A/N: So, I've been working through a list of prompts, and for the most part I've just been keeping them on my computer until I can publish them all together, but there was something different about this one, so I've decided to go ahead and post it on its own. The prompt for this was "Unread", and there were a few scenarios that came to mind, ranging from fluffy to funny to flat out sad. That being said, of course (since I'm a writer, and we're sadistic by nature) I was drawn to the most tragic one. As if Eliot needed more tragedy! I PROMISE I'M NOT TRYING TO TORTURE THE CHARACTERS! Ok, maybe I am a little bit... But it's for a good cause! Right? Maybe it's a good thing that I don't own Leverage...

Eliot had a secret. Well, to be fair, Eliot had lots of secrets, but not of this kind. Usually the secrets he kept were about his past – demons that didn't need to be brought out, and that he hoped he was finished with. This was something different. It was something that was still going on, but that was too personal for him to share, even with the team.

Once a month Eliot disappeared for a whole day. Once a month he traveled to a busy post office in the middle of Dallas, Texas, opened P.O. box 27, and got his mail. There would be the usual ads and special offers, which he dumped in the trash on his way out, but there were always four letters that he tucked in his jacket to take home with him. They were hand-addressed on cream-colored envelopes, and they bore a return address from somewhere deep in Oklahoma. Once Eliot got back to wherever he was currently living, he would lock the doors, pull the blinds, and find a lock box that was hidden in a wall, or under the floor boards, or in an air vent. He would open the box and gently place the unread letters next to the dozen or so others that looked just like them. He would then lock the box and put it back in its hiding place until next month. When the box was full, he would take it and bury it somewhere only he could find, and then he would go to get a new box.

He'd been doing that for over ten years, ever since he had gotten back from his first tour in the army and found his P.O. box stuffed with two years-worth of letters: letters that his mother had written him while he was away on a mission that she had never wanted him to take. When he first saw them, he couldn't bear to read them because he knew he couldn't go back home, his father had made that very clear, and after that it became a sort of ritual for him; get the letters, hide them, ship out, go to the post office once he got back, and hide the letters again. Through the years, there was always something comforting about knowing that, no matter where he went or what he did, when he came back home there would be something waiting for him. He never read the letters. After the homesickness went away it was because of shame; he couldn't bear to think of his mother knowing all that he had done, all that he had become.

For a few years, while he worked for Moreau, he didn't get the letters at all, but once he got away from that and got Moreau out of his head, he went back. He hovered outside of the post office for hours, pacing back and forth, convincing himself that the letters wouldn't be there – no one would write for that long without getting so much as a phone call in return – and yet hoping beyond hope that they would be. He finally went in just before the post office closed and, taking the key from its chain around his neck, Eliot opened box 27. There, packed in tightly together, were his mother's letters. He took them out and left quickly, but when he got back to his safe house the hardened criminal, assassin, and hitman dumped the letters on the floor, collapsed next to them and wept like he hadn't since he'd first left home.

After that he made it a point, regardless of where he was, to go back to that P.O. box in Dallas at least twice a year. He kept stashing the letters, never reading any of them, and never really being curious as to what they said. Once he joined the Leverage crew he made his visits even more regular and his life fell into a somewhat pleasant pattern for the first time in a decade. He should have known that it was too good to be true. And if he had ever thought that, he would have been proven right on one rainy summer evening.

Eliot was in the middle of a briefing at the Brew Pub when he felt something in his pocket vibrate. He knew what it was immediately but had to check to be sure. He reached in his pocket and fished the old flip phone out, glancing at the number on the display but already knowing that only one person would be calling this phone, and that the reason wouldn't be good. He told Hardison and Parker to do this one without him and left before they could say anything. Once he was out of ear-shot, he answered the phone.

"Hello?" There was silence on the other end. Eliot tried again, "Dad?"

An exhale.

Eliot tried a third time, asking a question he already knew the answer to, "Is everything ok?"

There was a bitter laugh, "Boy, you know it ain't. And it hasn't been since you left."

Eliot didn't answer, knowing that the man was right.

"I didn't call to chat," Harold Spencer went on, "and you know that, so I'll get right to the point. I ain't gonna be gentle with you boy, 'cause you never were gentle with us, but I thought you had a right to know. Your mother's dead."

Eliot had prepared himself for the very worst, and this was it. He said nothing, trying to measure his response.

"You hear me?" the man almost yelled, clearly frustrated with Eliot's silence. "She's dead! Though I guess I shouldn't expect you to care. You didn't then, so why should you now?"

Eliot felt heat rise to his face, and it took all his effort to control his voice, "I heard you. And believe it or not, I do care. How'd it happen?"

"You do, do you?" Harold huffed under his breath, then answered Eliot's question, "Cancer. They caught it in stage four. She never did have a chance." Eliot was still processing when his father went on, "I didn't call to invite you to the funeral or nothing; I just thought you should know."

