Archive of Our Own ^beta

2001

Alec felt a weird combination of right-at-home and out-of-place at MIT. He loved the nerdy atmosphere, where academic (over)achievement was the norm rather than the exception. It wasn't at all unusual to meet a fellow computer science student who'd built their own PC, or taken apart an electronic gadget to see how it worked. It was a welcome change from high school, where few people understood Alec's interests or appreciated his talents.

But in several other ways, it was a big shock moving from Atlanta to Cambridge. First of all, there was the weather. Alec knew before he went north that the Massachusetts climate would be harsher, but it was still hard to believe how cold the wind was. His Nana had knitted him a scarf, hat and mittens, but he found that even his warmest coat was far too thin. In his second week at MIT, he got a job at one of the departmental IT helpdesks. He spent his entire first pay-check on a decent winter coat.

Second of all, there was his new and kinda uncomfortable racial awareness. Alec came from a city where most of the population was African-American, so he found it very strange to be at a college where African-Americans made up only 10% of the student body. And beyond MIT, the city of Cambridge was pretty white overall.

He didn't experience too much blatant racism in his new surroundings, but for the first time in his life Alec really felt like a minority. He was used to being different, of course. In his neighborhood back home, he'd been labeled as a Weird Geek and as a Foster Kid. But he'd never been Black before, and it bothered him more than he'd expected.

The other thing that made him feel self-conscious at MIT was his accent; there weren't too many other Southerners around. Unfortunately, a few Northerners seemed to make negative assumptions about his intelligence based on his speech patterns. Alec knew he shouldn't let their prejudice bother him. But it was hard when he was a thousand miles from home, and desperately wanted people to respect him.

So he tried to tone down his drawl a little. Some of his classmates had fairly neutral newsreader-type accents, and he listened carefully when they spoke. Luckily, Alec had always been a good mimic. Putting on funny voices and clowning around was one way he'd made friends as a kid, when his Nana's advice of "just be yourself, honey" hadn't quite worked out.

Alec did manage to modify his accent enough that Nana noticed when he returned to Atlanta after freshman year. Of course, he couldn't help falling back into his old rhythms after spending the summer at home; it took a while to relearn his new manner of speaking when he went back to school. Eventually it became more natural, though he could never stop himself from saying "y'all". That was just too deeply ingrained...

***

Undergraduate computer science turned out to be very easy for Alec. Having dreamed for years of studying at MIT, he was actually a little disappointed! He was learning a lot of new stuff, sure, especially in the math and electrical engineering classes all computer science majors were required to take.

But in some respects Alec felt he was miles ahead of his fellow students. He just seemed to have an intuitive knack with technology that he really couldn't explain. He'd started learning how to hack at 14, thanks to his friend Willow, and he'd been fixing other people's computers for money since he was 15.

Even in a lecture hall full of very smart people, Alec quickly discovered that a key rule from high school still applied: knowing all the answers didn't always endear him to other students. So he settled into a pattern of responding when professors pointed at him, but otherwise keeping quiet. Nana would've told him not to hide his light under a bushel, but Alec figured that getting people to like him was more important than blinding them with his brilliance.

Fortunately, during the first semester there were a bunch of organized events for CS students to get to know each other. Unfortunately, it turned out that quite a few of Alec's classmates were those socially inept introverts with poor hygiene who gave geeks a bad rep. And many of the others had really narrow interests, which limited the conversational scope.

Alec could participate in lengthy discussions comparing various programming languages or operating systems, no sweat. But the arguments could get very repetitive, and nobody ever succeeded in changing anyone else's mind. It was like that West Side Story movie that Nana loved, with the PC users as the Jets and the Mac-heads as the Sharks. At least the OS Wars didn't (usually) end in street brawls and multiple fatalities...

Alec did meet an awesome girl at one of the freshman CS parties, though, and it was listening to a heated debate about open source software that brought them together. Alec, having just rolled his eyes at Jin-ho's wild claim that Linux would be a suitable OS for super-mini-laptops, glanced across the circle of onlookers and caught a pretty girl watching him. She smiled at him, and rolled her own eyes in sympathy.

