IMPROMPTU LEVERAGE FANFICTION
So this is the story of Nate and his scarf, courtesy of errant_evermore starting me off about scarves and making the brilliant comment that she was NOW THINKING OF NATE IN NOTHING BUT A SCARF.
Which is possibly the best mental image of ALL TIME.
So then ten minute fic happened.
This is the perverted story of Nate and his scarf, a Leverage bedtime story for the ages. (Rating R.)
So of course someone like Parker would love Harry Potter, that's a no-brainer, it doesn't take a Mastermind to figure it out, and Parker's been on a bit of a downer since the chocolate fair, because getting that much of a high is a precursor to a terrible down.
Nate's never learned how to socially acceptably cheer people up because Jimmy was a bastard and his Mom died before she could teach him anything social or anything with manners, and it was Maggie who taught Nate how to say thank you and please.
Most people just assumed Nate was being a BAMF when he took presents and walked through opened doors without saying thank you, and mostly they just backed out of the way because he was scary and the son of a gangster and you did not get in the way of gangster nobility.
So, Nate never learned to cheer people up with his words, only mess people up with his words, he can only ruin people's lives with his vocabulary because he quit the seminary before the counselling parts of the seminary teaching really started, and he flunked the few parts of the course he did take, because he didn't see the point, and then Maggie taught him how alongside other things like sex.
Anyway, Nate sometimes forgets what Maggie taught him, because his head resets to that angsty space in his head where Jimmy said he would Never Be Good Enough, and thus he doesn't know how to cheer up Parker with words, so he has to go with her language and money is so generic he buys her a scarf. A Harry Potter scarf. He gets her a Gryffindor one because a Slytherin one might give her ideas, and when he gets back to the apartment with the bag in his hands Sophie's there.
They're alone, and they really don't get so much alone time any more because Eliot, Parker and Hardison are idiots who don't understand what eyefucking means, and if he eyefucks Sophie any more he's going to need to go to the opticians and get glasses, and that's really irritating. Sophie's alone this time, and Nate forgets about Parker in the face of really good sex, and so Sophie takes him upstairs and Nate drops the bag with the scarf in, and he forgets about it.
Sophie's very good at everything she puts her mind to, which of course includes sex, and she has two settings in her life, stop and GO, so now she knows she can have sex whenever she has a Nate and some privacy, she goes full tilt, and okay, Nate's a little lazy when it comes to sex. He tends to just lie there and let the other person do most of the work, because he's a bastard AND a lazy bastard at that. Most of the women he attracts are control freaks anyway, and Sophie's no different.
Only Sophie knows Nate well enough to know he's lazy, so she decides to teach him a lesson this time and hit some of her own kinks so she ties him to the headboard and has her way with him. Nate's brainless, because orgasms do that to people, and it's only as he's coming to a couple of hours later, still tied up, that he realises why his restraints are so soft.
Because it's Parker's Gryffindor scarf.
So Nate is appalled, because he can't give this to Parker now, he can't. Not when he looks at it and thinks SEX WITH SOPHIE. He can't look at it around Parker's neck and think SEX WITH SOPHIE because there would be consequences. Consequences like what's happening now, and Sophie looks at him unimpressed and suggests kleenex and his right hand because she is pooped.
Nate untangles himself, because he's that much of a BAMF, and bundles the scarf up and hides it under his bed and forgets about it (except for a week when Sophie goes to England and Nate takes up that kleenex suggestion.)
Except, Parker's terribly nosy, so of course she eventually finds the bag and Nate was careless and had gotten the matching gift bag, because he's like that, things have to match, he's neurotic and anal, but it works for him. He'd written her name on the gift tag, so he couldn't exactly say he'd bought the bag to put money in when it had a matching scarf in.
So the inevitable happens. Parker wears the scarf everywhere, and Nate can't help it, he gets hard all the time. :( He tries his best to get away with it, hiding behind the counter and sitting down to his brave 'Let's go steal an orgasm, I mean, organist' speech and one time he even pokes Hardison with his erection by accident and it's like the worst thing in the world. But Hardison bleaches his eyeballs and it's all good.
Nate's not as sneaky as he thinks and Parker's horribly observant, so she does spy his reaction to her in the scarf, and then it happens: Parker keeps showing up in his bed, naked.
Nate is appalled because Parker's the baby of the family and besides, he's friends with benefits with Sophie and he's a monogamistic kind of friend, after all. So he gently levers her out of his room, sometimes wrapping her up in clothes, or distracting her by throwing twenty dollar bills from the window, although he stops that last one because she jumps out of his window naked and his neighbourhood reputation is pretty fucked as it is.
Eventually Parker tells him she's gotten the message. Nate knew Parker was slow in real life matters, but he's chucked her out of his bed ten times already, and he really wants alone time with her scarf, dammit, with Sophie, already.
And then he goes into his bedroom and finds Parker naked again in his bed, except this time she's wearing the scarf and Nate goes a bit cross-eyed because of the scarf, he knows how soft that is against his wrists, and of course he gets hard again because it's a Pavlovian response and of course that's when Sophie walks in.
She's not impressed, at Parker naked or at Nate's erection, which Nate doesn't think is fair because she's been plenty impressed with it before. She starts shouting a little bit, and Nate tries to explain, and Parker looks grossed out at Nate's scarf love, so both Sophie and Parker leave.
Parker melodramatically drops the scarf on the ground with her exit, and Nate watches them go because Parker's still naked and despite his honour he's human after all, and then he picks up the scarf and it's just as soft as he remembers.
Nate spends a lot of time in bed with his scarf after that. It's a lot less lazy than lying on his back, but the scarf is totally worth it.
THE MAN LOVES HIS SCARF OKAY.