This is the "Season Premiere" of my personal take on the phantom Season 6. Our story begins with a focus on Parker, Eliot, and Hardison, but rest assured that Nate and Sophie aren't gone forever.

Spoilers through the end of the series. See my profile for disclaimers.

Chapter 1

The light on the keypad changed from red to green. Easy peasy.

Sure, some companies had Sterankos, but then others would have easy fingerprint scanners like this one. Parker wasn't one hundred percent sure which one she preferred. Sometimes it was nice to play with the harder security systems, but she didn't always have time to give them the love and tender care they deserved. She already looked forward to her next vacation-those were the times when she could afford to hang around, cracking safes for fun. But whenever she was on a job for the Leverage team, there was always someone in her ear telling her to hurry up.

Literally.

"Parker, you gotta move," came Hardison's voice over the comm. "Next guard shift comes through in twenty seconds."

"Twenty seconds?" Parker barked a quick, delighted laugh. "That's like forever!" She removed her thumb from the scanner and peeled off the film to which Stanley Singer's perfectly-preserved fingerprint had been transferred from a champagne flute.

"Not when you're - oh! Oui, monsieur." Hardison suddenly shifted into his best French accent. Singer must have returned from the open bar. "I can assure you zat my employer will be here momentarily."

"No you can't," said Eliot. "I need another minute. Stall him."

"You ain't got another minute, man," murmured Hardison under his breath. "Guy's about to walk on out. Get your butt up here."

"I'm a little busy, Hardison!"

"What the hell you doing that's taking so long, huh?"

Eliot didn't say anything, but the familiar sound of his fist connecting with someone's face made the answer clear. That wasn't good. Eliot wasn't supposed to be beating people up for at least ten more minutes.

Parker pulled the door of the vault open and slipped inside, sprinting to the far wall, a mosaic of foot-square locked doors. She withdrew the master key they'd copied yesterday from the band of her hat and began opening each door as quickly as possible. They hadn't been able to get a straight answer on which compartment contained their objective, so, worst-case-scenario, she'd have to open them all.

It was a worst-case-scenario type of day, apparently.

"Eliot…" Hardison's tone was uneasy. "Seriously. I need you up here now. He's giving me a look."

"A look? What kind of look?"

"You know. A look. With his…you know, his eyes and - Eliot, for real, could you just - just get up here, man!"

"I can't, Hardison!" More sounds of scuffling and Eliot choking someone out. "There's guys at the back entrance we didn't know about." He grunted, probably taking a hit, but from the groans that followed, Eliot paid it back with interest. Finally, he said, "Okay. On my way."

Hardison audibly sighed in relief.

Parker's own relief at opening the final door on the wall, however, abruptly dissipated. "Uhhhh, guys?"

"What?" they asked in unison.

"It's not here." She paused. "I repeat, the circuit board is not here."

"Heard you the first time," growled Eliot. "Hardison? What's the play?"

"What's the play? We're already on plan H!"

"Well, it's not here," said Parker. "So I'm getting ou - " She turned to go, but froze. The guards on their round had caught up - three of them, guns drawn, blocking the exit. "Well," she said, forcing a smile as she considered her options. "That was a fast twenty seconds."

Hardison sputtered. "Wha - Parker? Parker?"

"The guard shift," said Eliot, swearing a little under his breath. "All right. I'm going to get her. Hardison, get out of there and get to the rendezvous. We're blown."

"No - guys - we can't just -"

"Hardison! It's over."

"I'm sorry, Alec," said Parker quietly. "We can't do it."

The comms were silent for a moment.

"All right," said Hardison. He took in a heavy breath. "All right. I'm calling it. Eliot…get her out of there safe."

"Always do."

Hardison's end of the comm devolved into a flurry of apologies and excuses to the mark. Hopefully he would manage to get away okay. Right now, Parker had her own company to deal with.

"Hi," she said cheerily. "You guys must be security! And I bet you'd like an explanation for this, right? Well, I've got one. Yup. Sure do…" She held up her hands and shrugged, muttering out the side of her mouth, "Eliot?"

"Almost there. Just keep their attention."

She coughed. "What am I supposed to do?"

"Make something up, Parker! This ain't your first rodeo."

"Ooh. Good idea!" She flashed another smile at the guards and mimed tipping an imaginary cowboy hat. "Sorry to disturb you cattlerustlers. Had a bull out of his pen. You know how it is." She tried to muster up some spit for a loogie, but didn't turn out well, so she went back to talking. "Anyway, I'm with the, you know, the ranchers association."

They all blinked for a second.

"Wait, what?" said the guard in the middle.

