A/N: Companion piece to my Leverage OT3 wingfic, "Blue Flecked With Brown" because Jacob and Eliot are brothers and you will never tell me otherwise.
The first one, Eve sees skittering across the floor of the Annex when her three Librarians are returning from a job well done. She's been pushing them to take a few cases without her now and again, and she's proud of how well they're doing. It comes drifting past her desk, and she bends down to pick it up curiously, imagining that it blew in from outside.
It almost looks like a cardinal feather, but she doesn't think that cardinals ever get so big, since the feather is nearly longer than her hand. It is red, though, the bright red of a Crayola, with a deep streak of black in the middle of it, leaving all the edges red. When she tilts it towards the light, the red part gleams brightly, and a faint oil-slick rainbow sheen is visible on the black part. After a moment's study, she sticks it in the pen cup on her desk, thinking maybe she'll show it to Flynn later. He'll probably know what bird it's from.
One day, when she's looking for Jenkins in the stacks, Eve sees Jacob sitting in a reading nook with Cassandra. They're both holding open books in their lap and seem to be comparing something in them, chattering excitedly back and forth. Seems like they've certainly moved past their initial animosity.
The next one she finds on the mezzanine, fluttering near the railing. Eve picks it up, wondering where it could've come from. It's nowhere near the Back Door, and Jenkins would have surely let them know if anything got out of the Flying Animals section. This one is almost entirely black, with only the very edges of it red, the muddy red of clay. She spins it between her fingertips, musing on it for a moment before shaking her head and tucking it one pocket.
When she heads down the stairs, she spots Jacob sitting at Ezekiel's desk, and it looks like the thief is giving him a lesson in rudimentary lock-picking, if the padlock and bobby pin that Jacob's holding is anything to go by. She almost wants to say something, just to mess with them a little, but it's rare that they ever actually sit together and have a conversation without herself or Cassandra as a buffer, so she keeps her mouth shut and walks away.
She doesn't notice the feather under Ezekiel's desk, glossy green-tinted black with a ripe-apple red base.
When Eve shows the feathers to Flynn, he studies them in confusion for several moments before admitting he's never seen any bird with feathers like this. She asks Jenkins, too, but he informs her that the only creature with red feathers in the Library is the phoenix, and he hasn't left his enclosure since the Great Incense Debacle of 1845.
The third feather she finds is the copper-red of a newly minted penny, with uneven streaks of black running down both sides, tip to quill. It's not on the floor under a piece of furniture somewhere, no, it's tucked inside a book like an impromptu bookmark. She snatches it out of the pages and marches down to Jenkins' lab, setting it down in front of him. She can't really 'slam' down a feather, it kind of goes against the entirety of what a feather is, but she does her best. "They keep showing up, and it's starting to get on my nerves," Eve declares by way of explanation, then sits herself down on an empty chair with arms folded.
Jenkins arches an eyebrow at her, then picks up a magnifying glass and a thick leather-bound book with a title in what looks like some kind of Latin, bending to study the feather closely. Eve watches as he flicks through the pages, occasionally humming to himself, before closing the book and sitting back. "I don't know what to tell you, Colonel. I would say perhaps one of your Librarians has been playing in the costume room, but since it is real and not imitation, I don't know. Have you considered the possibility that someone here simply collects feathers? I understand that's some kind of hobby nowadays," he muses.
"But if they did, I wouldn't be finding them on the floor, would I?" she counters, frowning as she turns the idea over in her head. Jenkins doesn't handle the feather with his bare hands. Eve doesn't even notice it at first, but it comes to her attention after a moment. He uses a rolled up slip of parchment to brush it back towards her, like it's a dead cockroach instead of a scrap of flight-adapted hair. "What's up, Jenkins, you got an allergy or something?" she asks.
"No, of course not," he replies. "But unless you know what creature it comes from, Colonel, I would not suggest you handle them so directly yourself."
He sounds so completely serious that she rethinks picking up the feather that she'd brought to him. After that, she tries not to touch them quite so much, lest she end up catching some kind of magical bird flu.
