Work Text:
Title: Life's Journey
Author: Carina Scott
Genre: Gen
Fandom: Leverage
Summary: Life's journey can have surprising results.
Written in response to a challenge over @WWOMB back on 05/01/09, just now realized that I never posted it here. Don't write gen often, which is probably why I overlooked it.
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Back when he was married to Maggie, Nate's world had been ordered, organized, and neat. He'd been satisfied with that. Both he and Maggie had slight leanings towards OCD, so it worked for them.
Then Sam had gotten sick. And while he and his wife had searched for treatments and researched every available option, his careful and ordered existence had become less so. He was too focused on saving the precious life of his only child to really care about putting the toothpaste in the right place or making sure to hang up his jacket.
After Sam's death, his life was knocked completely off its axis and he began to spiral out of control. The dissolution of his marriage hardly registered in the mass of misery and despair he was living in.
Teaming up with Alec, Eliot, Parker, and Sophie had given his life a little more structure. But not enough. He was still spinning out of control, only they'd stepped in to try to help give him some direction.
Looking back now, three months after the Davids job, still feeling the hum of satisfaction at seeing Blakpoole lose everything, Nate's world was still somewhat out of order. But it didn't bother him too much anymore. Sober for more than a month, he'd learned that order wasn't necessarily the key to a happier life. Be it Alec's empty orange soda cans sitting on the conference room table, tripping over Sophie's shoes because she'd managed to somehow run out of closet space, explaining yet again to Parker that picking locks was not a replacement for knocking, or finally accepting the friendship that Eliot had offered long before Nate was deserving; Nathan was happy with his life. Somewhere along the way he'd traded his ordered, organized and neat existence for a messy, cluttered, chaotic life. And he was finding more and more with each passing day, that he actually liked it that way.
END