Notes: I watched four hours of Ouran High School Host Club anime and ended up writing Leverage fic. Yeah. My brain doesn't always make sense.

Closed Worlds

When Sam was five years old and just starting Kindergarten Nate was surprised to receive a note from the teacher that he didn't play well with others.

A conference told him and Maggie that it was alright, even normal, for an only child to take some time to get used to being in school with other children.

Then Sam met Matthew and Clair, two other kindergarteners, and things changed. He started to play well with them and the notes stopped coming home. The teacher was confident that in time the three of them would learn to play well with more than just each other.

They didn't in kindergarten, but that was okay, having a world that consisted of the three of them was improvement from a world of one.

In first grade they got closer, they were in a private school and the grades were small enough that there was only one class they could be in so they stayed together.

Notes started coming home around the time the three of them finished creating a language together. They were wrapped up in each other's worlds.

It was play fighting with Matthew that Sam got the bruise that wouldn't go away that was the first warning he was sick.

A year later Matthew and Clair held each other's hands while they walked up to place a flower on top of Sam's coffin.

Nate doesn't know what happened to them after that.

It's just one more thing he lost track of.

But sitting here in the park, watching the three youngest members of the team sitting on a park bench outside the museum they'd spent the afternoon in (Nate had gone with them to make sure they were only scoping the place for fun and not actively preparing for a heist) he can't help think back to the day he took the three children to a children's museum and they ate lunch in the park outside.

He watches them, like he did back then, seeing the conversation flow back and forth, little gestures that broadcast closeness, understanding that isn't spoken so much as felt.

Their eyes rarely stray from each other and never focus on anyone else. Nate knows that even Eliot, with his constant awareness of his surrounding, only registers the humans around him in two groups "Us" and "not us". Not us might be broken down into "threat" "Not a threat" and "Attractive woman" but really Nate didn't think he saw much of a difference when it came down to it.

Watching the three Nate had to wonder if any one of them saw any more difference in other people than a collective "not us".

In his head, in all their heads, they made a big deal about the fact Nate had taken lone wolves and taught them how to not only do good but play well with others.

He was starting to be pretty sure he hadn't managed the later.

These thieves could get along. Hell, they'd made each other their world. Sometimes it was starting to feel like this team was the team's whole world.

But it was a closed world. No admittance. No others allowed.

Sure they might be nice to a client or old ally. Eliot might date his way through the eligible female population of Boston and Parker might have aliases that make friends. Sophie could have a whole group of theatre friends but the fact that she was so willing to just fake her own death and cut off contact with all of them was very telling.

The team did actually know how to play well with others when they had to.

But they'd never actually care until this team.

And the longer it was just this team, the more they learned to make each other into their entire worlds…

The more they were going to close this world off to everyone else.

Nate remembered the teacher's reassurance, that moving from a world of one to a world of three was good progress for a year.

He'd just try to forget everything that happened afterwards.