So I was watching The Beantown Bailout Job a while back and this little bunny grabbed ahold of my ankle and drew blood it bit so hard. Nasty little bugger it was. Anywho, so I know in movies they use little charges to make it look like people are getting shot, but my thought was that the charges Hardison designed for the job were stronger than they needed to be? After all, he thought he was designing something to blow chips out of marble and concrete. He's also a hacker, not an explosives expert.
As this was being written, Intelligence came out, aired thirteen episodes and was cancelled. *insert frustrated noise here* Listening to Josh Holloway's accent and the fact that his character was Delta Force and Eliot is implied to have been in a spec ops unit, my brain morphed the plotline into this little gem. It's a scary place in there sometimes.
For those unfamiliar, the premise of Intelligence is that Gabriel Vaughn has a computer chip in his head that can connect to the information grid and can create lifelike 'renders' in his mind and treat them like physical places. He can use the chip becaue he has a rare gene. He is protected by a secret service agent named Reilly. That's all you really need to know to make the crossover bits make sense.
Disclaimer: Hi, my name is galimeril and I am a graduate student with no money. Leverage is a wonderful show and if I owned it, Eliot would have a much larger role. He would also be shirtless a lot. I guess that means we're all sad that I do not own it. Please don't sue me. I am also only borrowing the world of Intelligence. Owning it would mean it wouldn't be cancelled.
As always, my work is unbeta'd. I love getting feedback and helping feed my fellow hurt/comfort junkies. ConCrit is always nice, but be aware that I only write fanfiction when I'm supposed to be doing something else . I rarely take the time to go back and rework previously written stuff. I am forever grateful to those who take the time for well thought out reviews. Thank you for reading my work!
Eliot flinched as Hardison's icy fingers smoothed out the adhesive on the second charge on his chest. He really hoped this worked or he was going to get shot for real. Again. It was not his first choice.
He listened over the com as Nate tried to snow the marks but he didn't seem to be getting any traction. Sophie slipped the detonator into his pocket next to the state trooper badge as Parker started taping ketchup sachets onto the already-affixed, questionably stable explosives. As the two finished their work, Eliot yanked his shirt back down and started towards the entrance.
"Soph," he whispered as he jogged. "Soph, make sure you shoot me before they do."
He didn't see her strained smile as he muttered a silent Please.
He approached the doorway with none of his usual caution and ducked behind the nearest thing big enough to mask most of his bulk. He fought down instincts honed over years behind enemy lines as the mobsters closed in behind him. He pretended not to notice until they were far to close. The struggle was brief and ended with him being frog-marched into the main floor of the warehouse. Eliot didn't care for the extremely exposed area, but this wasn't Myanmar and snipers weren't really the mob's style.
He put up a token struggle as he was thrust into a chair that creaked ominously. "I hope you know what you're doing." The murmur through his clenched teeth didn't carry far and Nate didn't look at all confident as he began to frisk the younger man. Eliot pretended dismay as the badge was snatched and triumphantly displayed to the assembled personages. He briefly closed his eyes as the criminals began to debate over who would be the one to blow him to kingdom come. It was unsettling to see the mousy banker taking over the role of nastiest SOB in the room.
Just as he was starting to think that Sophie had missed her cue he caught sight of her rounding the corner and raising her arm. They made eye contact as she pointed the useless weapon at him and he triggered the first explosive.
BANG!
FUCK! That hurt a lot more than he had been expecting. He glanced down in shock and then pushed his natural response to the pain aside, just as he had been taught to.
He triggered the detonator twice more as Sophie continued her advance and threw himself over the side of the chair. He hit the concrete hard and he fought to stay still as his shoulder popped out of socket and his vision greyed around the edges. He closed his eyes to sell the grift, or so he told himself, and made himself be still. He fought down a flinch as Nate's fingers crept over his chest, searching for the non-existent wire. The pain whited out his senses to the point where he didn't even feel Nate lift his phone.
He tenuously held onto consciousness as the con progressed. He listened for any indication that it was spiraling out of control and he needed to be resurrected but it seemed he wouldn't need to tag in. He heard footsteps approach and stop near his head at Nate's reluctantly impressed, "Ok, how'd you do it?"
Slowly, oh so slowly, he rolled himself up onto his elbow and nudged the detonator forward. Nate quirked his brow. "And the blood?"
