I've decided to keep up with the long standing tradition (of last year) to post on my and CK's birthday.

This is the beginning of a multi-chapter fic, based on the Horns of Dilemna, in which the Leverage team crashes in the middle of the case. It has, so far, four finished chapters and it will be at least five chapters long.

It is set in the same AU as my other stories Every Chance We Get and A Place We Can Share. Since a lot of this is from Jake's point of view, and he is discovering things at the same time as the reader, you don't actually need to read those first to understand.

It's quite a bit further along in the AU than Every Chance We Get, but you can assume that things that happened on the show mostly apply here as well. I had planned to write up other one-shots and episode coda that happen earlier first, but I guess my muse decided otherwise.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy!

As he watches her walk away, Jake hopes that Baird is making the right call by going into the server room alone and leaving them to go to Human Resources. Splitting up doesn't sound like a particularly good idea to him. He doesn't like the looks Golden Axe's CEO kept giving him throughout their talk in her office, and he is certain that she and her assistant lied through their teeth all along. But why did they focus on him so much, when Baird was the one talking?

"I'll wait for your friend," Franklin, the assistant, says when they get to the elevator. "Room 014. Go left, left and right."

Jake starts to walk into the elevator, but a hand on his shoulder stops him. Turning back, he sees Franklin give him a shake of his head. "You're coming with me," he says as the doors to the elevator close on Jones and Cassandra.

Jake tries to get out of Franklin's grasp, but it's too strong. He feels something hard bump his side, and looks down to see the barrel of a gun. He freezes.

"What−" he starts, but the man just gives him a shove toward the end of the corridor. He pushes Jake into what looks like a storeroom−but a storeroom with a reinforced steel door. Jake only has time to see metal shelves filled with boxes before he is thrown into one of them and crashes on the floor.

"Where did your friend go? Who else is there?" Franklin growls, waving the gun toward him. Jake looks around him for a way out, but nothing jumps at him. The room is small and has no other exit than the one Franklin is standing in.

"We have your...brother? The one who looks like you. Your friends are down in the labyrinth, and they won't be coming out anytime soon. Who else is there?"

"No one!" Jake shouts when it becomes evident Franklin is getting impatient for an answer. He has no idea what the man is talking about, but he does have a gun pointed at his head.

Franklin turns his head suddenly, as if hearing something in the corridor. Seconds later he is flying through the room, and his gun slides on the floor to somewhere under the shelves. Jake scrambles backward as quickly as he can, further away from where Franklin is fighting another man.

Before Jake can even stand up, Franklin crumbles on the ground, unconscious. Jake freezes in place as his opponent starts to turn toward him. His face is obscured by his long hair, but he doesn't even look out of breath.

Jake's own breath hitches when the man looks up. He knows that face.

"Eliot?" he asks slowly, unable to believe it himself. But it is him. Behind the long hair is the same face Jake sees in the mirror every morning. The face of the twin he hasn't seen in fifteen years.

Eliot frowns, still not quite looking at him. "Jake?"

"What are you doing here?" Jake asks. There are many other questions rushing in his mind, but this is the first he manages to ask.

"Eliot, we need to go," a voice says from the corridor. A blond woman sticks her head into the room, and meets Jake's eyes. Blinking, she looks back and forth between him and Eliot. "Oh. Why are there two of you?"

"Parker," Eliot says. "This is my twin brother Jacob. Jake, Parker is part of my crew."

Jake nods vaguely at the woman, still lost in the fact that Eliot is even here.

"You have a twin?" Parker asks. She pauses for a second, as if listening to something Jake can't hear. "Eliot, we really need to go. There's a bunch of security guys coming up."

Eliot starts moving. "Jake, you're coming with us. Come on," he says, walking out of the room.

"Wait! My colleagues are here too. I need to warn them!" Jake exclaims when he finally manages to take his eyes off Eliot. Baird is still in the server room, and Jones and Cassandra have gone down somewhere. He can't just leave them hanging if they're in danger.

"No time!" Parker says. She's right, Jake can hear people running down the next corridor.

"You can call them once we're out, but for now they'll have to handle themselves," Eliot says.

Parker takes the lead, Eliot's hand on her arm. Once they reach the stairs, Eliot says, "Front entrance is out, it's the first thing they'll have secured. Parker, you've got some rigs?"

"Of course," Parker says.

"Then let's go up."

Jake stalls at that. "What? Aren't we gonna end up trapped?"

"We're already trapped," Eliot says. "Roof's our only way out."

"But how?" Jake asks.

Neither of the two answer, instead starting up the stairs. Deciding his only option is to trust them, Jake follows.

