#me) for directing me where to get semi-precious beads a while back!!

[melit0n]

The whites of your eyes, turn black in the low light // the night belongs to you

These two have been a long time coming, lol. I wanted to have them for November for when I actually went to see them, but didn't have enough time (nor money). I think these are my favourite out of all I've made!

[aethersea]

May I request 41 - First Kiss and 94 - Hair Brushing/Braiding for the Leverage OT3, please? (Also extra bonus points if you give Eliot beads in his hair like in The Ice Man Job, because we didn't get NEARLY enough of that in the show) Thank you!

I cannot believe I wrote this whole thing out and then never published it. I’m so sorry, it’s been at least twenty-four years since you sent in this ask, please accept my humble apologies and also this ficlet.

However, this prompt is just pure fluff, and I hate to tell you this but I am not a fluff writer. I just can’t pull off that unadulterated sweetness. I am in this fandom for the shenanigans, first, last and foremost! So this fic is now a 5+1 of Eliot and Parker trying to seduce Hardison.

1. Parker thinks they need to give him gifts, so she goes through her stash and picks out the largest, fanciest jewel she’s ever stolen. Then she realizes: Hardison likes stories. He spends hours giving their aliases histories and pets and allergies and favorite foods, he can get a whole sordid history of jealousy and betrayal from a single corporate email chain, and Parker knows for a cold fact that he writes little stories with his online friends about being wizards together.

She goes through her stash again and picks out the most cursed thing she’s ever stolen.

It’s a jeweled statuette, almost as tall as her forearm, made of gold and studded with precious and semi-precious stones. Mysterious deaths have befallen five separate owners of this thing. Its base is dented from the time it was used to bludgeon Owner Number Three to death. The tiny rubies it has for eyes follow you across the room.

Parker puts a bow on it and leaves it in Hardison’s room while he’s sleeping. He wakes up to this horrible little statue watching him from his bedside table.

He texts the group chat, Hey did anyone put an evil little gold guy in my bedroom last night? But Parker chickens out and says nothing (drunkenly betting Eliot that she can seduce Hardison is one thing, but admitting that she likes him is something else altogether). Everyone else texts back variations on “nope.” (Except Sophie, who just sends back a string of heart eyes emojis and a wikipedia link. She loves cursed artifacts.) So Hardison puts the statue away in a closet somewhere and figures he’ll deal with it later.

Parker is mildly offended that he put her gift in a closet. She goes into his room the next night and puts it back on the bedside table, where it clearly belongs.

This goes on for a week. Hardison puts the statue in a desk drawer, then in one of the cabinets in the office downstairs, then in the dumpster down the street. Every day he wakes up to those glittering red eyes watching him sleep. He’s asked his internet buddies if anyone knows a good exorcist. Hardison doesn’t really believe in curses, but also? What the fuck. What the fuck.

~

2. Eliot assumes the drunken bet will be forgotten by morning. What kind of world would it be if people always followed through on promises they made while they could barely stay vertical? So he spends the morning nursing his hangover and cleaning his knives. Cleaning guns is no good while hungover—all the snaps and clicks of popping things in and out of place sound like actual gunfire when you’re hungover, it’s a nightmare—but knives are quiet and have no moving parts. Buffing and polishing them is soothingly repetitive work, and every once in a while he can throw one at one of the dartboards on the walls and reassure himself that his reflexes are still sound even after that much tequila.

It’s only when he gets Hardison’s text about the golden statuette that magically appeared in his room overnight that Eliot realizes Parker’s actually going for it. After some internal debate about whether he’s going to stoop to this or not, Eliot decides what the hell and starts making plans.

Eliot agrees that gifts are the way to go, but not stolen gifts. Not things. Anyone can give a thing. Proper wooing is about giving experiences.

Eliot plans for three days. On the fourth day, he and Hardison have their irregularly scheduled monthly coffee date, and Eliot texts him beforehand to say he wants to do it at the brewpub this time. Hardison arrives to find a deceptively simple meal: basic country fare perfected through years of experimentation, made with the best ingredients Eliot can get his hands on. And Eliot, after all, is still a retrieval specialist. There’s very little in the world he can’t get his hands on.

And yet the night ends and somehow he has not gotten his hands on Hardison.

