florastuart

White Collar 5.01 "At What Price"

florastuart — Mon, 21 Oct 2013 23:25:52 GMT

Things I loved unreservedly:

MOZ ♥ I think my favorite scene was the fake confession, where Neal is all how did that sound? and Moz is all ... sad and tragic? I love how completely open they are with each other. Neal is, we know, capable of locking down his emotions entirely, but he's not doing the stoic thing with Moz. He's hurt and upset by his father's betrayal and abandonment and he wants Moz to be there while he's recording the confession and he comes right out and says so. Oh, BOYS. *snuggles them*

And I liked that Neal is sitting painting, and talking about being in a zone, when Peter comes - I guess Mozzie's anklet-cracker is too heavy for Bugsy to carry around, but I like that Neal at least thought of the fact that he'd look suspicious not moving for four hours.

Neal's little speech about how wearing the anklet feels normal, now. I've read mixed reactions to this, but my interpretation is that Neal sounds ... freaked out and disturbed and uncomfortable, there. Like he's realizing Peter isn't the only one who's lost perspective, and it scares him that he's started to think of having a tracker on his ankle as normal and okay. It's a nice little parallel - Peter is upset and worried that he's forgotten that Neal is a criminal, and Neal is upset and worried that he's forgotten that the anklet (which can be read as metaphor for his relationship with Peter) is a cage.

(That's how I read Neal's expression and tone of voice - I don't think he actually means he misses the anklet when it's not there. But then, "Neal secretly likes/is reassured by the anklet/knowing Peter always knows where he is" has always been an instant backbutton for me in fic, so I hope that's not how they meant it to come across in the episode.)

Other things I liked:

The differences between Peter and Neal are about an actual disagreement over what is right, not "Neal knows what is right and does the opposite anyway and then mopes around feeling horribly guilty about it" like we got for most of S3 and S4. Neal doesn't believe he did anything wrong, here.

Although - am I the only one who really really misses the dynamic of S1 and S2, where Peter knew exactly what Neal was up to, and why, and Neal knew that he knew what and why, and the two of them could talk about it? And argue about what Neal should do, and why? Am I the only one who misses those days? In a lot of ways I feel like they were closer, then.

Neal's reaction to Peter's speech at the end was pitch-perfect, I thought - that "goodbye, Peter" felt very final. He's hurt, and he's not going to get over this soon (if ever - I'm not sure Neal will ever really trust Peter again, after this).

Also, I like the way the episode starts out, early on, showing Neal feeling abandoned and betrayed by his father (with that fake confession recording, and the exchange with Moz) and then ends with Peter ending their friendship and telling him he's no longer part of the family. I don't know if the writers meant to bracket it that way, with Neal-being-abandoned-by-father-figures, but it works.

Other things:

I wish someone had pointed out that Neal is taking a HUGE RISK by breaking the law to clear Peter's name. Yes, if Peter loses his job Neal will go back to prison for the last, what, one and a half years? of his sentence. But if Neal breaks the law to clear Peter, and he gets caught, that's a third strike and he's facing 25 to life. Assuming that Neal's motivations in helping Peter were all about keeping his anklet deal isn't only failing to acknowledge Neal's loyalty and affection for Peter, it's also failing to credit Neal with any common sense or ability to do basic math.

The smart, self-interested thing for Neal to do in this episode would be to sit back, let the system take its course, and if Peter doesn't get cleared keep his head down and sit out the last eighteen months in prison. Much smarter than risking a longer sentence to help Peter. I'm just saying.

(This is not a criticism of El - I completely understand her being upset and lashing out - so much as a criticism of the writers, 'cause they have her and Peter bring up Neal's concern about the anklet deal as the primary motivator for Neal helping Peter.)

Also, it is ... really straining my suspension of disbelief, that Peter doesn't immediately figure out that the coin heist was the price to free him. Peter is smart enough to figure out Neal is behind it, and he knows Neal has done shady things to protect him before (1.09? 2.14?). I don't buy that he doesn't understand exactly what Neal did and why.

(Of course, it's entirely possible that he does understand, and the entire point of that conversation at the end was Peter trying to piss Neal off badly enough that he wouldn't do anything that stupidly risky for Peter ever again? Which would be both adorably tragic and kind of ridiculous at the same time ...)

Okay, about that ending scene:

I think getting some distance from Neal is good for Peter. It's also good for Elizabeth, and there is nothing wrong with Peter prioritizing something other than Neal's best interest for once. Where Peter loses my sympathy is where he says he's doing this for Neal's own good.

And I'm still trying to sort through my feelings about this, and figure out how much of my reaction is about flaws in the writing and ignoring established characterization and how much is about the fact that the show is straying close to some of my giant flashing red DO NOT WANT buttons - which is something that has nothing to do with objective writing quality or in-character-ness at all.

While I completely agree that this is a good thing for Peter, I will be very upset if it's portrayed as a good thing for Neal. Both because I really don't think it is, based on how Neal's character has been portrayed so far (stricter punishments for breaking rules he doesn't understand the purpose of to begin with isn't going to teach Neal to respect authority/the law/the system - it might teach him to fear those things, but that's not the same), and also because ... I don't like stories about characters being boxed in and backed in a corner and controlled for their own good. Characters being trapped as a source of angst or h/c is fine - I love angst! But when it's portrayed as good and right and necessary and "tough love" - well-written or not, justified or not, for me stories like that are extremely uncomfortable to watch/read. It's ... a thing.