When she finds another feather—a soft, watermelon red with little black lines at the tip—under a table in the Annex, she remembers what Jenkins told her about not handling them so much and uses the mini broom and dustpan they keep around in case of accidents to sweep it up and throw it away. She thinks that she sees Jacob flinch out the corner of her eye, but when she looks up, he's already gone.
She loves Flynn. Truly, she does, and she's become closer to him than nearly every one of her past partners. But that doesn't mean there aren't times when she wants to take that stupid ascot and just choke him with it. Or maybe beat him over the head with his stupid adventure bag. Stupid man.
When she turns the corner, she nearly runs smack into Jacob's chest. "Sorry, Stone, I was just—oh!" she huffs in surprise when he suddenly seizes her in a close, tight hug, his arms locked around her back. "Uhm..."
"I know you wanted him to stay, Eve," Jacob mutters softly next to her ear, resting his chin on her shoulder. "But he'll come back. He loves you too much not to."
Her arms come up around him as she blinks back sudden, stinging tears. It helps that her Librarians have stayed with her and agreed with her, but still, it hurts to know that he can just up and leave her like that. Even though she knows that Jacob is right, he'll be back, it doesn't mean she has to like it. Eve closes her eyes and lets him hug her tightly, feeling like she's surrounded by warmth and safety and a burgeoning sense of family and comfort. It's a long time before she lets go, and when she does, Jacob smiles warmly and holds up one arm. She laughs a little and knocks her arm against his.
When she goes to sit down at her desk, after Jacob's left the room, she feels something itching in the back of her shirt. After a bit of squirming, she finally gets an angle where she can reach around and pluck it free. It's a tiny fan-shaped feather, raspberry red, with a thin line of black on the very edge.
Jacob doesn't talk to anyone for nearly two solid days after the fiasco in Oklahoma; Eve wishes she'd gone with, just so she could beat the ever-loving hell out of Isaac Stone. She finds nearly a dozen feathers in those two days, drifting listlessly under chairs and in the corners, dull and bedraggled. These ones, she doesn't throw away.
Sometimes magic is so much more trouble than it is worth. She wants to slam Sam's head against the wall a few times, and she also wants to punch that stupid damn executor/demon/devil creature thing right in his damn face. Sesselman or whatever the hell he is. Finding a loophole in the contract had been quick thinking on her part, but still, her Librarians almost got killed because she was off her game. She doesn't want to think about how sick and wan they looked when Jenkins pulled them out of the tunnels; she doesn't even want to think about how they look now, still sickly and only slightly better than before. A part of her is grateful, though, thankful that all three of them are still kicking, sitting on their low cots and muttering over the cups of unpleasant-smelling tea Jenkins is dosing them with.
Eve leans back against the edge of the desk and folds her arms over her stomach, watching as Jenkins goes around, pulling the blankets over Ezekiel and rescuing his teacup before it falls, before collecting the contract and taking it away, presumably to throw it down the bottomless hole he mentioned earlier. She kind of wants to napalm it for all the trouble it's caused, but Jenkins assures her that magical documents don't work like that. Shame. Once his footsteps fade, she walks between the cots. Cassandra and Ezekiel are both asleep already, and Eve uses one foot to nudge the redhead's heels under the cot so she doesn't trip on them waking up, then leans over to tug the blankets back over the thief where they've slipped aside.
When she circles back around to Jacob, she pauses before touching his shoulder. Sesselman had looked unwontedly keen on Jacob, even more so than Jenkins; Jacob hadn't taken well to the extra attention, either. He never liked it when antagonistic magical beings tried getting up close and personal, but he'd been particularly combative towards Sesselman.
Jacob looks up at her and offers a small smile. "If I pour the rest of this down the sink, will you tell Jenkins on me?" he asks, looking down at the tea left in his cup.
"No whining if you're still hungover tomorrow," she replies, taking the cup from him, though she doesn't blame him. It really does smell awful.