"Ketchup packets!" came Sophie's chipper explanation.
"Not all of it," Eliot muttered as he pushed himself the rest of the way up and tried to twist so that he was laying on his back. He groaned as ribs ground against one another and aborted his attempt. His shoulder let him know in no uncertain terms that it was very much against the idea of trying that again.
Nate and Sophie realized something was wrong when their hitter didn't rise from his prone position.
"Eliot? Eliot! What's wrong?"
He wasn't even sure which one was speaking anymore, as they laid hands on him and tried to help him turn over. His body instinctively arched away from the pain as his control began to slip away. His head bounced off the floor and suddenly there was a rush of images flying before his eyes and the pain ratcheted up to beyond even his formidable threshold. He screamed as more data rushed him and his mind began to shut down to protect itself.
His screams tapered off as the rush cut off as quickly as it came, leaving him wrung out and trembling. He gasped as his failing consciousness sent out a subconscious plea for help, recognition… anything. Nothing made sense anymore but as the blackness claimed him, he was sure he heard an answer. Hold on, brother.
"Gabriel," the strangled whisper was the last thing to pass the hitter's lips as the tension slowly bled out of his body and he sagged against Nate's supporting arms.
"Vaughn! Gabriel! What the hell are you doing?! We're not suppos- Gabriel! The safehouse is that way! Gah! Why do I bother? I fucking hate you."
Riley sprinted after her asset as he continued to move down the creepy row of warehouses. She had no idea what had him all riled up. One minute they had been talking like normal human beings and then he had gone all bird dog on her. He had even gone into the point stance before snaking around her and running off to god-knew-where. She was seriously thinking about turning in her badge so that she could just shoot him herself.
He finally stopped beside the entrance to a building that was identical to the other ten they had just run past to her eye. With only a cursory glance and a hiss of "Cover me, there's no cameras in there," he was taking point and breaching.
Yep. Murder. She was so going to do it. Slowly.
She wasn't really surprised to find the warehouse occupied, though she did wonder how the hell Gabriel had known that it wasn't empty if there wasn't a way for him to see inside.
He was closing in on a man and woman who seemed to be bending over something. They didn't notice the approach as their backs were to Gabriel. Still, she didn't think much of their situational awareness…
"Get away from him!"
The barked order surprised her, but not nearly as much as it seemed to startle the couple. The woman whipped around, snapping to her feet as she raised a pistol, the man remained on the ground where he seemed to be cradling a third party, though he did have the audacity to glare in what he clearly thought to be a menacing fashion.
The woman's voice was cool as she stepped into Gabriel's firing line. "No."
Interesting.
"Gabriel… who are these people?"
She didn't miss how the woman's eyes shifted to her when she heard her partner's name and the man's eyes narrowed further. Riley's own weapon drifted lower as she spotted the blood-stains on the unconscious third man. "And what the hell happened to him?"
Gabriel radiated tension and his accent was thicker than she had ever heard it when he answered. "Don't know about the other two, but the one bleeding out is my brother and so help me God, if she doesn't put up her weapon I'm going to drop her where she stands. Get. Away. From. Spencer!"
Well. That wasn't quite what she had been expecting to hear. To her surprise, the first one to answer was the woman. "Brother?" She whispered. "Eliot doesn't have a brother, does he?" She directed her uncertain gaze toward the men on the floor.
"Gabriel," Riley hissed. "Something's off here. They're not hurting him –"
"She shot him!" Gabriel barked. "I saw her do it!"
"Noooo! I didn't! I…"
The posh accent was cut off when the man holding the unconscious brother finally spoke up. "Okaaay. I think this is all just a bit of a misunderstanding. We all want the same thing here – to take care of Eliot. So, why don't we all just holster our guns and talk like civilized folk."
Riley wasn't paying attention to him anymore. "How? How could you see it? You said there were no cameras in here."
Gabriel's eyes flicked to her before settling back on the still form steadily dripping red on the floor. "He showed me. I saw it… He- he- I think he's like me, Riley."
Her mind spun with the implications. Another chip? Why hadn't they known about this before? Another successful implantation would have meant another asset, invaluable to Cyber Com. She made a decision and hoped she wouldn't regret it.
