Written for commentfic for the prompt: Leverage, any, the Leverage team uses a collective Dread Pirate Roberts-esque system. (as in, they find & train replacements to carry on their legacy.)
They all get doubled eventually. It starts on a job with Parker meeting a 12-year-old girl named Kimmie with no one and nothing, and it's just too hard to convince Parker that they're not enough like a family to keep her. They see why Parker can't let go; the girl has blonde hair that falls in her face, and the same stubborn, confused look when things don't go her way.
Parker tries to teach her to steal, Sophie tries to teach her to grift, Hardison tries to teach her to hack (but just ends up playing WoW with her), but nothing takes. She has little talent for it, and less desire. Nate tries not to worry about whether they are warping this young mind, but he is quite outvoted.
Nate thinks that Eliot will be on his side at least, and at first Eliot is, and he's nice to the kid but tries not to get too close since as soon as they find someone they know personally to adopt her, he figures she'll be gone. Eliot gets it; they can't just leave her to someone who seems decent on the surface, especially given the crap parental figures most of the crew had, but secretly Eliot hopes maybe Maggie can be convinced to raise the girl. He talked about it with Sophie, and even she agreed that if Parker could be convinced, that might be best for the girl.
But then one day, Kimmie is just sick of hearing Hardison talk about which Chief Engineer best understands Star Fleet technological innovations, and she punches his shoulder.
His chair falls over and so does he.
She looks terrified for a second, like she thinks they're going to kick her out.
"I'm okay," Hardison says, springing back up to reassure her.
"Sorry," she says.
"It's fine," Hardison promises, but she doesn't believe him and she looks panicked still. She is about to run into the other room when Eliot blocks her way.
"We need to talk," Eliot says, solemnly.
"I won't do it ag-" she tries to say, but Eliot interrupts.
"First of all, that was hilarious. Second, you have real good power, but you need to work on your form."
Kimmie just stared for a second and then nodded. Eliot offered to show her a few things, and Kimmie nodded again.
She was a natural. Alert, always aware of the exits (not for reasons they wanted to think about, but still). And she was fast and strong, and she could fall on her face a dozen times and still get up swinging. She started practicing all the time, with Eliot and alone, and it was obvious she had never been calmer or happier.
No one suggested she might want to go somewhere else, after that. Once it was clear that she thought of Eliot as the big brother she never had, once they saw that she was discovering her immense talents and her self confidence, they no longer believed that putting Kimmie somewhere else would be for her own good. And besides, they all had enough of a sense of self-preservation to know notto ever, EVER suggest it to Eliot.
They kept her out of their team jobs, and at Eliot's urging, she went to school in addition to learning to fight. But when she is 16, she gets a call from Nate. He and Parker are being held at gunpoint by an armed team, but Eliot is coming to save them. But Hardison and Sophie have just had their cover blown and they need to be extracted from a ship full of smugglers who happen to be former Special Ops. Eliot says he'll handle both, but Nate can tell when he's making promised nobody could keep, and so against Eliot's dire threats, Nate calls Kimmie, who shows up at the shipyard with her hair obscuring the youth of her features, and a grenadge belt on her jeans.
She walks up to the ship and they ask who she is, guns pointed at her.
She glares and says, evenly, "I'm Eliot Spencer."
The name rings a bell, and the men visibly have to stop themselves from taking a step back. "You're a girl," a not too bright crew member points out.
"Yeah, most people who know that? Not much for talking. Hard for them to move their jaws now," she says, voice and eyes hard as Eliot's ever were.
"What do you want?"
"Two people. On your ship. They're thieves, and they stole from my employer, and he insists on getting them in one piece so he can handle it personally," she says, and they see her muscles relaxing, her keeping her shoulders loose in case she needs to knock three of them out in the next two seconds.
"Who is your employer?"
"Someone who appreciates discretion. Now are you going to hand them over, or do I show you why so many people know my name?"
They hesitate. One bold crew member steps forward to shoot her, but the man in charge knocks him out with a butt of a gun and says, "Moron's going to get us all killed." He nods at Kimmie, then, says, "fine, we don't want that trash on our ship, anyway," and gestures to a man to bring out Hardison and Sophie. They see Kimmie there and act unsurprised when the smugglers let them go, their leader snarling, "Next time we meet, Spencer, don't expect any more nice treatment. You're just lucky we have somewhere to be."
When they get back to HQ, she fills them in, and Eliot arrives with Nate and Parker to hear most of the story. First, he yells at Nate for calling her, then at the team for getting in two messes on opposite sides of town, then more at Nate for calling her, and then yells at Kimmie for taking such a risk. They all calmly wait for Eliot to be done yelling, except of course for Kimmie who yells back, "If you don't like the way I do my job, then you can shove it right up your ass!", and she sounds so much like her mentor that the team starts laughing.
Eliot turns his anger back to Nate and says, "You see? You see what you've done?"
Nate gets a look on his face, his 'big plan' look that means he's thought of something that is utterly brilliant and genius and that all of them wil hate. And he says, "What I've done is to start on the team's retirement plan... So let's go steal a team."