Fic: With the Left Over You (2/3)
Title: With the Left Over You
Fandom: Stargate/Leverage
Rating: K+
Genres: gen, apocafic (kinda)
Recipient: mackenziesmomma
Prompt: Leverage/Stargate, Eliot Spencer and Laura Cadman, More alike than you know
Summary: Eliot Spencer is back in the US, in search of his old team. He finds someone else first.
A/N: Holiday Fic Request Meme. Yay, part two of the crossover! And no, no 'verse name for it. As you all know, if you name something, you can't kill it and you have to keep it. I have enough 'verses as it is. I ain't keeping this one. Seriously, I won't. Not... until I'm done with all the other 'verses in the queue. At least. Yes.
( For a Better World to Live in )
With The Left Over You
"Where do you go, with your broken heart in tow?
What do you do, with the left over you?
And how do you know when it´s time to let go?
Where does the good go?
Where does the good go?"
Tegan & Sara, "Where Does The Good Go"Well. Back in the good old US of A. Who would have thought. After roughly eight months out in the Sahara desert, even rundown Montezuma in the middle of Iowa nowhere seems to be Heaven on Earth. Okay, so not having to walk out into the biting cold each morning to get his share of water and gas for the day would be nice but it definitely beats having to shake sand from your sleeping bag and shaking your boots to get rid of any deadly critters in them.
It's been two weeks since he's been back and he's still amazed at how much the US is still the US. Okay, minus Hawaii, Alaska, New Mexico and Florida. Alright, and Texas as well. But after what went down before he hightailed it out of here on the next flight to Africa, he'd have expected to see the nation break up in a lot more pieces but apparently, the now centralized government had enough hold on the majority of the states to keep them together in an iron grip. It's something he doesn't like to think about.
However, he still had to go back. He just had to. There had been some talk on underground channels that there was this hacker who was giving the government a lot of trouble and people kept saying he's doing it for some underground resistance network called Takeover. Which he once knew to be a synonym to... leverage. For half an eternity he'd tried to forget his team, for their sake and his but the moment he heard about this hacker, he'd known - hoped - it would be Hardison. So he'd left the team of former soldiers and government employees and contractors he'd been roaming the desert with and made his way back to the US.
Lorne hadn't been exactly overjoyed - after all, they really needed a door gunner - but he'd understood, or at least that was what he'd claimed. He'd tried to tell himself that he didn't care what Lorne and the rest of the team thought but he'd come to like them, almost against his will, and he knew he was going to miss them.
That little Czech guy they all just called Sparks, Mehra who often gave him the impression that she was running the show instead of Lorne, Lorne who gave Mehra the impression she was running the show instead of him just so he wouldn't have to butt heads with her too often and who handed him a slip of paper with the words “If you’re ever in trouble again and need a bit of close air support… try calling this number.” as a parting gift, Keller the doc who looked too young to take care of them with basically nothing... damn. He actually misses them. Just like he still misses his old team. He should have never joined up with either of them.
Anyway. Not important now. Now it's important that he tries to get in contact with Takeover reps and finds out who's the hacker making the government wussies shit their pants. No better place in the world than this godforsaken hellhole for that. It was abandoned by the locals a couple years back and now it's one of many anonymous hideouts for all sorts of people not keen on getting in contact with government authorities. It's a passing joint where no one ever stays longer than a few weeks and he just arrived three days ago. So he's still got some time to spare before anyone notices him.
Alright. That's bullshit. Someone already did notice him. The girl who just came out of the house they threw him out of. She's rather short, walks with a slight limp and wears her reddish hair in such a neat bun every day that he's almost sure she used to be a soldier, too. She’d seen him getting thrown out five days ago and had given him a hint where to go looking for a place to crash and stow your gear safely away. Since then they’d encountered each other at rations call and inside the city… Once he even ran into her when he was trying to scout exit routes in case the local contingent of state troopers decided they needed to stock up on booze, drugs and weapons again and stage a raid into the city.
He goes back to cleaning his bag and a few other items of travelling gear. That doesn’t stop him from continuing to think of her, though. She never told him her name, just told him to call her Red like everyone else did. For some reason… she reminds him of Lorne. Something in her attitude or the way she keeps to herself and… “Hey.”