She was a seriously cute redhead, and she reminded him of Willow. Remembering how talking to Willow at that science fair had worked out pretty well for him, Alec decided to go for it. So he broke away from the Linux argument, and went over to introduce himself.

Her name was Melissa, and she was from Philadelphia. She declared straight off that she was a Windows user, with her hands on her hips and a mock "Wanna make something of it?" expression. Alec hastily assured her that he was too, and then offered to get her something to drink. After a brief misunderstanding over the definition of coke vs. Coke (apparently it was a Southern thing), they spent the rest of the night sitting in the corner talking. The conversation felt natural and easy – Alec hadn't had so much fun for ages.

It turned out that Melissa was also a huge Tolkien fan, so Alec suggested that they should see The Fellowship of the Ring together the following week. Via a complex barter system, he managed to get his hands on two tickets for the sold-out 12.01am screening on opening day. Afterwards they found a 24 hour diner near the theater, and spent most of their meal discussing the movie. It was an incredibly awesome night.

He had to revise his definition of incredibly awesome after their third date, when Melissa invited him back to her dorm, told him that her roommate was away for winter break, and led him to bed. Alec was unbelievably happy (and relieved) to finally sleep with a girl. Although he was inexperienced, and super nervous, Melissa seemed to have a good time as well.

The thing with Melissa was fun, but it didn't last. Over spring break, her high school boyfriend came to visit and talked her into getting back together. Alec was hurt by the break-up, but not heartbroken. And having had one relationship made him so much more confident around girls.

He dated on and off over the next few years. In sophomore year there was Katie (engineering genius) followed by Monique (CS major); in junior year, he went out with Sandra (math student) for six months. Alec couldn't say that he'd met the perfect girl for him yet, and he didn't take any of them home to meet Nana. But he figured that when the perfect girl eventually entered his life, she wouldn't mind that he'd had some fun and gotten a little experience under his belt...

***

Having grown up in a small house full of kids, one thing Alec really appreciated about college was the opportunity for solitude. His chem student roommate Lee, a pretty cool guy, mostly split his time between the labs and his boyfriend's dorm. So Alec often had the place to himself.

He'd tried to personalize his side of the room a little. There were photos of his siblings pinned to the bulletin board, and one of Nana on his bedside table. Alec called her every Sunday, but he still missed her so much. Sometimes, when the homesickness got really bad, he wished that he'd stayed in Atlanta and gone to Georgia Tech instead. Nana seemed to be psychic, though, and a long chatty letter often arrived when he was feeling down.

She also sent him care packages: a dozen of her amazing chocolate-chip cookies, a little jar of her famous peach jam, or some brightly-colored woolen socks. He already had more pairs of socks than he'd ever need, but she still kept knitting. So Alec hung up the extras in a row along his wall, like a rainbow of yarn. It made him smile every time he looked up from his computer, and Lee seemed to appreciate it too.

The walls of his room were covered with movie posters and pictures cut out of magazines. He had pin-up girls everywhere, but not the standard mostly-naked kind (Alec was a 21st century guy: his porn lived in heavily-encrypted folders on his hard drive). Instead, there was Storm from X-Men, Scully from The X-Files, Trinity from The Matrix, and several female characters from Star Trek. His prize possession was an original Princess Leia poster he'd picked up for 50 cents at a yard sale back home.

Alec had also started collecting publicity pictures from the new hit show Firefly – especially photos of Kaylee, the super-cute ship's engineer and his favorite character. He'd fallen in love from the very first scene (the incredible battle flashback) of the pilot episode. With a crowd of other geeks, he gathered in the dorm lounge every week to watch the show.

***

Alec had deliberately decided to minimize his hacking exploits during college. Of course he still did little things here and there, to make life easier. For instance, he usually arranged a free upgrade to business class on his flights between Boston and Atlanta (it was damn hard to get comfortable in coach when you were 6'2).