This is just not right. Eliot knows how to deploy a smolder, okay, Tangled reference aside he is damn good at flirting and he knows the looks he’s giving Hardison are clear as day. It’d be one thing if Hardison had turned him down, or if he’d been uneasily unwilling, or even if his eyes had widened slightly in suppressed panic and he’d abruptly found a reason to leave. Eliot can take rejection, bet or no, and he’d have bowed out graciously without a fuss. But this was much, much worse.

Hardison didn’t even notice he was flirting.

He’s going to have to up his game.

~

3. “How do you seduce people?” Parker asks bluntly, turning up at Sophie’s door just past midnight.

Sophie, despite the hour, is utterly delighted by the question.

This goes as well as you would expect.

~

4. Eliot’s taken a lot of dates to sports games. Hardison may prefer sparkly elves with purple lightning magic to a decent MMA fight, but baseball is the American pastime. Eliot gets them perfect seats, hot dogs from the best vendor in the stadium, even chilled beer that he smuggles in without letting it get warm. It’s going to be a perfect game.

And it is. At first. Hardison, it turns out, has a lot of opinions about baseball. What he does not have is an understanding of the rules. They’re not even into the second inning by the time Eliot finally snaps and starts arguing with him about it.

They make it all the way to the fifth inning before Eliot realizes that Hardison’s basing his complaints off the rules of a game from a Star Wars novel.

They’re at the bottom of the eighth before Eliot will speak to him again.

~

5. Eliot and Parker are drunk again. This is not intentional. They didn’t even mean to come to this bar, but the smoothie place with the fried oreos that Eliot had brought Parker here to try was playing such incredibly bad music that they’d ordered the oreos to go and fled. The bar was just the coziest looking place on the block, and of course they’d ordered drinks to avoid being rude––Eliot had entertained himself for a few minutes scouring the menu for something that would pair well with fried oreos and popcorn chicken.

And now they’re drunk. The conversation has, perhaps inevitably, turned to the ongoing bet.

“I tried everything!” Parker wails. “I laughed at every joke, I touched my hair constantly, I got him talking about things he likes.” She thunks her forehead on the bar. “All that happened is now I know the complete history of orcs in western literature.”

“Hardison wouldn’t know flirting if it pinched him on the ass,” Eliot grumbles.

Parker slaps his arm. “No pinching Hardison!”

“I’m not going to—I don’t pinch people!”

Parker’s ignoring him. Eliot pouts and takes another sip of his drink. He’s not entirely sure what this one is––it’s blue and kind of fizzy, that’s all he can say for sure. Parker took over the drinks menu several glasses ago, and she’s been picking them based on what has the most fun name to say. Eliot’s pretty sure the alcohol content’s been doubling with each order.

“Eliot,” Parker slurs, “we need to work together.”

“What?”

Parker lifts her head from the bar and frowns at him, the way she does when she’s figured out the obvious solution and is just waiting for everyone else to get on the same page. It’s adorable. It’s always adorable, but right now her eyes are wide and slightly unfocused from the alcohol and she’s listing sideways a little, almost as if she’s unbalanced, and it is the most adorable thing Eliot has ever seen. Parker’s never unbalanced, but some part of Eliot’s fuzzy brain thinks she’s about to fall on top of him and cannot wait to catch her.

“You can’t seduce Hardison,” Parker points out. Eliot is drunk enough to get offended by this, but too drunk to get out a complaint before she continues, “I can’t seduce Hardison. But if we work together, the two of us can definitely seduce Hardison. Together.”

Eliot stares at her. Then he takes another sip of his fizzy blue drink. Later, when questioned, he will blame his next words on that drink.

“Worth a shot.”

They take Hardison to a movie. They research for three weeks beforehand. They find the best movie theater in town, with the nicest seats, the biggest screens, and concession snacks that Hardison likes, and they buy tickets for the midnight premiere of the superhero movie that Hardison hasn’t shut up about for the past month. Parker even hacks into the theater’s computers in a last-minute fit of nerves and cross-references the credit cards with drivers’ licenses to make sure the people sitting in front of them won’t be too tall.

Parker witnesses a kidnapping in the parking lot while the boys are getting popcorn. They don’t even stay long enough to catch the commercials.