Well. He doesn’t look up from his cleaning. But he answers her. “Hey.” He knows she wouldn’t go away anyway.
There’s no answer from her for a couple of minutes but he keeps scrubbing away. She’ll say her piece, regardless if he appears interested in it or not, that much he learned in the few days he got to know her. She seems to be rather like Parker in that. It’s a thought he doesn’t want to continue.
She saves him from it eventually, anyway. “So… just wanted to tell you… there’s going to be a vacancy at my place soon.”
He looks up again. Red's leaning against pillar next to the bathtub someone put outside as the neighborhood's version of a Laundromat. Her hands are in her pockets and in the thin winter sunlight, her eyes look cold. Or maybe guarded, just like Lorne and his crew used to look so often. As she notices his raised eyebrows, she adds, "I'll be gone by nightfall. Need to keep moving."
It's not that it really surprises him. Whenever he'd seen her, she'd tried to look relaxed or at least calm but her body had always betrayed a certain amount of nervous energy. As if she couldn't bear to stay too long in one place. Just like Parker. He gets back to scrubbing his pack. Then a question slowly forms in his mind and he stops. "Why tell me of all people?"
Red shrugs. "You seemed to be a decent guy." Then there's... a twinkle in her eyes. Or maybe just the sun reflecting from an odd angle. "Are you? Decent, I mean."
He decides not to take the probable innuendo. "Used to be." At her questioning glance, he adds, "Hard to be decent when you're fighting for survival."
At that, a weird look of understanding crosses her face. Then... she sits down on the edge of the bathtub, next to him. "You weren't always on your own, were you?"
Why would she ask that, he wonders and is tempted to scowl at her and take his stuff to clean it elsewhere. But she offered to get him into the place she was staying at. It seemed a hell of a lot more decent that where he's staying at now. He grunts. "No, I wasn't. What about you?"
She's silent and he wonders if she'll cheat him and not reciprocate his generous sharing of information. It lasts for about another minute. "No, me neither." Then a pained little expression crosses her face. "Tell you a secret?" Huh? "I hate working solo."
That came... out of the blue, really. But... he's got nothing better to do than cleaning and he figures he should just play along. "Why?"
Instead of an answer, she squints into the sun for a moment. Then a shrug. "Never got used to it. Used to be a Marine on a top secret base." What, another soldier doing hinky stuff? Is there something about him that attracts them like flies? And she even elaborates after his inquiring stare, "We didn't come in pairs, we came in quartets. Working solo after that is like working with three limbs missing. Impossible."
He knows that feeling. It's his constant companion. He'd like to attribute the fact that he never got rid of it courtesy of the sudden appearance of Lorne's crew when he was just about to start letting go of his old team but it would be a lie. He's tired of lying. "I thought nothing's impossible for a Marine."
Something weird happens. Red snorts. It's not like she never smiled but she never... she never smiled. Every time something akin to a smile or a grin appeared on her face, it looked more like she was just trying not to frown. That snort, though... that was real. "Funny you should say that. My old team leader liked to say that, too."
The smile she's showing now is laced with a hint of pain. Deep, real pain. Like a wound that never really healed. The only reason he can recognize it is because he's got a few of those himself. "Miss him?"
It's almost as if Red is trying not to grit her teeth when she replies, "Like hell. Wasn't even a Marine, that one. But he coulda been." A wistful note enters her voice. It's startling how much she resembles Lorne whenever he mentioned their lost door gunner.
"What was he?" He's genuinely interested. It's been a while since the last time he was.
"Air Force." Alright, that's not what he expected. Must have been one weird base. "Never got to know what he used to fly but he had the most ridiculous call sign ever."
He's pretty sure she exaggerating. No call sign could ever be more ridiculous that Fortune Cookie. He huffs. "I heard a couple that could probably rival it."
Wow. He didn't think someone like Red could bluster like that. It's as if she's like a completely different person. Maybe, he thinks, it's the person she was before whatever caused the limp happened. "No fucking way with this one. Found out about it by accident and we could never stop calling him by it in the oddest moments after that."
Oh, yeah, sure, uh-huh. He's pretty sure he can top off whatever that guy's call sign was. "What the hell was it?"
