A/N: Leverage AU idea that's been floating around in my mind for a while. It's completed, but I don't want to publish all the chapters at once ;)
If the summary hasn't put you off & you're still looking for Eliot, Parker and Hardison, I'm afraid it really is for the best if you just move along, because this it mostly pre-show and centers on Sophie (and Nate).
Disclaimer: I don't own Leverage or the characters, neither am I a Historian so any inaccuracies in that department will hopefully be forgiven.
"[...] then she had had her equal consciousness that, within five minutes, something between them had - well, she couldn't call it anything but come. It was nothing, but it was somehow everything - it was that something for each of them had happened."
Henry James – The Wings of the Dove
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Boston, May 1910
Tugging the belt around her waist in place, the dark eyed grifter took in her reflection carefully. Out of the mirror, Angelique Delacroix was staring at her, face framed with a handful of escaped curls and showing a subtle hint of mischief in her smile. While her names and personalities were slipped on and discarded like the many cloves in her possession, her face always stayed the same: high cheek bones, dark, mysterious eyes rimmed with naturally long and dark lashes and a complexion that was just a hint too dark for the fashionable pale white most women were wearing these days (most rich women, that was). Others might have let themselves get discouraged by this flaw, if one wanted to call it that, but Angelique carried herself with confidence and turned her complexion into an advantage. Many of her other personas did as well, appearing exotic and carrying an air of mystery around; in different situations it came in handy to pose as a low born girl, although she had always preferred to avoid those characters. After all, money was her game and unless she needed to be a damsel in distress, ready to be saved by her knight in shining armor, those girls rarely came in handy anymore. They had, however, been what saved her many times, years ago on the Continent.
Angelique's eyes clouded with the memory of other girls and women she had been, but before the reminiscing could take her even further away from Boston, she pulled herself back into the here and now.
She had been spending quite some time here in America. It hadn't been her first time, but with all those fast changes on the new continent it only took a year or two to make it a completely different experience. While she enjoyed the general industriousness and the spirit that everyone could make something out of himself here, she knew that hear heart would always belong to Europe. Nothing could replace the decade old culture and the history of certain places and, after months in America, she longed for the Parisian opera and French fashion. Her con in Boston was almost finished – if everything went according to plan, she'd be on her way to New York by the end of the week and on an ocean liner back to London within the following days.
If everything went according to plan. She knew all too well that with her charms and good looks, she always needed a good portion of luck for everything to work out. So far, in all those years of being a grifter, she had had more luck than she probably deserved, but wherever she went, it was always painfully clear to her that it could run out any second. She took a breath so deep that her ribs strained against the corset she was wearing, and held it for a moment. Everything would be alright. Harold had been eating out of Angelique's hand since the moment he had laid eyes on her at one of those big Boston society balls (truth be told, she could have picked nearly any man out of the crowd that night, throwing them a coquettish smile and asking silly questions in broken and heavily accented English) and while she knew he was carefully planning his proposal to her, she was carefully planning how to alleviate him of a few well chosen pieces of his art collection.
Harold wouldn't even miss them. He had made his fortune in trade and hardly knew where to put all his money. To her own benefit, he had generously decided to invest chunks of it in expensive jewelry for Angelique, who enjoyed anything that shone and glittered and had cost a pretty penny that wasn't her own. The gems would add a nice sum to her own fortune if she sold them, but she hadn't quite decided yet. If she got her hands on the Vermeer and a few other, only slightly less famous Dutch painters' works like she planned to, selling those on the European black market would provide a more than comfortable cushion for her until her next adventure started. Harold, the old fool, had told her he had bought the lot of those paintings at an auction a few years ago. He paid a fortune for them, but he couldn't bother to remember their names. No one with such disregard for art should own any of those paintings, she thought spitefully, but lightened up again immediately; she was freeing them from his possession after all.
All things considered, Harold really was a good guy – she just couldn't respect anyone who didn't appreciate art. He had been the perfect gentleman the whole time she knew him, and she knew all too well how proud he was to have made a catch like Angelique. She chuckled slightly as she recalled how his face had lit up like a little boy's at the sight of his Christmas stockings when she had agreed to let him take her out for tea. Any other woman should have considered herself lucky with him, but even in his fifties he still hadn't married. All the questions she had – quite carefully – asked him about the topic he had evaded and left unanswered, which only made her mind race. Had he been jilted by a sweetheart back in his days? Or did women simply not like him? She could hardly believe that they weren't interested in him, after all he was swimming in money. Just not interested in climbing the social ladder, but the right woman would help with that. He had been incredibly shy, despite all her encouragement, when he asked her out the first few times; maybe that was the problem. Still, she had managed to get him out of his shell and she certainly wasn't going to complain about the way she had him wrapped around her finger by now. It would make her job quite easy, but she knew her betrayal would hurt him. She hadn't quite decided yet whether she would leave him a note, telling him an imaginary old lover had surprised her and swept her off her feet (and away from Harold) and she was sorry to disappoint him – or whether she should simply disappear. Usually she chose the latter, but all those times she couldn't have cared less about her marks.
