All the usual disclaimers about these characters and the concept not belonging to me apply. And I can only apologise to John Rogers, Chris Downey, and Joe Hortua who wrote such an awesome story for Nate at the end of The Toy Job...there's no way these four stories can compete! (but I wrote them anyway...sorry.)

Author's note: As noted in the story summary, lots of potential for spoilers. But the show HAS been off the air for over a year, so, seriously, if there are episodes you haven't seen yet, STOP reading this story AND GO AND WATCH THEM! They are far more entertaining - and explosions are so much more satisfying on screen than on paper...

Anyway, that being said, this little four-part story is a 'thank you' for all the people who have favourited/followed one of my stories in the past month or so. I don't know what sparked the recent activity (maybe the communal grief at the first anniversary of Leverage's cancellation drew more people into the fandom?), but it reminded me how nice it is to see those notifications pop up in one's inbox - and helped coax one of my smaller plot bunnies out of hibernation (most of the other plot bunnies have turned out to be giant rabbits, and I'm a little wary of poking them with sticks...I may just have to wait for their alarm clocks to wake them up :).) I hope you like this story as much as whichever one you previously ran across!

PS. Un-betaed as usual. All mistakes, typos, etc are all my own.

PS2. I didn't mean to suggest that there will actually be any explosions in this story. Sorry. Maybe next time.

It's an awkward silence that follows Nate's revelation about wanting to pass his childhood dream of becoming master trumpeter onto Sam. Parker fixes her gaze resolutely on her hands. Hardison's eyes skitter around the room, but refuse to meet any of the others. Eliot, with an obvious effort of will, keeps his focus on Nate, and Nate meets his gaze for a moment before clearing his throat and looking away. He looks to Sophie for recue. Like Parker, she'd initially dropped her eyes, but unlike Parker, she looks back up, giving Nate a little smile. She knows she needs to say something, to fill the silence. The exchange of trust had, after all, been her suggestion. But Nate, damn him, had upped the ante on her. The story she had planned on sharing – a light-hearted account of her seduction of a Spanish diplomat's son – would sound insincere in the wake of Nate's story, would be a repudiation of the way he has bared his soul.

"Do you remember the Countess of Kensington?" Sophie asks instead.

She looks around and sees the relief, tinged with varying degrees of curiousity, in the four pairs of eyes that have shot to her face.

"She isn't actually my aunt," she continues. "But she and her husband were family to one of the first 'Sophie's I became."

"Does that mean you are a princess?" Parker demands. "And do you have a castle?"

Sophie smiles, shaking her head.

"No, Parker," she says. "But I suppose I could have if I had done things differently...I guess that's kind of my point."

She pauses, realising she's going to have to give them a little more background than that.

"My parents were good people," Sophie continues. "And they gave me the kind of childhood I am sure they thought was best – largely through the English boarding school system. Unfortunately, their plans weren't my plans, and the one thing they maybe hadn't thought through fully was that an English girls' boarding school can open up a broader range of contacts than might be quite in a parent's mind when imagining their little darling ultimately marrying into Society."

The arch look Sophie sends Nate is full of shared secrets.

"Mettier was godfather to one of my classmates. We spent an... informative... summer at his estate, perfecting our French accents and learning the wines."

Nate snorts and tops up both his own and Sophie's glasses. The younger members of the team exchange bemused glances and shrugs.

"My parents were oblivious to what I was getting up to," Sophie goes on. "I'll never forget the looks on their faces the day I finished school and told them I wanted to move to London and be an actress. They just looked so lost. ...I remember looking at them and thinking 'Who are these people?', and then realising my mother was looking at me as if the exact same thought was running through her mind."

She pauses again, regret flickering across her face.

"We didn't fight about it – no-one yelled. In fact, it was all very polite and proper. But after that, we just drifted apart. Other than Christmas holidays, I hadn't spent much time at home in years anyway, and what letters and phone calls there had been just sort of dwindled away...Anyway, I went to London and started auditioning. The Countess and her husband were one of my best friend's parents; I'd visited them over numerous school holidays and called them 'Auntie' and 'Uncle" for years, so I didn't hesitate when they invited me to stay. The whole 'Duchess of Hanover' thing had started as a dare years earlier, the first time I went to visit over a long weekend...it just seemed easier to maintain it than for my friend and I to explain we'd lied to them before. No-one really questioned it anyway...in the theatre world it wasn't uncommon for people to use a stage name, and anywhere else being introduced by the Count or Countess of Kensington generally ensured not too many questions were asked. When they were, well, there had been some convenient fires in various records halls over the centuries as well as some very confusing marriages."

