New Leverage AU, based on this video of someone from a cat café account introducing their cats and describing what types of crime they (allegedly) engage in:
Hardison bought them a cat café instead of a brewpub.
Parker thinks it's a great idea. As soon as Hardison shared the idea with her, she started planning out the incredibly elaborate system of climbing structures, catwalks, tunnels, and hidey-holes at both cat and human scale. Hardison wasn't able to implement all of her ideas, especially not before the rest of the team arrived, but he managed a lot, including purchasing the rest of the building the original café occupied and expanding into that space.
The renovated café quickly becomes known for the fact that it is both the physically largest cat café any of the patrons have encountered and that sections of it essentially double as an indoor play structure for both kids and adults.
Hardison, as someone with allergies himself and knowing Leverage would want to bring clients here, poured a lot of thought into the cat-free and "allergy-friendly" side of the café, where patrons can enjoy all of the café's food and beverage offerings, watch the cats, and even climb a limited portion of their signature human-sized "cat tree" while remaining separated from the cats by enormous windows. The two areas are served by separate ventilation and both have thorough air filtration. The cat-free side quickly becomes popular with the remote-work crowd who like to bring their laptops and watch the cats without any actually climbing on them and their work materials. (There are also customer-free portions of the building the cats can retreat to and optionally view the customers through glass.)
Eliot and Sophie, of course, say the idea is absolutely insane. Sophie's mostly ticked off about the unilateral move to Portland and them taking on the extra burden of a (weird, niche) business (although she makes little secret of being charmed by many of the cats themselves), but Eliot is particularly incensed about the difficulties of trying to run a café that's full of animals. "Running a good café isn't child's play, you know. You planning make food on site with cat fur everywhere? You think the Health Department's gonna stand for that? Sure, you can probably get away with some kind of automatic coffee machine and prepackaged food, but that ain't a café, that's an animal shelter with a damn vending machine."
His complaints trail off as Hardison steers him into the (newly renovated) kitchen, through the airlock-style double doors from a hallway not open to the cats, each with an automatic air curtain to keep cat fur as well as cats from slipping through. The other side of the kitchen has pass-throughs and doors directly to the cat-free side of the café. The gleaming new espresso machines are already in place, along with other basic kitchen equipment, although Hardison comments that he's still researching the best ovens and layout for baking all of their pastries on-site (the printouts and notes on his research are already bundled up and ready to be "spilled" on top of the materials for their next job, in front of Eliot).
The kitchen also features several plexiglass tunnels so that cats can watch the action in the kitchen without contaminating the space. Eliot will never admit, even under torture, to making squinty eyes and kissy noises at the cats that come to hang out with him while he cooks with no other humans around to see, especially when prepping pastry in the wee hours of the morning before anyone but the cats is awake.
Finally, Nate regrets having turned Hardison loose with free rein to pick the Portland HQ. When he suggested a restaurant or something as a front, he assumed he knew the limits of what that could entail--in hindsight, he's glad they didn't end up operating out of a Medieval Times* knock-off. He's performatively grouchy about the cats, yet never seems to chase away the ones that mysteriously end up on his lap during job planning. There's one particular "shoulder cat" that seems to love nothing more than riding around on Nate's shoulders during a briefing, occasionally punctuating particularly passionate sections with supportive meows.
Another quirk the café becomes semi-known for is the prominent lost-and-found counter where patrons can try to reclaim items that have vanished from their pockets, as the cats at this establishment seem to be oddly prone to pickpocketing...
*Consciously or not, Nate is on some level aware of how much Hardison and Parker would enjoy watching Eliot "joust."