~

+ 1. “Hey Eliot,” Hardison says during movie night, a little over a week later. “Remember the Ice Man Job?”

Eliot groans. “I try not to.”

Hardison throws a piece of popcorn at his face. “Shut up. Remember how you did your hair for that one? With the little—those little beads on, like, a braid?”

Eliot shoots Hardison a suspicious glance. “Yeah, I remember.”

“Teach me how to do that.”

Eliot shoots Hardison another, more deliberate look, this one pointedly directed at Hardison’s complete lack of braidable locks.

Hardison rolls his eyes as if that’s a silly detail to get hung up on and leans forward to dig around in one of the boxes he has under his coffee table. He emerges with a ziplock bag of plastic beads in no time flat and hands it triumphantly to Eliot. Then he yanks a few cushions out from behind Parker, who’s sitting on his other side, and puts them on the floor in front of him. “Sit here?” he asks Parker, patting the cushion pile.

Parker takes a moment to consider being offended at having her cushions stolen, but curiosity gets the better of her and she just plops down between Hardison’s legs, grabbing the bowl of popcorn as she goes, and waits.

Hardison lifts her hair with sudden gentleness, drawing it over her shoulders and letting it fall down her back in a golden wave. His fingers brush against her neck. Parker shivers. Eliot is distantly aware that he’s gone perfectly still, focused with a hunter’s intensity on Hardison’s dark, graceful fingers carding through Parker’s hair.

Hardison leans back, hands on his knees, and Eliot breathes again. “Well?” Hardison looks over at Eliot, a tiny smirk of challenge on his lips. “Show me how it’s done.”

Eliot is suddenly, brutally aware of how close they are. Hardison’s couch is obscenely comfortable, which is half the reason movie nights are at Hardison’s in the first place, but it is not large. Their thighs are touching. Hardison leans away, to give Eliot access to Parker’s hair, and he’s still so close that Eliot would barely have to reach out a hand to—

Eliot ruthlessly shoves that thought down into the dark where it belongs. He dealt with this, he dealt with this years ago, and accepting Parker’s stupid bet doesn’t mean he’s forgotten the way Hardison and Parker look at each other. It just means he doesn’t mind losing for a good cause.

So he keeps his tone steady and his fingers brisk as he shows Hardison how to braid the clunky plastic beads into Parker’s hair, and if he flushes with heat when their hands brush each other, well, nobody has to know. He’s been trained to withstand eight different schools of torture. It won’t show on his face. His voice never once falters.

Parker has had no such training. Her lips have parted, and her breathing is shallow. She’s staring glassy-eyed at the TV. Hardison can’t see her face, sitting behind her, but Eliot watches her carefully, worried that they need to call this off. Parker’s not used to intimacy, to closeness that means something, and for all the three of them have spent half their movie nights literally on top of each other, this is something else. This has weight.

Eliot puts a hand on her shoulder, pressing down just enough that Parker startles and cants a glance over at him. Eliot raises his eyebrows in question, and Parker glares back: don’t you fucking dare. Eliot backs off. Hardison, frowning in concentration as he threads a wisp of Parker’s hair through a green bead, graciously pretends he didn’t see the exchange.

Hardison gets the hang of the beading fairly quickly, and Eliot shows him a few different techniques. He’s almost managed to convince himself that nothing is actually happening when Hardison says, conversationally, “You two are really bad at this.”

Eliot glowers his confusion. “At movie night? You started this, if you wanted to actually watch Alien then you shouldn’t have—”

Hardison’s smile is soft, but Eliot decides for his own safety to focus on the laughter at its edge. “No, at this.” And then he slides his hand onto Parker’s neck, caresses her cheek, and isn’t the slightest bit surprised when she gasps.

Parker whips around, and there’s hurt on her face but it dies in the glow of Hardison’s gentle, unteasing smile. Hardison pulls her up with the lightest of touches, and she goes, eyes fixed on his like salvation.

They kiss sweet and slow, and Eliot’s heart twists in his chest and he can’t breathe. He needs to leave now before he shatters in half, but if he moves then they will look at him, and he would rather never breathe again than meet their eyes right now.

