SOOOOOOOO, this story was the product of a rabid plot bunny--- RABID PLOT BUNNY--- but what else could a crossover between Leverage and Ordinary People be? It's meant to be pure Nate angst, obviously, and it explains why he got sober between the Two Davids Job and the Beantown Bailout Job. I know it's mostly exposition and very little real action, but this is just the introduction. Review if you want. Can't promise how long it will be. Sounds promising, right? Anyhoodles, thanks for reading this and accepting my nefarious Natewhump.

Everything belongs to not me.

Apparently retirement didn't sit too well with Nate.

He had a plan, he really did. No more close calls with law enforcement and security guards. No more guns in his face or broken ribs or concussions. No more dissapointed looks from Sophie or comments whispered between Elliot and Hardison behind his back.

After the last con, he was going to get his head on straight. Nate had spent the last few months immersed in details and the job, but that didn't work out as well as he'd hoped. Work didn't sort out his problems--- it just created new ones and brought back the old.

Sophie could barely look him in the eye anymore. When she did, Nate couldn't hold her gaze for more than a few seconds. Her looks were either a reproach--- for his drinking, he assumed--- or whistful, melancholy. Sophie joined the team because of their shared history, but she came back for their future. She could tell, though, that with every drink, every trip to a bar, Nate drove that future further and further away.

Nate wasn't stupid. He realized what he was doing to her, knew that he was drowning the best thing he'd had in a long while with Jack Daniels and Johnny Walker. For a while--- at least a month or two--- the booze helped him out. It calmed his nerves during a tense job and numbed his mind during the long hours of the night, which allowed him to concentrate and work out the details of a job. Nate couldn't really figure when the functioning alcoholic in him just became an alcoholic, but he knew that it had something to do with work.

Pulling jobs was supposed to distract him. Helping people was supposed to relieve him of the gringing pain and hatred that stuck with him over two years. Instead, he saw whispers of Sam in every victim, and every case became an opportunity to exact revenge. Leverage took on more cases dealing wrongful death and corporate negligence than regular fraud; Nate didn't realize that until Hardison made an off-hand comment in his office a few months back. The team was fine with the cases he selected, but they could see that he was determined to avoid the one target Nate was really desperate to hit.

Then Sophie had to poke the bear.

She had to wheedle and prod, convince and cajole--- until Nate finally agreed.

She opened the floodgates and unleashed the fire. It felt good to focus all the pain and hatred and guilt festering inside Nate onto someone else, someone who deserved it more. It felt so good--- until there was no one left to hit.

In some ways, the aftermath of the museum heist was worse than the weeks after Sam's death. The autopsy, the funeral, the sympathy from well-wishers and colleagues passed by without knowledge, without time. Nate was numb to everything. He couldn't bear the thought of a flat-lining heart monitor, of a child-size coffin being lowered into the ground, of small children coming to his son's funeral when they should be in summer camp. For so much of his life, Nate was a proactive, action-oriented person, but putting his son in the earth was the one thing he could not do. Days, weeks, months passed by in a fugue state, with friends and family concerned and understanding.

Eventually Nate woke up. Eventually the hate, and guilt, and burning fire took hold of him.

The guilt started when Nate had his first drink, the first of his descent, on the day he officially quit IYS. Nate remembers the fight he had with Maggie that day word for word. She found him drunk, sitting on Sam's bed holding his backpack, at 2 in the afternoon. The anger started with the first fight that lead to his divorce took place when she had lunch with Ian to discuss future job opportunities.

All that had been unbearable, which is why his wife left him and he became an alcoholic.

Now, though, he had no where left to go. No up, no left, and he had given up the right way to live as soon as he ran the first heist. There was no numb feeling, no comfort in the bottle, no team to distract him with witty comments or problems to be solved. He had no justice, only the hollow feeling of revenge. He had taken something away from Ian, but what was money in the grand scheme of things?

So now he was just a drunk. A very rich drunk. He didn't have to worry about living out of his car, or whether he had to be respectable. Hell, he didn't even have Sophie telling him he needed to get help. Nate just had the fire, and the drink, which led to very bad choices.

Getting another scotch at last call. Hiding his keys from the bartender. Parking two blocks from the bar so he could avoid the DUI trap.

Getting behind the wheel.

Sophie would have scowled. Hardison would have pulled drunk driving facts from the internet. Parker would give him a questioning stare, or maybe a random nonsequitor before bouncing off to play with a lock. Eliot would have put him in a choke hold until he dropped his keys.

Maybe it was a good thing none of them were there. Maybe Nate needed the screech of tires on wet pavement, the harsh swerve to avoid impact, jumping the curb with a scrape of metal over cement, collision with a solid object that nearly tore the car in two. The unstoppable force meets the unmovable thing. He needed safety glass spread over the road and airbags slowly deflating.

Nate quite literally hit rock bottom, but he didn't know it yet--- he hit his head before his car plunged into the drainage ditch at the side of the road. With his life derailed by such an obvious metaphor, it was time to see if the mastermind could climb his way out.s