He grunts as he flops back on the cot and tugs the covers over himself haphazardly. "Nah, I'll be fine," he mutters before falling asleep, snoring softly. There's a feather under his cot, a vivid crimson one with mottled black streaks down one side; she finds another, this one a glittering ruby red with little black lines on the very end, in the rumpled blankets the next day when she's helping Jenkins put the cots away. And, oddly enough, there's a little puffball of a feather stuck to the back of Cassandra's dress, and a short, silky feather clinging to Ezekiel's blanket.
When they've broken Prospero's enchantment, Eve and Jenkins are the only ones who notice that Ariel is staring fixatedly at Jacob, almost vibrating with repressed energy. And she's the only one who sees the simmering black warning glare that Jacob throws the faerie. When she finds a feather on the floor in the binding circle he'd stood in, it's singed around the edges, the original colour impossible to determine.
Eve's doing a round of the Library. She's changed back into her own clothes, which feels so very good after wearing that medieval stuff for so long; hell, just walking feels good after spending 400 years immobile. Flynn is off helping Jenkins try and locate all the scrambled rooms, too wired to sleep, the same as her. She strolls down a hallway, checking off the doors that she sees on the list Jenkins gave her when she passes a reading room tucked between two doors. She keeps walking for a moment, then has to stop, turn around, and come back, peering into the small reading room.
All three of her Librarians are on the sofa in the reading room, completely crashed out after the week they've had. Cassandra's slumped against Jacob's shoulder, her red hair spilling down his chest like some terrible wound, arms tucked around his waist; Ezekiel's completely horizontal, his head and shoulders pillowed in the historian's lap. Jacob is the only one awake, one arm around Cassandra, the other draped over Ezekiel. His eyes slide open a little to look at her. Surprised? he mouths at her silently.
She smirks and shakes her head. I knew it, she mouths back at him, and he grins once before tipping his head back against the sofa and closing his eyes again. When she turns away, when she's only seeing them in the corner of her eye, she swears that she can see some kind of shadow hovering over them, blanketing Cassandra and Ezekiel; it vanishes when she looks back, though.
When she checks in the small reading room the next day, there's a rumpled, half-crushed feather wedged between the sofa cushions. It's the colour of a ripe cherry—a real cherry, not one of the jarred ones—with a bold black stripe that's slightly off-centre.
Eve stops finding the feathers for a while, but not because they've stopped appearing. Because someone else is finding them first. Well, two someones, actually. She doesn't notice it at first, but Cassandra's taken to wearing little braids in the underside of her hair, and there's usually a feather or two tied to it, almost blending perfectly into her hair. She's made a few pairs of earrings, too.
Ezekiel doesn't keep any with him, but one time, when Eve goes into his surprisingly tidy, organised office, she's surprised to see, on the wall next to his desk is a shadowbox lined with dark green felt, full of feathers. They aren't pinned in, but the hollow quills have been carefully poked into the felt so they stay in place. They're arranged in delicately layered rows by size, from ones that are longer than her entire hand to itty-bitty ones that look like red and black dandelion puffs. Laid together like that, she can see how the red moves from one hue to the next, how the black stripes and streaks line up to make an almost-pattern.
She doesn't ask. If they want to tell her, they will. She's not their mother, and they're all adults. She trusts them to let her know if something important comes up. When she finds a stray feather, she leaves it on Cassandra or Ezekiel's desk. Sometimes she gets the distinct feeling that Jenkins doesn't approve, judging from the long looks he bends on Jacob from time to time, usually after he's found a stray feather. A part of her wants to grab the old knight and just shake him because it took them this damn long to get their heads out of the arses, do not ruin this, dammit.
He hasn't said anything yet, but if he ever feels the need to, well...he and Eve will be having a very long conversation.
Flynn asks about the feathers when he gets back, wondering if she ever found out where they were coming from. Eve only kisses him and answers with a smile, "Magic." If he figures it out, he'll do it without her help. Friends keep each other's secrets. Even if those secrets involve the occasional molting.