Tuesday: The Undead

[nevcolleil]

Hey, guys! nevcolleil here again as your guest host for the week. Today's theme is The Undead. Focus your prompts on zombies, vampires, immortals... characters who've come back from the great beyond - be creative

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Fill: Arcanum Arcanorum (Leverage) (1/2)

[metamorphagi]

Really, they should have figured it out by now. Some thieves are good, some thieves are great, but Parker’s level of perfection in all her heists should have tipped at least one of them off at this point. Sometimes, Parker thinks Eliot has some idea-the way he studies her, like he can see into every preternatural nerve fiber, every invisible mark of ectoplasm she leaves on the things she touches, the fact that once his hand moved straight through the cereal she always eats that is nothing more than an apparition (she can eat, you see, but everything tastes like ash and it’s just better for everyone if she pretends)-but he’s never brought it up.

Probably, she guesses, because he’s seen worse, and come on, she’s not a bad poltergeist, exactly.

She’s kind of surprised Hardison hasn’t clued in yet, given his proclivity to fantasy genres and determination to believe that Bigfoot exists. (Hardison accuses Eliot of messing with him when he says he’s fought aliens before-“It’s a very distinctive goo”-but Parker has a distant cousin who’s an alien, so she trusts him.)

Or perhaps Sophie should have talked to her about it, considering how great at detecting lies she is. One doesn’t become the world’s greatest grifter by having anything less than a superb sense about people. Parker considers herself the second-worst grifter on the team ahead of only Hardison, but apparently she’s better than she thought. That, or Sophie simply doesn’t want to consider the possibility.

Or Nate, who knows them all better than they know themselves, who seemingly can predict their movements and intentions before they make them. But then again, no one’s really been able to figure out Nate, so it serves that he might be blind about some things, too.

She’s honestly a little miffed that none of them have ever even approached her about the whole thing, had instead simply declared her “crazy,” that there’s something psychologically wrong with her. She's not wrong, she's just...different. She’s played along because-shut up, okay-she doesn’t want to risk losing them. Or worse, having them look at her oddly, converse with her like she’s some bomb that’s going to explode.

But then again, she’s also kind of pleased that they’ve simply accepted her skills as the best in the world. After she’d told her first four foster families about her true nature and having each of them shriek in horror and kick her out, it’s nice to have people admire her. Even if they don’t know that she sleeps best when she’s floating somewhere around the moon.