Hardison breaks off the kiss, gazing at Parker with something just this side of wonder, and then he does look at Eliot. Eliot flinches. He opens his mouth to…say something, make some joke or hasty excuse and scramble out the door, but Hardison raises a hand to Eliot’s face, slides his long fingers to cup Eliot’s neck, and pulls him forward, as gently as he did Parker.

It’s a chaste kiss, no more than a soft press of lips, because Eliot is too stunned to respond and Hardison doesn’t push. It lasts a long time. A whole era of change happens in the span of that kiss, as everything Eliot thought he knew tears out of place and then settles, gingerly, into a new understanding.

Hardison pulls away, his hand still warm on the back of Eliot’s neck. His smile is pure sunshine. Eliot finds himself smiling back, helpless.

Hardison’s grin turns smug. “And that,” he says, looking between Eliot and Parker, “is how you do it. Y’all are disasters, honestly, I can’t believe two master criminals working together couldn’t manage a single real date—”

Eliot heaves a deep sigh and drags Hardison into a headlock, pinning his arms when he flails. Parker surges to her knees and starts tickling him mercilessly.

They don’t finish the movie.

[martykatewrites]

The Tomb in the Cliffs

What is this place?" Roma ran the beam from her electric torch along the walls of the chamber while Ardeth followed with his lantern. "Look," she said as she flashed the torch overhead, "The ceiling hasn't been worked but the walls are smooth and carved. It's rough just like the walls of the corridor. I see the gods of the underworld, Horus, Osiris, Isis, Hathor, carved into the walls along with an image of the weighing of the heart, but where are the hieroglyphs?

She pointed the torch at the floor, revealing a shiny stone sarcophagus without its lid. "That's basalt, it's very hard to carve and polish but look at it! It's plain, though, not a carving in sight! And what happened to its lid?"

She walked over to the plain stone coffin and peered inside, "Nothing on the inside, either, no traces of gold leaf." She sat back on her legs, thinking, running her hand through the sand at its base.

"Look!" she commanded and he came over to her side. She held up three beads carved of lapis lazuli. "Someone was here, this tomb was raided at least once, but what self-respecting Egyptian would bury themself in a tomb without their name or spells painted on the walls from the Book of the Dead? They used them to guide them on their journey through the Underworld. And why did he, and I think it was a he, choose to be buried so far from the Valley of the Kings? He should have been buried where the other nobles had their tombs."

She went over to a wall with a carving of what might have been the owner and his wife. "Look, this isn't bas-relief, this was carved directly into the wall. They carved the corridor and the chamber but only half-finished it. She crossed to the other side, "And here's two boys, these may have been his sons, but why no hieroglyphs? Egyptians wanted their names to be spoken to assure that they would have a place in the afterlife."

"There should be pictures of him harvesting grain, maybe hunting ducks, and one of Anubis attending his mummy, but there's nothing. This was most certainly a noble, but he was buried away from the others in the middle of this godforsaken place, no temple for funerary offerings or priests to say prayers for him. The sarcophagus is exquisite---even though it is plain there was a lot of work put into it. I wonder if there are any ushabtis here with his name on them?"

Outside they could hear the howling of the wind as it blew clouds of sand about, but inside the chamber they were safe. Roma ventured as far down the corridor as she dared until the sands started reaching her and she retreated into the tomb.

"How long do you think the storm will last, Ardeth? I want to get out of here, something is feeling very wrong. This is not a good place."

"Usually about half an hour, but no two storms are alike. Remember the story of the Persian soldiers that were buried alive by a sandstorm? We should stay here until we are ready to leave for the night. You need to get some sleep, do not tell me that you don't, you are half dead on your feet. Enjoy the chance to rest someplace cool.

And it was cool in the tomb if it was a tomb, refreshingly so, but she was not convinced. "I don't think he wants us here; we should leave."

"He? Who is he? If this tomb was ever used it was abandoned long ago. What have you found besides a few beads? We'll leave tomorrow evening, so rest and take it easy. Explore this place if you must, I know you want to. The spirit of the occupant no doubt disappeared with his grave goods and his mummy."

In the end, she found it hard to resist his logic. He removed the cots from the pack camel and set them up, but when she laid down, she found it hard to keep her eyes closed. She was tired to the point of exhaustion, yet sleep eluded her. Her mind and body had begun to accustom themselves to sleeping during the day and staying awake at night. Fatigue might yet overcome her, but she was not ready to give in to sleep, not yet.