The one on the left shrugged.

"Ma'am," said the one on the right. "We're going to have to ask you to come with us."

"But…but…but the cows!" exclaimed Parker. "We have to find the cows!"

The guards all looked at each other.

"I think she might be mentally unbalanced," said the one in the middle.

"You're not far off," said Eliot from behind them.

The guards turned in unison, but before they could raise their guns again, Eliot had knocked them out cold, two of them with his fists and one with the point of his elbow.

"Owwie," said Parker with a little shrug and an impish smirk.

Eliot narrowed his eyes at her as she crossed the room. "The ranchers association? Are you kidding me? How many times I gotta tell you -"

"You can't fake country?"

Eliot stuttered in his obvious irritation. "Y-yes!"

"I know." Parker gave a quick little shrug. "I just wanted to confuse them. Worked, right?"

He rolled his eyes and grabbed her hand to pull her down the hallway. "Whatever. C'mon. We've gotta go."

Hardison was waiting with Lucille 4.0 at the back entrance and frantically motioned to them as they exited the building. "Come on!" No sooner had they jumped in than he peeled away from the curb, Lucille's tires smoking.

For the first few blocks, Parker peered through the back window. "Doesn't look like we have a tail."

"Good," muttered Eliot. He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. "At least something went right today."

"Excuse me?" said Hardison. "We were four-fifths of the way through that con! A lot of things went right -"

Eliot glared at the back of Hardison's headrest. "Yeah, but it don't mean anything if you can't close the damn case!"

"Well maybe I would have closed it if you hadn't taken your sweet time with those back entrance guards!"

"Hey!" Eliot jabbed his finger threateningly at the air. "You didn't say anything about guys back there. There were five of them, by the way. So you're welcome."

"For what? For blowing our cover?"

"STOP IT!" yelled Parker. They did, and looked at her. "Just…stop. We don't have to fight." She hugged herself and sighed. When they'd stopped the bio-bomb plot in DC, their teamwork had been so good that no one ever doubted that the three of them could keep Leverage Consulting & Associates going on their own, even down a mastermind and grifter. But the past few months hadn't really borne out those expectations. The truth was… "I miss Nate and Sophie."

Back at headquarters - still located above the Portland Bridgeport Brew Pub as it had been when Nate and Sophie were around, despite Hardison's continued insistence that the new and improved "Leverage International" would relocate to the safety of a major European city any day now - Parker and Hardison went straight upstairs, but Eliot flipped the sign in the restaurant's door to "Closed" and poured himself a pint of their house India pale ale behind the bar. He nursed it as he tried very hard not punch a hole in the wall.

Today had been a disaster. Frankly, the last three months had been one ongoing disaster. This was the first time they hadn't managed to limp through a job to completion, but nothing about their current efforts to keep Leverage afloat was remotely up to the standards of the five-man-band days. For one thing, they were taking on fewer clients, but somehow still doing a worse job. Their cons were getting sloppy, more smash-and-grab than elegant. The rich and powerful abusers of power that Leverage was known for taking down weren't getting punished in perpetuity; mostly they were just getting robbed.

A huge part of the problem was that now there were only three of them. Three, compared to five, was a lot harder to spread over the variety of roles needed to pull off the cons that could take down whole corporations. Just like today, Eliot couldn't simultaneously be beating up guys downstairs and playing a part for the mark upstairs. When they'd first gotten their hands on the Black Book, they'd assumed that teams around the globe would want to use it to get the people who'd "broken the world," as Nate had put it. But they hadn't counted on most criminals still acting like…well…criminals. Fat cats were being targeted, but not for any altruistic reason, and none of what was taken from them was given back to the little guy if Parker, Hardison, and Eliot weren't behind it. So they'd stopped giving away the Black Book's contents, and they weren't getting any more extra help. At one point, Hardison had joked about holding "auditions" to solve their numbers problem. But, unfortunately, bad-guys-gone-good-guys were in short supply, and Tara Cole didn't come cheap.

Which brought them to the issue that none of them was a bonafide grifter. Not that they couldn't play roles or play them well - they could - but Eliot's first instinct was still to hit, Hardison's to hack, and Parker's to steal. Without a grifter around, it was harder for the rest of them to justify the grifting, which was ultimately the glue that really held their diverse skills sets together, the one thing they all had in common. So instead of working together like a well-oiled machine, Eliot saw them drifting back to the way they'd been when they'd first met: a group of people who worked alone.

