Title: Reparations
Author: Annerb
Fandom: Leverage
Summary: Maggie sees the world differently now.
Rating: All Ages
Categorization: Maggie-centric, Maggie and Sophie friendship

Reparations

Maggie walks the length of the low-lit gallery. The main lights have been long since turned off, only the soft spotlights on the paintings themselves still aglow. It's a rare treat to see a museum like this, after hours.

Well, Maggie reconsiders, a rare treat for an honest person anyway.

She's found herself reconsidering a lot of things like that in the last few years.

Passing by a modest landscape, Maggie pauses. The frame is original—a bronze, ornate frame softened by a fine patina of age. Leaning forward to peer at the surface of the painting itself, she can make out small figures in the foreground under the haze of sfumato. The brushstrokes are small enough to be invisible to the naked eye, even as a single brush hair remains half-buried in the final transparent layer of paint. All signs of the hand of a true master at work.

Just not a traditional sort of master.

She's spent a lot of time the last two weeks she's been consulting at this museum in front of this particular piece. An older gentleman had once paused next to her to comment, "Beautiful, isn't it?"

She had demurred to his judgment, making some sort of non-committal sound in her throat rather than asking, "Is it really?" like she wanted to.

He still walked away with a pitying glance at her for her seeming inability to understand beauty when it's right in front of her.

Maggie cants her head again, trying to see beauty. She only sees details, tiny clues towards a mystery yet to be solved.

She's always said you can learn a lot about a person from what they see in art.

The deliberately loud click of fiendishly tall heels echoes down the gallery. Maggie doesn't look away from the painting, not even bothering to wonder how her guest managed to get past the evening security. The heels might have had something to do with it.

"There you are," Sophie Devereaux says, a hint of exquisite perfume and night air arriving with her.

Maggie smiles in genuine welcome, but doesn't move away from the painting. Shifting her attention to Sophie, she logs the way her eyes barely brush the painting's surface.

Sophie's hand slides into the crook of Maggie's arm, tugging gently. "Are you ready? I thought we were going to meet next door?"

Yes, they were, at the bar Maggie suggested. The one she deliberately isn't sitting in right now. She doesn't apologize for that, instead moving down the gallery to the next painting, a Boucher of a young girl in a yellow dress reading. She cants her head towards the painting. "What do you think?"

Sophie looks at the painting, her eyes swiftly taking in all the details. "Beautiful."

Maggie considers it for a moment, what Sophie must really see when she looks at a painting. They are her life after all, much the same way they are the center of Maggie's life. But rather than chemistry and technique, she wonders if Sophie just sees challenge and strategy and the thrill of a wonder acquired.

Nate would only see the wrongs, Maggie thinks. See the long history of mistreatment and fear and people taken advantage of. Parker probably looks at a painting and sees security systems and lasers and that perfect click. Smells money and the challenge. Hardison might try, Maggie thinks. Might try to see something of the painting, the subject beyond the security systems and amazing feats it will take to beat them, but for all the questionable application of his gifts, he's a good person. He can get pretty. But beauty takes pain.

She suspects Eliot might be the only one who can look at art with any pure appreciation of beauty or feeling. Maybe that makes him the most normal. Again, something Maggie never would have considered before, because she knows deep down without ever being told, just what sort of things Eliot has done, the things he doesn't even bother trying to ask forgiveness for.

There was a time Maggie assumed to be a criminal there must be something wrong with you, something fundamentally broken inside. And it's not like the members of Nate's team don't have their issues. Parker probably very well is crazy. But it's a real, self-aware sort of crazy that most honest people could never handle.

Then there is the small fact that Sophie is a liar and a charlatan and a grifter and still somehow the most authentic person Maggie knows.

Maggie looks at the Boucher again, tries hard to see it. "Is it?" she asks. "Beautiful, I mean?"

Sophie eyes shift to Maggie, another quick assessment taking place.

"I have a hard time seeing it any more," Maggie admits with a shrug. She thinks there must have been a time she saw beauty. Wasn't that what had drawn her in at first? Even after all the years of school and study and chemistry and learning to see art as a product of processes of gesso and canvas and pigment and animal hair brushes and fingerprints smudged in color, she still must have been able to see it.

She can't anymore.

