Author's Note: YAY we hit 30 reviews! My muse is slightly fed and I feel slightly loved. As hinted at in the title this chapter is going to be full of psychoanalysis of the characters. The reason for this is because I always read much too far into any fictional characters and the depth of the characters is how I decide whether I like a particular show or not. Because Bones and Leverage are two of my favorite shows it is no wonder that I have thought long and hard about it. I am sure I am not the only one who does this, so let me know your opinions. As always: Enjoy!

Chapter 13: From WOW to Psychology

As soon as the plane touched down the group headed to the hotel that they had agreed they would all stay in. As luck would have it there were only three rooms available and neither Booth nor Nate wanted to let the other team out of sight, the only remedy? Brennan, Sophie and Parker would share a room, Hardison and Sweets (both joined by a love of WOW and Hardison's bad ass connections and technology) would share a room and Nate, Booth and a glowering Elliot would share the suite. Elliot had already offered to stay in the rental, or even on the street, it wasn't like he hadn't done that before, but Nate insisted that he stay. These arrangements are where they spent their first night back in El Paso, the next day would start the plans to bring down McGill.

Everyone slept well that night, except for Sweets and Hardison who had spent the entire night playing World of Warcraft and watching Dr. Horrible's Sing-along Blog on the monitors Hardison had set up. Elliot, after catching his recommended ninety minutes in the bath-tub, had gone down to the gym to work out and was now in the shower while everyone else gathered in the lead men's headquarters.

"Good morning everyone," Nate opened, "today we are going to do something that none of us have ever done, we are going to work with the law." Booth wanted to scoff but, Elliot out of the room, was struck by the close-knittedness that the Leverage team had for one another. Nate was truly a charismatic leader and, if records could be believed, was an upstanding citizen until about two years ago. The fact that this insurance salesman could inspire such loyalty from a band of infamous thieves and criminals impressed the seasoned ranger.

Parker raised her hand, waiting expectantly to be called on. She was already dressed for infiltration. "What are they going to do?" she asked after being called on, "We already have a grifter, hitter, hacker and thief: there's not much of an opening for an anthropologist and FBI guy." A normal person would have added "no offence meant Dr. Brennan," but Booth guessed that Parker and Bones had that in common. Sweets had already noticed this while on the plane and had quickly jotted it in the margins of his manuscript on Booth and Brenan.

"You, Parker, are going to take the good doctor under your wing; I need you to infiltrate McGill's office and I have the sneaking suspicion that Agent Booth here won't want one of my men to go in without one of his." Nate turned to face Booth who was sitting a bit apart from the others, "And you are much too large to fit into the ducts that Parker uses, no offence. It's the shoulders," he mimed the size of Booth's shoulders on his own. "Hardison," Nate moved on, "you and Dr. Sweets are going to go through McGill's public files. Doctor, I," a look to Booth, "we want to know if you find anything out of the ordinary." The two nodded. "Sophie, meet McGill, get in good with him, make up your own character but don't oversell it, we may need you to get out of there quickly." The Englishwoman clapped her hands, excited at this order, and Nate moved his attention to Elliot who had just finished dressing and was entering the room, "You are going to go to the office with Dr. Brennan and Parker," he tossed the keys to the car he had rented, "you drive and keep them safe." Elliot nodded, keeping the women safe; it's what he did best. "Agent Booth, you're with me." When the man hesitated he held out a hand, "Unless you have any better ideas," when none were offered he continued. "Okay everyone, we all know our jobs, let's go and steal us a political figure."

Sweets concurred with Booth (had they been speaking telepathically that is), Nathan Ford did have a charismatic air about him, one that drew the once independent and mostly loner thieves together for a common goal; good . . . or what they all collectively saw as good. Though agreed that there were lapses in the law system, Sweets still wasn't fully convinced that they were only doing good, nor was he positive that Nathan Ford was out purely for the good of others. Because of the loss of his child those years ago, a death that surely he himself still felt responsible for, it was very possible that Nathan Ford was using any means necessary to launch his own personal vendetta against the "evil" in the world. When Booth and Nate left the room to work on their own plans, Sweets jotted this down in a clean notebook he had bought just before entering the plane. He as well had been looking forward to this case.