I don't know why it's a thing, but it's a giant button I have, and if the show is going to start pushing it regularly this season I may not be watching very much longer.

(It is odd, I know, that I'd latch onto a show like White Collar, a show that is about a felon on a tracking anklet, but the show thus far really hasn't emphasized the power differences or the control Peter has over Neal that much. In a lot of ways it's easy to pretend they're equal partners.)

And now for my newest theory: I think Neal is going to DC this season.

Think about it. There was no reason to mention DC in the scene where they're talking about the promotion, unless it's foreshadowing for something. Also, if Peter is promoted to head of New York White Collar and Neal is still working for that department, Peter is going to be Neal's new handler's boss. And I think what Peter really needs is to remove himself from Neal's chain of command entirely, so he's not in a position to make decisions about Neal's fate, if he's going to get the emotional distance he needs.

Which leaves sending Neal to another city (or giving him to Organized Crime or Bank Fraud or something).

The main argument between Peter and Kramer in S3 was over whether Neal should be treated like a criminal. In 3.16 Peter is adamant that this is a bad idea ("As long as we treat him like a criminal, he'll always think that he is one", etc) while Kramer believes this is the only way to handle someone like Neal, and he needs to be controlled. Now that Peter has changed his mind, I strongly suspect Peter and Kramer are going to reconcile, and I think we are going to see Kramer again. Even if he's not Neal's new handler, I think Kramer is going come back this season.

(This is all speculation and I am completely unspoiled and staying that way, but this is my theory.)

ETA: Am I the only one who, after watching that Peter and El reunion hug, had to pause the ep and try not to cry and/or yell NEAL AND KATE SHOULD HAVE GOTTEN A HUG LIKE THAT at the screen?

I need another plotbunny like I need a hole in my head …

florastuart — Sat, 12 Oct 2013 03:29:14 GMT

… but this prompt is just entirely too awesome.

“Day of the Dead” was a Babylon 5 episode where several characters each got a visit from a dead person - sometimes someone they’d been close to, sometimes not, but they all had interesting conversations - that lasted for one night. Translating that idea to White Collar could be quite awesome. Except I’d probably mix it up a bit.

So far I’m thinking:

Neal - Byron (I want them to meet! And spend all night telling heist stories! I think they’d have a great time!)
June - Ellen (Again, two people who should meet, and I think they’d have a lot in common despite coming from opposite sides of the law. Although having Kate visit June is also tempting.)
Mozzie - Kate (Because they’re too much fun to write together, and I think Mozzie appreciates Kate a lot more now that she's gone than he ever did when she was alive. Because she’s someone Neal listened to who wasn’t a fed and now he wishes he had an ally pulling Neal toward his side of the law. And they could stay up and watch movies and snark at each other.)
Peter - Adler (Because I’m evil. And I think they’d have an interesting conversation.)
Elizabeth - Fowler’s wife (They can commiserate about the difficulties of being FBI spouses, and how frustrating it is when their husbands do stupid things and don’t listen to them! Seriously, this could be a lot of fun.)

(Of course, I kind of want Kate to visit everyone on this list. Or maybe she visits Fowler, and they spend the whole night sniping at each other. Yeah, I know I’m not who you wanted a visit from, I’m not happy about it either, you don’t think I’d rather be hanging out with Neal right now? At least he can cook. And he’d have decent wine available …)

Thoughts? Anyone have other suggestions?

White Collar Big Bang Fic 2/2: And the ghosts in the attic they never quite leave (PG, 14,300 words)

florastuart — Thu, 26 Sep 2013 12:23:49 GMT

See Part 1 for header and awesome cover art!

They talk about safe things, during dinner.

Helen has a dozen stories about a recent Hawaiian vacation, and it’s easy to let her carry the conversation for a while. Once the plates are stacked to one side she passes around her phone, and Diana and Neal make admiring noises at photos of white sand and turquoise water.

It’s an oasis, a fragile moment of calm; when Helen leaves, she knows, Neal will head back to the hospital and Diana will follow him. Neither is a necessary errand, but they will hold the vigil until they’re needed elsewhere.

“Christie’s lucky,” Helen says, “I haven’t got around to uploading any embarrassing baby pictures on this yet.”

Diana doesn’t keep baby pictures, embarrassing or otherwise. She has only a few photos tucked into her wallet; she pulls them out and passes them around in the wavering candlelight. Her father, shaking hands with the president. Christie, smiling, in front of the Washington Monument. And sixteen-year-old Diana outside an embassy guard station, Charlie beside her, his boots pale with dust and a pistol at his belt.

“Where’s that?” Neal holds the last one close to the light.

“Dubai.” Diana squints, leaning closer, but the lettering on the plaque at the gate is too small to read. “I think.”

It’s the last picture Charlie was in, and one of the few that shows his face; in most photos he’s in the background, a shadow half-cropped from a corner or hidden behind her father.

“That’s the embassy?” Neal frowns. “That’s where you lived?”

She looks at it again and snorts, realizing what he sees: the gatehouse behind her and the guard inside with his rifle, the high embassy walls topped with thick scrolls of razor wire. “It’s nicer on the inside. Trust me.”

“I should hope so,” Neal says. “’Cause it looks a hell of a lot like a -”

It’s not even that funny. But their eyes catch at the right (or the wrong) moment and they’re both doubled over laughing, a high-pitched raw wheezing that goes on long enough to leave her breathless.

