#for context connor is danny ocean and leon is rusty ryan

[scoringeffects]

Culd you do a drabble of connor/leon in the ocean's 11 au?

"Tell me this isn't about him"

send me a drabble prompt to kickstart me into eventually finishing a hrpf wip!

“He’s like a machine,” Holloway says, as they watch Eichel greet high rollers on the casino floor, “comes in at eight every day, does everything the same as he did yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that.” 

“I’ve heard,” Leon tells Dylan, because anyone who had ten dollars worth of business in Vegas knew of Eichel and Eichel’s idiosyncrasies.

Dylan chews his lip for a second - Leon had sworn he’d spoken to Connor about that, and Connor had said something about weeding the tells out the group - before he rakes together the courage to say, “I’ve heard, also, that he’s fucking ruthless, he won’t go after just you, but your sister and your mom and your wife. Everyone you’ve ever met will be worse off just for knowing you.”

He sounds–

“Scared?”

Because he and Connor might need to start weeding out something more than just the tells of the group. If Holloway, Holloway who walks and talks like he’s just been shot out of a cannon, who walks and talks like failure isn’t an option, like that just isn’t something that can happen to them, starts building up Eichel the boogeyman, then their slim chances become fucking anorexic.

They watch Eichel charm his way into a smile from a woman draped in Van Cleef and adorned in Cartier, and a handshake from her partner. Holloway turns to him. “Are you and Connor fucking suicidal?”

Leon just grins at him. 

“Now what?”

“Now,” Holloway watches one of the private marked doors. 

“Dylan.”

“Yeah?”

“Not you.” Leon tracks the guy who’d come out the door - well dressed, head ducked typing rapidfie on his phone, and slipping around the tables directly to Eichel.

He stands near him, closer than Leon is with Holloway now, lets Eichel rest a hand on the small of his back, lets him drag his eyes from his styled hair down to his Louboutins, and murmurs something to him. Eichel grins, slides his hand around to squeeze his waist, lets go, and turns back to the patrons.

-

“Tell me this isn’t about him.”

He's in the elevator with Connor.

Connor flushes a dull red, fiddles with his hands. He does a better job of pretending he isn’t a rather unbecoming shade of burgundy, than he would before, and shoves his hands into his pockets faster.  Leon wants to laugh, “You’re a shitty fucking liar,” he reminds him.

“It’s not,” Connor tries to convince him, mullish.

“He went to Eichel, because you weren’t there, and now you want to, what? Tear down his town?”

“He went to Eichel because he stopped–”

The door dings open onto Connor’s floor. He flushes darker.

“Are you following me?”

“He doesn't love you anymore?”

Connor shoves the keycard in the wrong way at first. A young couple stumbles out a door down the hall, giggling. Connor manages to get his door open on the third try and Leon crowds into him, getting intimately familiar with his pale blue shirt, entering the suite, lest he shuts him out. 

“He doesn’t love you?”

“He didn’t divorce me for the fucking– the fun of it, did he?” Connor snaps. He goes to toe off his shoes, thinks better of it, and undoes his laces standing up. “He left before the Met job.” He sheds his tie, takes off his belt and pulls his shirt out his trousers. Leon’s still standing in his suit and his shoes and just watching him litter his room.

“He divorced you in prison.” For going to prison. Love between Connor and Dylan had never been in question. Such a non-issue, so assumed - the sun will set in the west tonight and rise in the east tomorrow morning and Connor and Dylan love each other - that Nuge had once, humiliatingly, when they were younger and ready to eat the world whole in a single bite, taken him aside to tell him that he didn’t have a chance of a chance. 

(“Connor’s a good friend,” Nuge tells him in his kitchen, handing him beer after beer. Leon feels a little like this is a test. Connor is a good friend. Good at what he does. Makes his heart soar when he pulls a grin out of him. Leon agrees with Nuge, mostly because anything else would result in a big, bold F on his report card, follows him out the kitchen and hands Connor and Dylan a beer each. Doesn’t watch them make eyes at each other and the easy way they touch each other, and disappear intermittently to the bathroom all throughout the evening.)

“He asked me to choose.”

“You don’t love him?”

Connor shrugs. He blew the Met job for them. Leon was lucky to leave the state mostly unscathed. Nuge had to disappear to Canada for a few months. Tyson’s still there - though Leon thinks he just likes it there nowadays. 

“What the fuck? Connor?”

“What?”

Leon’s trying really fucking hard.

“You blew the Met job for fucking what?”

Connor flushes bright red, his eyes harden, and there’s a part of Leon that relaxes for the first time since seeing Connor. There's another part that notches arrows and digs trenches and loads canons. 

“It was three fucking years ago, get over it.” 

Connor would’ve blown shoplifting in Sephora, Leon realises now. “Your husband asked you to choose between him and this and you chose prison.”

“He already knew he was going to leave.”

Nuge was right, all those years ago. It doesn’t stop him from protesting, years too late: “I was still there.”

Connor’s in front of him. Smaller than he’s ever seen him. Leon’s still in his shoes, a scant inch taller than he is barefoot, two-some inches taller than Connor.

“You didn’t write. Or call.” Connor accuses him, quiet, unable to keep the frown off his face. He wears his beard longer now. Leon thinks he can see some greys, but it could be the lighting.

“You went to prison.” And you didn’t have to. You went to prison, rather than eat the world whole with me.

Connor’s mouth is on his, and his ex is within a ten-mile radius, and they’ve bitten off more than they can chew, and in a month they might not have kneecaps - depending on how this all goes. It's a bad fucking idea. Leon’s lived most of his life with his mouth too full. Anything he’s ever done with Connor is drenched in impossibility, chance, luck, and blind faith.

Leon kisses back.