OKAY so I have two ideas about a leverage x pjo crossover and they hinge on whether or not the leverage crew are demigods are not. I also have a general one which is what this post is
leverage demigod/pjo au masterpost
I’m betting some (or all) of the leverage crew have complicated feelings about the demigod-godly parent relations. they hear through the grapevine that this 12yo has been accused of stealing zeus’ master bolt and that his mom has been kidnapped by hades and they’re like ABSOLUTELY NOT FUCK YOU
cue hijinks where the leverage crew is behind the scenes while annabeth, grover and percy are on the quest having the road trip from hell. except it’s not actually that bad??? whenever things look like they’re going to get REALLY bad something happens and the kids aren’t in a lot of danger anymore. annabeth is almost annoyed because she wants to prove her worth etc etc (love her dearly but she needs some rest (and therapy)), grover is overwhelmingly relieved, and percy is just hella confused but vibing and set on seeing his mom again
meanwhile eliot is fist fighting a minotaur and like five other monsters, sophie is seducing medusa (and it’s kind of working??? can’t blame her though sophie is a MILF), parker is planning a heist in the underworld, hardison is dusting off a pet project that’s a gadget that cloaks demigods from monster detection (good for everyone but perfect for percy), and nate is masterminding while also furiously planning a beat down speech for the big three
it’s possibility titled: the master bolt job
nate says let’s go steal a stolen master bolt or something like that
(parker: isn’t that defying the gods?
nate: we’re giving it back)
the journey ends with percy’s mom back safe and sound, nate yelling at the gods (but not before letting percy tear them a new one first. of course he lets the kid go first!!!), a new godly child support system, and camp half blood employing their first on-site therapist.
hardison teaches the hephaestus kids how to make tech that doesn’t attract monsters. eliot cooks the best dinner the camp has ever had (hestia who adores him maybe helped), the hermes kids are awed by parker (thee parker?!?). sophie instills the fear of god (woman) into mr d to treat the kids better and gives the oracle a spa day as a treat. nate helps chiron with training-life management for campers (he is NOT a role model for that but he knows what works. chiron is chuffed that this random dude is giving him advice but rolls with it because he’s a good sport)
aphrodite is enamored with the love parker, hardison and eliot have for each other. they don’t know it but she gave them her blessing 💖
still thinking about grishaverse! leverage crew and here’s my backstories
elliot was a member of an elite ravkan first army unit that did a LOT of damage to people on the border of shu han. he go disillusioned with his military and started working jobs as the hard hitter for different operations in shu han. he’s pretty much the hardest hitting known otkazat'sya in the known world. he used to run with damian moreau, a man who has an entire island nation off the coast of the southern colonies in a stranglehold. he’s not a man to trifle with, especially since he sealed his heart off a long time ago.
hardison’s family are zemenyi and he learned how to be a fabrikator at a young age with teachers on the west end of the country. when he came back in his mid-teens for a year, he realized that the family farm was heading into ruin and his grandmother and cousins needed MONEY, not him to get more training when he can learn on the job. the job might be forging documents and crafting false items and conning people, but hey, they can’t complain right? he’s sending money home. he’s blended together fabrikator techniques from novyi zem and ravka and both their orders, and more. he’s changing the game. he’s the guy you call when you need something done.
parker is fjerdan. with a druskelle for a father and a battered but angry traditional fjerdan for a mother, parker was inundated with propaganda from a young age. but she also thought it was dumb. if these people were really evil monsters, wouldn’t they JUST be monsters all the time? why would they heal other people if they were just monsters? that’s dumb. she lives in a smaller village further north than the capitol, and one day when she’s sick of it, she runs away and stows away on a ship south. she starts a pirate gang with a few other kids, and she’s the one who gets turned in when she’s at djerholm and has to spend a few months in juvie, where they’re just like BE GOOD FJERDAN WOMAN and parker’s trying to figure out how to pick all the locks and climb everything in the building
she vows never to set foot in fjerda again after she gets out, and spends most of her time running jobs in ravka and shu han.
sophie is a mystery. no one’s really sure where she’s from. some days she claims to be from os alta, raised among the richest of the ravkans. sometimes she claims to be from the southern colonies, or the southern isles, or a small family who settled on the zemeni coast- or. well. kerch, sometimes. but she doesn’t claim that much. it’s not very glamorous when you base your operations in ketterdam. she doesn’t ever play a brothel girl. it seems to be a bit of a sore spot. she can play a character from just about everywhere. and she does. she’ll play whichever role will get the job done, and she’s grifted so many different suckers across the nations of the world and stuffed away so much of their wonderful art.
