A/N: Because Eliot and Tessa's relationship can be explained entirely through Meat Loaf songs. Leverage and Eliot Spencer aren't mine, and Tessa Quinn doesn't belong to anybody but herself. Rated T for language.

Tessa Quinn shouldered her rifle, checking to make sure her boots hadn't left any prints on the carpet of the general's office. The job hadn't really been her style - if it'd been up to her, she would've simply snuck in and slipped a fast-acting undetectable poison into the brandy that the general drank every evening - but the money had been good, and her client had stipulated that he wanted the general shot through the heart. Work was work, she'd decided, and the fact that the general was a truly vicious son of a bitch was an unexpected perk. Until she had the reputation to pick and choose her jobs, she'd have to play by other people's rules once in a while.

She pulled herself up into the air shaft, her slender frame easily supported by the metal ducts. She'd come in through a window in one of the third floor rooms, but she made it a policy never to take the same route in and out of a job after she'd nearly been caught last year. From the blueprints of the military complex, she could crawl through a few hundred feet of ductwork and end up at the intake vent along the west perimeter of the building. It would be another half a mile to her stolen getaway vehicle, which she'd hidden off the road in a thick copse of trees; an easy hike for a hunter who ran ten miles a day as part of her regular routine.

The general's office was on the ground floor, as was the intake vent, so Tessa had expected it to be a fast escape. It probably would have been, too, if the ducts hadn't run through the building's makeshift prison area.

The laughter was what caught her attention. Plenty of sounds were normal for that part of the building, but laughter wasn't one of them. She weighed the risk of stopping to find out what was going on against the potential risk of not knowing the situation and decided to make a brief detour, sliding noiselessly into a side duct with a ventilation grate that looked down into the room where the laughter was coming from.

There were three uniformed men there; guards, most likely, since this was the area where they held their prisoners. They were standing around a rough-hewn wooden table, onto which they'd strapped a shirtless man who was mumbling words she couldn't quite make out and bleeding from half a dozen deep cuts on his chest. Even from her vantage point in the rafters, she could see the prisoner's flushed face and the fevered glaze of his startlingly blue eyes. His wounds were likely infected, which explained his nonsensical babbling. He was probably delirious.

Tessa considered her options, wincing in sympathy as the guards attached alligator clamps to the semi-conscious prisoner's skin. Electroshock torture was an unpleasant way to die. With a barely audible sigh, she moved her rifle's stock up to her shoulder, bringing the prisoner into her sights. It was far too dangerous to try and rescue him, and he might well be as evil as the man she'd just killed, but she couldn't just leave him there to suffer. It might be days before the guards tired of their games or he succumbed to the infection. She could put him out of his misery and be out of the building before the guards even realized what she'd done. Her finger was tightening on the trigger when she finally understood the words he kept repeating.

"Daddy, please…"

The guards let out another spate of laughter and Tessa froze. Maybe the guards thought they were the cause of that anguished plea, or that the prisoner was pleading for his father to help him. Tessa knew better, and the words cut straight to her heart. How many times had she begged that way, said those same words in that same voice, terrified and helpless?

One of the guards flicked his hand across the prisoner's chest and another cut appeared, blood running in rivulets where the guard's knife had sliced his skin. The prisoner moaned and something inside Tessa snapped.

The guard who'd cut him was the first to die, collapsing with a wet gurgle as Tessa's bullet transected his trachea and lodged in his spine. The other two were dead before the first guard hit the ground, one with a bullet through his eye and the other with a hole in the middle of his forehead. Tessa kicked out the grate and dropped eight feet to the dirt-covered floor, landing with a jolt that she barely felt through her haze of fury.

Up close, the prisoner was in even worse shape than he'd seemed to be from afar. She grabbed the first guard's knife from the ground, cutting away the restraints and disconnecting the prisoner from the clamps they'd attached to him. She didn't bother to call herself ten kinds of fool for delaying her own escape or for firing her rifle from inside the ducts, where even the muted sound from her silencer would echo and might alert the rest of the guards. There would be time for self-recrimination later, assuming she survived this particular lapse in judgment.

Getting the man up into the ducts was nearly impossible, given his half-conscious state, and eventually she had to shift the heavy wooden table over to the vent and stand on it in order to shove him up into the ductwork. She considered just leaving the table there, since she'd already made a complete mess of things, but ingrained habit forced her to return the table to its former position. She did take the opportunity to lift a few items from the dead guards before taking a running jump at the vent opening and pulling herself in, closing the vent grate behind them.

Dragging him through the ducts was relatively easy, since his bare skin was slippery with sweat and blood and didn't offer much resistance in the way of friction. Through some minor miracle, they made it to the intake vent without being caught or hearing any alarms going off, but Tessa knew it was just a matter of time before either the dead guards or the dead general were discovered.

Once she'd clambered out of the shaft onto the grass outside, she pulled the injured man out after her. He blinked up at her and she realized for the first time how good-looking he was. Or would have been, anyway, if he hadn't been covered in blood and grime.

"Look at me," she said suddenly, putting her hands on his shoulders and willing him to focus as he started to slump forward. They absolutely could not afford for him to pass out right now. "Hey. Listen. I know you're hurting, and I'm trying to help you, but we're going to have to go a little further before we're out of trouble. We have to go through those woods, all right? And I'll help you as much as I can, but I'm not big enough to carry you, so you're going to have to walk. Can you do that?"

He moaned again, wordlessly, but nodded.

Tessa exhaled sharply. "Good. Let's go."

She put his arm around her shoulders, wincing at his muffled cry of pain. Both of his shoulders had extensive bruising that suggested they'd been recently dislocated, but there wasn't anything she could do about that now. At this point, his only choices were to stay here and die or go with her and have a fighting chance at living through this.