She waited until Ardeth's breathing became steady, then picked up her torch and began to explore the chamber further. The carvings on the wall were of such exquisite quality that the occupant must have been a member of the nobility or a minor member of the royal family. She ran her finger along the wall, kneeling at its base feeling for chips of painted plaster, but found none. A tomb this elaborate would surely have been painted but she found no sign.

She found a frieze of baboons that represented the hours, but none of the hieroglyphs that should have accompanied them. How curious, she thought, this place is devoid of writing, and all the sacred spells that should be on the walls are missing. It's as if the person who rested in this place demanded complete anonymity and was willing to risk not naming his name. Or the Pharaoh issued orders that there should be none.

She walked around slowly, keeping to the wall, shining her light downwards, looking for indications that enough sand was present that could provide a shield for hidden artifacts.

She stumbled upon one when she tripped over a loose bootlace. A glint of blue showed sticking out of the sand and she dug eagerly, mindless of the fact insects might be hiding, and discovered a blue faience ushabti.

Eagerly she brushed the sand from its surface and saw that it had the face of a man. She showed the torch on it, hoping that she might, at last, find a name, but all she saw, written in gilt letters now badly faded, was, "I am the servant of he who dwells in this tomb." She repressed an urge to throw it against the wall but slipped it instead into her pocket.

She dug around and found only two more. She returned to the sarcophagus and dug in the sand around its base finding some beads of turquoise, amethyst, and carnelian. Whoever had robbed this tomb had done a very thorough job, almost nothing had been left behind. The coffin had probably been gilded wood inlaid with semi-precious gems such as the ones she had found. The mask could have been cartonnage, gilded, and painted with an idealized face of the owner.

The tiny bits of gems went into her pocket with the ushabtis. From the size of the tomb it might have held many treasures if the owner had been wealthy, but why oh why were there no signs of writing anywhere?

"You are supposed to be sleeping," Ardeth's tall body loomed over her, but she paid no attention.

"I couldn't; see what I found, look." She drew the ushabtis from her pocket and showed him the handful of gems. "Whoever was buried here must have been wealthy, a noble or a member of the royal family, maybe. This must have been a rich burial, but I cannot understand why there are no names or hieroglyphs."

He looked briefly at her finds and nodded and she returned them to her pocket. What he did next took her by surprise. "What am I going to have to do to make sure you do as you're told?" The look of affection, visible even in the darkness, took her by surprise, then he took her in his arms and kissed her.

She had not expected this, nor ever dreamed of it, let alone the fact that she would kiss him back—and Ardeth knew how to kiss.

What am I doing, she would have thought in other circumstances but all she could think of was how it felt to be in his arms, how right she seemed to feel there. And she didn't want him to let her go.

She thought of something her father had said after she and Ardeth had yet another fight. "The two of you fight like brother and sister, or like a married couple." She had denied any such thing but he looked at her and smiled.

Was it possible that there had been an affection percolating between them that neither would admit? She felt confused, a feeling that always made her uncomfortable.

"Ardeth," she said tenuously, but he laid his fingers on her lips. "I have been waiting to do that for a very long time," he said, "I did not wish to frighten you." She could see him smiling in the faint light of her torch.

"You didn't, but you took me by surprise. Maybe father was right," she said dreamily, "He used to tell me that you and I fought like a married couple."

He threw his head back and laughed, then walked over to the cots, and put them side by side.

"What do you think you are doing?" she asked.

"I am going to make sure you do not get up again. If I have to, I will bind your hands and feet so you cannot move. Come and lay down, I want you to sleep and be rested when we set out again. The storm is over but it is cool in here so I wish to take advantage of it. It will cost us time, but you will be better rested if we remain here until tonight."

She could not sleep for a long time, the memory of him kissing her would not leave her. She was surprised but not surprised, she had known him for most of her life and Ardeth never hesitated to be direct. It was her feelings that she feared the most, but with Ardeth next to her she felt protected, and safe.

Having him so close felt comforting, she could reach out and touch him if she wished. She had never imagined that she could have felt like this for him, but his kiss had awakened her to a feeling she knew had only been waiting to emerge.

But could he protect her from whatever might be living in this tomb?