Eliot opened his mouth to respond, but before he could the other man hung up. Eliot sat there with the words on his tongue: Thank you, Dad. I'm sorry I left you.

Eliot shut the flip phone and slipped it in his pocket. It took him less than a minute to decide what he was going to do, and then he was out the door and on his way.

He didn't stop by his apartment, he didn't need to. Instead he went straight to the airport and booked the soonest flight for Oklahoma City.

Eliot was tired. No, it wasn't tiredness that he was feeling, it was weariness: life-sapping, bone-bruising weariness. He felt like he had been chewed up and spit out a dozen times over, and there was nothing he could do about it. Opening the door to his apartment, he went in and shut it behind him. He couldn't bring himself to take another step, so he collapsed against the door and slid down it. Setting the lock box he had been carrying down beside him, he surveyed the stack of boxes just like it that sat under his table. He leaned his head back on the door and thought distantly about the past few days.

He had gone to his mother's funeral – it wasn't hard to find out where and when it was going to be – but had only watched from a distance. He didn't blame his father for pointedly not inviting him, and would have felt uneasy if he had actually gone and mingled: too many familiar faces, too many well-meaning questions. No, it would be better for him to remain unseen, but he couldn't have not gone.

So he had gone and listened to the kind words the preacher had to say, and to the tearful stories the friends and relatives had to tell, all with dry eyes himself. Somehow it didn't seem real. Part of him had always known that he would never see his mother again, but the other part had stayed in quiet denial all these years. In the end he left just before the funeral was over and headed out of town. He didn't drive to the airport; instead he traveled in the opposite direction, pressing on at a steady pace until he was miles from all civilization. Then, pulling over on the side of the empty road and taking a shovel from his truck, he strode over to the base of an ancient willow tree and began to dig.

The next few days passed in a numbed blur. He crisscrossed the country, digging up boxes and only talking to anyone when absolutely necessary. Parker called once, very straightforwardly asking if he was dead or injured, but once she got a negative answer she simple said "Ok", and hung up the phone. After that he finally flew back to Portland. He had just retrieved the last box from its hiding place and come back to his apartment. As he stared at the stack in front of him, his mind – which had remained stubbornly blank for the better part of a week – woke up, and not to pleasant thoughts.

He had known that he needed to gather the boxes, and had chased them down with an almost animal instinct: impersonal, yet desperate. But now that he had them, he didn't quite know what to do with them. Well, he knew what he needed to do, but he wasn't sure if he had the courage for that just now. He sat there, on the floor of his apartment, staring at seven dusty, innocent boxes, and he felt pure dread. He didn't even know what he was afraid of; it just came over him in a cold sweat. All the reasons he had ever used for not opening his mother's letters forced themselves into Eliot's mind, and all of them crumbled to dust immediately. All of them but two.

If I open them Mom will find out what kind of person I've become.

If she finds out, she'll stop writing.

Eliot's whirling mind stopped abruptly. Neither of these excuses could stand any better than the others because of one irrefutable fact: his mother was dead.

Eliot closed his eyes. He took a deep, shuddering breath and held it.

His mother was dead.

He exhaled and tears began to form behind his closed lids. They welled up and overflowed.

His mother would never find out what kind of man he had become because she was dead, and because she was dead, she would never write another letter.

Eliot squeezed his eyes shut and buried his head in his hands, trying to shut out the thought, trying to distance himself from it like he had done from so many other things in his past, but he couldn't. A great, heaving sob broke out of him, and after that, another. Tears slipped from between his fingers and dropped to the floor, soaking the carpet as Eliot Spencer wept. It wasn't Eliot Spencer the killer, or Eliot Spencer the criminal, or even Eliot Spencer the soldier who was weeping, it was little Eliot Spencer the son, crying for his mother. It was the toddler who had tripped on the sidewalk and needed his mother to kiss his knee, and the boy whose mother had fixed his favorite action figure. It was the kid who thought he had known better than his mother and had left her despite her tears; but even more than that, it was the man who had run so far, and for so long that he just couldn't stand it anymore.

Eliot sat there all night. He never stirred from that spot. It wasn't until the sunrise began to glow through the window that he realized it had even gotten dark, and as the light grew stronger, so did he. Lifted by a strength he knew was not his own, he reached for a box – the very first box – drew its key from around his neck, and opened it. He took the letters out and lifted them to his face. Underneath the decade of dirt, and the scent of the box, lay a faint trace of his mother. He took a deep breath and pulled the very first letter from the pile. His hands trembled as he opened it, ever so gently, and he unfolded it. Eliot Spencer, the son, began to read what his mother had written him, all those years ago. There in that letter the mother and son were as close as they had ever been.

They were and always would be held together by their tear-stains, mingled on the paper.

A/N: I hope that you enjoyed this! Please let me know if you did (or didn't). If you want to read more of my Leverage stuff you can look up my story Hitter, Hacker, Grifter, Thief, (Mastermind). That's the one-shot collection that I originally wrote this for, and that I'll probably eventually add this to. Thank you so much for reading!