"Fortune Cookie." Holy. Fucking. Crap. He’s pretty sure the coughing fit he just had ranks up in the top three ever in his life. Probably even second, after that one time when Parker… No. Concentrate on the moment. Concentrate on ignoring the slightly worried look on Red’s face. “Hey, you okay?"
He clears his throat one last time and then grunts, "Yeah, just... never mind."
For a moment, it looks as if she’d turn tables on him and interrogate him about what the hell that just was. He’s ridiculously relieved when she says, “Okay…” with a bit of lingering disbelief in her voice but continues, “Anyway, I gotta… get back to my place.”
She gets up and starts walking away with one last nod but after a few steps… she turns around again. “You know, I kept thinking… I don’t think you ever stopped being a decent guy. I think you need to be a decent guy.” What… is she getting at? And why the hell is it so difficult to look wholly disinterested in what she might have to say? “If you want to… I could get you in touch with a couple of other decent people.”
She… what? Did she just say… what he thinks she said? Did she just use a code for the resistance, for Takeover? He swallows. And says, “Knock yourself out.” Hopefully that was casual enough not to make her actually curious.
Thank God she just regards him with another of those searching looks and then simply nods before taking her leave again. He watches her walk away and thinks about a lonely ex-American soldier deep in the Sahara flying rescue missions for Bedouins and missing his door gunner like Red misses her former team leader. He thinks about a lonely ex-retrieval specialist sitting around in Montezuma, Iowa cleaning his gear and missing his two ex-teams. He takes out his phone. There are two calls he has to make.
The first one only gets him an anonymous voicemail recording but that’s okay. It’s all he needs. He can work with that. And Red said she can get him in touch with people who’ll maybe be able to provide more intel.
The second one… He never needed the number Lorne gave him before but he checked if it's still live only recently. He waits until Red is finally out of sight, then dials. When a familiar voice answers from the other end, he skips pleasantries to say, "I might have found something that could be of interest to you." It’s actually kind of satisfying to hear a pronounced silence from the other end for at least a minute. This is going to be… interesting, he’s sure about that.
~*~
TBC in Sometime Yesterday.
Fandom: Stargate/Leverage
Rating: K+
Genres: gen, apocafic (kinda)
Recipient: mackenziesmomma
Prompt: Leverage/Stargate, Eliot Spencer and Laura Cadman, More alike than you know
Summary: Eliot Spencer is back in the US, in search of his old team. He finds someone else first.
A/N: Holiday Fic Request Meme. Yay, part two of the crossover! And no, no 'verse name for it. As you all know, if you name something, you can't kill it and you have to keep it. I have enough 'verses as it is. I ain't keeping this one. Seriously, I won't. Not... until I'm done with all the other 'verses in the queue. At least. Yes.
( For a Better World to Live in )
With The Left Over You
"Where do you go, with your broken heart in tow?
What do you do, with the left over you?
And how do you know when it´s time to let go?
Where does the good go?
Where does the good go?"
Tegan & Sara, "Where Does The Good Go"Well. Back in the good old US of A. Who would have thought. After roughly eight months out in the Sahara desert, even rundown Montezuma in the middle of Iowa nowhere seems to be Heaven on Earth. Okay, so not having to walk out into the biting cold each morning to get his share of water and gas for the day would be nice but it definitely beats having to shake sand from your sleeping bag and shaking your boots to get rid of any deadly critters in them.
It's been two weeks since he's been back and he's still amazed at how much the US is still the US. Okay, minus Hawaii, Alaska, New Mexico and Florida. Alright, and Texas as well. But after what went down before he hightailed it out of here on the next flight to Africa, he'd have expected to see the nation break up in a lot more pieces but apparently, the now centralized government had enough hold on the majority of the states to keep them together in an iron grip. It's something he doesn't like to think about.
However, he still had to go back. He just had to. There had been some talk on underground channels that there was this hacker who was giving the government a lot of trouble and people kept saying he's doing it for some underground resistance network called Takeover. Which he once knew to be a synonym to... leverage. For half an eternity he'd tried to forget his team, for their sake and his but the moment he heard about this hacker, he'd known - hoped - it would be Hardison. So he'd left the team of former soldiers and government employees and contractors he'd been roaming the desert with and made his way back to the US.