nate ford IS from the barrel in ketterdam. his father is a notorious crime boss who’s finally been sealed away in hellgate, and he managed to claw his way over to the side of law and order by the grace of ghezen. he’s not a mercher himself, exactly, but he works for one who’s peddling “insurance”. it’s a fairly novel concept, but the idea is that if his clients pay this merchant, then he will spot the bill for large transactions in certain areas. home repair, ship repair, farm repair, crops, health- you name it. nate just makes sure that the claims are legitimate. they aren’t always.
but when nate’s son falls deathly ill and it seems the only way that he might survive is a trip across the sea to visit a grisha healer in novyi zem or ravka... well. the merchant who he works for AND pays for insurance won’t have it, and his son... well. that kid DIES.
and when one of merchant council’s former allies comes offering a job to retrieve “plans” that he “created” as a way to bite the merchant who killed nate’s son in the ass... well. he’s not about to turn that down. he gets a team together, fucks over both the mercher who fucked him over AND the one that used them, and then they start... running jobs only on the worst of the worst.
watch out, scum of the grishaverse. your slaving is getting revealed. your quack remedies and fake relics are getting revealed. your jurda fields are getting burned. your indentures are getting unionized. your grisha are getting freed.
OK, the idea of a soulmate au where you can't look anyone but your soulmate directly in the eyes was not done with me yet.
Leverage version:
Sophie knows all the tricks for faking full eye contact. For a third-party observer, it's nigh-impossible to tell that she's not quite achieving direct eye contact short of using cameras with very good eye-tracking software. Trying to fool a mark into thinking she's their soulmate via “eye contact” is tougher, but on a mark who hasn't met their own soulmate (and thus has never experienced true full eye contact), Sophie still has a pretty good success rate.
Every member of the team has been drafted as her fake soulmate on a con at least once. Or, at least, Sophie has tried. Parker failed to pick up on any of the hints Sophie was able to drop without blowing their cover, so Sophie had to switch tactics. Hardison tried valiantly to hold the near-eye-contact, and they pulled off the job, but he was struggling and his resulting nervous blather did not help the illusion at all. Eliot picked up her cues and pulled off the illusion flawlessly… and hated every second of it. The first time they faked prolonged eye contact, he ducked away to Nate's bathroom the second they got in the door, and Sophie (slightly insulted) wondered if he was going to throw up. He didn't, just practically boiled his skin off in the hottest shower he could stand.
Nate is by far Sophie's most frequent “soulmate” on the job… None of the rest of the team are entirely sure whether the eye contact is fake or not, and neither Nate nor Sophie is telling.
Parker has never had any interest in making eye contact, and was genuinely unaware that this was a serious thing people actually believe in. (Sure, people talk about finding their “soulmate” through eye contact, but people also talk about summoning Bloody Mary through the bathroom mirror. That doesn't mean it's real.)
The first time she looked directly into Hardison's eyes was both accidental and jarring. She averted her eyes and assumed they would never mention this uncomfortable situation again. She was not expecting Hardison to suddenly want to have an intense, excited conversation that was clearly loaded with some meaning she wasn't picking up on, and she definitely wasn't expecting him to do so while trying to eagerly stare into her eyeballs.
When Eliot happened to walk in, she latched onto him like a spooked cat, demanding he do something about Hardison; there was something wrong with him, like he's possessed or something; make him stop!
Eliot has habitually avoided even the possibility of eye contact with anyone since he was in high school. (He certainly wasn't trying to lock eyes with people even before that, but, well, he and Aimee had tried once, back when they were young and naive and thought maybe they were meant to be. They weren't.) In his line of work… it was better not to know. There was just no way that would end well.
He doesn't have anything against other people finding their soulmates, though. Really. So he's not quite sure why there's such a bite to his words when he snaps at Hardison to knock it off—that “soulmates” is no excuse for trying to look someone in the eye when they don't like it. But he's sure he can feel a headache forming as he's stuck between Parker's “'Soulmates'! Ha! …Oh, come on. You're kidding, right? That's not real” from one side and Hardison's horrified “Oh my god, I'm sorry! Parker, I am so, so sorry—I was just so excited, you know? I didn't realize—” start of what was clearly going to be a long and heartfelt apology on the other.