She blinks rapidly when she can sit up and breathe again; Neal swipes a hand across his face, composing himself, and Helen watches them both with an alarmed look.

A car slows, passing along the street, lights sweeping the darkened block. Diana sits up abruptly, raising one hand toward her ear and a radio that’s not there.

Down on the street level, visible through the balcony railing, she sees a dark car parked across the street; two agents are on duty inside, watching the house. She knows another two are stationed in a truck at the corner.

Neal’s eyes flick toward the street, then back to her, catching the gesture as she lets her hand fall.

“I’m guessing pictures are something to avoid, in your line of work,” Helen says, looking at him. “Incriminating evidence, and all that.”

Neal’s face splits in a grin, dazzling false glitter brighter than a signal flare. Diana thinks of a creased black-and-white ATM camera photo and wonders if he has any others of Kate; she’s reasonably certain no one has any photographs of Mozzie.

His phone buzzes before he can say anything. Fear stutters across his face for half a second before he answers it.

From the hospital, Diana thinks as he locks everything behind an apologetic smile. Her eyes track him as he retreats inside, crossing to the sink and facing away from her.

Some kind of relapse. She drums her fingers beside her wine glass, listening, and hears only the slow murmur of traffic passing at the corner. The night is warm, and snatches of music rise from open car windows. Larssen, showing up to finish what he started.

Both, perhaps, with the way their luck is going -

“She’s not unhappy here,” Helen says quietly, and Diana looks up, startled.

She's fully awake, now, and expecting the next crisis. (They’re due for one, surely; it’s been nearly eight hours since the last.)

“She’d like to be closer to home,” Helen says, “but she never liked living in the capital any better than you did.”

“I want to make her happy,” Diana says, because it’s the truth, even if she’s done a poor job so far. She doesn’t know how much Christie has told Helen, of the bitter fights when they arrived here, of the resigned, frustrated silences that grew between them afterward.

She lets her eyes drift toward the doors, staring at the line of Neal’s back as he leans against the counter, phone still pressed to his ear. She doesn’t know how to say she wouldn’t have made it through the past week, without Christie to lean on.

“She worries about you,” Helen says gently, and Diana blinks.

Someone has to do something, she told Christie. Fowler’s disappearance, barely two days after the explosion, had been all the vindication she needed for planting a fake music box. With their one suspect lost without a ripple into the dark the real box was their only lead, a fragment of a song holding the only hope of tracing him or whoever he worked for.

“She’s proud of what you do, you know,” Helen goes on. “And she knows you and Agent Burke both take risks because you care about people, and about your work. But she doesn’t want to see you get hurt.”

Why you? Christie had asked, over and over again.

Diana didn’t come here because it was safe. She came here because she wanted to be one of those who ran toward the sound of gunfire, and never again the one pushed aside to safety at another’s expense.

One block over, a roof light flickers on casting a glare on the French doors, a blurred reflection and she can’t see Neal.

She gathers up the plates and the empty bread basket to go inside. Neal turns as she enters and gives her a tired smile and a thumbs up as she sets the dishes in the sink: all’s well.

She lets her shoulders sag in relief, breathes out slowly and rinses the plates, and leaves the doors cracked open when she leaves.

“Everything all right?” Helen asks.

“Just an update from the hospital.”

Neal faces the doors, now; his voice is too low to hear but she can see his face soften, weary and open and relieved.

“Your friend who was shot?”

“Neal’s friend.” Lawyer. Partner in crime and all-around bad influence. “Family.” Or what’s left of it. “Mozzie is -”

A sheet anchor in a storm. She runs out of words and refills the wine glasses; more wine is the last thing she needs but it’s something to do with her hands.

“Mozzie is family.”

She uses the word differently than most, than Christie, but so does Neal. She watches a pair of fireflies drift upwards from the gardenia blooms, following a lazy swirling path over the rail, brief lights like embers rising.

Sometimes Neal reminds her of her father; sometimes she thinks he’s more like herself, desperate for a home without knowing how to root in solid ground when he finds it.

***

Two days after the opening press conference, half-deflated balloons still trailed beside the main entrance to the new Timmy Nolan Memorial Park.

The official groundbreaking for the new playground wouldn’t take place until spring, assuming public opinion hardened behind it enough that the city planners couldn’t back out once they realized they’d been played. The weekend after Jennings’ arrest it was only a wide field, winter-brown grass rimed with frost and a forlorn welcome banner snapping in a cold wind.

(Someone had had the sense to take down the campaign posters.)

Diana wrapped her arms around herself and scanned the field, searching, until she spotted three men in trench coats walking a yellow lab.

“That took a while,” Neal said, concern shading his voice, as Jones handed her a paper cup of hot chocolate and Satchmo shoved his face against her knees, begging for scritches.

She opened her coat enough so they could all see her badge and her gun, secure at her hip and back where they belonged. Peter caught her eye and nodded firmly.

“You did good,” he said, and she didn’t say I know.

The board of inquiry was standard procedure, any time weapons were fired; she hadn’t expected them to find fault and they didn’t.

Gary Jennings was the kind of slick politician her old boss in DC would have ignored, except to shake his head sadly, and Barrow was a sleaze and a bully and she felt better than she probably should about shooting him.

(It helped that the idiot had let her get close enough to be reasonably sure of a non-lethal shot.)

