[Fic] Different Road//Same Destination (PG) AU
Different Road//Same Destination
(by mizzy2k )
Fandom: Leverage
Category: AU. Prison!AU.
Summary: Prison!AU. Another day, another bar. But this day, and this bar, should have led Nathan Ford on a different path. But it's true what they say. Sometimes you're meant to meet the people that you're meant to meet. Sometimes you can't escape your destiny. And sometimes you can't avoid the fall you've been assigned.
Wordcount: 3500
This is the day Nate's life impacts directly with Giovanno Boccaccio's greatest legacy: a turning point.
He's knocked elbows with a fair few in his life, but no real wow-where-did-this-come-from collisions until today. Paul, who introduced him to God. The devil, who turned him from his seminary path and introduced him to Maggie. Blackpoole, who ruined his life with the same panache as one would order a sandwich and coffee.
No complete surprises, though-until now. And as usual for such an epic turning point, Nathan Ford doesn't have a clue.
It starts like this: Some guy called Victor something-or-other tries to offer him a job.
In another life, Nate might not have brushed him off, but it isn't this life. In this life, he's about to agree to hear more of Victor-whatever's offer, but his liquor levels are too high, and instead of accepting the spurious job offer on the tip of Victor-whatchamacallit's tongue, he listens to the dark call of something in the back of his mind, and surrenders to unconsciousness instead.
He wakes in the ER, with an over-efficient nurse telling him he fell off his stool and they had to pump his stomach. He does not wake to Victor-whosoever, but Maggie's pinched, angry face-she's still the emergency contact in his wallet. She is not impressed to find him, but she is there, and that's it. That's the collision moment. That's the instant Nate's life flips around again.
The logic, fuzzy at it is right now, is clear: He's not good enough for Maggie Collins, not in a million years, but if someone as radiant as she can drop everything just to see how he is, maybe he's worth something. Not much, but something. And somebody who's not completely worthless shouldn't really be spending their Thursday afternoons unconscious on the floor of a random bar.
So he does what any self-disrespecting washed-up alcoholic would do:
He joins an AA program and signs up for the prison service.
- - - -
There's this guy in his AA program that Nate is pretty sure is not an alcoholic. He looks too healthy for a start, his young skin taut over his angled frame. He doesn't mainline coffee in the breaks like the rest of them. He's way too alert. He doesn't fidget, and his eyes don't trail the exits, plotting out the route to the nearest 7/11.
The next time their group leader Patrick suggests they buddy up, to sponsor each other, Nate gravitates to him. He doesn't need a sponsor. He needs a mystery to concentrate on, something to let his mind wander through while his body wants it to think about drinking, and the young man is it.
Nate doesn't get much out of him, apart from his name: Alec. That, and the way he swigs soda. Identical to the way Nate can used to down bourbon. So maybe Nate's just making mysteries up in his head.
- - - -
When Nate filled in the paperwork and attended the prison service college, he didn't think he would be working at an all-female facility, but equal opps has swept the world faster than swine flu, and he finds himself working on a mixed crew.
They first put him in B block, but he recognizes a face-a woman he used to call Sophie Devereaux, although it's not her real name. He could look up her real name and know it, but the thrill of the mystery is dead. Gone along with the person he used to be. He notes down her cell number and stares at her blankly for so long, the woman reacts as if perhaps she's gone crazy and he's not someone she used to know. He fills in a security incident report, and instead of moving her, detail re-assigns him to the iso block.
- - - -
Nate works on the isolation beat with a rotating array of people. When he's on night shifts, he works with a guard called Spencer. Spencer's hair is cropped close, haphazard, and sometimes he shakes when unlocking one of the string of gates they have to open and close to get anywhere. Sometimes Spencer moves his hand, like he's pushing back hair which isn't there. Nate thinks Spencer once had long hair, and lost his strength along with it. Like Samson.
- - - -
There's a girl in isolation.
She doesn't look old enough to be a criminal.
She doesn't look old enough to be anything.
She reacts like she's been conditioned to react to certain things.
Nate thinks: they've put her in here because they're not safe for her.
- - - -
Another night, another shift. The admin girls have these choruses-how are you today-sing-song style and false cheerfulness. Nate used to answer. Aimed for close to truth on occasion. But now he sings the deadpan chorus of all the guards:
Can't complain.
No one would listen.