Hardison thinks soulmates are very romantic, and he's always hoped, you know? He tries not to talk too openly about it—dreaming of finding your soulmate was deemed “girly” and “wussy” by the popular boys at his high school, and he had more than enough targets on his back for bullying as a kid without drawing attention this one.
He's always kind of thought he'd probably never find his, if he even had one. He did so much of his socializing with like-minded people online, and you can't make eye contact—not real eye contact—over a webcam. There have been some near misses that made his heart flip (Hell, back during that first Dubenich job, when Eliot had taken out all the Pierson guards and then given him that smug little smirk, for an instant—just for an instant—Hardison had almost thought their eyes met directly. He must have imagined it, too caught up in the incredibly sexy and unexpected display of competence on display in front of him to avoid a split second of daydreaming about what it would feel like to look straight into those incredibly blue eyes. Anyway, it had never happened again, and after working together for so long, they surely would have looked each other in the eyes by now if it were possible.), but no dice.
Until now. Parker, though… Even while apologizing (he should have realized to be more careful with Parker), Hardison could barely keep the absolutely giddy smile off his face. There had been no mistaking that, and god when people talked about “getting lost” in their soulmate's eyes… Wow, they weren't kidding!
Nate will expound at length about how the concept of “soulmates” and consequently the act of making eye contact have been exploited and commercialized for all of recorded history, the absence of any scientific evidence that the rare ability to make eye contact with another person actually correlates with any real measures of relationship compatibility rather than being a random biological quirk that has been superstitiously fetishized, and (if the person who brought it up isn't desperately trying to escape the conversation yet) whether the concept soulmates is compatible with Catholic theology.
Very few people last long enough through his disparagement of the entire concept to notice that he has skirted around ever actually saying whether or not he's ever made direct eye contact with another person, and even fewer are willing to risk touching off another lengthy tirade to press him on the matter.
Hear me out: Elliot, son of Hermes. Ares and Zeus and stuff all make sense but his official title is "retrieval specialist". He's a messenger, just a very violent one. Also the way he slips into grifting so easily reads like a little but of trickster blood to me.
Hello! I saw a post of yours saying you have a Leverage Hell AU series on Ao3. Any chance I can get the link to that? Thanks!
☠️ Warning ☠️: Consumption of Hell AU may result in Leverage brainrot and compulsions to write angsty fic. Experts* recommend against consumption of large doses of this AU in a short period of time, particularly for new users who do not know how they will be affected. Certain lines in this AU have been identified by the state of the comments section to be hazardous to human health. Writing while under the influence of Hell AU may pose a risk of spreading this contagion to others.
Please consume responsibly.
We Have Never Had a Hitter (That Wasn't Actually Moreau's)
How it started: *Browsing for a movie to watch last night.* The Lost City (2022). Hmm, don't recall hearing much about that. Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum? OK. Romance novelist and cover model get thrust into a jungle adventure due to kidnapping. OK, that sounds worth a try.
How it's going: (in discussion of the AU of Mr. Quinn having a romance-novel-writing hobby:) "And, lo, in the midst of his turmoil, Finn heard a voice echoing out of the heavens (sounding remarkably like Elias, although Elias was sound asleep on the other side of the campfire), saying "Have you considered just letting them peacefully enjoy each other's company for a while with no ninjas? Huh?! Maybe share a home-cooked meal and then later a kiss that they're not gonna second-guess and get all weird and sad about? You ever think about that?!?!" And as he got up to do an extra patrol in case the ninjas had figured out how to disguise themselves as mysterious sky voices, he also started to wonder if maybe, just maybe, Elias really could feel the same about him."
The Discord chat has been wild (delightfully so).
If any allos sensed a disturbance in the Force last night, it might have been the three aspecs "yes, and"-ing absurd "romance" plotlines about the fictional characters/alter egos of a fictional ace romance novelist who has zero canonical links to either romance novels or being ace. If it's any consolation, at least one of our (also fictional) presumed-allo characters is pretty upset about it, too.
