Ficlets x 2
Title: Signals
Fandom(s): Leverage
Pairing: Parker/Eliot
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 700
Written for: inanna1130, as part of her whedonland Heart of Gold gift.
A/N: Set in season 1.
Of all of them, Parker’s a thief in the most traditional sense of the word. Evasive maneuvers are supposed to be her thing, but she’s as slender as a whip and she cracks just as hard.
Eliot’s vision dances grey around the edges as he waits for the air to come whooshing back into his lungs. It’s been along time since anyone, let alone a tiny blonde girl, surprised him with an elbow to the sternum.
As he struggles to regain his equilibrium, he hears Parker laugh. It’s not a pleasant, polite, tinkling sound; it’s strident and too bright, like a beacon. Her cheeks are flushed with self-satisfaction, and she’s pressing her hands against her belly, presumably in an attempt to hold back the gales of laughter.
Eliot can only think of one way to preserve his dignity at this point. Parker’s eyes are crinkled up in amusement; she’ll have time to register that he’s coming toward her, but only just. Eliot steps forward.
Bending himself at the waist and settling his hands on her hips, he slings Parker over his shoulder into a fireman’s carry. She lets out an indignant squeak, but he figures she’s mostly just trying not to get dumped on her ass as he moves toward the door of his office. Eliot’s in the hallway before he realizes that he has no idea where he’s going.
Without pausing to think, he strides toward the conference room, where the table is high enough that he can drop her onto it without doing any damage.
“That was a fine opening gambit, darlin’,” Eliot says, swinging open the door to the conference room and stepping through, “but you’ve gotta have more than one move if you want to win a fight.” He punctuates the sentence by plopping her down on the table, taking care to be sure that though she’ll feel the impact, it won’t be with her head. There’s an art to it that nobody ever appreciates. Of course, most of the people Eliot ends up dropping onto hard surfaces eventually wish they had received a swift head blow.
Parker, however, just rolls onto her side and unconcernedly lifts a hand to check the elastic band securing her ponytail, as if lounging on the conference table had been her objective all along.
“Who said anything about a fight?” she asks, examining her fingernails. “I was just trying to get your attention.”
“By knocking the living daylights out of me?!” Even Parker has to see how messed up that is… right?
“Did I really do that?” Parker abandons her air of casual disinterestedness and scoots toward him, dangling her legs over the edge of the table.
Eliot looks at her wide grin and mentally curses at himself for the inability to stay mad at her. “All right. So you have my attention. What do you want?” he asks, folding his arms across his chest.
Parker looks at him with a slight tilt of her head. There’s a gleam of determination in her eyes that he’s seen only once or twice before -- when she was trying to figure out the best approach to something she was going to steal.
Eliot is so busy trying to memorize the Look that he misses it when she extends her legs from where they’ve been idly dangling from the edge of the table and wraps them around his waist.
He has to make a quick choice: step forward, allowing Parker to draw him in, or step backward, using the weight of his body to break her hold on him -- and probably end up sitting on his ass on the floor.
He moves inward, to where he’s so close, he can smell the lavender of her hair, so close that he can see the pulse along the side of her neck.
“This is a bad idea,” he warns her.
“Why?” she asks, pursing her lips.
There are a hundred answers to that question, starting with ‘Because Nate will have my balls’ and ‘Because Hardison will give me that hurt puppy look’ but Eliot doesn’t feel like having a conversation about any of them, so Eliot just does. Leans in and finds out that Parker tastes like coffee, which is faintly surprising, because he’s never seen her actually drink it.
Title: Things Chuck Should Not Be Thinking About
Fandom(s): Chuck
Pairing: Chuck/Sarah/Casey
Rating: PG
Word Count: 600
Written for: inanna1130, as part of her whedonland Heart of Gold gift.
A/N: Set in season 1.
If there’s one thing Chuck hates even more than being shot at, it’s being taken hostage. And, judging from the last expressions he saw on Casey and Sarah’s faces, they would tend to agree.
The car has a huge trunk. Well, it would have to be, to fit all three of them. And Casey practically counts as two people, so that’s all the more impressive. Like, TARDIS levels of impressive -- if only the car could dematerialize. So, major kudos to the bad guys for their uncharacteristically economical choice of vehicle.
The problem is that, despite the capacious interior, once all three of them are inside, there is less room. Significantly less room. No room at all, if Chuck is being honest with himself. His nose is mashed into Sarah’s shoulder, and he is trying very hard not to think about the way the abbreviated length of the space forces him to bend his knees until one is pinned against the wall of the trunk -- and therefore between Sarah’s legs, holding them slightly apart.
