Disclaimer – Leverage is owned by Electric Entertainment and TNT. If I owned it, we'd have more episodes, and Eliot would have a lot more screen time!

Comments and feedback to Ralkana47@yahoo.com would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Author's Note – Takes place sometime during season two.

Dedicated to my Nana and my Tata, who've made a difference in the lives of a lot of little Alecs.

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Alec Hardison is a geek. He's proud of it. Geeks run the world.

The team has pretty much come to terms with his geekiness, though he knows they still get annoyed with his endless in-briefing sci-fi and movie quotes and references – Nate rolls his eyes, and Eliot threatens violence (though Eliot threatens violence if you breathe too close to him, so whatever). And he knows that they sometimes get embarrassed for him when the geek comes through too strongly.

He wants to tell them not to be embarrassed, that he's proud of who he is, but that gets too close to the things they don't talk about.

They're more than a team – they're a family, and they all know it, even though they won't admit it. But they're a broken family, full of broken people, and the only reason they can stay a family is that they don't poke at each other's private pains and secrets, and they don't share too much of their own.

So Alec can't tell them why he knows about broken families.

He was little, it's true, but he has vague, hazy memories of sleeping on the floor with his brothers and sisters, shivering in the dark 'cause there was no heat and no power, of dirty clothes and no water for baths, of scratchin' and scratchin' 'cause of lice and insect bites, of the scrabbling of rodent claws on filthy floors.

He remembers deals gone bad, shouting and screaming and hitting and crying. He remembers sirens and flashing lights in the middle of the night, huddling with his siblings in a dark closet, and the way his mama screamed when they took him away.

Those are the things he'll never tell anybody.

But that means he can't tell them that the first clear memory he has of anything good is sitting on the soft, clean, carpeted floor in Nana's tidy living room, surrounded by her and the other boys. He'd done his chores and finished his homework, and he got to eat popcorn and watch Deep Space Nine.

Alec had no idea what was going on. To this day, he couldn't tell you what episode it was. But he remembers that there were starships and starbases and space battles and funky looking aliens in bright colors, and what he really remembers is going to bed that night and praying that when he woke up, he'd be Jake Sisko.

So when Sophie smiles as she calls him a geek, when Parker grudgingly acknowledges his Trek references, when Eliot bitches the whole way through an episode of Who – but stays to watch anyway – Alec smiles.

Because he's home.