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Eliot Spencer has made a careful study of dangerous animals. He knows every kind of wildcat from your classic lion and tiger down to the tiny black-footed wildcat that boasts the highest kill rate of any feline. He can tell the difference between the nonvenomous Mexican milk snake and the timid yet venomous coral snake that it mimics. He focuses on hunters more than scavengers and doesn’t pay as much attention to prey, but he’s cataloged a wide range of animal posturing: puffing up fur or feathers, baring teeth, ears twitching— all the different ways animals signal their intent.
Eliot Spencer watches the daemons of his opponents and his targets the same way he watches their body language: It is, always, to analyze a threat and prepare for attack. He can make a pretty solid guess about what kind of fighter someone is going to be based on their daemon’s form, whether they’re more likely to favor stealth or speed or strength, how well they’re likely to work with their colleagues in a group fight.
(Sure, everyone knows wolves are pack predators, but Eliot will always look for a partner or three when facing a hyena, and woe betide anyone who assumes General Flores’ raptor daemon means he’s a maverick who works alone, not when Harris’s hawks not only hunt cooperatively, they nest in groups and have even been observed coming to the aid of injured flockmates. Eliot should’ve known he’d never leave his men behind.)
He's not always right. Quinn, for example, caught him off-guard. He expected an orangutan to do some aggressive posturing to avoid active combat, but Quinn's daemon lunged to get her overly-long arms around Boudicca's throat at the same instant Quinn's fist met Eliot's face.
Eliot profiles the team from their first meeting together. Nate Ford's bloodhound is a known quantity; Boudicca could take her in a straight fight without much trouble, but it's a pain and half to get her off their scent when a job is done. On the flip side, while a raccoon would pose no challenge to a wolfdog in one-on-one combat, Eliot would not want to be responsible for tracking one down-- or trying to keep one captive once caught. He is baffled to observe that Leia, even from the very beginning, has no hesitation in coming within reach of Boudicca's sharp teeth, even though a raccoon's best shot against a predator like he is, like Boudicca is, would be to stay out of reach.
He'd known a spy with a mockingbird daemon once, and until meeting Sophie, he'd never known anyone better at infiltration or undercover work, so once he pauses to look past her genuinely painful Lady MacBeth to identify the exact bird daemon, he treats Sophie with a healthy respect and an unhealthy (but not, perhaps, inaccurate) distrust.
He has to look up Parker's dragonfly, though, after their first con is over. He's intrigued to learn that globe-skimmer dragonflies have an enormously large range, spanning every continent except Antarctica, and that they are remarkably efficient hunters of other bugs. He reads further and learns about their panoramic vision. No wonder Parker is impossible to sneak up on. For all he struggles to predict her and finds her priorities confusing, it doesn't take very long for him to rely on Parker, to trust her instincts. If Parker senses something wrong, Eliot's gonna get to her as fast as he possibly can, no questions asked.
It is a painful irony, Eliot slowly comes to realize, that for all the daemons he has read accurately at a glance, it is his own Boudicca he’s read wrong all these years. He’d read hatred in her snarl and fear in her ears and accepted both as his due, never realizing that she was reading fury in his fists and disgust in his shoulders and accepting that as her due. With Damien Moreau and Fortuna behind bars, Eliot and Boudicca begin to relearn each other’s language.
Sophie, for all her nonviolence, is the closest of the team to Eliot in her analysis of daemons. She always looks up the daemon form of any new mark she targets— not for the associated stereotypes, at least not beyond the standard predator/prey and warm/coldblooded binaries most people fit into. Sophie looks up behavioral details. Is staring considered aggressive? How do they show fear? For so many of her cons— what is their courting behavior like?
(Bloodhounds like a bit of a chase, a bit of a tussle, a little bow of vulnerability. Sophie tries to forget that she knows that).
Once she’s with them in person, there’s no better interpreter than Sophie Deveraux when it comes to understanding the interplay of a human-daemon pair. Are they in physical contact with each other? Attuned to each other’s perceptions? Do they watch each other’s backs or watch things together? How casually do they touch? If size permits, does the human carry the daemon? Where Eliot’s eye is trained for threat-detection, Sophie’s is tuned to vulnerability. Whether a mark is uneasy with their daemon or bound tightly will change her approach but it won’t impact her success rate.
And what any of that says about her relationship with her own darling Melpomene is not something she’s able to dwell on, not when Mel’s decision to sit on her shoulder or circle overhead or perch nearby is always determined by what impression they want to give, what kind of character they’re playing. Her Grace the Duchess of Hanover’s mockingbird invariably sits on her left shoulder, while Ice Queen characters have a beady-eyed bird glaring from her right shoulder. Southern Belle Kitty’s songbird likes to nestle in the wide brim of her sun hats. Her assistant characters, be they wedding planner or PR manager, usually have a twittering bird fluttering nearby.