She wasn’t happy about it; it was not a thing she held lightly, and she hoped it never would be. But her hands didn’t twitch and her gun felt no heavier than it did a week ago, and part of her thought maybe it ought to.

A kite sliced through the cold air, trailing bright streamers against a watery winter sun. She wished Charlie were here. She wanted to hear him tell her it was okay for her to be okay with this.

She’d hardly had time to do more than work and sleep, over the past two months, between the cases they were working officially and the one they weren’t. She’d slid back into the old patterns of working with Peter, the two of them clicking solidly into place in a comforting rhythm.

Christie was settling into her new job, and if she and Diana and the music box still made for three uneasy roommates they hadn’t had a real fight about it in over a week.

(They hadn’t had a real conversation, either, but Christie had kissed her and whispered good luck as she left for the hearing that morning; it was a start.)

She felt as though a weight had lifted; having too much work to do was somehow less of a constant, dragging frustration than leaving needed work undone for the wrong reasons. She and Peter might have bent a few rules badly enough to sprain them, but there were still bright lines between right and wrong and since she left DC she was surer than ever which side she was on.

Fowler and his mysterious contact might have slipped through their fingers last week but she and Peter were putting the pieces together. It was a thrill, the two of them together against powerful and corrupt enemies; the victory against Jennings was a first step, and only one of many.

This was what she was meant to do, and who she was meant to be: justice in the clean arc of a hammer, swinging down.

***

Her phone buzzes; she stands, walking toward the railing, but it’s only a text from Peter. She gives a quick response, we’re fine, and resists the urge to add stop worrying.

“Christie?” Helen asks, and then, at Diana’s headshake, “Your boss.”

“Just checking in.” She leans against the railing, solid stone cool and hard beneath her arms. Between the thick clouds coming in and the city lights spreading below her, she might be suspended above the stars, looking down into the wide bowl of the sky. A radio tower blinks a steady beat against the skyline; a distant siren keens, fading into the dark.

“Quite a view,” Helen says at last, echoing her thoughts.

Diana returns to the table, sits facing the doors and turns the stem of her wine glass, slowly, between her fingers. “It’s not Virginia.”

She’s not sure if she’s trying to offer apologies or explanations or excuses.

“Moving is never easy,” Helen says.

Diana nods, because it’s what’s expected; for her moving is as easy as finding the right gate at the airport and stepping on the plane.

Christie planted a tree in her backyard when she was nine years old; Diana has never seen it but Christie likes to tell the story. A slim cherry sapling that shot up and shed feathery pink blooms across the yard every spring for her birthday. She presses the flowers in a scrapbook every year and makes cards with them; she gave one to Diana for their three-month anniversary and had no idea why Diana was overwhelmed by it.

Diana stares at her wallet photos still lying on the table. For too many years home was a row of airport seats and a thin blanket and Charlie’s shadow watching beside her, boarding announcements and security warnings in languages she didn’t know, a runway falling beneath her and Charlie’s shoulder for a pillow.

She’s been entertained at palaces older than this country but she’s never had a tree to call her own, or stable ground to plant one.

She stifles a yawn as the French doors open and Neal returns. “I’m sorry. I’m not much of a -”

“Please.” Helen touches her hand. “Don’t apologize. It was a wonderful dinner. You’ve been very kind.”

“It’s been a hell of a week.”

She’s not sure how to explain this, the bone-deep exhaustion whlie she’s still wide awake, the sense still hanging over her that something terrible is about to happen.

She looks at Neal as he drops into a chair. “The little guy all right?”

“Sleeping. June’s still over there.” He leans back, looking briefly as tired as she feels. “She says she’s going to stay all night.”

Diana thinks Neal understands, on a deep inarticulate level; home was never a location and family has nothing to do with blood. When you live on the move, those who move with you are the only anchor you have.

Christie carved her initials in a tree truck; Diana left drawings on the walls of a hundred rooms in a dozen countries, echoes of memories hidden behind impersonal hotel paintings and another layer of paint during the twice-a-decade remodeling.

After long enough, nothing you leave remains.

“Peter says hey,” she tells him, and he makes a face, looking down and away, uncomfortable and awkward and not used to this kind of hovering concern.

(He can damn well get used to it, after a stunt like -)

“You both admire Agent Burke a great deal,” Helen says, and Diana blinks.

“He’s a good agent,” she says, and feels the ground shifting again. “And a good teacher. I’ve learned a lot from him.”

“Are you sure he’s innocent in all this?”

She doesn’t say define “innocent”. “He wouldn’t lie to me,” she says instead, and it’s the truth.

“I spent twenty years working dispatch for the Alexandria PD,” Helen says. “I knew a lot of cops, then. Good people. They took their jobs seriously.” She’s speaking slowly, as though feeling her way. “I know it’s not an easy job. You see a lot of good people get hurt, watch a lot of bad people walk.”

Diana nods, uncertain.

“A - friend of mine - knew a guy. A good cop, she’d worked with him for years. He was accused of planting drugs in a suspect’s car.

“Everybody knew this suspect was their guy. They’d been after him for months. He’d been involved in at least three shootings but he kept his hands clean, and there was never enough evidence to pin anything on him in court.”

Crickets saw a melancholy counterpoint to the cooing of a dove from a neighbor’s tree. Diana closes her eyes and a theme from Mozart teases the edges of her hearing.