Lorne hadn't been exactly overjoyed - after all, they really needed a door gunner - but he'd understood, or at least that was what he'd claimed. He'd tried to tell himself that he didn't care what Lorne and the rest of the team thought but he'd come to like them, almost against his will, and he knew he was going to miss them.
That little Czech guy they all just called Sparks, Mehra who often gave him the impression that she was running the show instead of Lorne, Lorne who gave Mehra the impression she was running the show instead of him just so he wouldn't have to butt heads with her too often and who handed him a slip of paper with the words “If you’re ever in trouble again and need a bit of close air support… try calling this number.” as a parting gift, Keller the doc who looked too young to take care of them with basically nothing... damn. He actually misses them. Just like he still misses his old team. He should have never joined up with either of them.
Anyway. Not important now. Now it's important that he tries to get in contact with Takeover reps and finds out who's the hacker making the government wussies shit their pants. No better place in the world than this godforsaken hellhole for that. It was abandoned by the locals a couple years back and now it's one of many anonymous hideouts for all sorts of people not keen on getting in contact with government authorities. It's a passing joint where no one ever stays longer than a few weeks and he just arrived three days ago. So he's still got some time to spare before anyone notices him.
Alright. That's bullshit. Someone already did notice him. The girl who just came out of the house they threw him out of. She's rather short, walks with a slight limp and wears her reddish hair in such a neat bun every day that he's almost sure she used to be a soldier, too. She’d seen him getting thrown out five days ago and had given him a hint where to go looking for a place to crash and stow your gear safely away. Since then they’d encountered each other at rations call and inside the city… Once he even ran into her when he was trying to scout exit routes in case the local contingent of state troopers decided they needed to stock up on booze, drugs and weapons again and stage a raid into the city.
He goes back to cleaning his bag and a few other items of travelling gear. That doesn’t stop him from continuing to think of her, though. She never told him her name, just told him to call her Red like everyone else did. For some reason… she reminds him of Lorne. Something in her attitude or the way she keeps to herself and… “Hey.”
Well. He doesn’t look up from his cleaning. But he answers her. “Hey.” He knows she wouldn’t go away anyway.
There’s no answer from her for a couple of minutes but he keeps scrubbing away. She’ll say her piece, regardless if he appears interested in it or not, that much he learned in the few days he got to know her. She seems to be rather like Parker in that. It’s a thought he doesn’t want to continue.
She saves him from it eventually, anyway. “So… just wanted to tell you… there’s going to be a vacancy at my place soon.”
He looks up again. Red's leaning against pillar next to the bathtub someone put outside as the neighborhood's version of a Laundromat. Her hands are in her pockets and in the thin winter sunlight, her eyes look cold. Or maybe guarded, just like Lorne and his crew used to look so often. As she notices his raised eyebrows, she adds, "I'll be gone by nightfall. Need to keep moving."
It's not that it really surprises him. Whenever he'd seen her, she'd tried to look relaxed or at least calm but her body had always betrayed a certain amount of nervous energy. As if she couldn't bear to stay too long in one place. Just like Parker. He gets back to scrubbing his pack. Then a question slowly forms in his mind and he stops. "Why tell me of all people?"
Red shrugs. "You seemed to be a decent guy." Then there's... a twinkle in her eyes. Or maybe just the sun reflecting from an odd angle. "Are you? Decent, I mean."
He decides not to take the probable innuendo. "Used to be." At her questioning glance, he adds, "Hard to be decent when you're fighting for survival."
At that, a weird look of understanding crosses her face. Then... she sits down on the edge of the bathtub, next to him. "You weren't always on your own, were you?"
Why would she ask that, he wonders and is tempted to scowl at her and take his stuff to clean it elsewhere. But she offered to get him into the place she was staying at. It seemed a hell of a lot more decent that where he's staying at now. He grunts. "No, I wasn't. What about you?"
She's silent and he wonders if she'll cheat him and not reciprocate his generous sharing of information. It lasts for about another minute. "No, me neither." Then a pained little expression crosses her face. "Tell you a secret?" Huh? "I hate working solo."