Again she took a breath in an attempt to clear her mind. Harold was supposed to be picking her up to take her to dinner and then the theater in a few minutes. In fact, Angelique had told him she would wait outside her hotel for him and she was still in her room, staring at herself in the floor length mirror. She briefly rested her fingers on her belt, feeling her small waist beneath it, before smoothing out the skirt of her dress. Eyes still focused on the mirror, she reached for the hat she had already laid out earlier and carefully fixed it in her hair. The hat itself was dark, but there was a large red rose tied to its side that made her outfit just daring enough for Angelique, the mysterious French woman. Tugging at her curls one last time, she turned away at last and put on her coat, before she left her room and with it her worries and doubts behind.
.
Angelique made her mind up that night: Harold deserved some sort of closure and she would forget her grifter professionalism this one time. Well, not forget it completely, but it was going to be a risk nonetheless. She realized getting emotionally involved in her cons was a weakness, but this weakness of hers also made the characters she played more accessible and real for her (or so she liked to tell herself).
Only a few days later, she set her plan in action.
The paintings she had planned on stealing were even more easily obtained than she had thought. A big padlock secured the entrance to the storage, but all she had needed was the key. No one guarded the place and there were no other safety measures installed. Finding the big, heavy key had been the only real obstacle Angelique had faced, but even that had been a piece of cake. Harold had practically volunteered any information she had wanted out of him, and so the key had soon left a clear imprint in a bar of soap, during a venture to the powder room.
As soon as the paintings were in Angelique's possession, she dropped the forged key into the nearest river. It would be days, weeks even, until someone noticed the absence of the art she had acquired and even longer until anyone might suspect her. When that happened, Angelique would have disappeared and the grifter would be well on her way to Europe.
Mere hours later, a distraught Angelique visited Harold to tell him about Pierre, her French lover, who had come all the way across the pond to find her and beg her to marry him. How could she have refused when her heart still belonged to him? she asked with tears in her eyes, before she broke out in dramatic sobs, repeating her apology to Harold over and over again. Her confused suitor had no idea what to do and so he settled for awkwardly patting her back and telling her everything was going to be alright. When she offered to return to him the jewels he had given her during the past few weeks he refused quite gentlemanly. They had been a present after all and he wanted her to keep them as a souvenir.
Just as sudden as Angelique had appeared at Harold's doorstep, she vanished again, with tears and kisses, leaving Harold quite dumbstruck in a cloud of her rose perfume. When he called her hotel at the end of the day, she was long gone.
.
The grifter rid herself of Angelique as soon as she left Boston – partly to cover up any trace of where her path might have led her and partly because, as much as she liked the characters she thought up in her mind and gave life to, they also became rather stifling after weeks and months of being the same person. It was strange, how that happened, when everybody else was only one person all their lives, the grifter thought while watching the landscape rush by from the window of her train department. After a long con, removing the mask of her persona was always a relief; at the same time, however, she always felt like plunging into darkness. So many years of wearing masks had made her forget who she really was and so she spent those days and weeks in between personalities as Anonymous (which, of course, also had advantages).
She loved leaving places and names behind by train. The monotonous sounds and movements made it easier for the remnants of whoever she had been in the previous city to fall away from her. They left her feeling naked and vulnerable, but she was also alone in her compartment and had time to reacquaint herself with who she was and who she might become next.
This time she had already laid out her next personality like a dress on the night before it was supposed to be worn: she would exit the train and start her journey back to Europe as Sophie Devereaux, the same woman who had come to America months earlier, to visit a distant relative. The relative had unfortunately become sick, so Sophie had decided to stay longer than she had originally planned and had only left his residence after his death (which had conveniently provided her with a considerable inheritance in form of jewelry and paintings). When the grifter tried on the personality that was Sophie on the train, it felt like she was slipping on a pair of gloves – not quite new, but not properly worn in either, but she would use the days in New York to do just that: let the glove get used to her hands again, smooth itself against her fingers while still remaining a quite distinctive leather glove.
Sophie Devereaux was an aspiring actress. She had a steady income funded by her family – money that she liked to use to travel through Europe and spend on new dresses or champagne – but her real passion was acting. She devoured written plays and learned all the lines of the female heroins by heart, but at the end of the day she always had to admit that she had never actually set foot on stage. Despite her big efforts, and natural affinity to drama she had never gotten a role and yet she remained confident in her skills. Sophie was quite different from Angelique – fun loving and almost a little careless as opposed to mysterious and grave; but most importantly, she spoke perfect British English, which made the act a lot more effortless for the grifter.