Sophie smiles, tracing patterns on the bar with an expensively manicured fingernail.

"The first few years were wonderful. Most of the parts I got were small roles or 'member of the chorus' type things, but between the Countess' social contacts and the theatre crowd it was a whirlwind of parties full of men ready to fall in love with me, and it felt like success... It started to fall apart when my friend and the man she was seeing died in a car accident after a weekend visiting friends in the country. I wanted to move out of her parents house at that point, but they begged me not to, saying they'd come to see me as another daughter and they couldn't stand losing us both. So I stayed and we grieved together... I'd come to love them for their own sakes by that point and I played into the role of daughter more than I probably ever had with my own parents. But I had another reason for staying..."

Sophie trails off.

"One of the men who'd been ready to fall in love with me was a member of the Royal family. I don't know that I was in love with him exactly, but I was...dazzled. I mean, talk about glamour – not to mention the jewels! As much as I loved the idea of being an actress, I couldn't resist that temptation. He was married, but I was naive enough at the time to think that wouldn't matter – not when he loved me. And that might have been true for him. The Queen, however, was not going to let divorce sully even a secondary line of succession. And, of course, the whole Duchess of Hanover persona couldn't stand up to the scrutiny that would have followed a public announcement that he wanted to marry me... I don't think I have ever been more humiliated than in the private interview I had in the wake of that. It was made very clear that my options were exposure as a fraud – bringing public shame down on myself, the Count and Countess, and my parents – or breaking off all contact immediately and making myself scarce, in exchange for no official denunciation of Lady Charlotte Prentiss."

Sophie stops, sipping her drink.

"As you can imagine, it didn't seem much like a choice...I left that same day. I had to explain to the Countess what had happened. She was, of course, shocked. I think less at the fact that I had lied about who I was and taken a Royal lover, than at the fact I had let the latter become known – that simply not being the way things should be done. Uncle William was away at the time, so I didn't see him before I left...I have no idea what she told him. I knew I'd let them down – used them, even – and I didn't want to face that. So I buried Charlotte as deeply as I'd buried my childhood self in her, and moved on, making new lives, new people that gave me the escape I was looking for."

She stops again, looking pensive.

"I ran across Uncle William's obituary a couple of years ago," Sophie admits. "But even then I couldn't bring myself to go back. Seeing the Countess when we went to London after Keller was...uncomfortable. But it forced me to acknowledge that piece of my history – of myself, and to bury those parts of Charlotte I should never have let live. Now she's just an aristocratic coat I can slip on and enjoy when she's needed, not a person I have to worry about losing myself in."

Her audience takes a moment to digest this.

"So, that storage locker of art works and artefacts in London that you turned in during that con...?" Nate prompts.

Sophie smiles nostalgically.

"Mostly 'gifts' that were given to Lady Charlotte," she tells him. "Plus a souvenir or two I picked up elsewhere."

"But no castles?" Parker sounds disappointed. "You had a prince and you didn't even get one castle?"

"What can I say, Parker?" Sophie is amused. "I was young, and still learning. I do have a rather nice ring and brooch set from that little interlude, though. I'll show it to you sometime, if you like."

Parker nods, but she's starting to look jumpy again as she realises Sophie's story is over, and either she, Hardison, or Eliot is going to have to speak up next.

"So," Sophie asks brightly, as if reading Parker's mind. "Who's next?"

She looks expectantly between the younger members of the team. Parker twitches away from her gaze, clearly uncomfortable. Eliot has retreated to the end of the bar, glaring into his whiskey as if it can solve the riddle of what would be an appropriate – and unclassified – secret to share. Hardison just looks hesitant, as if he's not quite sure he has a story that qualifies as the kind of trust they're supposed to share. He has secrets galore, of course, but they're mostly technical secrets about backdoors and weak spots that can be exploited to gain access to useful databases or beat even the impossible levels in all computer games, and experience has taught him that the others just do not appreciate such information: Sophie's eyes glaze over within seconds; Parker nods along enthusiastically, but this is just a cover for wherever her mind has wandered off to instead – she either genuinely doesn't care or has already beaten that particular game anyway; Nate sighs and tells him to skip to the punchline; and Eliot doesn't even give the topic that much consideration – just goes straight to the Dammit, Hardisons and demands to know why he needs to know such stuff.

Sophie raises an eyebrow questioningly at Nate.

"Hardison?" he asks. "You got something to share?"