-empted his question, “I did verify all of this, and as best as I can possibly tell, his story matches the evidence I could find in the CIA databases, the NSA databases, the old CIFA databases, and all the other electronic hidey holes where the government likes to bury secrets.” Claire looked surprised that he had hacked into so many highly secure databases to verify their identities. Charlie did not.
“Well,” Sophie said, “this has been quite the story time. Claire, no wonder you’ve got such a talent for the dramatic, growing up with a history like that. Now we’ve got all that business out of the way, I believe I offered you tea over an hour ago, and after all this, it’s certainly long overdue. Although, I’ll probably have to remake mine after all this time, sorry, Eliot.”
Eliot let slip a barely perceptible wince, “Actually, I-”
“Yes!” Parker jumped in. “Hot drinks, then scheming to take down our actual mark.”
“I lied about the hot drinks,” Eliot knew it was better to just rip the Band-Aid off. Five sets of eyes stared at him, ranging from confused to glowering. Before they could jump down his throat, he continued, “I thought you were in danger and I was trying to get you out without raising suspicion. I wasn't going to leave you alone with people I thought were threats while I went to prepare hot drinks.” Turning to Claire, he asked, “how did you know something was off, by the way?”
Claire shrugged, “you stopped trying not to scare me.”
“What?”
“Since we got here, you’ve been very careful about respecting people’s personal bubbles. You only rarely touch Hardison and Parker unless they come to you first, and while you’re comfortable around Sophie, you never get in her space. Then, especially with us, you’ve been trying to make yourself smaller, like you’re trying to make yourself less threatening so you won’t scare us, and you have never even come close to initiating physical contact. Then suddenly, your body language switched so you were making yourself bigger and holding yourself ready for a fight, like you wanted to look intimidating. On top of that, you suddenly grabbed my shoulder and then tried to separate my brother and me from the rest of the group. I didn't know what you wanted but I knew something had changed and it wasn't good, so I tried to get you in a hold where you wouldn't hurt us.”
Charlie rolled his eyes at his sister, but the rest looked impressed. Sophie looked positively gleeful. She had found a protégé who could read people almost as well as she could, genuinely enjoyed theatre, and liked to talk about shoes too. “Come on dear, let’s go make that tea,” Sophie led Claire out of the office, Charlie following behind after a nod to Hardison.
Parker glanced at each of her partners. “I nominate her as back-up, back-up Sophie.”
Hardison said, “okay, a back-up Tara. I can get with that. Seconded.”
Eliot groaned, but he had to acknowledge that the kid managed to fit in with them both in skill-level and personality, and that was hard to do. Not only could she grift in Sophie’s league, she could also fight. She was half Eliot’s size, but had held her own against him. She could certainly be useful on any number of jobs, and from what she and her brother said, they genuinely cared about helping people. Looking at the hopeful faces of his partners, he had to concede that he had no reason to say no anymore.
“Fine. Agreed.” He grunted, “but only if Tara’s not available.”
“Good.” Parker nodded solemnly as she started leading them towards the kitchen too. “Now we can deal with the lying about hot chocolate issue.”
Eliot groaned, “Parker, I thought you were in danger!”
“No lying about hot chocolate. That’s a rule, or if it’s not, it should be. Hardison, can we make that a rule?”
“Don’t see why not, babe” their voices faded down the hallway, followed by Eliot’s most annoyed growl, as they went to join their new teammates.