They don't encounter anyone on the way up, and Jake is the only one out of breath when they come out onto the roof.

"This is going to be a little tricky," Parker says as she starts pulling things out of her backpack. "I only planned for the two of us, so I only have two rigs. Jacob, have you ever done rappelling?"

"Some, but only in mountains. Wait, you want us to jump?"

"Eliot," Parker says, ignoring him. "You have more experience than him, so I'm going to give him your harness, it should fit him just fine. You put on mine, I'll adjust it for you, and I'll just hold on to you."

"Fine," Eliot says, looking unperturbed.

Jake looks at him aghast. "That sounds really dangerous," he says, trying to keep himself from panicking. Have they gone crazy?

"Don't worry, Parker knows what she's doing," Eliot says to him, taking the harness Parker is shoving into his hands. He fiddles with it without looking at it, turning it in his hands, then he starts to pull it on.

Jake frowns, watching him. Eliot looks fit and healthy, much more than Jake ever will be. He's bulkier than he used to be, but it's all muscle. His moves are as graceful as always, and he holds himself with that quiet confidence Jake never quite managed. But there is something off about him that Jake can't put his finger on.

He doesn't notice Parker throwing a harness at him until it hits him right in the face. "Hey!" he yells.

Parker laughs, "Eliot number two doesn't have reflexes!" she exclaims triumphantly.

Jake grumbles as he untangles himself from the harness and figures out how to put it on. Who does she think she is?

She adjusts Eliot's harness with expert hands, then Jake's, pulling the straps tightly around his torso. Jake really hopes that Eliot is right and she know what she is doing.

"Okay, when you're ready, you're going first," she says as she attaches him to the rope now secured to the roof.

"I'm not ready," Jake says.

"Well, you better be soon, because we're running out of time!"

At that moment, the staircase's door opens and armed men come running out. "Great," Jake murmurs, stepping closer to the edge. He forbids himself firmly from looking down, and jumps.

He only just hears Parker's shout of delight over the rush of wind as the three of them go down side by side.

When they slow down and eventually stop going down, ten feet above ground, Parker talks him through giving the rope enough slack to take him the rest of the way down. She herself lets go of Eliot to land lightly on the sidewalk below them.

"That was...intense," Jake says as his feet touch down, trying to catch his breath.

"You okay?" Eliot asks, the smirk on his face tainted by a touch of worry.

"Yeah. It was kinda fun, actually."

Parker is already pulling the harness off him. "Of course it was. Now we need to keep moving," she says. "Come on."

She leads them to a silver van in a side street two blocks away. "Hardison, we're here," she says seemingly to no one.

The back door to the van opens, revealing an open space filled with more electronics than Jake has ever seen. A young black man ushers them in, pausing only to stare at Jake.

"Wow," he says. "I see what you mean, Parker. So you're Eliot's brother?"

"Hardison, this is Jake. Jake, Hardison is the other member of our crew. He's a hacker."

"Nice to meet you," Jake says, climbing into the van and shaking the man's hand. Hardison gives him a nod, still staring, then turns away to slide into the driver's seat. "Let's get out of here," he says.

Eliot sits down on the van's bench beside Jake, leaving Parker to take the passenger seat up front. He is still reeling from the way events have unfolded. Having to pull out in a hurry because they got made is annoying, but salvageable. But finding his brother, the brother he left behind in Oklahoma fifteen years ago, in the middle of a job in Boston? That's a whole other story.

It's not that they're really estranged. Born eleven minutes apart, they've always had a bond stronger than anything Eliot has ever experienced with another human being. He tried, really tried, to stay away from Jake, for his own protection, back when his life turned on its head and he ended up in a world of darkness and crime. For four years, he let his brother think he was dead.

And when he cracked and finally called Jake, with the firm intention of it being the last time he ever heard his brother's voice, he was unable to let him go. That was just months before Chapman caught up with him in Los Angeles.

In the eleven years since, they've stayed in touch over the phone. Eliot promised himself never to put Jake in danger because of his job, and until today he's succeeded. He distanced himself from his family so long ago, abandoning his birth name and cleaning his record, that no one ever found them, not even Hardison. And now Jake is here, chased after by the security of the decidedly dodgy company they have been working for weeks. Jake, who's supposed to be working at their father's pipeline company in Oklahoma.

Jake, who doesn't know Eliot is blind.

Eliot flexes his left hand in a familiar move. He can hear Jake fiddling with his cuff beside him, one of his telltale anxious stims. Eliot is briefly amazed that he can still recognize that after all this time and a dramatic change of perception, but he can almost see it in his mind's eye, better than he has seen anything in years.

