kashinoha asked: #70. (67%) with Hardison/Parker/Eliot!
From this ancient prompt list, because I am the worst and it took me forever to get around to this. I just want everyone to be proud of me because I almost went somewhere REALLY terrible with this prompt. Because the last episode of Leverage fucked me all the way up and I remain vengeful about that. That near miss will be obvious.
The con had unraveled at light speed. Things had gone south almost as quickly as the time Leverage Incorporated had stolen the maquettes of the David, leaving Parker scrambling to adapt their plan and salvage as much as possible. They’d managed to get the files that would prove their target responsible a fistful of deaths revolving around tainted eggs, but now Eliot’s earbud was fried.
Well. He thought it was fried—admittedly he hadn’t devoted a lot of time to checking in more detail. Between the black eye swelling on his face (bone undamaged, bruising unlikely to occlude vision), the blood seeping into his jeans from a nasty knife cut to his thigh (missed the artery, unlikely to prove lethal, would inhibit full range of motion) and the four cracked-hopefully-not-broken ribs impeding his breathing (another hit would shatter them along the fissures) and, naturally, the fact that he was tied to a chair (efficiently, they had practice), the earbud had taken low priority. If it was fried, he was going to murder Hardison with his bare hands, assuming he got out of this with both hands intact.
Also assuming that the others got out of this to be murdered, of course, which was never a certainty when someone had the forethought to take their hitter out of the equation. Eliot almost would have been reassured if the target’s hired muscle (most of them half-decent, with a small command structure of better trained mercs) was busy torturing him, because if they were occupied with him, the others would have time to get out. Instead, they had managed to knock him out with a hard blow to the head (mild concussion, vertigo manageable for motion) and left him here alone, tied up and out of play. But he was trying not to think about that, because if he thought too hard about the kind of disaster that could befall Hardison and Parker when he wasn’t there to take the hit for them, he got a little lightheaded (possibly the concussion, more probably a mild anxiety response). So the dead earbud had to take a back burner to getting the fuck out of here and finding the other sixty-seven percent of Leverage International.