"Gabriel, if we want to help him we're going to have to compromise here. Lady, drop the gun and we won't shoot you. I'd listen to the man who says he wants to help. Believe me, you try anything - if he doesn't shoot you, I will."
The darker-skinned woman carelessly dropped her weapon on the ground. "Careful, Sophie! You can't just go dropping guns like that!"
"Honestly, Nate! Do you think Eliot would have given me a loaded gun? Especially one I was going to point at him?!" snapped Sophie as she helped Nate lower the injured man the rest of the way to the ground.
Not loaded? Gabriel growled low in his throat but tucked his gun in his waistband as he started forward.
"You were bluffing!" Riley gaped as she lowered her sidearm as well.
"Yes, I do that a lot actually. Now are you going to help or keep staring?"
The harried explanation for the situation came out as Gabriel's KBAR sliced neatly through the unconscious man's shirt. He winced at the spectacular array of color that marred the expanse of skin. The blacks and purples of deep contusions were layered over fading yellows and greens from earlier impacts. The deepest bruising seemed centered around the three sluggishly bleeding holes in Eliot's chest. Gabriel could see now that they weren't the bullet holes he had initially feared, but they needed attention.
He was running up against the fact that he had never needed to be the field medic with Eliot around. He chipped several helpful medical references as he gently traced the misshapen shoulder. This, at least, he knew how to fix. If I wasn't put back soon, Spencer was going to have to have yet another round of surgery to rearticulate it. He grasped the shorter man's forearm and told the hovering man with the broken capillaries and watery blue eyes to help him brace Spencer. The last thing he wanted was to do this twice.
"Wait, wait! Should you be doing that?"
"Honestly? Probably not, but I remember how he was after Sudan and I'm not putting him through that again."
"Wha-?" Gabriel didn't give him time to respond, he just pulled hard and re-aligned the joint. He heard an oddly satisfying slurping squelch that made his assistant – he took a moment to chip his face – Nate Ford, go even paler than his Irish complexion normally warranted.
The jolt of pain seemed to pull Eliot closer to the surface if the stuttered groan was any indication. Gabriel leaned forward and tapped Eliot's face as he called out to him. "Browncoat! Hey Browncoat! You with me, soldier?"
"…'changel?" Startling blue showed against the otherwise dusky features and Gabriel brushed aside a stay lock of hair as Eliot continued to revive. "Archangel? Th' hell are you doing here? What hit me? My head feels like Silver used me ta t'ch slp'r holds 'gain."
"One question at a time, all in due time. Now, I need you to give me an honest sit rep, can you do that for me?" Eliot's eyes flickered to Nate and then to the hovering women. "You can trust my partner. Do you trust them?" Gabriel questioned pointedly.
"They're fine, Archangel."
"Well alright then. Can you move? What's the damage?"
"Aside from ringin' m'bell pretty good, everything else should be fine healing on its own. Gonna need some help with the ribs, though. Feels like you already put my shoulder back. Thanks for that – that surgery's a bitch. I don't know how far I'll get, but you know the old saying – when you can't walk…"
"Yeah, I know it. Just lay here a moment. We'll take you to our safehouse and patch you up. Riley, can you grab the car, please?"
"Gabriel, I'm not leaving you alone with them!"
"Riley, it's gonna take more than a grifter and an ex-insurance investigator with an empty gun to take me out. Although," he turned his gaze downwards "they seem to have done quite a number on you."
"Shut up, Archangel." The protest was weak and Eliot's eyes were already drifting shut as streams of data began rushing back into his mind.
"So… your brother, huh?"
Gabriel closed his eyes as he turned to face the nosy bastards surrounding Spencer's bed in the safehouse. They had doubled in number and it had been a tense ride over. The con-artists had kept crowding him as he worked over the still form in the back of the van they had offered up. The blonde had absolutely no sense of personal boundaries and made Gabriel extremely twitchy when she kept slipping behind him to watch his fingers twine bandages over the fresh stitches. Spencer kept a well-stocked med kit, as always, for which he was extremely grateful at the moment.
"Half-brother," his exhausted mutter echoed through the uneasy silence. He ignored the thieves and focuses on Riley. "Apparently we share the same father. We didn't find out until someone in our unit needed a bone marrow transplant. We all took the test to see if we were compatible and we came up sharing too many chromosomes to not be related. Spencer grew up on the reservation with his mom."