Which brings him back to his problem, the one tying knots in his stomach. He didn't mean to hide his accident from Jake, not really. Well, that's a lie. But back when it happened, when Eliot called Jake for the first time after being rescued from captivity, he found himself unable to speak about what happened. It's not like Jake could have done anything from several states away, when Eliot refused to tell him where he was, anyway.

And he's never found a way to tell him since.

"What the hell are you doing in Boston?" he asks finally, preferring to attack rather than wait for questions. He's fairly sure Jake hasn't noticed yet, but he's bound to figure it out soon, and Eliot can't hide it forever.

He tries to squash down the fear in his stomach.

"Working. What are you doing here?" Jake fires back.

Eliot can tell this is going nowhere and decides to wait until they're back at the hotel. He shakes his head, ignoring the question.

"It's good to see you," he says instead, his voice barely above a whisper. He carefully doesn't think about how that's technically a lie.

A bump in the road brings them closer, almost touching. Jake makes a noise with his throat and Eliot feels his hand grab his arm suddenly. He moves so their hands grasp and squeezes.

They stay silent for a moment, until Parker calls from the front of the van. "We're almost there!"

The van pulls up close to the hotel almost as she says it. Hardison and Parker get out of the front, and Eliot gets to his feet. He doesn't try to hide his slight fumbling for the back door handle, but he doesn't go as far as pulling out his cane. He's not ready yet.

Jake walks out behind him. Eliot takes a second to orient himself, the noise around him telling him they're parked a block away from the hotel, in front of the small café they've gotten breakfast from the last few days. Parker taps the back of his hand to guide him, but he pushes her away and follows Hardison's footsteps instead.

He curses himself silently when he realizes what he's doing. He doesn't actually want to hide his blindness from Jake, he just dreads his reaction so much that he's subconsciously trying to push the moment back for as long as possible.

"I really need to call my colleagues and warn them," Jake says once they're standing in the hotel suite.

Eliot nods, saving his questions for later. "Over here," he says, showing Jake to his bedroom. Jake walks in and closes the door behind him.

Eliot pulls off his jacket and drapes it over the back of a chair, and plops down into an armchair, kicking his shoes and losing his tie. He almost unconsciously pulls his legs up, which he only does when he's tense−or completely relaxed.

"A twin brother, Eliot? How come you never talked about him?" Hardison asks, sitting on the couch, already typing on his keyboard. Parker joins him shortly.

"You okay?" she asks.

Eliot nods toward her with a tight smile. She may seem clueless about human relationships, but she's always been the best at gauging his mood.

"Never really came up. I'm sure I mentioned him a few time," he evades. Of course that's not what Hardison is really asking.

"I knew you had a brother," Parker says. "Just not that he's your twin."

"There's no record of a brother in your files," Hardison says.

"No, of course not. With the life I've had, you think I didn't take precautions to protect my family?" Eliot hesitates for a moment, but Hardison will go looking whatever he does. It might as well be in the right direction. "Look for Jacob Stone," he says. "Born in Oklahoma City, June 27, 1977."

"That's your birth date," Parker observes.

"Twin brother, Parker."

"Yes, but your last names are different," she says.

"I changed mine after I left home," Eliot answers. "Eliot Stone is my birth name."

"Eliot Stone," Parker repeats, as if trying it out. "I like Spencer better. But it has a nice ring to it."

"Eliot Spencer is an alias?" Hardison asks. "Then it's really good. I couldn't tell, which means it's, like, as good as CIA IDs."

"That's because it is one," Eliot says. "It's the ID the CIA set up for me to infiltrate Moreau's ranks. They completely erased my records from before, so they couldn't blow it when I left them. After that it was easier to keep it."

"Even when Moreau was after you? I always wondered why you didn't just disappear and make a new life somewhere."

"With the resources he had, he would have found me eventually. It was better to use my name to find a way to bring him down. After this," Eliot waves a hand toward his eyes, "he told me himself he would leave me alone, and I'd already made a name for myself in the retrieval business, so I kept the alias."

"It says here Eliot Stone was killed in action in Afghanistan in 1998," Hardison says.

Eliot listens for a second, making sure Jake is still talking on the phone in the next room.

"Yeah. That's what I meant when I said they erased my records. Jake is the only member of my family who knows I'm alive."

I hope you enjoyed this chapter! Please tell me what you thought, and how you think it's going to go. Eliot and Jake have a lot to tell each other...

Updates should be coming more regularly than every six months this time!

I have a Tumblr (theemmaarthur) if you want to keep up and interact, though reviews are nice too ;)