If Courage Isnt The Absence Of Fear But Doing The Right Thing Regardless Of It, Maybe Confidence Isnt

If courage isn’t the absence of fear but doing the right thing regardless of it, maybe confidence isn’t the absence of insecurity but knowing you have real worth despite it

Leverage: Supers

They don’t have superpowers. They don’t. Or at least, they don’t have super powers.

Sure, Nate jokes that he’s psychic. It’s a con he’s played on more than one mark, not counting the times Sophie (or, memorably, Tara) picked up the role. The rumors of precognition floated around him as an investigator no matter how much he insisted otherwise. As his reputation as a thief grew, so did the rumors. Being assumed as a seer of some kind has been a help as much as a hindrance, really, but it deters more trouble than it attracts, so Nate’s let the rumor lie.

But there are times, once in a while, when Nate pauses. His voice will get raspy. Usually it’s just a word: duck, stop, run, wait. The team has learned that you don’t argue when he uses that voice, because he’s always right, and it’s saved their lives more than once. Nate calls it a feeling, or an instinct, and then changes the subject. One time, when he was drunk and pressed, he slurred, “It didn’t save my son.” After that, they stopped asking.

Sophie isn’t actually a shapeshifter, not like in that 1970’s footage of the person changing, one face after another sliding across their body like a slideshow. They know Sophie can’t do that, because she’s a good liar but they know she cares, and if she could do that, she would have, when they were in a few tight spots where a change of face would have stopped the violence.

But there’s something just slightly too good about her performances, sometimes. Even though it’s her skills that sell it, her features never betray her. Her skin is always just enough of the right shade. Her eyes are always just close enough to the right shape. It could be written off as the mind playing tricks, except that Hardison keep having to update his facial analysis algorithms, because they keep getting Sophie wrong. People who have met her before swear they haven’t, and vice versa.

Eliot is easy to pin down, if harder to prove. It’s just not natural for anyone to take that much damage and never need a hospital. He always waves it off, insists it’s not as bad as it looks, but that doesn’t explain why he has smooth skin in places where he absolutely should have scars, given the injuries he’s acquired during their work.

One day Hardison cracks the right server and finds a photo he recognizes on a list in a military database. After that, he notices the way Eliot reacts to mentions of super soldiers and government experiments. It’s subtle. It could be mistaken for the general dislike many army grunts have of superheroes, if he didn’t know better.

Parker also has instinctive reactions, though she denies them even while tensing, just enough for her teammates to notice, around large men in lab coats when they tower over her, around needles and syringes. She doesn’t know why because she was far too young to remember anything before the endless foster homes.

When she trusts them, eventually, they get glimpses of Parker dislocating joints that shouldn’t be able to dislocate and popping them back into place without blinking or bruising. It’s a bit too much for even the most limber double-jointed acrobats. Hardison thinks of cats, who can fold their collarbones to fit through tight spaces, and deliberately does not go looking for Parker’s past.

And Hardison? Hardison doesn’t think he has anything at all above baseline. Sure, he’s always talked to his tech. He names his computers, the vans, the robots. He whispers soothing encouragements or desperate pleas off-mic. Like any good programmer, he’s irrationally superstitious, but he doesn’t really, logically, objectively think much of it, until the day when Parker thrusts her phone in his face, cracked and probably irreparably dead, and tells him to ask it to turn on for just a bit longer so they can call for help.

He does. It does. Parker seems completely unsurprised. Haridison starts being more aware of how he talks to things, starts leaning how to feel the connections that he’s been tapping into unconsciously his whole life.

They don’t have superpowers. But then again, none of them ever claimed to be normal.

reblog this if you’re jewish or your blog is a safe space for jewish people

in light of recent events as well as a new rise in creating nazi ocs I think this post is an important one to have on your blog if you stand behind your jewish followers or are jewish yourself.

joke’s on darcy, lizzie happens to be besties with mrs collins so do you know what that means? visits. do you know who mrs collins will inevitably bring WITH her???

mr collins. buckle in for some one-sided conversations on the grandeur of pemberley and how there is but one estate only marginally finer, he thinks you will no doubt agree, which can only be, of course, rosing’s park, which can be viewed by his own very humble abode

they’ll all have their dinner and the women will retreat to another room and darcy will stare very, very imploringly to his wife to please, stay. like, please. this man doesn’t shut up. surely you want to talk to him. let’s tag team. please lizzie. he will ask of nothing from you for an entire fortnight if you please actually stay in the same room so mr collins will have SOMEWHERE ELSE to direct his onslaught of ass kissing. lizzie. lizzie.

If Netflix Marvel really is canon with Disney Marvel (as in Daredevil and Kingpin aren’t “variants”), then I want to bring back this point I made a few years ago:

Remember how Peter Parker was complaining about how he had nothing to really deal with in “Spider-Man Homecoming”? Before he encountered Vulture, he was stuck doing minor activities like helping people with directions and stopping bike thieves. For some reason, he couldn’t find any big-name criminals to take down.

Coincidentally, “The Punisher” season 1 came out that same year. In that show, Frank Castle temporarily retired after wiping out the gangs that were responsible for his family’s murders. And the show emphasized the fact that Frank took out every single member, even the low-level guys. 

So, while correlation doesn’t necessarily mean causation, it’s fun to imagine that the reason why Peter didn’t have much to do in “Homecoming” was because the Punisher killed all the major criminals in the city.

And then you have:

1) Luke Cage clearing out the major criminals in Harlem

2) Matt Murdock taking down Wilson Fisk, the biggest mob boss in NYC  

Taking all of this into account, Frank, Luke, and Matt were so good at fighting crime that they didn’t leave Peter with much to do in his first movie.