Now she sees authentic and fake and lies and accidents. She sees chemical equations and anachronistic materials.

But never beauty.

She tells herself the mystery is enough.

Sophie opens her mouth as if to say something, but Maggie pulls her back in front of the landscape. "And this one?"

Sophie very carefully doesn't look at the painting. "Lovely."

"Not really," Maggie says. "It's a fake."

"Hmm?" Sophie says with the indifferent curiosity of an uninvolved part. It's nearly as flawless as the forgery, except for the slight flash of something in her eyes.

Maggie might feel a flush of accomplishment at picking it up, at managing to ambush Sophie Devereaux well enough to make her blink. Maggie isn't that naive. Sophie Devereaux only blinks if she wants to. She only shows up in Chicago if she wants to.

Maggie smiles. "Charles Ralston died. Did you hear? His heirs donated the entirety of his collection to the museum. It's really going to be the making of this center." Maggie leans in, lowering her voice. "They were teetering on having to close the space entirely."

It explains why the museum director has chosen to become strangely deaf each time Maggie brings up the evidence that the painting isn't authentic. As the cornerstone of the collection, the news would bring everything else into question.

Sophie does a credible job of looking like this is all news to her.

"It's really a shame it's a fake," Maggie says, wondering if this is what it feels like, that perfect bit of pressure that finally clicks everything home.

Sophie sighs like she hadn't intended to capitulate all along. "All right, you win. But can't we do this over drinks?"

Maggie lets herself be pulled out of the gallery.

They end up at a perfectly swank bar, one that is elegant, but comfortable. There is a just lively enough crowd and neither Maggie nor Sophie lack for drinks or company. Maggie sips her wine and eyes the handsome, but not too handsome generic businessman beside her. He says something self-deprecating and charming, and Maggie smiles back, thinking that she only has two weeks left in Chicago but might as well make them enjoyable.

She can enjoy life. She regularly does.

Despite what anyone knowing her story might think, Maggie isn't broken. She smiles and laughs and appreciates fine wine. She enjoys the company of nice men, and thinks she will very likely love again someday.

Her child is dead, but she is living.

She walks this world as a women who can easily conjure the memory of her child's smile, first words, laughter. She can think of that and smile and keep walking and keep living. She can do this because she also has a dark, hard kernel lodged up right behind her sternum, dug in and permanently installed. She never touches it, never thinks about it—the bundled truth that her beautiful child doesn't live in this world, the sound of Nate's scream when Sam died. She survives by living around it, like there is another woman trapped and suspended inside of her. She wonders, sometimes, if that makes her a sociopath.

Or possibly just normal.

Nate is different. Nate wears his grief like a hair shirt—the broken, unblunted edges scraping and rubbing raw against his skin with every movement. He's a Medieval Catholic saint, an altar boy with his fingers held deliberately in the flames. It's why she can't blame him for the drinking, the only way to bank the flames, to live with the constant grating pain.

She doesn't begrudge him Sophie either, knowing she saved Nate in a way Maggie never could have.

New Nate and new Maggie are in total opposition. Neither of them can align with the other's coping mechanisms. And while Maggie still loves Nate, or knows what it was to love him, how she managed it—she knows he was another casualty of her recovery, that her passion for him was inextricably wound up with those memories that she can't touch, can't let breathe.

She suspects beauty got caught up in that tangle too. She doesn't risk investigating it to be sure. She just lives without it.

The nice man in the not-too-expensive suit leans in and touches her hand, his eyes bright and earnest.

She will love again. There may even (maybe maybe maybe) be children. But her son's death took beauty with it, and really, that seems okay. Something should be different. It's maybe the one thing that keeps her from truly being a sociopath.

It's funny to her that everyone on Nate's team always says she's the most honest, most normal person they know.

In Maggie's new world, she thinks that person may very well be Sophie. She never makes the mistake of assuming that something in Sophie's past had pushed her to being a criminal. She did it because it's who she is. Because she never could have been anything else. She isn't running from something. She's just…being. Maggie admires the hell out of that.

They aren't exactly the most likely friends—an art conservator and an art thief. Not to mention ex-wife and wife. But it works.

Maggie's glad it does.

Beautiful Chicago! Sophie's text had read the day before. Girls' Night?

