Notes: Gift for leverageland Secret Santa Exchange, but it's been edited and added to since it's original publication. Lyrics from The Perishers 'Sway'. My first real attempt at writing non-angst for Leverage, so I hope you enjoy.
They'd exchanged no words last night, bone deep exhaustion and the residual shock from the explosion making communication unnecessary and unwanted. But she'd followed him up the stairs of his apartment (he only has to catch her once as she stumbles, and she only enjoys his warmth a little bit more than a lot), and as he'd burrowed under the covers in his eternal attempt to be warmer (she supposes it comes from growing up somewhere where winter is Cold, with a capital C), she'd collapsed next to him on top of the blankets, too tired to make even the minimal effort it would take to crawl under there with him.
So, they're not even really sleeping next to each other, even though she can hear his even breaths and smell him, the smoke and dirt and liquor smell covering up something subtle that's so very Nate.
Now, as he turns over to face her, and the light coming through his bedroom window catches on his hair (casts a huge yellow halo behind his head in the messy curls, and he looks strangely, beautifully angelic) and lights up his eyes (makes them sparkle like stars in the daytime sky, and she's reminded of all those skies they've stood under together, daytime, night time or otherwise), Sophie is suddenly reminded that under it all, under the apathy and the alcohol and the angst, there is an innocence to Nate Ford.
The man (boy) who lost his mother (too soon) and son (and even though he knows, somewhere, on an intellectual level that it's not his fault, all he sees are the two connections: cancer and him), who seems to want to place the full weight of everything that has ever gone wrong in the entire world (except his own problems) on his shoulders, who has seen almost everything life has to throw at him and watched as everything good he has ever earned turned into tragedy that he had to survive (and survived it, by building up this steel wall around the pieces of his heart) and picked up right where his father had left off with the drinking and the not caring and the crime (even though, of all the promises he's broken to himself and other people, the one he wishes he'd been able to keep was that one), still believes in absolute right and absolute wrong, truth and evil, that people have good in them and that good can win out, that bad people need to be stopped by the good people. And still believes in her.
She smiles at him, reaches forward to brush back his curls and run her thumb over a smudge of dirt along his cheekbone. Nate smiles back, looks less like a soldier after a day-long battle (that he may or may not have lost) and more like a boy coming in from his games (where it doesn't matter whether he won or lost), the light and the smile taking years off his face. They still don't speak, still tired and sore and them (so sometimes words are best left unsaid.)
But Nate tugs on the blankets softly, and she shifts to let him pull them out from under her and drape them back over her, including her in his warm cocoon. She moves closer and he wraps an arm over her waist to pull her to him. This close, the smoke/dirt/liquor smell can't cover up the Nate smell, and she thinks that it smells like warmth and safety and just enough sadness to keep it from being sappy.
And maybe, it smells like love.