Actually, there is a long list of things Chuck is trying very hard not to think about, except the list is playing on a loop through his mind, and it keeps getting longer with each reiteration. Don’t think about how short the skirt of Sarah’s Weinerlicious uniform is. Or how she still smells delicious and kind of sweet, like corn dogs. Or how if he moves his face just a few inches, there will be breasts. (For some reason, that thought seems to reoccur more often than the rest.)
Chuck has one arm trapped under the weight of his own body, but the free shoulder abruptly begins to ache from the odd position it’s been forced into, and Chuck begins to move his arm before realizing that he has nowhere else to put his hand. There is a little bit of space for it, but that space just so happens to be on Sarah’s thigh, and given the position of his knee, that move would be unwise in the extreme.
Which begs the question -- if Chuck is having trouble finding a place to put his hand, where are Sarah’s hands? Where, for that matter, are Casey’s hands?
“How are you guys doing?” Chuck means to ask, but the puffy sleeve of Sarah’s uniform gets in his mouth, transforming the sentence into, “Hmmph owah juice noowah?” Chuck tries to bring his hand up to remove the cotton from his mouth, forgetting for a moment where they are, and bangs his knuckles hard against the hood of the trunk. He lets out a yelp that is almost as much surprise as it is pain.
“It’s okay, Chuck.” Sarah’s hand finds his in the dark, and he wonders vaguely where it came from as she massages her thumb over the back of his hand. “We’ll get out of this, I promise,” Sarah continues.
Chuck feels some of the tension drain out of his body, and as the muscles in his neck relax, he realizes that his head is sort of pillowed on Casey’s bicep. His body does a sort of involuntary jerk, except there’s nowhere for it to go, and the backs of his thighs press painfully into Casey’s knees.
“Easy, Bartowski,” Casey murmurs, his breath warm against Chuck’s ear, and Chuck feels like a skittish horse when he senses Casey’s hand splay out over his ribs. Casey maintains a steady, light pressure against Chuck’s flank, and his hand is hot even through the layer of Chuck’s shirt.
The reel of Things Chuck Should Not Be Thinking About begins to loop through his mind again, only this time it’s the extended edition -- including deleted scenes and bonus features.
Fandom(s): Leverage
Pairing: Parker/Eliot
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 700
Written for: inanna1130, as part of her whedonland Heart of Gold gift.
A/N: Set in season 1.
Of all of them, Parker’s a thief in the most traditional sense of the word. Evasive maneuvers are supposed to be her thing, but she’s as slender as a whip and she cracks just as hard.
Eliot’s vision dances grey around the edges as he waits for the air to come whooshing back into his lungs. It’s been along time since anyone, let alone a tiny blonde girl, surprised him with an elbow to the sternum.
As he struggles to regain his equilibrium, he hears Parker laugh. It’s not a pleasant, polite, tinkling sound; it’s strident and too bright, like a beacon. Her cheeks are flushed with self-satisfaction, and she’s pressing her hands against her belly, presumably in an attempt to hold back the gales of laughter.
Eliot can only think of one way to preserve his dignity at this point. Parker’s eyes are crinkled up in amusement; she’ll have time to register that he’s coming toward her, but only just. Eliot steps forward.
Bending himself at the waist and settling his hands on her hips, he slings Parker over his shoulder into a fireman’s carry. She lets out an indignant squeak, but he figures she’s mostly just trying not to get dumped on her ass as he moves toward the door of his office. Eliot’s in the hallway before he realizes that he has no idea where he’s going.
Without pausing to think, he strides toward the conference room, where the table is high enough that he can drop her onto it without doing any damage.
“That was a fine opening gambit, darlin’,” Eliot says, swinging open the door to the conference room and stepping through, “but you’ve gotta have more than one move if you want to win a fight.” He punctuates the sentence by plopping her down on the table, taking care to be sure that though she’ll feel the impact, it won’t be with her head. There’s an art to it that nobody ever appreciates. Of course, most of the people Eliot ends up dropping onto hard surfaces eventually wish they had received a swift head blow.
Parker, however, just rolls onto her side and unconcernedly lifts a hand to check the elastic band securing her ponytail, as if lounging on the conference table had been her objective all along.
“Who said anything about a fight?” she asks, examining her fingernails. “I was just trying to get your attention.”
“By knocking the living daylights out of me?!” Even Parker has to see how messed up that is… right?