There are a few things Maggie doesn't bother wondering in the wake of that text. Like how Sophie knew she was in Chicago, let along what Sophie herself is doing here. Maggie knows that technically Nate and Sophie are out of the revenge game, but she also understands that something that ingrained doesn't just go away completely overnight. Or maybe ever. Sophie is self-aware enough to admit that, even if Nate isn't.

She's also not surprised to find Sophie without Nate. Nate might be off chasing another great white whale, or maybe Sophie just wanted some space on this trip. Maybe she wanted to see a play or slip on an old persona like a favorite coat or eat a real piece of pizza for once. There are too many possibilities to entertain, and asking guarantees nothing like truth. It makes sense though, that Nate and Sophie would be the sort of couple who don't spend every moment with each other, that they might pull apart all the better to swell back together.

They hadn't been like that. When Nate hadn't been off on a case, they had been an every moment, dinner at six o'clock kind of family. A quietly sitting on the couch together, doing the crossword and talking about the news kind of couple. But that had been old Nate. iBefore/i Nate. And she'd been a different person too. It would be too stifling now, too hollow. There is a reason she's started taking jobs all over the world, a reason there has been a string of nice men who are sweet and fun, but equally easy to let go of.

She'll get there though. Wherever she's going. Maggie is giving herself the gift of time.

The handsome man with a slightly crooked smile slides Maggie his card, cell number scrawled on the back. She takes it, sliding it into her purse, pausing to enjoy the feel of his hand on her back.

As he leaves, Sophie gives Maggie an appreciative nod. "I like that one," she says, and Maggie takes comfort in knowing Sophie's ability to read someone.

It isn't until martini number four that Sophie finally works her way back around to the real reason they are sitting here—the fake painting. "He wasn't a very nice man," she says, fingers holding her glass in a slightly different manner, her accent shifting as if she is sliding back in time.

Of all the things Charles Ralston wasn't, nice was probably the least of it. He made his fortune on the backs of helpless tenants and shady deals, and probably had at least one actual skeleton in his backyard if not his closet.

Sophie's face lifts, eyes bright with indignation still. "Did you know he intended to be buried with them?"

"The paintings?"

Sophie nods, brown hair tumbling across her forehead. "Like owning them meant they were his and his alone. Forever. His to destroy."

Maggie shivers against the implications of how Ralston might have treated other things he considered his own. Basic property laws may agree he had the right, but the hubris of taking a work of art, a piece of historical culture and dragging it down under the ground with you after you died to molder… It's fairly breathtaking in its arrogance. But also infuriating.

"I'm glad you took it," Maggie says, her lips beginning to feel the slightest bit tingly. Just enough to be pleasant. "I bet it was fun."

Sophie shakes her head in a slightly mothering way, as if only an honest person would say something like that. "It wasn't fun, darling. It was work," she says, but it's pretty clear to Maggie that most days those are the same thing for Sophie. She probably doesn't even realize how lucky that makes her, how different from most honest people.

Maggie considers that her world was a lot easier when it was all simply right and wrong. Normal and bad.

But it was also a lot less interesting.

They linger until the bartender kicks them out, calling them a cab. Maggie insists on stopping at Sophie's hotel first, putting a lot of work into not falling for any of her carefully placed gambits. She pretends not to see the flash of a blond ponytail in the lobby as they pull up, the bellhop with his hat pulled low over his face.

Sophie gives Maggie a kiss on her cheek, and Maggie hugs her back.

"Thank you," she says.

"For what, darling?" Sophie says, eyes wide.

Maggie smiles, knowing when she's being treated like a mark. "Dinner tomorrow?"

She nods. "I know the perfect place."

Of course she does.

Maggie will even try to look surprised when Sophie brings a long a few friends.

The next morning, Maggie walks through the gallery on her way to the conservation rooms, pausing in front of the landscape. It sits exactly where it was when she left the night before, now just the slightest bit askew—the only evidence of what happened here while she sat sipping drinks and flirting with a nice man.

Her eyes take in the brushstrokes, the web of cracks in the surface, the glow of the underpainting. Every little detail that finally falls into place. Not perfect, but authentic.

She doesn't see beauty, but something almost as important. A wrong made right.

Reaching out, Maggie nudges the frame straight.

.fin.