He also helped his family out. Nana had gold-plated Cadillac health insurance, despite only paying rusty Pinto premiums! And when Tommy got a negative credit rating through no fault of his own (he got fucked over by a dodgy loan company), Alec hacked the records and made sure his brother's credit history was squeaky clean.

But Alec mostly steered clear of infiltrating government systems. Now he was legally an adult, the consequences of getting caught were a lot more serious. More to the point, he was getting enough mental stimulation offline these days; he kinda didn't need the thrill anymore. And anyway, knowing that he could crack the Pentagon's security in a matter of minutes took a lot of the fun out of it...

In junior year, though, Alec got involved in a different kind of hacking: the grand tradition of MIT pranks. His friend Jin-ho, the Linux devotee, roped Alec into a small but perfectly formed hack. Bill Gates came to MIT to officially open a building named after him. Thanks to Jin-ho and Alec, though, all the computers in the building's lobby booted up in Linux instead of XP, and displayed the Linux penguin logo. It was beautiful.

Junior year was also when Alec got seriously into computer games. He'd worked all summer at an IT company back in Atlanta, and saved up enough for a fantastic new desktop. It had a superfast processor and a kickass graphics card, plus a big flat screen. Honestly, it would have been a criminal shame not to use it for gaming.

Unlike some geeks who were fanatical about a single game, Alec had pretty broad tastes. He could spend hours playing a game like Myst IV, solving puzzles and exploring the beautifully realized world. But sometimes, he just needed to shoot bad guys and blow up aliens. FPS games were especially therapeutic after one of Professor Cohen's interminable systems architecture lectures. Reminiscences about 1960s-era mainframe technology belonged in an ancient history class, in Alec's opinion; Cohen was talking to students who'd never even seen a punch card.

***

In fall of 2004, one of his friends got an advance copy of the new MMORPG World of Warcraft. Alec tried it out, and got hooked immediately. The combination of MIT's spectacularly fast internet connection and his great hardware set-up meant it was all too easy to immerse himself in the gameworld for many hours at a stretch.

One of the members of his WoW guild was a 16-year-old California girl who called herself 'Mac'. She and Alec really clicked, and soon began chatting regularly in-game and via email. They lived on opposite sides of the country, but they were often online at the same time since Alec tended to stay up until at least 3am.

It wasn't a sexual thing with Mac. She looked cute in her pic, but she was too young for him. It was more a meeting of minds. Alec liked her sharp intelligence and sardonic humor, and he really admired her innovative approach to fund-raising for college – that Purity Test scam was a thing of beauty.

Mac reminded Alec of Willow in a number of ways: cute geek girl, isolated at school, and with only a few people who really appreciated her. Mac also spent some of her spare time providing technical assistance to a friend of hers, who was saving the world one person at a time.

But Veronica Mars was a part-time private investigator, helping clients for money, rather than a vampire-fighting superhero like Buffy Summers. After all the supernatural drama of Sunnydale, it was a refreshing change to see someone addressing human corruption, criminality and cruelty. And it seemed that Neptune, California had no shortage of such failings.

Mac and Alec also had something very personal in common: they were both raised by people who weren't their biological parents. When not engaged in their usual good-natured but snarky arguments (Apple vs. Microsoft, Diet Coke vs. the orange soda Alec loved, the proper interpretation of Donnie Darko, etc.), they sometimes debated which of them was worse off in the family sense.

Alec had been placed in foster care as a baby, after his mother died. He knew nothing about his mom apart from her name, Tina, and his father was even more of a mystery (he wasn't on Alec's birth certificate). Mac's story sounded like something from a soap opera: she'd been swapped at birth with another girl! She lived in the same town as her real family, but wasn't able to live with them.

So in terms of a tragic origin story, it was kind of a tie. But at least both Alec and Mac lived with people who loved them, even without understanding them or their interests. He had his Nana, while she had parents who'd chosen her over their biological daughter.