He ignored the snoops for the moment because Spencer's eyelids were starting to flutter and the last thing he needed was his brother ODing on data again.
"Spencer? Spencer! Hey, Browncoat, you in there!"
The hacker behind him twitched at Eliot's call sign and began to mutter about Spencer holding out on him.
As Eliot came back online, Gabriel kept up his soothing stream of chatter to ground his brother-in-arms to the analog plane of existence and the present. The startlingly blue eyes swept around the room and took in the tableau before him.
Gabriel's own gaze defocused as the memory of the first time they brought the chip online was called forth. It was a vivid one, to be sure.
The medical team had finally decided he was fully recovered from the latest series of surgeries and tests. It was time to take their new toy out for a spin – so to speak.
He swung his legs over the cot in his recovery room and shivered as the recycled air hit his bare chest. He took a deep breath as the doctors and techs surrounded him and began attaching various leads and monitors to his person. He resisted the urge to push them back as they pressed in far too close for him to feel comfortable. He endured the seemingly endless rounds of questions and typing that seemed far louder than he thought those tiny plastic keys had any right to be.
One by one, the doctors and techs drifted away and it was just Gabriel standing tall as Amos' fingers jittered over the final lines of code. He was jabbering on about the Packers game and watching the news the night before. He whispered that there had been a murder of some daytime cable actress, doing his best to make the obviously uncomfortable man at ease by bringing him up to speed on current events, as Gabriel had been denied access to any and all forms of electronics for the last month and wherever this bunker was, it didn't exactly have a subscription to the New York Times.
"You ready, man?"
A curt nod was his only response. A final sequence of commands was entered and then, even Amos was gone.
Gabriel lost track of time as he stood still, waiting for the software hiding in his skull to boot. He didn't notice as the walls began to merge into an indistinct grey blur and his eyes began to water. His drifting thoughts suddenly became a lot more pointed as
He staggered to the side as a new wave of information flooded his senses with overlapping datasets. He couldn't focus and he didn't know how to turn off the bytes being jammed between his own thoughts and memories.
Hands reached out of the swirling colors and fragmented images, gripping his shoulders. His training kicked in and he lashed out blindly…
He caught the wild swing as Eliot lurched off the bed and used the contact to sync into a shared render. Eliot's gaze skittered around the blank walls and shadows Gabriel had conjured up. "Where are we? What did you do, Gabriel?"
"You had the gene too, didn't you?
Eliot's gaze sharpened. "This isn't real, is it?"
"Oh, it's real alright. It just exists in my head. Yours is a bit too delicate to be sharing space in right now. That's one hell of a concussion you've got right now."
"Hm. They didn't tell me it could do that. How'd they rope you into CyberCom?"
Gabriel felt his eyebrows twitch at that. "I volunteered, like everyone else in the program. I'm surprised I didn't know about your involvement. I was told the only one who survived the initial attempts was paralyzed."
"I was for a while and wasn't that a bitch. It never worked and eventually, I recovered. Not surprised they didn't tell you it was me – probably thought you'd change your mind or somethin'."
Gabriel resisted the urge to shake the younger man. There was something he was holding back.
"Don't, Gabriel. I recognize that look. Leave it alone. You don't need to know the details leading up to the chip. Just tell me, are they going to leave me alone? Are you going to force me back now that it's online?"
The shorter operative looked pained at the thought. Without seeming to realize it, he took control of the render and the sterile landscape morphed into a warm room with a large set of display screens. Gabriel was pulled along on deceptively strong current of emotion as Spencer accidentally pushed his memories of the last few years into the shared headspace and dragged him through the death of Spencer Cahill and the rise of Eliot Spencer and finally the birth of just Elliot. Elliot who kept them safe on their jobs to offer leverage to those who had no recourse and made sure they all had at least one good meal a day. Elliot who was learning to be happy and how to love again...
He hesitated. It was his duty to report the new asset to CyberCom, but he also had a duty to his brother…
"Nah," he managed, "you seem to be doing pretty good work here."
Spencer -Elliot now - he corrected himself, gave him a sharp look but nodded, taking the gift horse for what it was.
"That being said, you don't know how to control it. It's going to do some serious damage unless you get a lot more training than I can give you befo-"
"I don't want it!" The vehement declaration took him by surprise.