- - - -
Alec listens. Nate doesn't say much. He tries to explain a little about how the drinking helps. Somehow Alec understands it best when Nate uses computer-based metaphors.
The truth is like defragging his brain, leaving everything clear and neat: you killed him, you killed him.
The alcohol leaves fragments. Makes the recycling bin impossible to empty. Uses up all the hard drive space so there's no more kilobytes to hold the guilt in.
- - - -
Sometimes Spencer leans up against the bars, pushes his forehead against them, leaving imprints on his skin. Nate's pretty sure Spencer thinks he's on the wrong side of the bars.
He's entirely sure all prison guards think this.
- - - -
Paperwork disappears like confetti in the rain in the prison, as in any large faceless company where no one's paid enough to care. Nate finds himself randomly assigned to Devereaux's block. He used to think she was as pretty as the art she used to steal, and now she does look like she should be in a gallery. Blotches of colour spread across her pretty face, purples and blues and greens.
She won't tell him who's painting her face with their fists.
He adds the question to the pile of mysteries starting to clutter up in the back of his mind. They're piling up, but the pile isn't tottering over.
Yet.
- - - -
One of the questions on his pile is the girl in isolation. She looks so young, so vulnerable. But Nate walks in, he does his round like clockwork even though the rest of the guards aren't as diligent with their timetables, just in time to see a guard taking his chances with her person.
She floors him, with nothing but a bony elbow and her knee. The guard drops to the ground, groaning. The girl stares at Nate, as if asking what he's going to do.
The Nate that followed every rule to the letter would report the incident.
That Nate died two years ago.
He inclines his head at her, and she stares back at him, and Nate realizes the truth:
She's not in there to protect her from the prison inmates.
She's in there to protect the rest of the prison inmates from her.
- - - -
The questions get too much. Nate feels like he'll burst if one of them isn't answered. He's barely sleeping. The questions buzz around his mind like they're insects underneath his skin. If he doesn't start to know the answers, he'll- he'll-
(But if he gets them all answered, will his brain be empty again? Will his brain only have grief in it and loathing? Will the uniform, the chance to blend in and look like everyone else, be enough to push himself down every day?)
- - - -
Nate starts with the one question he doesn't think matters too much. The fact that it was the second question (after what if I hadn't passed out that day in the bar?) that he had didn't occur to him until later, and he takes a juddering breath, being glad of the escape-pulling the answer to it out from underneath all the other questions could have made them all tumble down.
"You're not an alcoholic," he tells Alec, after the meeting has finished, so there's no witnesses. Nate feels enough shame for the whole world; he doesn't feel the need to add to it.
"What's alcoholism but guilt?" Alec says. "And guilt's something I've got plenty of."
Nate stares at him, and nods slowly, as if it makes all the sense in the world.
It does, to him.
- - - -
"You should stand up to them," Nate says. He's aware of Spencer's eyes on him, but where other people feel intimidated by him, Nate feels nothing. He feels like he could press his forehead up against a gun and feel no fear. Why would he be scared? He has nothing left to lose.
Let Spencer stare. There's got to be something left of Sophie Devereaux, even if it's just the name. The bruised woman behind the bars in front of him can reconstruct a whole new Sophie. He knows she can. He met Emily, Charlotte, Alison, Esther and Veronica once upon a time, although it feels like that was another life ago. They may have been different women, different personalities, but they all had one thing in common: a spark of life in her dark eyes.
The woman in front of him is bruised and broken, sallow and shy, but there's life still in there. Just a little. But sometimes just a little was enough.
"Why?" The woman he calls Sophie doesn't even lift her head up. "There isn't a point."
"There is," Nate says. "We just haven't found it yet."
"We?"
She lifts her head up at that. Nate matches her stare, trying not to show emotion, although he feels it, a hint of gladness, thrilling across the surface of his cheek, inching into the soles of his feet-because that spark of life is still there.
Simmering.
Hidden.
But there.
- - - -
The girl is still in isolation. Nate rests against the edge of his station, watching her pace. Her shoulders are so thin, she could probably just push through the bars. She's caged herself for a reason, and Nate thinks he understands. Only the most damaged put themselves in prison deliberately.
"Parker," Spencer says, as if it's easier to talk to Nate's back. "Her name's Parker. She's a thief."
"Parker." Nate runs the syllables over in his mind. They chime against a memory, a memo from a million lives ago. "She's a really good thief. She's insane."
