Bullying
Title: Bullying
Author: ZanneS
Rating: G
Genre: gen/Leverage
Characters: Elliot
Summary: Elliot found his career path early in life.
Author's Note: Thank you to mymuseandi for agreeing to beta!
Disclaimer: Devlin owns all.
Bullying
The first kid came with a bag of fresh baked cookies and a few X-Men comics.
Elliot wasn’t sure what the little guy - a freshman, he thought, but he couldn’t be sure - was doing over at his table.
No one came to his table without an express invitation; he’d made it a point not to invite anyone since he’d started going to this school and won the rights to this patch of cafeteria from Stoney Johnson. Just to make it clear who owned this piece of prime real estate - located in the corner of the caf by the largest window, where Elliot could keep an eye on his car and the room at the same time - Elliot had spent the first lunch period after his win carving his name in the metal surface with a switchblade, right next to the large divot caused by Stoney’s head.
Elliot glared up at the small boy through the lengths of his hair, his blue eyes burning with warning, making the freshman gulp nervously. The kid reached out trembling hands to show the loot and warily placed it on the table, pushing it towards Elliot with the tips of his fingers while trying to keep the bulk of his body out of arm’s reach.
Elliot glanced from the offering to the kid’s face, before he reached out to snag the top comic and idly flip through its pages.
“Whaddaya want?” he asked, his rough voice making the boy’s eyes widen in surprise.
Elliot didn’t talk to a lot of people either.
The boy fidgeted on his feet, Elliot’s welcome far from reassuring if the sweat that broke over the kid’s brow meant anything.
“Um…you don’t know me….”
“Get to the point,” Elliot said, taking a bite of cookie and then studying it with a glimmer of surprise. “Is that nutmeg?”
“Yeah, my mom….” At Elliot’s level stare, the boy stuttered to a stop, before he said in a rush, “Mark Hannigan threatened to beat me up if I didn’t do his science homework for him for the rest of the year, and I’m not even in Chem, so it’d be kind of hard and I already have Advanced Bio and English so I wouldn’t have time anyway….”
“So?” Elliot took another bite of cookie, and flipped another page, his eyes fixed on the comic.
“So…I was hoping you’d be like…my bodyguard? Scare Mark off?”
At that, Elliot’s intense blue-eyed stare rose from whatever he was reading to meet the kid's eyes. He thoughtfully munched another cookie, crumbs spilling over the graphics. He studied the small boy standing before him, from the top of his greasy hair, down to his grubby Converse sneakers.
“Oh…um…. I guess that means you’ll think about it?”
Elliot didn’t answer.
The boy pushed his glasses back up his nose, and gave him a small bow. “Thank you…uh, thanks.”
Elliot shooed him away with a careless wave of his hand and ate the rest of the cookies as he perused the latest adventures of the X-Men.
That Wolverine was one cool dude.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
When rumors of Mark Hannigan running out of algebra and crying like a little girl, with a suspicious wet stain on the front of his pants, started circulating, Elliot started to receive more supplicants.
They came in slow trickles, usually in pairs, as if they needed moral support to ask for their favors. And with these visitors came the offerings - small things, really. Sometimes it was baked goods, or books, or comics. There were a few tapes and videos, or a Walkman, even a T-shirt, but no one ever paid any actual money.
Elliot never asked. Accepting money in exchange for acts of threat or intimidation was a class 4 violation guaranteeing up to three years of incarceration. He’d read the legal code once, when there wasn’t anything good on TV.
It was also illegal to spit on the sidewalk in areas where the population was more than 3,000 people within a twenty-mile radius, or to engage in a duel and win - though losing didn’t seem much of an option since the loser would be dead.
So, Elliot would sit, overlooking the cafeteria like a monarch from his solitary seat. Kids would come up to him, leaving payment on his table and telling him what they hoped he could do for them to keep the bullies at bay.
It got to the point that he didn’t even need to frown in the general direction of whoever was causing the problem, because if someone was seen at his table leaving homemade lasagna or a copy of Maxim, word would get around and the problem would go away on its own.
When graduation came, and Elliot had to look forward, he remembered what his teachers had always told him, that high school set the groundwork for the future.
Maybe there was a way to make some money out of this particular skill set after all.