“My friend knew those drugs weren’t planted. She knew there were lines this cop wouldn’t cross. She was sure he’d never do anything like that.” She shakes her head slowly. “She was wrong.”

Diana remembers Peter opening the music box for the first time, the two of them leaning in close to listen, to hear what was in this song someone would kill for.

“Good people can make mistakes,” Helen says. “And this Larssen sounds like he’s dangerous. It can be very easy to justify a small lie, to take down someone like that. It’s easy to justify a lot of things, when someone close to you gets hurt.”

Neal stands abruptly, jostling the table; the vase of gardenias rocks back and forth, splashing water across the glass. He walks over to a stone planter beside the railing and stops, staring into the darkness of the street.

“That’s - not Peter’s style.” His voice is strained and quiet.

“It’s normal to want to protect your friend.” Helen’s voice is gentle, but Diana keeps her eyes on Neal. “Just be sure you’re protecting someone who’s worth your loyalty.”

Diana remembers sitting up late with Peter at his kitchen table, two giant mugs of coffee and a box of latex gloves, one of Elizabeth’s dishcloths to wipe away Neal’s prints and an elegant little pearl-handled .38 to fill the empty space in her closet safe.

“I am,” she says, and Neal turns, his face pale and unreadable in the flickering light.

***

It was a three-month probie stuck staffing the Marshals’ office on a Sunday afternoon.

Diana offered no explanation, only her best flat glare and the kid burned a new key for the anklet without asking questions.

It was the first thing that had gone their way all day.

(No, the second.)

She tossed the anklet onto the dash as she got into the car, massaging her wrists and shutting her eyes. The passenger door thumped shut as Jones settled in beside her.

She gripped the steering wheel, black and already hot after ten minutes parked at the curb, warmth like a gun barrel recently fired. The anklet key was heavy in her pocket.

(Tell them my dog ate the damn thing, Peter had told her, and she’d heard what he hadn’t said, what he’d meant: make. this. not. have. happened.)

Jones stared at her, silent, and finally asked, “Are you okay?”

“We were supposed to see Romeo and Juliet in the park today,” she said. “Me and Christie.” The tickets were still stuck in the change compartment beside the gear shift.

An uncertain pause, and then: “I guess Caffrey owes you a rain check.”

“I never liked that play.” The words were oddly flattened. She’d agreed anyway; Christie had made plans two months ago and things were still fragile between them, so Diana had swallowed her grumbling about idiot teenagers and the things they did for love -

She’d been more excited about finally catching Fowler, anyway.

(This was her chance to be the hammer; this was what she came here for.)

“Neal wasn’t running,” she said at last, because she’d explained nothing, so far. Peter needs you at the office, she’d said, and Jones had pulled into the mostly-deserted garage to find Neal climbing out of Diana’s car wearing cuffs and no anklet; it would be anyone’s first guess. “We were moving in to arrest Fowler today, and Peter - didn’t want him involved.”

“He always suspected Fowler had something to do with that plane.”

“More than suspected.” She rubbed her arms again. “Fowler bought the explosives. We found a receipt.”

“’We’ kept that pretty quiet.”

Not quiet enough.

Jones opened his mouth like he was about to say something biting, then breathed out slowly instead. “It’s personal. I get that.” He didn’t ask the obvious questions: how long were you two planning this? and why wasn’t I included? “I’m not surprised Caffrey wanted to be there at the takedown.”

She twisted the key in the ignition, felt cold air blowing over her hands and a trickle of sweat along the back of her neck.

“He brought a gun.”

The words fell, flat; the purr of the engine was loud in the sudden silence.

She closed her eyes, saw a courtyard of warm pink brick and a fountain at the center, and Neal with a straight line on his target, sprinting up the stairs.

She didn’t say it would have been me. It wasn’t; she didn’t fire; no one did.

She didn’t fire but her wrists ached all the way up to her shoulder blades, like she’d just come from a day at the range.

She put on the turn signal, stared at the blinking indicator, clicking steadily like a heartbeat. She saw brightly-dressed dignitaries milling like bees around the fountain and Neal, backlit against the open window at the top of the stairs, his eyes flat as a steel blade and holding no room for compromises.

It was a clean arc, across that courtyard and through the window on the other side; it was a clear straight line down the end of his sight. And all the bonds that held Neal were made of paper; in the end she could only watch them burn.

***

The next phone call is for Helen. It’s Christie, heading into her last two hours, and Helen goes inside and leaves Diana and Neal to the dark.

Diana tops off the wine glasses, sets the empty bottle back in the bucket, now more water than ice, surface broken by a dying moth, wet wings fluttering and frantic.

Neal gathers up her wallet photos, still lying on the table; he stares for a moment at her younger self before holding them out to her.

His voice is hushed. “He was with you in a lot of places.”

“Yeah.” She’s told him about Charlie already; there’s not much more to say. She tucks the photos back in her wallet, as if she can sheathe edged memories by keeping them out of sight.

He walks away from the table, shoves his hands into his pockets and removes them again. She stands beside him, resting her elbows on the railing as he folds his arms tightly across his chest. His body language is classic uncertainty, defensiveness and confusion; as a professional con he knows this, and yet he lets her see it anyway, which means … something.

She wishes she knew what.

He tips his head back and stares up toward the roof. “They get the guy who did it?”

The words are carefully noncommittal; he doesn’t look at her.