That came... out of the blue, really. But... he's got nothing better to do than cleaning and he figures he should just play along. "Why?"
Instead of an answer, she squints into the sun for a moment. Then a shrug. "Never got used to it. Used to be a Marine on a top secret base." What, another soldier doing hinky stuff? Is there something about him that attracts them like flies? And she even elaborates after his inquiring stare, "We didn't come in pairs, we came in quartets. Working solo after that is like working with three limbs missing. Impossible."
He knows that feeling. It's his constant companion. He'd like to attribute the fact that he never got rid of it courtesy of the sudden appearance of Lorne's crew when he was just about to start letting go of his old team but it would be a lie. He's tired of lying. "I thought nothing's impossible for a Marine."
Something weird happens. Red snorts. It's not like she never smiled but she never... she never smiled. Every time something akin to a smile or a grin appeared on her face, it looked more like she was just trying not to frown. That snort, though... that was real. "Funny you should say that. My old team leader liked to say that, too."
The smile she's showing now is laced with a hint of pain. Deep, real pain. Like a wound that never really healed. The only reason he can recognize it is because he's got a few of those himself. "Miss him?"
It's almost as if Red is trying not to grit her teeth when she replies, "Like hell. Wasn't even a Marine, that one. But he coulda been." A wistful note enters her voice. It's startling how much she resembles Lorne whenever he mentioned their lost door gunner.
"What was he?" He's genuinely interested. It's been a while since the last time he was.
"Air Force." Alright, that's not what he expected. Must have been one weird base. "Never got to know what he used to fly but he had the most ridiculous call sign ever."
He's pretty sure she exaggerating. No call sign could ever be more ridiculous that Fortune Cookie. He huffs. "I heard a couple that could probably rival it."
Wow. He didn't think someone like Red could bluster like that. It's as if she's like a completely different person. Maybe, he thinks, it's the person she was before whatever caused the limp happened. "No fucking way with this one. Found out about it by accident and we could never stop calling him by it in the oddest moments after that."
Oh, yeah, sure, uh-huh. He's pretty sure he can top off whatever that guy's call sign was. "What the hell was it?"
"Fortune Cookie." Holy. Fucking. Crap. He’s pretty sure the coughing fit he just had ranks up in the top three ever in his life. Probably even second, after that one time when Parker… No. Concentrate on the moment. Concentrate on ignoring the slightly worried look on Red’s face. “Hey, you okay?"
He clears his throat one last time and then grunts, "Yeah, just... never mind."
For a moment, it looks as if she’d turn tables on him and interrogate him about what the hell that just was. He’s ridiculously relieved when she says, “Okay…” with a bit of lingering disbelief in her voice but continues, “Anyway, I gotta… get back to my place.”
She gets up and starts walking away with one last nod but after a few steps… she turns around again. “You know, I kept thinking… I don’t think you ever stopped being a decent guy. I think you need to be a decent guy.” What… is she getting at? And why the hell is it so difficult to look wholly disinterested in what she might have to say? “If you want to… I could get you in touch with a couple of other decent people.”
She… what? Did she just say… what he thinks she said? Did she just use a code for the resistance, for Takeover? He swallows. And says, “Knock yourself out.” Hopefully that was casual enough not to make her actually curious.
Thank God she just regards him with another of those searching looks and then simply nods before taking her leave again. He watches her walk away and thinks about a lonely ex-American soldier deep in the Sahara flying rescue missions for Bedouins and missing his door gunner like Red misses her former team leader. He thinks about a lonely ex-retrieval specialist sitting around in Montezuma, Iowa cleaning his gear and missing his two ex-teams. He takes out his phone. There are two calls he has to make.
The first one only gets him an anonymous voicemail recording but that’s okay. It’s all he needs. He can work with that. And Red said she can get him in touch with people who’ll maybe be able to provide more intel.
The second one… He never needed the number Lorne gave him before but he checked if it's still live only recently. He waits until Red is finally out of sight, then dials. When a familiar voice answers from the other end, he skips pleasantries to say, "I might have found something that could be of interest to you." It’s actually kind of satisfying to hear a pronounced silence from the other end for at least a minute. This is going to be… interesting, he’s sure about that.
~*~
TBC in Sometime Yesterday.