When she stood, he stood with her, and as she started out toward the car, he leaned heavily on her but managed to stumble along beside her. She couldn't help the proud little smile that tugged at her lips. Whoever he was, he was a fighter.

The trip to the car wasn't anything like the pleasant hike she'd envisioned at the beginning of this job. She never could have managed it if she weren't far stronger than she looked, and even with that, she still couldn't have gotten him to the car if he'd been fully unconscious. He wasn't particularly tall, but every inch of him was exceptionally well-muscled, and he probably had a good eighty pounds on her.

Tessa heaved a sigh of relief at the sight of the Jeep, and together they half-walked, half-staggered the last few feet to reach it. She loaded the man into the backseat and he collapsed with a groan. By the time she had the Jeep started, he was unconscious again. Just like she'd promised herself, she cursed her own idiocy all the way back to her safehouse.

Eliot woke up in an unfamiliar bed, which wasn't particularly unusual for him. The handcuffs anchoring him to the bedstead weren't entirely unheard of either, but the IV in his arm and the bandages around his chest suggested that this wasn't merely the aftermath of a wild Saturday night.

"Good morning, Eliot."

He jerked his head to the right and saw an unfamiliar woman sitting in an armchair in the corner of the room.

"That is your name, isn't it?" she continued, closing the book she was reading and setting it aside as she rose. "Eliot Spencer. Retrieval Specialist. Most recently suspected of stealing the Sapphire Monkey of Avi-Nalan, worth nearly two million dollars, from General Korota's personal art collection." Her smile wasn't quite as friendly as he could have hoped. "I did a little research while you were sleeping."

Eliot tried to respond, but his mouth was dry and the words stuck in his throat. The woman offered him a glass with a straw in it. He weighed the odds that it held poison, then gave a mental shrug and drank from it. If she was the one who'd gone to all this trouble to rescue him from Korota and patch him up, she probably wasn't going to waste all that effort just to kill him now.

"Thanks," he murmured, his voice still rough from all the shouting he'd done while they'd tortured him.

"So what did you do with it?"

He looked blankly at her and she rolled her eyes.

"The monkey, Spencer. What did you do with the monkey?"

"I wish I'd…never met…that fucking monkey," he replied slowly, his ribs complaining with every word. The woman stared at him for a moment, disbelieving, and then dissolved into laughter. He might have still been half-dead from torture and dehydration, but that didn't keep him from noticing how beautiful she was when she laughed.

When her laughter had mostly subsided, he caught her gaze again.

"You know my name. You got one of your own?"

"Quinn," she replied, brushing her copper-colored hair out of her eyes. "This is my safehouse. I found you in the guard complex and brought you here."

He glanced around the room, approving of what he found. There was a large assortment of medical equipment, three separate deadbolts on the door, bulletproof glass in the windows, and a sniper rifle resting on the table next to Quinn's chair. The rifle was an Accuracy International AWC, and it didn't take his weapons expertise to see how lovingly it was maintained. Quinn was clearly a woman who understood the value of a good gun.

"You should see my knife collection," Quinn said, noticing how his gaze kept returning to the sniper rifle. "I'd show it to you, but I'd hate to do all this work to keep you alive just to have you die of envy."

"Quinn," he repeated, dredging the depths of his fuzzy memory for a piece of gossip he'd heard several months ago. "Any relation to the Quinn who killed Ishikama?"

She gave him a mocking bow. "At your service."

"Huh." There hadn't been any love lost between him and the Yakuza, and if assassination were an art form, he'd consider Ishikama's staged suicide to be a masterpiece. "You do good work."

"High praise, coming from the great Eliot Spencer." There was some irony in her voice, but under it he heard respect and was glad that, in this case, his reputation seemed to have preceded him.

"You have a first name?" he asked, then considered his question for a moment. It was possible that Quinn was a girl's name. "Or maybe a last name?"

She smiled wryly. "Tessa."

"Tessa Quinn." Eliot fixed the name with her face in his mind. "Pretty name. Pretty girl."

"Pretty slim chance that flattery's going to get you anything from me," she finished for him, but that smile still danced on her soft pink lips, and he couldn't restrain an answering grin.

"So, Tessa," he said, watching her expression carefully. "Any chance you're going to untie me? Or did you have…other plans?"

She blushed, which was both unexpected and charming in a professional assassin of her caliber.

"I have to go," she replied, and he realized then that she was dressed for the outdoors, a warm coat draped over one arm and a packed bag by the door. "I have another job and I can't be late. I was just waiting for you to wake up." She dangled the keys to the handcuffs from her finger, then dropped them lightly onto his chest. "From what I've heard about you, I'm sure you'll be able to get yourself out of those cuffs, steal a car of your own, and head back to your real life. This apartment is paid up through the end of the month, so stay as long as you need to. Whatever you don't use, either take it with you or get rid of it. I won't use this safehouse again."

"Wait, that's it?" he asked, frowning as she shouldered the rifle. "Not even a kiss goodbye?"

"You want a kiss?" She grinned at him, green eyes bright with mischief. "Come find me. Maybe you'll get one."

"Wait," he protested again, and Tessa paused with her hand on the doorknob. "I don't understand. Why help me? You don't even know me."

She turned to meet his gaze again, and her expression made his breath catch in his throat. It was a look he'd seen before, the kind of look soldiers gave each other when they talked about the parts of war that anyone who hadn't been there couldn't possibly understand, born of the camaraderie that came from shared suffering.

"I know enough."

By the time he'd processed what she'd said, she was gone. He stared at the closed door for a moment, then shook off his stunned paralysis and got to work unlocking the handcuffs.

Hangin' on barely, hitch a ride away
Midnight at the lost and found
Lost souls in the hunting ground
A remedy for all your ills
Midnight at the lost and found