"Eliot, without the training you'll probably lose your mind!"
"No! I don't want the chip at all! Our lives are hazardous enough without the fucking insanity that comes with tech like this. If people get wind that this fucking thing is operational, they're going to come after me even than when it was just a cool microprocessor that they could dig out of my head. And, if they come after me, they're going to go through my team. Can't you just turn it off? How did it even get turned on in the first place?!"
Eliot's furor caught him off guard and the render crashed.
Gabriel came back to himself surrounded by five intense stares and one vacant one. Eliot's eyes wandered around the room, briefly alighting on faces but never focusing, too lost in the flood of data that he had no hope of processing. He shook his head and pulled Reilly aside. After a brief debate that was no less heated for all that it lacked in volume, and regrettably evaded Sophie's lip reading, Gabriel pulled away and went back to sit beside Eliot's bed.
He took in the small family before him. This was the life his brother had found happiness in, he would do everything he could to help protect it. "Eliot is very special. He has a piece of tech in his head that I am going to help deactivate. Know that it is his wish that I do so. I don't know what's going to happen when I do. Don't touch either me or him while I'm working or Reilly will shoot you, clear?"
The hacker started forward like he was going to put himself between the siblings but a hard look and restraining hand from the group mastermind had him and the others nodding their reluctant agreement. He could feel the little blonde's unabashed stink-eye on his back as he gripped his brother's face and pressed their foreheads together.
The render found him back in warm room and he found Eliot in the kitchen, his long hair scrunched behind a bandana and puffing into a halo around his face as the steam played with wayward wisps.
"Eliot."
His attention snapped up to Gabriel's face. "Can you turn it off?" The hope writ across the angular features damn near broke the older man's heart.
"I can try," he said, at last. "We developed a way to disable a rogue chip, but I can't guarantee what will happen once I turn it off and the process is not going to be pleasant."
Eliot's face darkened as he nodded to his brother. "I can take it. Do it."
Gabriel plunged forward into the render, sinking beyond the instinctual visualization and in a move worthy of The Matrix he accessed his chip's twin's operating system. He teased apart the strands of programs and found the interface between the ganglia and the protein-coated contacts. Carefully, oh so carefully, he linked the chips together and pushed a small command from his own memory into the string of code that made up the program he was visualizing.
He sabotaged the interface protocol that allowed information and input to flow between the chip and the host brain and with a final mental twist, he slotted the new command into place and dropped out of the render as Eliot's body arched off the bed and his screams rent the air.
He wrenched himself away from Eliot, trembling too hard to stay in the chair. He slid, boneless, down to the cheap carpeting and tried to assuage his rebelling stomach. The screams cut off as abruptly as they began and a tension in his mind that he hadn't even realized was there suddenly eased. It had worked.
He took Reilly's proffered hand and pulled himself up. Eliot looked dizzily around, his eyes at last taking in the people crammed into a room not meant to hold seven people. They come to rest on Gabriel.
"Thank you, Ga-" His heartfelt gratitude is cut short by a blonde cannon ball launching onto the bed and hugging him in a manner that bordered on homicidal as the rest of the team crowded in and began bombarding the battered form under the covers with questions. Rather than linger, as he so badly wanted to, he pulled Reilly towards the door.
"This safehouse is blown, Reilly," he declared more loudly than was strictly necessary. "We can't stay here. Nobody else should be showing up either," he added as he pushed the protesting agent out the door. He leveled one last lingering look on the group behind him before he stepped out of his brother's new life.
"I knew you were holding back, you bastard!" Gabriel tensed and moved to intervene. "BROWNCOAT?! I knew you liked Firefly! What other nerdy pleasures have you been mocking me for while you secretly enjoyed them?! I bet you…"
The tirade faded as he pulled the door shut behind him. with a smile Spencer was in good hands and would be taken care of. He had his own mission to complete and an agent to appease before she went nuclear. It was shaping up to be a good day.
Here ends our tale. If you were confused: Gabriel chooses to stay out of Elliot's life because he's afraid the people he works for will force Elliot to turn the chip back on and work for them. I hope you enjoyed my little foray into two new fandoms and my first crossover! Please drop a review if you feel the work merited it. It's always helpful to hear what you guys liked and what you didn't. Thank you for reading and if I don't see ya – good afternoon, good evening and good night!
galimeril ;D