exactingleverage:

↪The Homecoming Job

bairnsidhe:

[Caption: two gifs from Leverage. Hardison is working on his computer, saying, “You know, this man has his computer hooked up to the city’s free Wi-Fi? My nana could hack this thing.”]

There was one thing Hardison never told anyone.  Not Nate, not Sophie, not Parker or Elliot.  Hardison had a teacher.  The way Parker had Archie, Hardison had her.  She used to work for NASA, wrote out the flight codes by hand.  She helped launch the shuttle that put Armstrong on the Moon.  And she taught him everything.  At ten he was writing his own computer codes in spiral notebooks during math classes he could have passed in his sleep, taking them home and showing them to her.

“Look, Nana!  This one draws butterflies on the screen.”

“That’s good, Alec.  But you switched from COBALT to C++ in the middle here.  That’s not gonna do you any good baby.  Here’s how you fix it…”

Her pension from the government helped pay for all of Nana’s kids, but when she got sick, it wouldn’t quite cover her medicine or doctor.  She wasn’t going to short the kids any, and Alec knew that.  He also knew that they’d look at her first if he took money out of an account linked to her job.  He knew this because she told him, because she knew how his mind worked.  That’s how he wound up hacking an overseas bank that had lent money to her old boss, the one who denied her request for government healthcare.  And if he left behind some breadcrumbs for the authorities to find that led to that jerk, well, there are worse things to do on Prom night.

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