Still, Mac often talked about counting the months until she could leave for college. Alec didn't blame her for wanting to get out of a small town where she didn't fit in. He did suggest, though, that she shouldn't rule out staying in-state – she might miss Neptune more than she expected. Alec's own homesickness had diminished over time, but he still found it hard to be so far away from Atlanta.

Alec really enjoyed talking to Mac, but he had to severely curtail his online time as he neared the end of his senior year. With finals approaching, he actually needed to study. After trying and failing to play WoW for only a couple of hours a day, he eventually went cold turkey. That whole 'WarCrack' joke didn't seem so funny anymore. It got so bad that he had to unplug his ethernet cable to get any work done...

***

After graduating, Alec got a job with a software company in Boston. The work was easy, and boring, but he had to put in ridiculously long hours and couldn't devote so much time to keeping up his online friendships. He and Mac drifted apart – she had her own real-life stuff going on, especially with her new boyfriend – and eventually lost touch.

Alec endured a year of legit IT work, at four different companies. But he didn't have a lot of respect for authority, especially when the person in charge was a computer-illiterate fuckwit. So he got fired, three times in a row. He finally decided that his talents were wasted in the corporate world, and quit the last job before he was pushed.

It turned out that Alec's hacking skills hadn't rusted at all during his failed attempt at respectability – weirdly, he was better than ever. And he'd earned enough to buy himself the best hardware and software on the market. Since he could access pretty much any computer system, and successfully cover his tracks afterwards, doing it for money seemed to be the next logical step.

There wasn't exactly a handbook for joining the criminal fraternity, so Alec started small. He moved to New York, hung out on certain hacker forums and in some dive bars, and developed useful connections. He wanted to avoid violence (especially the risk of violence to himself), so he took white-collar jobs: fraud, theft, and some staggeringly complex financial scams. He built up a reputation as a guy who could hack, drink soda, and crack jokes at the same time.

Alec's offshore bank account soon had a very impressive balance, and he quickly lost count of the number of laws he'd broken. As far as Nana knew, though, he had a highly-paid job at a Wall Street investment bank. He imagined her telling neighbors and church friends about her boy's success, and felt guilty for deceiving her, but it wasn't enough to make him stop. The money was too good, the thrill was too great, and Alec figured he was old enough to start following his own moral code. If he only stole from rich folks, and nobody got hurt, then where was the harm?

***

2009

When the Leverage crew set up its HQ in LA, a few years later, Alec tracked Mac down again. She was studying at Hearst College, near San Diego, and she invited him down for the weekend. She made it clear that she had a boyfriend, but that was cool – Alec had a big crush on his teammate Parker, even if she remained sadly oblivious.

It was so good to meet Mac in person at last, and she looked great. She told him that she'd gone through some heavy shit at the end of high school, with the suicide of her boyfriend and the revelation that he'd been a mass-murdering psychopath. The first year of college had been rough too. But she seemed happy now, with an active social life, excellent grades, and plans for graduate study.

Alec and Mac easily fell back into their old argumentative friendship. They debated the relative merits of recent superhero movies, with Alec claiming that some comics were sacrosanct and should never be adapted (film-makers always got them wrong). Mac accused him of being like the Comic Book Guy in The Simpsons, which he chose to take as a compliment; that man had standards, you know? Hell, Alec didn't rule out buying a comics store himself some day, just for the old-school geek cred...

They also revisited their long-standing points of disagreement. Mac still championed the Mac, of course, and Alec had to acknowledge her point that Apple products were the shiniest. He now split his allegiance: Linux was best for hacking, Windows was best for gaming, and the iPod was the best MP3 player. Alec had maintained his loyalty to orange soda, while Mac had switched up to Red Bull. They tried to rope in her friend Wallace as a taste-tester, but he held his hands up and claimed neutrality: "I'm like Switzerland, man – leave me out of this!"

Alec really liked Wallace, who balanced his jock side (he was a great ball player) with an impressive aptitude for mechanical engineering. The two of them took Wallace's latest project, a remote-controlled helicopter, down to the beach for field testing. They debated how to further refine the design all the way back to Mac's apartment.