"That she is," Spencer says coolly.
There's too much of a calmness in Spencer's voice.
Nate frowns, and turns slightly. Spencer's face is like carved rock. "You're not surprised I know her rep," Nate says, sounding out the idea, slow but sure.
"You're Nathan Ford," Spencer says, his eyes dark, like holes, like caves. Like nothing. "I used to work in your field. Once upon another lifetime."
Nate gets that sentiment. He really does.
- - - -
"You used to be a priest, right?"
Alec leans bony elbows on equally bony knees, looking at Nate earnestly like he's the semicolon he's been scouring his coding for all night.
"I-" Nate forms his mouth into a lie but it catches in his mouth and tastes like good whiskey. He stays still, shrugs, and swallows it down. He looks around at the other buddy pairings around the room, because if he doesn't, he might remember how good the taste of it was, and then he doesn't know where he'd be. Some of them are crying. Nate hasn't cried since- "Yes. Nearly."
"I need forgiveness," Alec says without blinking.
"Take a number and get in line."
"You?" Alec laughs like the idea's completely ridiculous, beyond thought. "You're a good man. Anyone can see that."
Anyone, Nate thinks softly, is wrong.
Instead, he says, "I forgive you."
They're just words, but Alec looks at him like the four syllables somehow mean everything.
- - - -
"Your colleague is a criminal, you know."
In Nate's head he's been calling her 'the woman he calls Sophie', but there is a lot of the Sophie Devereaux character in her movement. It's got to be deliberate on her part. She is a Grifter, and she must have noticed Sophie was his favourite character of hers.
She's waking up in that cell, one day at a time.
Nate glances down the corridor to where Spencer's leaning against the railings, his uniform taut around his body as usual, his face a disinterested mask.
"We're all criminals," Nate says, with a shrug. "The difference is we've never been caught." He smiles at her sadly, turns on his heel, his regulation black shoes squeaking against the tiles.
"I've worked with him. With him, a thief named Parker, and a hacker named Hardison. We were hired by a worse criminal, the kind that doesn't get caught; the kind that lets others get their hands dirty. I'm in here for the job I worked with your colleague against my better judgement," Sophie says, pressing, pushing with her words. Nate freezes automatically, and isn't pleased at his body's reaction-it's admitting too much, too soon.
"Working against our judgement is why we end up in these places," Nate says, not turning to look at her. He's already staring at Spencer again, the bland uniform clearly not hiding his strength or his build. Spencer, Spencer, his mind is skipping through the names in his mind. Eliot Spencer? There's something in the back of his head that thinks that name is right.
"I'm not lying to you," Sophie says.
"I've never heard that one."
Sophie exhales through clenched teeth. "Ask him. Ask him about Victor Dubenich. Then come back and tell me he doesn't look guilty."
Nate looks at her sideways. She recoils from the bars, from the poison in his expression. "I don't have to do anything you tell me to," he tells her.
He leaves her standing there, and knows he does.
- - - -
Dubenich.
Nate thinks about that day in the bar, the man looming over him, the job proposition on his surly face.
Victor Whatever.
Victor Whojamacallit.
Victor Dubenich.
It's an uncomfortable fit.
When he mouths the name out loud accidentally while sat with Alec at the next AA meeting, Alec's face drains of all colour and he flees the room.
Nate thinks about Sophie's words, a hacker named Hardison, and the way Alec only responds to computers and programming allegories. Alec Hardison. It fits.
- - - -
In the end, Nate's too much of a coward to ask Spencer about Dubenich.
In the end, he doesn't have to.
He finds Victor Dubenich in front of Parker's cell, on the opposite wall, leaning back as one of Nate's other colleagues open the cell for him. Parker doesn't make a sound, doesn't whine, but she presses herself against the back of her cell, and her fists are clenched.
Nate moves into action without thinking about it, his hand automatically going for his baton. He clubs Dubenich to the ground, and then smacks the traitorous guard around the face. The guard crumples to his feet like tissue paper.
Nate's fingers close around the bars of Parker's gate. He hesitates.
Parker stares at him, then his hand. Her mouth works silently, and then, not so silently. "What are you doing?" she whispers.
His eyes fly to hers. "I don't know," he admits. It's the truth, and it's the strangest feeling Nate has ever felt. She smiles at him, tight and humourless.