Below them, streetlamps throw overlapping pools of white and pale orange along the sidewalk, piling shadows in inky dark heaps behind parked cars and under hedges. Two agents are watching from one of those cars, she knows.

Two agents are drinking burnt coffee and eating Chinese takeout while she and Neal sip expensive French wine, and she’d give anything to be in that car with them.

It’s a simple duty, to watch and to guard in the dark, to stay awake and alert, to stop anyone who might hurt Neal. But it’s not the charge Peter gave her, tonight.

The silence lengthens; crickets hold a hushed conference with the breeze whispering among the azaleas. Bats swoop lower, toward the abandoned table, moving in to snatch their own dinner from the moths lured in by the candlelight.

Peter asked her to make Neal get some sleep but she can’t do that. The most she can do is distract him, and that only for so long; they’ve had no chance, yet, to slow down and stop and think about any of it, and now it’s all catching up and they can only brace for impact.

Peter needs her to protect Neal from himself, to make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid, and she’s trying.

(Peter charged her to stop Neal, last Sunday; she can still hear his voice, rough and desperate.)

Neal is asking for something else entirely.

“Sniper shot him from the roof,” she says at last, and doesn’t look up. “About two seconds after -”

The bare facts are simple enough, but those aren’t what Neal needs.

She could tell him it didn’t help, having the shooter’s blood splashed across her shirt along with Charlie’s. It didn’t stop the nightmares; it didn’t numb the pain. It didn’t fill the empty hole at her shoulder, every time she turned around. But that’s not what he’s asking.

She lifts a hand, moving as if to squeeze his shoulder, then lets it fall on the stone. He’s not asking for that, either.

He’s asking - begging - for answers she doesn’t have, to questions she’s wrestled since she was seventeen. She looks at him and the glass walls of rage are gone from his eyes, replaced by something raw and lost and searching.

He’s listening, finally; he’s looking to her for some hope or solace and she has none to give.

Last Sunday things were simple and now they aren’t anymore; sometimes the straight path leads over a cliff’s edge and you can’t see - not until the ground is giving way beneath your feet - that it’s a long way down.

She hears footsteps as a lone figure turns the corner down on the street and imagines the agents below snapping to alert. Now she does grip Neal’s arm, tugging him back from the railing.

(She can do this; she can check the angles and watch the street and pull him out of the way of potential snipers.)

She feels him exhale, sees his shoulders sag, tension going out of him, relief or defeat or both as he rakes a hand through his hair.

A thin horned moon throws a wavering pearl reflection in the water spilled across the table; she blots it away with a crumpled napkin as the candle flames jump, light stirring the shadows like a breeze against a curtain.

(She can cuff him; she can drag him back from that cliff’s edge and she can guide him down those twisting stairs when he stumbles, blind with shock.)

She can try to put the pieces back together. They’re all trying, holding onto shards like broken glass, but the edges are ragged and sharp and won’t align, and someone forgot to bring the glue.

She could grope for any of a hundred platitudes, useless lies well-meaning people told her. She can say that someday those days when Kate’s absence sucks all the air out of the world, those days won’t come so close together; she can’t say they’ll ever go away.

Nothing will heal this but time, and she can’t bring herself to lie to him.

***

It was Charlie who taught her how to shoot.

He’d stood behind her, guiding her as she placed her feet that first time, adjusting her stance and her aim and her grip. He’d been her first teacher and he’d taught her the first rule of firearms; the first rule was iron and she had never broken it: don’t ever pull a gun you’re not prepared to fire.

Charlie was gone and he couldn’t teach her anymore; he couldn’t give her answers while she was still groping for the questions.

She’d thought she was ready to make that call.

She almost asked Peter, later, what he would have wanted her to do. She never wanted to find herself in that place again, but she wanted (needed) an answer all the same: did you mean for me to take the shot?

As if she could put off that responsibility, even hypothetical, onto him.

Three times, she almost asked. In the silent parking garage when Peter handed her cuffs back to her; as they left the antique shop, listening to Neal’s phone ring through to voicemail over and over; in the back seat of Peter’s car on the way to the hospital, following the ambulance, with her hand on Neal’s neck holding his head down between his knees.

She never did ask. She knew what he’d say.

He wasn’t going to do it, Peter would have told her. There was never any need. I knew he wouldn’t shoot.

She remembered the fear in Peter’s eyes, in his voice; if she’d asked he would have lied, to her and to himself because he had to. Because he couldn’t think about what almost happened and so she swallowed the question because she didn’t want to think about it either.

(Her gun and Neal’s in a line like a blade’s edge and Peter off to the side, his gun aimed at the floor, his eyes on Neal when she looked to him; she was alone, two lives weighed in her hands.)

She came here seeking justice beyond rules; she came here because she was tired of protecting criminals. And she was this close to shooting a friend to protect a murderer and Charlie was gone. He was gone and Peter was silent.

(She couldn’t see Neal’s face. She could see Fowler’s, and that was enough; she watched him close his eyes and she knew he knew the threat was real.)

She couldn’t stop thinking about it.

But perhaps if she didn’t ask, if she didn’t talk about it the question rolling over and over in her mind would stutter to a stop, and fade away.

***

They go inside for dessert.

The decision is hardly rational. There’s a detail outside and if they fail Neal’s glass doors are no protection; if Larssen wanted Neal dead Neal wouldn’t still be breathing but the balcony feels suddenly exposed.

