Work Text:
Eliot sloshed out of the sea, wearing just a seal skin draped over his shoulders. He headed towards the wharf where a fishing boat had just finished docking, dragging something behind him through the surf.
The—
"Hold on!" said Eliot.
Leverage HQ:
"What do you mean 'just a seal skin'?" Eliot said.
"You're supposed to be a selkie," said Parker. "A selkie that just shed his seal skin wouldn't be wearing clothes."
Eliot sputtered. Hardison smothered a snort of laughter, earning a glower from Eliot before he returned to the problem at hand.
"Parker, I am not flashing my dick in front of a wharf full of fishing crews to satisfy your desire for cryptid accuracy."
A squeak escaped Hardison before he clamped a hand over his own mouth, smothering any further sound.
"I don't think they'd mind? It's a nice dick."
"I mind, Parker!"
"Fine." Parker huffed as if Eliot was just being difficult. "A swimsuit, then. We'll just have to be careful to wrap the seal skin to hide it."
…
Eliot sloshed out of the sea, wearing a seal skin draped over one shoulder and wrapped strategically around his hips. He headed towards the wharf where a fishing boat had just finished docking, dragging something behind him through the surf.
The “Siren's Song” was the newest acquisition in the mark's fishing fleet, bought cheap after its previous owner had been forced to liquidate his business. The mark's operation had moved into town the previous year, cutting corners and breaking laws to undercut the more established suppliers and sabotaging the competition at every turn. They systematically forced most of the smaller operations out of business, gaining an ever-growing stranglehold on the local industry. To add insult to injury, those who could no longer afford to keep their own businesses and boats afloat in the face of the new competition still needed the work to keep themselves afloat, forcing many to accept jobs on the very boats they and their neighbors used to own. Eliot could see their client, the son of the boat's previous owner, on deck prepping to unload the day's catch.
“Sophie,” Eliot growled into his new waterproof comm, “you'd better have primed this guy right. If I did this for nothing, someone is gonna die today, and it ain't gonna be me.”
“That expression is perfect, Eliot,” said Sophie, as if she hadn't heard his threat. “You look terrifying.” She did not sound terrified.
He'd drawn the first stares only seconds after he surfaced. Not surprising—this wasn't exactly a popular swimming location to begin with, and, well, the swimmer being a guy dressed in a seal skin (and seemingly only a seal skin) was pretty much guaranteed to keep people's attention once he caught it. Besides, Hardison and Sophie had been working overtime get the local rumor mill charged with tales of mysterious lights on the water and strange noises, as well as the inexplicable equipment failures that had been plaguing the mark's fleet for the last two weeks and had lured him to show up in person.
More importantly, for their purposes, the team had been running a campaign of psychological warfare on the mark himself, to two ends: 1) cultivating general paranoia and superstitious feelings that some nebulous entity was targeting him and 2) priming him with subtle references to seals and the harm posed to them by his illegal fishing practices.
The closer Eliot got, the more heads turned his way. Work on the near end of the wharf ground to a standstill as he approached. The more workers who stopped to gape at his approach, the more the silence drew others' attention.
Their mark was oblivious, his back to Eliot as he watched the crew unload.
As he climbed the steps onto the structure itself, the spreading stillness was just reaching the Siren's Song crew itself. Eliot saw a tool drop out of their client's slack hand as he caught sight of Eliot. The mark, furious at work slowing to a crawl, finally turned to see what they were all looking at…
And came face-to-face with Eliot.
His dripping hair was braided and adorned with shells. A large shark's tooth hung as a pendant over his breastbone. Saltwater dripped from his hair and his seal skin to puddle around bare feet. Eliot managed to refrain from shivering, despite the breeze over mostly bare, wet skin.
Wordlessly, he hauled the illegal trap he had dragged from the shore in front of him and dropped it at the mark's feet, the broken device spilling dead fish across the man's shoes. Piled inside the trap was an assortment of the trash and empty chemical containers that his fleet dumped overboard. The mark's face was ashen. There wasn't a sound on the wharf except the whistling of the wind, the splash of water, and the creaking of the boats.
Eliot crunched down on the fish-oil capsule tucked into his cheek, suppressing a grimace as his tongue quickly dispersed the pungent oil around his mouth. He leaned in close, over the trap, close enough for the mark to smell the fish on his breath despite the brisk breeze.
“We were in these waters before you came, and we will be here after you're gone,” he growled. “You are a menace we will not tolerate. You have two days to remove all the equipment you have left in our waters. If we see another boat fishing under your name, another trap set, another piece of poisonous trash dropped in our home, then we will come hunting in yours.”
With that, Eliot turned on his heel and walked away, leaving the trap at the mark's feet and a wharf full of fishing crews staring at the despised fleet owner and the evidence of his crimes. He descended the steps to the shore and sloshed back into the waves, diving beneath the surface to vanish back from whence he came.
…
Leverage HQ:
“And that's the plan,” said Parker. “It's a reverse Thames Tumble.”
Eliot scrubbed a hand over his face. He sighed. “OK, first, why am I a naked seal man in this con? I can threaten this guy perfectly well as a human. And, second...I'm a little scared to even ask, but how the hell is this a 'reverse Thames Tumble?'”
“Well, as we all know, a Thames Tumble is when someone the mark knows falls into a body of water to escape a romantic overture...”
Eliot bit back a retort about not knowing that because there is no such con as a Thames Tumble, and stuck with a noncommittal grunt. Hardison was pretending to be engrossed with crunching data on his computer, but Eliot could see him smirking.
“...so a reverse Thames Tumble is someone the mark doesn't know emerging from a body of water to tell them they suck.”