Summary: Secrets have a way of making their way out into the open, even when they've been hidden by the best thieves in the world with the most amazing security.
Disclaimer: I don't own Leverage, can't even steal it (not Parker here), but I do plan on borrowing it for a bit since this mischievous bunny named Plot won't leave me alone.
TEASER
These four loners that joined together with the former insurance agent had melded into a fairly cohesive team over the last few years, but they all still have their secrets. There are things that they can never tell each other even now. So, they hide those secrets away in their own special hiding places.
Parker hid her secrets in a safe guarded by multiple of her own security measures under a Federal Reserve Bank in Washington D.C. that she actually broke into once blindfolded, after she had the idea for one of the team jobs. Anyone would have to get past the security of the bank, before even thinking about getting past her own special brand of security.
Alec Hardison's secrets were deep in the darkest depths of cyberspace that no one could decrypt or hack, whether that may be the CIA, NSA, Interpol, or even Chaos (who he had caught trying once, probably thinking it was money that he'd siphoned away for an emergency stash). They were protected by viruses, wormholes, and encryptions that would take forever without knowing specifically how to shut them down and in what order to shut them down.
Eliot Spencer kept his secrets in a lock box buried in the yard of his childhood home where he lived with his mother, before joining the military, before meeting Aimee, but mostly before he became Eliot Spencer, Retrieval Specialist. They stayed there for one major reason: some of them began there and it always reminded him where he came from when he began to forget.
Sophie Devereaux, or whatever name she was going by at the time, kept her secrets locked safely away in storage units across the world, each under a different alias's names. Her deepest darkest secrets, though, were kept in a safety deposit box in Los Angeles under her true name, the one that Nate still had not earned the right to know.
Nate Ford's secrets were kept in the very last place anyone would look for his secrets, and where only one person in the world could ever actually find. He trusted his ex-wife Maggie to keep them safe forever and to tell him if anyone even came close. He still remembers placing the denial for the claim that would save his son Sam's life there in the small fire-proof safe, locked under the first statue he had retrieved from Sophie when chasing her across Europe, in his previous office at IYS insurance, and it only stayed there because it really was the last place anyone would look to find it. Eliot had told him several times that his biggest problem was that he thought too much, but sometimes he knew that thinking too much was his best security system.
They all forgot, though, that secrets have a tendency to come out, no matter how well they might be hidden.