Neal blows out the candle lanterns and Diana collects the wine glasses. Helen is tucking her phone away when they come in, blinking in the warm yellow light.

“It looks like rain,” Diana says, and no one questions her.

“Christie says she loves you and you’d better save her some dessert,” Helen says.

Neal makes the coffee. And it’s good coffee, better than Diana has ever had at work and miles above the stale sludge from the hospital cafeteria and she leans against the counter and breathes in the aroma as it steeps.

He pours into three mugs and adds a generous slug of Bailey’s to each.

“Friends old and new,” he toasts, and they all clink their mugs together.

Diana pulls the crème brûlée from the fridge, sets four ramekins out; they’ve chilled and set by now, not even quivering as she sets them on the table. Neal brings over the sugar and the blowtorch.

“This is the fun part.” He lays out three clean spoons and they each take a heaping spoonful of sugar, dusting it over the surface of the custard.

The torch hisses as Neal lights it, a bright flare and then a steady blue flame; he’s in his element, here. He’s an accomplished craftsman, showing off his art.

Diana sips her coffee; it’s as good as it smells. Better, even. She watches as he passes the torch over the sprinkled sugar, a flame like a paintbrush tip layering rich caramel glaze as smooth as glass. There’s an artistry to it, and Neal’s smile fades to a look of intent concentration, leaning over the table like a fine canvas.

“Voila!” He presents the finished dish with a flourish, switching off the torch and offering it to Helen; she blinks, and he says, “I’ll show you.”

He guides Helen’s hands, at first, then steps back to let her finish the glaze herself. When she’s done she hands the torch back to him.

“Your turn.” He offers the torch to Diana, catching her eye with a grin.

The grin is real, not the fake plastic thing he’s worn all evening. The light in his eyes is unaffected, uncomplicated fun and it catches her off guard. It’s a light she hasn’t seen since they closed the Dutchman case.

It’s like watching someone learn to walk again.

And for a suspended moment all she can see is the back of his head and the angle of his shoulders down the end of her gun sight and she turns away and sets her mug down, carefully, before she breaks it.

She breathes slowly, in and out, and clenches her hands around the lip of the sink until her fingers ache.

When she turns back Neal has finished glazing hers and Christie’s both. His face is a polite mask as he lays the torch aside, suave and smooth and false and she sees a haunted shadow behind it, a twisting guilt to think he could be happy, even for a few seconds, in a world without Kate.

Diana knows that feeling, too; she can’t tell him that will ever go away, either.

***

The hospital was quiet and tense and it was easy to forget, in the windowless lounge at the end of the ward, that it was nearly midnight. It was as easy to believe Mozzie had only gone into surgery five minutes ago, as it was to think he’d been there forever.

Neal’s face was shocky and set under the unforgiving fluorescents, a tensely-coiled mess of pain radiating don’t touch me in waves she could feel halfway across the room.

“Three more hours,” he said, as she sat in the chair beside him. “They said. At least. If he doesn’t -” Broken phrases stumbling to a halt and he let out a soft, shaking breath. “Do you think -”

Broken glass sparkled in his hair as he turned; she resisted the urge to brush it away. “They’re doing everything they can.”

“Do you think you -” He turned, a quick glance encompassing her and Peter both. Peter stood covering the entrance to the lounge, on guard, and Neal’s look might be seeking reassurance or escape from a trap, she couldn’t tell which. “Do you think you and Peter can hold off the Marshals until there’s - some news?”

His voice cracked on the last words, splintering into fragments.

“The Marshals aren’t coming, Neal.”

He thought he was going back to prison.

He wasn’t, for a great number of reasons, some having to do with sympathy for him and others to do with potentially awkward questions about the music box that they’d prefer to avoid, but most of which boiled down to one stark fact: letting the Marshals take Neal would require her and Peter to let him out of their sight, and there was absolutely no way that was going to happen tonight.

Neal stared at her like the words meant nothing.

She’d spent the last hour on the phone with her father; she’d spend hours more, in the days to come, making whatever deals she had to, in whatever dark rooms she could find, to keep Neal here. And all for what might be a temporary, ineffective bandage; she knew if Mozzie didn’t survive they were going to lose Neal, too, one way or another.

“The Marshals aren’t coming.” And she wasn’t sure if she wanted to hug him or punch his lights out, but she made herself speak gently, with an effort. “You’re not going anywhere.”

***

Diana wished Christie could have joined them for dessert; the smooth taste melts away any remaining awkwardness and before long the dishes are empty, the spoons collected, and Helen’s cab is honking downstairs.

They all follow Helen out to the curb. Neal carries her suitcase and they put her in the cab, after another round of heartfelt, genuine hugs. The street is dark after the cab turns the corner, and Diana feels the last of the mask slip away. She turns to Neal; his face is open and raw and tired.

Back upstairs, Neal washes the dishes. Diana stands beside him, drying the plates and glasses as he hands them to her. It’s an uncertain rhythm and slightly off, alcohol and a post-adrenaline crash beginning to take a toll.

“This was nice,” she says, finally, because someone should say something and it’s true. “Thanks for helping out.”

“I owe you one,” he says. “Several. A lot, really -” There’s an awkward silence, like he wants to say something and he’s trying to figure out how. Then, “It was an invasion of your privacy, yours and Christie’s, and I never …”

She stares at him as he trails off, her brain wading through wine and exhaustion after his meaning. And it hits her: he’s trying to work his way around to apologizing for Alex Hunter.