"Well," Hardison pulled his laptop into his lap, leaning back into the couch that Parker and Brennan had just vacated. Elliot had followed them out of the room. "Let's get to work, I'll find the papers and you psychoanalyze them."

Alec Hardison. Booth hadn't given Sweets much information on this guy. (Iceland wanted him in their prisons for reasons the psychologist couldn't even begin to fathom.) From everything Sweets could tell the man could have and should have turned out to be a normal, upstanding member of society. His life of crime puzzled Sweets. As best he could tell, Hardison had only turned to hacking when public and private education bored him. Schools don't try hard enough to keep intelligent and talented students amused, leading many to follow other means of education. Alec turned to the World Wide Web. Sweets didn't blame the man, in fact he felt much more comfortable with this man, guilty of everything that he was charged with, than he did with Zach, even after he found out that the doctor wasn't the one who actually murdered the man.

"Here, put this in your ear," Hardison had debated over whether to give the other team ear buds but, at the insistence of Nate (to keep everything on the up-and-up) Hardison had given in and passed one to Sweets, "you can hear everything that is going on from the others. This is how we communicate on a job, keeps us all safe."

The first thing Sweets heard was Parker saying that they had made it to the office.

Parker: no one knew if it was a first name or a last, because she had no other. There was no doubt in Sweet's mind that she deserved every warrant those countries had after her. She was talented, she was smart, she was bat-shit insane. On the plane he had discovered that she had blown up her foster parents (he still wasn't sure if she had been joking or serious about that, it was hard to tell with Parker) and that led Sweets to believe that she definitely had no role models growing up. In much the same way as Harlow's study with the Rhesus monkeys and the cases of feral children, Parker did not have much positive human interaction, and therefore her "humanness" i.e.: the way she interacted with humans in a social way, suffered greatly. It was also apparent to the doctor that her time with Nate and the rest of the gang must have helped her in this area, she seemed to have forged an almost family-like bond with the other criminals, an especially close one with Sophie, he noted. Also, her need to be touching someone or sitting next to them, showed a distinct lack of love (of course he had already hit that bull's-eye before he noticed the seating arrangement.)

"Parker, could you keep it down," Elliot was grunting, trying to keep his voice low so no one in the office would hear him, "do you want everyone to know we're here?"

Of course, Sweets had already met Elliot Spencer from his imprisonment but since then his impressions of the man had changed greatly. At first he had thought him just a thug who had aspirations of being a bigger thug but after seeing his interactions with his team, including his subordinance to Nate, Sweets now realized there was much more to the man than met the eye. It was obvious that Elliot had never had a strong father figure, which would explain his aggression, a learned trait. The fact that he was, even to his own detriment, protective of the women, must have stemmed from a deeply rooted Oedipus complex (also indicative of an absent or abusive father) which must have outlived his own mother. The man had two options: get stronger or die and he had chosen the less lethal one. The need to get away from everything that he had known, mixed in with his own experiences, Elliot had fallen into the retrieval specialist world. Sweets highly doubted that he had actively sought out this career or that he had immediately agreed to it (the doctor highly doubted that Spencer was a bad kid growing up). Though there were still many unanswered questions about the man (ones that Sweets would continue to search for) he felt suddenly less afraid of him.

A constant background noise was Sophie chatting with McGill's secretary, something about a new partnership with a bogus ranch near Ft. Worth. Her Southern accent was impeccable.

Though not often diagnosed by psychiatrists or psychologists, Sweets was almost confident in labeling her with some sort of dissociative identity disorder even going so far as to say it was a fugue. While she was fully aware of the different characters she played, it was obvious that she was a method actor. She did not merely invent her personas, she birthed them, her own self, whoever she was, being too weak, to nubile to handle the world in which she lived. Too soft to live in the real world, Sophie Devereaux was born and molded her own world which justified all of her actions. She was the real danger. She could convince herself that anything was justifiable.

On that note, she too had a lot in common Dr. Brennan. The thought made Sweets cringe.

Hardison had an array of documents on his desktop, "There ya go Doc, psychoanalyze that."

Author's Note: Thank you all for humoring my psychological ramblings. Did I miss anything? You can look forward to a normal chapter next, hopefully showing exactly what everyone else was doing while Sweets was psychoanalyzing them. Tootles and Review!