Maybe worst of all, Eliot found himself chafing under Hardison's leadership. Before walking away, Nate had actually tapped Parker to take on his "mastermind" role for the team - and she did have a talent for piecing together the parts of a con - but when they'd begun their war as a trio, it had quickly become apparent that what Parker wasn't as talented at was leading. She liked the big picture, but she wasn't good at explaining it or directing it tactically. That was where Hardison's ability to communicate had become important. Unfortunately, even the shift to Hardison on point hadn't fixed their problems.

When Nate had been the obvious captain, and Sophie his second in command, the team's next move had always been clear. If Nate said they were going to do something, they did it, even if they didn't agree with it. Eliot had personally disagreed with Nate's decisions more often than might have been good for the rest of the team to know, but Nate had been the coach, and they, as players, had to trust him to call the plays. Nate had also demanded respect, expected it, and everything he did made that clear. Hardison, while a natural leader and supposedly chomping at the bit to run his own crew, couldn't seem to decide whether he wanted to be in charge of this crew or not. He wasn't confident and consistent; instead, he was constantly second-guessing his decisions. At the same time, he put enormous pressure on himself to perform and bristled whenever Eliot said or did something that could be interpreted as "critical." There was a look in Hardison's eye every time they took on a new client - the "What would Nate do?" look. Eliot saw it slowly driving him crazy. And that was driving Eliot crazy.

He ran a hand through his hair and blew out a deep breath. He hated that he was beginning to resent some of the only friends he had. How could things have gotten so outrageously awful in such a short amount of time?

All because Nate and Sophie were gone.

He downed the last of the beer and rinsed out the glass. It wasn't fair to blame Nate and Sophie for leaving. They'd done enough good in the world for fifty lifetimes, helped hundreds of people who couldn't help themselves. They deserved happiness, a life together that wasn't built around swindling people out of their money and possessions and reputations, even if those people were the scum of the earth.

All the same, Eliot would have done anything to get them back. Not just for the sake of the cons, but for the sake of the team. Because, at this rate, they weren't going to be a team much longer.

Of course, sitting around drinking wasn't accomplishing anything. But it was nice to have a moment alone, just him and the pub. Eliot had found he did some of his best thinking here. It was too bad they'd almost certainly have to leave it behind, now that this job had been left open-ended. It was one thing to show themselves during a con when the mark was discredited or arrested, rendering any testimony against them harmless. But they hadn't dealt the death blow. At any time their faces could be all over Portland.

"Dammit," he muttered, and put the glass back under the bar.

He took the stairs two at a time. Hardison and Parker had apparently already had the same thought as him. They were trotting around with duffel bags, stuffing all manner of things into them. Parker had one bag completely full of Euros. And was that another crammed just with Jolly Ranchers?

Hardison put three external hard drives into a briefcase as he finished typing something into his laptop with the other hand. He looked up as Eliot walked in.

"Hey, man. Look, about earlier -"

"Forget about it. Let's focus on getting out of here."

Hardison smiled sadly, lips pressed together. "I've got us all booked on different flights. You know, typical escape plan. You want Tokyo, Sydney, or -"

"Why are we splitting up?" interrupted Parker. She set down the bags she was carrying and walked over, arms crossed. "Why do we always split up?"

"Because it keeps us safe," said Hardison. "We're harder to track down when there's just -"

"I don't think that's true," said Parker. Her brow furrowed. "I think we're safer together. We can't look out for each other if we split up."

"Parker…" Eliot began.

"No!" Parker's eyes flashed. "No, I'm not going to do it. We can't fall apart. We can't. You promised. You promised Nate and Sophie -"

"That was then, Parker!" said Eliot.

Hardison was looking down at his hands. "We didn't know it would turn out like this."

Eliot tried to take a little of the edge out of his voice. "Parker, it's not working with just the three of us. We can't pull off the same kinds of jobs. Maybe it's time we went back to what we're good at. What we know."

Parker was frowning, surprisingly emotional. "Well maybe you think you can go back, but I can't." She shook her head vigorously. "I don't want to give up. I won't."

Maybe the tough love approach was going to be the only one that got through to her. Eliot didn't like the thought of deliberately hurting Parker's feelings, particularly when he himself wasn't keen on the notion of giving up and parting ways any more than she was, but it was the only thing that made sense. The way things had been going, they needed to cut their losses before they got arrested…or worse.

It was his job to protect them.

"Listen, Parker," he said, gruff and all hitter now, not friend. "We're splitting up and you're going to -"

"Uh, guys?" interrupted Hardison.

Eliot cut off and looked at their hacker, who was pointing at the surveillance monitors for the brew pub.

"I agree that we should continue this conversation and all that," Hardison said. "But we've got company."