Thinking

By Thalia

Tag to "The Bottle Job"

Disclaimer: The only way I could own Leverage is if I were to steal it, and I'm no Parker. You do the math.

A/N: Hi all, this is my first Leverage fic, so please be kind and enjoy.

Parker: What's Nate thinking?

Eliot: He's not.

Nate had heard Eliot say that he wasn't thinking when he took that first drink, but that simply isn't true. It was probably one of the most highly considered decisions he had ever made in his life, and he knows that it looked like it took almost no time at all for him to make it, that it had taken just one look at Cora for him to decide, but it was so much more.

That one look at Cora had brought everything he'd said from earlier that night to the forefront.

"I grew up in this place."

"Cora here, I remember the day she was born. She grew up here too."

"This was my dad's office."

And so much more about the card games and this bar being better than any prep school. Beyond that it was a neighborhood bar, a place for the community to come and drown their sorrows or celebrate a win, a place everyone knew and where many of the patriarchs of the neighborhood had played a low-stakes card game or two. McRory's was a family owned business that deserved to stay in the family. But McRory's was as much a part of Nate's family, his life, the essence of who he was, as it was the property of the young Mistress McRory.

When Nate looks back at the those thoughts, that part of the decision making process that lead to the first drink, he wants to believe that those reasons were enough, that those reasons were the primary basis of his decision, but he knows he'd be lying to himself if he believes that. Nate knows there was a whole other set of reasons.

In a place deep down inside, he knows that, as much as he cares about Cora, the reason he didn't look in Eliot's direction before he took that drink is because the team was the greatest deciding factor, and he knows that this one action alone is going to hurt them, but not nearly as much as he's afraid Mark Doyle might hurt them.

The team's presence was all over McRory's. They do their business here; their base of operations and his home are immediately over the bar. This place is where the team celebrates when things go really well. This is one of the few safe places the team has, and Doyle was a threat to all of it -- a threat to them, and Nate wasn't about to allow that.

Doyle was the worst kind of scum. He was a loan shark and that had the potential to cause lots of problem. His kind of scum would bring in other kinds of scum, other levels of vile and dangerous criminals. Organized crime would have the opportunity to move into the neighborhood which sooner or later would bring with it an abundance of law enforcement personnel that the team just really could altogether do without.

More than any of that though, McRory's was a family place, and the team was family. Well, they were a type of family at least and after losing his son and his wife they might be the only type of family he would ever have again, and Nate was going to do everything in his power to keep it because he knows if he's ever going to get past this problem, ever get past everything that one drink did to undo the past several months of sobriety, ever get back the trust and confidence that he lost with that single seemingly inconsequential action to an outside observer, then he was going to need the team, his team, to help him through it. While the mastermind might not be able to admit aloud, now or ever, how close he has become to the others or the level and depth of his feelings towards them, the fact remains that the team is the only family he has left, and he intends to keep it.

So, in those few moments that he had to decide, with the myriad of information and emotion swirling through his head at light speed, Nate chose. He chose to take that one drink to save the con, the bar, his home, his team, and his childhood memories. If one drink was what it took to stop Mark Doyle, the low-life scum-sucking bastard that he was, from getting his hooks into McRory's and the surrounding neighborhood, then he would gladly take that one drink, even knowing that one drink would turn into so much more.

Nate knows. He knows that Eliot thinks that he wasn't thinking. Knows that in that moment Eliot felt betrayed and maybe, so did the rest of the team. But none of them can ever know how very much he was thinking when he took that first sip. None of them can know how heavily the decision weighed on his very soul in those few brief moments before he lifted the glass to his lips and took that first hesitant sip. And none of them, well, none of them can ever know how that with each successive drink, he wishes he hadn't been thinking at all because then that one decision might not haunt him quite so much. That look of disappointment and disgust in Eliot's eyes might not hurt him quite so much. That each second, minute, hour and day the alcohol courses through his system after that single moment might not eat away at what little was left of his already emaciated soul quite so much.

And even with all the pain that decision caused both him and his team, Nate Ford knows one more thing: if he were given the chance to do it all over again a million times over, he would make the exact same decision.

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