She watches little Widmark Fowler with his newly-settled songbird Wilhemina cupped in his open hands, and struggles to uncurl her fingers for Mel. It is intimate, to allow anyone to see her touch her own soul. And even then, she doesn’t know for sure if the vulnerability she allows the struggling child to see is genuine or feigned. A complicated mix of the two, Mel says later, perched in the windowsill. The emotions may be real but the show of them is more or less artificial. Mel doesn’t want to talk about it, and if she's being honest, neither does Sophie.
Mel never does develop a strong preference of where to sit when they’re not on the job. But as the years go by, the rest of the crew becomes accustomed to birdsong in the background. The song itself changes frequently, whistles blending into chirps, chirps abruptly switching to trills, the occasional bit of violin or guitar slipping in, but it’s always Mel, darling Melpomene, filling the room with music. Sophie watches her family relax to the sound of her soul’s song and thinks that she would tear the face off anyone who dared threaten these people.
Parker’s interest in daemonology is nearly nonexistent, with two main exceptions. First, Parker considers daemons’ sensory perceptions to be an additional level of security that they must be careful to bypass. Lesser thieves may not think of it, but many daemons have better night vision than their human halves, or have sharper ears, or noses sensitive to fainter traces of odor. Pit vipers can see heat, like an infrared camera. Parker prefers heists where they don’t ever come near people, or ones where they are in and out so fast it doesn’t matter what the security daemons notice, but they’ve got as many tricks for fooling daemons as they do for fooling motion detectors. So yeah, Parker learns about daemons, but it’s more zoology than daemonology, really— they are not concerned with what the daemon’s form or attitude might reveal about the content of the person’s character, just what it might sense about their presence in a heist.
Second, Parker instinctively tracks predators. Not the same way Eliot does— Parker will hardly give a second look at one of the big cats, for example, and Boudicca herself doesn’t ping any of their fear buttons. Parker’s too large to be a reasonable meal for the mockingbird, and too small to be appealing to either of the canid daemons. But a dragonfly is a nice source of protein for a raccoon, so it’s Leia who makes them the most nervous, at least in those early days.
(Macaques eat dragonflies too, though it’s not their preferred diet. Archie has never mentioned it. Parker has never forgotten.)
There are a few other things they notice— dog daemons, irritatingly common, make them anxious in a way they steadfastly refuse to think about, and though they never trust anyone, they especially don’t trust anyone with a squirrel shape. Overall, they are no worse at reading animal-form emotions than they are at reading human-form— which is to say, worse than they are at understanding hieroglyphics, on both accounts. Eventually, Sophie takes them under her wing (they snicker at the pun) and under her guidance, they slowly build up a codebook of sorts, a checklist of things to look for to help inform a guess about what a person is going to do. It covers human expressions first, since there’s a lot fewer of those to memorize than a million different kinds of animals, but eventually they learn enough to fake it most of the time. Between Boudicca and Brigid, they start to relax around dog-people.
As for Hardison— Hardison never once tries to encage them, never tries to own them, never tries to rush them. Hardison lets them tie him up so they can teach him how to get himself free, and Parker doesn’t need Sophie to tell them that this is what trust looks like.
Until he started working with the team, Hardison didn’t think all that much about daemons. Oh, sure, he’d notice them in person, and he’s self-aware enough to distrust his instinctive recoil from anyone with a daemon form that preys on raccoons or the heebie-jeebies he gets from insect daemons.
(Oddly, even when they’d first met, he’d never had that flinch from Boudicca or Also Parker, though a wolfdog could easily have a raccoon for dinner if not for breakfast and dragonflies have more appendages than he’s usually comfortable with.)
But most of Hardison’s criminal career— hell, most of Hardison’s social life, too, before the team— had been online, where no one could see each other’s daemons. Hardison and Leia prefer fantasy video game universes where there aren’t any daemons; Leia finds it insulting that most video game avatars treat daemons as an accessory in character creation, like eye shape or hair color, that allows for personalization without meaningfully impacting character stats at all. Hardison's been gaming for years with a half-orc paladin whose never mentioned their daemon's form, though he occasionally chimes in on the voice chat to celebrate their victories. Sure, yes, Hardison knows that Sir Argarack the Dragon-livered has a fluffy Maine Coon cat IRL, the same way he knows her salary, college GPA, and sleep apnea diagnosis, but that's because he's Hardison, not because any of those things have been relevant to their friendship.
