For @thepromptfoundry's Trope Fl!p Fest day 11 'blorbo in the real world', I'm having Parker and the Leverage gang watching the news!
Parker POV, Leverage ot3 Parker/Hardison/Eliot, team as a family, <1k words, rated G, no warnings apply
Parker flops down onto the couch between Hardison and Eliot even though they're already sitting closely next to each other and there's really not enough space for her between her partners, getting comfortable against Eliot's chest and tangling her legs with Hardison's.
"Turn on the news. Please." Sophie always says you have to be friendly in a romantic relationship, so Parker is trying to remember her please-es and thank-yous. She thinks Hardison and Eliot might even notice. Sometimes.
Hardison obligingly switched the channel. A TV crew in France is standing around discussing a break-in into the Louvre, being badly translated and overly dramatified by the American news anchor in the corner image.
"Oh, are they showing the jewel theft?" Sophie leans over the couch, abandoning Nate to their game of checkers or whatever they were playing. Parker wouldn't dare let an in-progress game out of her sight like that, Nate's a cheat and she knows it. Well, they're all cheats when they can get away with it.
"There's been a break-in? Into the Louvre?!" Hardison gapes at the screen. "How'd they do it? Haven't they got top notch security in there?"
Parker snorts. Hardison can be so naive sometimes. Half the place doesn't even have cameras.
"They're pretty bad thieves," she judges as the report goes on. "They just smashed everything when they could have carefully broken into the display cases and avoided the alarm going off. And when the alarm did go off, they lost some of the shiniest parts of the loot!"
"Not very professional, I agree," Sophie nods along. "Although I can appreciate a good 'pretending we're supposed to be here' grift in the way they just walked right in, practically invisible in their high vis vests..."
"They could've done that and then still broken in properly," Parker argues, although she still thinks they could've easily stayed hidden completely. Sophie keeps trying to get them all to appreciate the finer points of a good grift, but Parker will always prefer hiding in vents and dark corners over pretending to be something she's not.
"They got caught at the airport?" Eliot suddenly exclaims, still watching the news report. "Who tries to fly commercial after a gig like that?"
"You think they got paid by someone else?" Hardison tilts his head.
Eliot just shrugs. "The loot wasn't caught with them, so either they hid it or they already passed it on to someone else, and there's no way to easily sell so quickly after the fact without having a private buyer already lined up beforehand. Someone wanted something for their personal collection, maybe they took whatever else they could get their hands on in the vicinity for extra cash..."
"They got caught because their DNA was on the things they lost on the way out," Parker pouts at the TV in professional outrage. "They didn't know what they were doing at all."
"Whoever hired them didn't know what they were doing," Nate gripes from somewhere behind the couch.
"Are we still not acknowledging that you can apparently just walk into the Louvre and walk out with a bunch of jewels like it's nothing?!" Hardison is nearly hyperventilating. That's bad, right? Like when he really didn't want to go bungee-jumping. Parker pats his hand.
"I think you're the only one this is news to," Eliot rolls his eyes at him.
Hardison reaches over Parker and pokes him. "Maybe I should improve their security for them," he muses. "We could break in, install some more cameras in their blind spots..."
Parker frowns. "Why would we stop thieves? We are thieves."
"If we keep all the shiny jewels in one place in a museum, you can get to them much more easily than when they're split up into lots of privately hidden away collections," Sophie suggests, like Parker can't tell that Sophie just likes museums and wants to talk Parker into helping Hardison with the breaking and entering part of updating the security.
Still, she isn't exactly wrong...
Ao3 • more Leverage • November fics • Prompt me!