After hearing so much about Veronica from Mac, Alec finally got to meet the plucky girl detective that evening. She was tiny, especially from Alec's 6'2 perspective, but she had a huge personality. In that regard she reminded him of Eliot – when he turned that fierce glare on you, you quickly forgot that he was only 5'8.

As they chatted, Alec learnt that Veronica's ambition was to join the FBI. She'd already done a summer internship, and planned to go to Quantico after she graduated. Alec was careful not to disclose the true nature of his work, instead referring to himself as the Chief IT Officer for a long-established LA consulting firm. She looked understandably underwhelmed, and the conversation moved on.

Alec didn't seriously think that Veronica would turn him in, given that she'd also done many illegal things in order to help people. Still, he didn't want to take the chance. He'd been much more reckless when he was an independent operator, but now he had a team to worry about.

It was odd to feel so responsible for the safety of people who weren't family. He hadn't felt this way since he'd defended his youngest foster-sister against bullies, back in high school. Nate, Sophie, Eliot and Parker were grown adults, and far more capable of looking after themselves than little Jessie had been back then (though not so much anymore, now she'd taken up Alec's suggestion of kick-boxing classes).

But whether Alec was covering their tracks or covering their asses from the van – scanning police frequencies, disabling alarm systems, and all his other essential duties – protecting his teammates was his first priority. And he trusted them to have his back too. Alec was happy to see Mac similarly surrounded by good friends, who appreciated her talents and loved her for who she was.

***

On the drive back to LA the next day, Alec took a detour to visit The Giant Hole in the Ground Formerly Known as Sunnydale. He knew what had happened in 2003, of course; Willow had told him all about the final showdown with The First Evil. He'd been amazed to learn of the role that a certain magic amulet had played in the battle, shooting out light beams that incinerated all vampires in sight (and then caused the town to implode!). The stories about that long-lost amulet had been an important inspiration for Alec when he'd designed his vampire-killing light grenade back in 2001.

And Spike, who had been an unwilling guinea pig during the development of Alec's device, had voluntarily worn the amulet and sacrificed himself for Buffy's cause. It was so weird how these things turned out, but Alec really shouldn't have been surprised by anything where vampires were concerned...

Alec stood at the edge and looked down at the crater. Although he knew the full story, and had watched the news footage, actually seeing it for himself was still a shock. He bowed his head, thinking of all the people (alive and dead) that the Hellmouth had swallowed. Willow's beloved Tara, buried in Sunnydale, was one of them. He wondered if Willow ever came back to mourn her here, at this giant chasm that was now a mass grave.

The last 100 yards of the road leading to the crater was lined with stalls selling souvenirs and snacks. A replica of the old brightly-colored 'Welcome to Sunnydale' sign, with the population figure now reduced to zero, stood just in front of the rim fence. Tourists queued to have their pictures taken next to it. Alec rolled his eyes. Even in the face of epic supernatural catastrophe, base human nature still prevailed. It was both deplorable and strangely comforting.

Alec got back in his car, and headed north to Los Angeles. He had a date with Parker – well, kind of. She was coming over for pizza, and they'd be watching Ocean's 11 together for at least the fourth time. Alec loved the movie's snarky dialogue, and the complex cons that required such precise timing and teamwork. But he hated that the tech guy was such an outdated stereotype ("Hey, some of us have social skills, OK? We ain't all stuttering, sweaty fools").

Parker loved the pickpocket, and the Chinese acrobat, but mostly she enjoyed mocking the methods used to reach the casino vault ("State-of-the-art equipment, my ass. There's more to a decent rappelling rig than shiny metal and pretty red lights...like, I don't know, checking that the cable is the right length? And then Danny forgot to check the batteries in the trigger – what a fucking amateur!"). Parker was hilarious – and hot – when she got her rant on. Alec often found himself watching her beautiful, expressive face rather than the movie.

Yeah, it was gonna be a great night with his perfect girl. Alec couldn't wait to get home.