"Figure it out," Parker says. "Because we're on camera."
Nate flinches, the memory of the countless lenses bearing down on his skin at all times flooding back. He looks at her, urgently. "Dubenich. He hired you?"
Parker lets out this sound. Wounded puppy, kicked schoolgirl, angry child. "He tried to blow us up. We didn't run fast enough. Your friend was there too."
"I don't have any friends." The questions spilling in his mind shriek at him. The pile grows lower, lower. "Spencer?"
Parker's strange expression softens and she nods. "Spencer. I think... I think he's trying to get me out. He carries around guilt." Her head tilts. "Even more than you."
Dubenich tried to hire him too. And these criminals? It doesn't make sense.
It does.
Nate's brain, when on form, is a masterpiece. He could control these criminals. Under his direction, the things they could do... The people they could help, if Nate could find something to bind them to him, to bind them to his will...
But it's taken too long. The guard at his feet is stirring. He shuts the door, and Parker's eyes flutter shut.
"I'm going to get you out," Nate says.
"Yeah," Parker breathes, and she sinks to the ground. Like she's heard it before. "Yeah."
- - - -
His brain is empty. The questions have answers. Sorted and square. But his mind doesn't linger over grief, over self-pity and self-hate. Instead his mind fills with maps, with timings, with adrenaline.
If he doesn't think too much about the why, he can focus on the how.
- - - -
Alec's the easiest component of the plan. Nate finds him sucking down orange soda in the park, gulping it down like he's Nate and it's beer.
"How would you like that forgiveness?" Nate starts, and Alec looks unconvinced. "Hardison," Nate finishes, the surname a magic spell.
Alec's eyes widen. Hardison the hacker awakes.
- - - -
Next: Spencer.
"Eliot. Dubenich tried to finish off Parker. I have a plan."
It's a little melodramatic, but Nate's casual whisper pays dividends. Spencer's eyebrows make an escape for his hairline. Nate stares at the wall, a slow smile carving his face apart. He used to feel this thrill before, chasing after his quarry. His skin resonates with it. It's contagious. He can feel Spencer's skin tighten, his tension matching Nate's. Identical.
He's expecting a fight, but maybe Spencer really is as broken as he is, because all he gets is a quiet, "All right, then."
All right is probably pushing things, Nate thinks, but doesn't say it out loud.
- - - -
The prison governor himself ends up sanctioning their escape, even though he doesn't know it.
Parker could and did slide through her jail bars. Nate knows Sophie can talk her way out of anything, and he tries not to freak out that her ability apparently includes talking her way through things too: to be specific, eight locked jail gates.
Alec's provided them with these earphone things that feel weird, futuristic. Nate's already imagining the spread of possibility. He's rescuing these people. He's saving them from prison and from themselves. That's the tightest bind possible in their world, and Nate thinks, I can hold onto them with this.
He wonders when he got so selfish.
Alec hacks the roster, gets them on hospital escort. The governor stamps the form and hands Nate the petrol card for the van. Parker pretends to be sick. She might even have been physically sick. Nate's carefully ignoring that. Sophie charms her way far enough into the prison to pick up the uniform Spencer stashed for her in an air vent. She's the nurse who helps them wheel Parker into the van.
They drive away, and stop about two miles from the prison. Alec climbs in, his laptop under his arm, and the others thank him for their help, not yell at him for running away from them after the explosion.
Nate glances in the rearview mirror, at his collection of criminals, and he can't help but laugh. They join in. It seems the thing to do. Nate gives his prepared spiel and they listen, eyes wide and earnest. His plan to take Dubenich down is flawless and will make them very rich, and then they'll be tied to him. They'll do his bidding for as long as he can manipulate them. He'll reform them in his own image, flawed but impressive, good at heart but deep down inside broken and torn.
He catches a glimpse at his face in the mirror, and he stops laughing, even though the others continue.
It doesn't seem like the thing to do any more.
- - - -
Nate's plans are better than the AA sessions, better than the uniform, better than melting away into the blandness of routine. But sometimes, between the cons, his brain empties. The grief is there, just there, just there, too much, too-
Nate reaches for vodka, the weight of it steady in his hand, the call of it too strong. He tips his head back, and lets it fall. Lets himself fall. Lets everything fall.
His thoughts are like bars. His mind is a cell.
The others might be free, but he's not out of the prison at all.
Master Post