What Really Matters When The Sun Rises
Written for the prompt : Leverage, Eliot, he hates being awake at dawn
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Eliot didn't actually hate the dawn or any particular time of day really. He decided long ago to save strong emotions for things that really mattered and while dawn may not be his favorite time of day, it isn't really that awful.
Seriously, sometimes dawns can be beautiful, the colors in the sky, the sense of everything waking up, starting fresh. Then dawn is . . . optimistic, a moment to cherish all the things that might happen in the day ahead. Then again, it is rare that Eliot is that poetic or even reflective under normal circumstances.
Right now though he does actually hate the dawn. He's in one of two situations that he really hates being in when dawn comes, because both of them rob all of the optimism from everything. He's trying to reconcile himself with the fact that it's not the worst of the two but it isn't helping him at the minute.
The worst place to be at dawn is tied up in a dank basement, after the first round of torture and before they come back to try again with no way out and no one likely to come and get you. Eliot's been there and amazingly lived to not tell anyone the tale because he tries not to remember it himself, so he certainly doesn't want anyone else knowing the truth of it.
So he's not there, he reminds himself. Life isn't that bad.
Instead he's in a hospital bed, unable to sleep because he's in pain but there's no way he's having any more of those drugs the medical staff keep trying to ply him with, because who knows what he'd let slip then. He's on his own with nothing to take his focus off how bad he feels and just how much he fucked up and he hasn't seen any of the team since he was admitted so he doesn't know if anyone else got hurt.
That is the worst part of this dawn, not knowing whether anyone who really matters got hurt.