“Did I really do that?” Parker abandons her air of casual disinterestedness and scoots toward him, dangling her legs over the edge of the table.
Eliot looks at her wide grin and mentally curses at himself for the inability to stay mad at her. “All right. So you have my attention. What do you want?” he asks, folding his arms across his chest.
Parker looks at him with a slight tilt of her head. There’s a gleam of determination in her eyes that he’s seen only once or twice before -- when she was trying to figure out the best approach to something she was going to steal.
Eliot is so busy trying to memorize the Look that he misses it when she extends her legs from where they’ve been idly dangling from the edge of the table and wraps them around his waist.
He has to make a quick choice: step forward, allowing Parker to draw him in, or step backward, using the weight of his body to break her hold on him -- and probably end up sitting on his ass on the floor.
He moves inward, to where he’s so close, he can smell the lavender of her hair, so close that he can see the pulse along the side of her neck.
“This is a bad idea,” he warns her.
“Why?” she asks, pursing her lips.
There are a hundred answers to that question, starting with ‘Because Nate will have my balls’ and ‘Because Hardison will give me that hurt puppy look’ but Eliot doesn’t feel like having a conversation about any of them, so Eliot just does. Leans in and finds out that Parker tastes like coffee, which is faintly surprising, because he’s never seen her actually drink it.
Title: Things Chuck Should Not Be Thinking About
Fandom(s): Chuck
Pairing: Chuck/Sarah/Casey
Rating: PG
Word Count: 600
Written for: inanna1130, as part of her whedonland Heart of Gold gift.
A/N: Set in season 1.
If there’s one thing Chuck hates even more than being shot at, it’s being taken hostage. And, judging from the last expressions he saw on Casey and Sarah’s faces, they would tend to agree.
The car has a huge trunk. Well, it would have to be, to fit all three of them. And Casey practically counts as two people, so that’s all the more impressive. Like, TARDIS levels of impressive -- if only the car could dematerialize. So, major kudos to the bad guys for their uncharacteristically economical choice of vehicle.
The problem is that, despite the capacious interior, once all three of them are inside, there is less room. Significantly less room. No room at all, if Chuck is being honest with himself. His nose is mashed into Sarah’s shoulder, and he is trying very hard not to think about the way the abbreviated length of the space forces him to bend his knees until one is pinned against the wall of the trunk -- and therefore between Sarah’s legs, holding them slightly apart.
Actually, there is a long list of things Chuck is trying very hard not to think about, except the list is playing on a loop through his mind, and it keeps getting longer with each reiteration. Don’t think about how short the skirt of Sarah’s Weinerlicious uniform is. Or how she still smells delicious and kind of sweet, like corn dogs. Or how if he moves his face just a few inches, there will be breasts. (For some reason, that thought seems to reoccur more often than the rest.)
Chuck has one arm trapped under the weight of his own body, but the free shoulder abruptly begins to ache from the odd position it’s been forced into, and Chuck begins to move his arm before realizing that he has nowhere else to put his hand. There is a little bit of space for it, but that space just so happens to be on Sarah’s thigh, and given the position of his knee, that move would be unwise in the extreme.
Which begs the question -- if Chuck is having trouble finding a place to put his hand, where are Sarah’s hands? Where, for that matter, are Casey’s hands?
“How are you guys doing?” Chuck means to ask, but the puffy sleeve of Sarah’s uniform gets in his mouth, transforming the sentence into, “Hmmph owah juice noowah?” Chuck tries to bring his hand up to remove the cotton from his mouth, forgetting for a moment where they are, and bangs his knuckles hard against the hood of the trunk. He lets out a yelp that is almost as much surprise as it is pain.
“It’s okay, Chuck.” Sarah’s hand finds his in the dark, and he wonders vaguely where it came from as she massages her thumb over the back of his hand. “We’ll get out of this, I promise,” Sarah continues.
Chuck feels some of the tension drain out of his body, and as the muscles in his neck relax, he realizes that his head is sort of pillowed on Casey’s bicep. His body does a sort of involuntary jerk, except there’s nowhere for it to go, and the backs of his thighs press painfully into Casey’s knees.
“Easy, Bartowski,” Casey murmurs, his breath warm against Chuck’s ear, and Chuck feels like a skittish horse when he senses Casey’s hand splay out over his ribs. Casey maintains a steady, light pressure against Chuck’s flank, and his hand is hot even through the layer of Chuck’s shirt.
The reel of Things Chuck Should Not Be Thinking About begins to loop through his mind again, only this time it’s the extended edition -- including deleted scenes and bonus features.