Prior to Leverage, Hardison’s main concern with daemons was the challenge they presented to identity theft. He’s never been into daemon profiling when it comes to his marks. As far as knowing someone’s most intimate secrets, Hardison will take their internet search history over the animal-shape of their soul any day.
But with the team, Hardison learns. He never does develop Eliot’s eye for dangerous daemons or threatening postures, but he and Leia become attuned to Boudicca’s body language in a way that’s almost as good. She always has an ear pointed to whatever she’s classified as the biggest threat, and they know for sure that things are getting intense when she starts grooming her front paws. He knows to follow the twitching of Brigid’s nose, and to listen for Melpomene’s song.
And as for the dragonfly— well, less than 5% of people have insect daemons and struggles to understand them are common enough that there’s a viral SNL sketch about it, but these days, Hardison has no trouble recognizing joy or anxiety or grief or glee or fury or pain in either part of Parker. He’s learned— she’s let him learn, him and Eliot both— and if he misses something, she’ll tell him sooner or later.
(It doesn’t occur to him to think about his skill at understanding Leia. He knows himself. When they had nothing, they had each other, and now that they have the others and are had by them in turn, he doesn’t need to see the arch of her whiskers or her toothy grin to know she’s as happy as he is. Sophie might watch the way Leia and Boudicca groom each other or the way Also Parker likes to perch behind Leia’s ear (parallel to the hairpin/lockpick they’d given her) with a knowing smile, but Hardison can feel the warmth of Leia’s joy in his bones.)
Nate has believed that relying on daemon-form to tell you about a person is unreliable ever since he was a kid listening to his dad dismiss anyone with a dog daemon as though you could lump seventeen percent of the world’s population into one disdained monolith. (Dogs are the single most common daemon-form by a large margin). Working in insurance, he finds further evidence for this belief. Animals, like people, are not just one thing. On one early case, he watches the senior agent he’s shadowing fixate on a woman with a crow daemon as a possible suspect— everyone knows crows are thieves— but the actual culprit has a completely anodyne turtle daemon, and Nate IDs him when reviewing personnel files at the company and spotting someone repeatedly passed over for promotion despite his high level of production with multiple notes in his file citing a lack of respect for coworkers, especially women. Nate thinks that overreliance on daemon form blinds profilers to the undercurrents of motivation, entitlement, and attitude that inform a person’s choices, and he tries not to let those stereotypes influence him.
(Tries being the operative word— he never quite gets over his impulse to shield Maggie and her delicate butterfly, even when it’s destructive to their marriage, and cat daemons’ teasing of Brigid invariably gets both their hackles up.)
Nate and Sterling argue about this for years. Sterling agrees that relying on stereotypes is foolish and short-sighted, but he maintains that the problem with daemon-profiling is that people simplify and lump related animals, not that it is inherently unreliable. Like Eliot, Sterling has a gift for identifying exact species and deducing likely behavioral patterns from that.
(Sometimes Nate wonders which man would be more offended by the comparison and snickers to himself).
Sterling would say that the senior agent's mistake was badly profiling, and that if he'd correctly identified the turtle daemon as a twist-necked turtle, which sneaks around the rainforest floor eating the eggs of other amphibians, he wouldn't have dismissed the actual culprit as quickly, especially not if he knew that twist-necked turtle males bite the females aggressively during sex. Nate counters that looking all that up for every single person is exhausting and isn't useful enough to be worth the extensive effort since you never know what part of an animal's description might be remotely relevant to their actions.
Still, when they talk about it on their own, Nate and Brigid admit to each other that daemon-profiling upsets them not solely because of its inaccuracy but because it is so deterministic, as though one’s choices are inevitable once one’s daemon has settled, like they shouldn’t hold people accountable because, well, of course they were going to be a thief, what else could you expect from a raccoon? Of course the wolfdog will be violent, the dragonfly creepy, the mockingbird untrustworthy. Sterling would snort and ask if any of those descriptions were inaccurate, but Nate knows that no one is just one thing, and people’s choices matter.
Eliot and Boudicca choose to be fiercely protective and caring.
Hardison and Leia are kind, soft in a way that terrifies Nate, and they never stop trying to be better.
Parker and her dragonfly see things in a way Nate can’t quite fathom but respects more and more with each passing job.
Nate loves to watch the ease with which Sophie and Melpomene shift between characters, her charm and charisma on full display, and he loves to hear Mel’s mixed-up song, and when he asks her to join him, she says yes, yes, and yes. And he and Brigid choose to trust her.