He thinks she’s angry about a knife scratch on her window frame and the theft of something that was never hers in the first place and it’s such a spectacular case of missing the goddamn point she doesn’t know whether to laugh or scream.

She slams her hand down on the counter and he starts; a wine glass in the sink falls on its side and cracks.

“Diana.” He leans in, damp fingers touching her wrist. “You want to tell me what’s wrong?”

She says, flat and precise, “I almost killed someone a week ago. And I’m still having a really hard time dealing with that, all right?”

His head snaps back, wary suspicion in his eyes, like he’s not sure if she’s mocking him.

“I almost had to shoot you.” Somehow saying it out loud makes it real, in a way it wasn’t before. Her voice drops, low and fierce. “Do you get that, Neal?”

He stares at her; the silence presses down and he takes a breath as if to speak but says nothing.

“What was I supposed to do?" she demands. Peter would lie, if she asked him; Neal gives her no such comfort. He only blinks, his face pale and his eyes huge.

She wonders if suicide by cop had been part of his plan, or if he simply didn’t have a plan beyond Fowler’s death.

She can’t bring herself to ask that question. It looms over all of them, huge and massive and when it falls they will have nowhere to go.

“Do you have any idea what kind of trouble - even assuming the official investigation didn’t end with me or Peter in prison for falsifying federal evidence and God knows what else I’d still have one more person I care about who’s dead because of me and how the hell am I supposed to live with that?”

She stops when she runs out of breath and they stare at each other; she’s not sure which of them is more stunned.

“Diana -”

“Don’t.” She throws out a hand, blocking whatever line of unreason he intends to use. “I don’t even -”

They both reach for the broken glass in the sink at the same time.

“I’ve got it,” Neal says, quiet and hoarse, and she watches as he gathers the pieces and lays them on a towel, though to her eyes it looks beyond fixing.

“You have a lot of people, here, who care about you,” she says finally, as if words can fix anything; these are all she has. “Please try not to forget that.”

They finish the dishes without speaking, and if her hands aren’t entirely steady she can try to blame it on the alcohol. When the clean plates are all stacked she stares blankly at the empty sink until Neal says, again, “I got this.”

She blinks at him; they’re both supposed to be resting, but she knows he meant to head back to the hospital once dinner was over, and she’d been intending to follow.

“Couch,” he says, and she lets him boss her, here, in his apartment, gives him back the illusion of control.

She leans her head back against the cushions and watches him put away the dishes.

“Moz swears that’s the most comfortable couch he’s ever slept on. Of course, given where he usually sleeps -” He trails off. “I won’t go anywhere,” he says. “I promise.”

She gives him a flat, suspicious stare; he tries for his classic innocent look for about half a second.

“You need to rest, too,” she says. Before he can protest: “Try. For a little while.”

She thinks he’s going to argue but he only crosses the room to the light switch and the room goes dark.

He drops his belt over a chair back but stretches out still in his Westwood trousers. On the couch Diana tugs her holster off her belt, tucks the sidearm under a gilt embroidered pillow and draws up her feet, hiding them under the throw.

She hears the bed creaking as Neal shifts, and a soft sigh, and he says, “Night, Daisy.”

She grabs the pillow and hurls it in the general direction of the bed; there’s a thump and she hopes whatever she knocked over wasn’t too expensive. She gropes for another pillow and wedges it against the armrest. “Call me that again,” she says, around a yawn, “and I’ll break both your arms.”

The only response is a weary chuckle. She lies in the darkness, listening to his breathing even out. Something ticks steadily from the direction of the stove, or maybe the refrigerator, a slow tapping of electronic kitchen noises like an echo of footsteps, pacing.

The sound fades away and Diana sleeps.

White Collar Big Bang Fic 1/2: And the ghosts in the attic they never quite leave (PG, 14,300 words)

florastuart — Thu, 26 Sep 2013 12:18:46 GMT

Title: And the ghosts in the attic they never quite leave
Characters/Pairings: Diana/Christie, Neal, Peter
Rating: PG
Word Count: 14,300
Spoilers: Spoilers through 2.10 Burke’s Seven
Warnings: None
Summary: On the limitations of geometry as a guide to moral decision-making, or, the one where Neal and Diana cook dinner together and light things on fire.
Author's Note: Huge thanks to LC, my amazing beta, who is awesome and wonderful and who made this much better than it would have been otherwise. Also thanks to frith_in_thorns and neontiger55 for cheerleading and encouragement! I do not own any of these characters. The title is from Vienna Teng's "Eric's Song".

Art: The gorgeous cover art is by the amazing and talented love_82 - thank you SO MUCH! :)

In Diana’s earliest memory of him, Charlie walked the perimeter in the sun-drenched courtyard of a Venetian palazzo.

She stood beside a fountain, listening to water fall from the open beak of a verdigris-scaled swan, while bees hummed in the climbing rose scrambling up a wall of warm pink brick. Charlie walked along the low hedges, from one gap to the next, neat lines in a perfect hexagon around the courtyard’s border.

At the end of each circuit he stopped, near the broad path leading toward the main gardens, where he could see every entrance and her as well. He stood with a trained stillness, arms hanging loose and ready at his sides.

Her father and two men she didn’t recognize wandered from one carefully-trimmed topiary sculpture to the next, a soft buzz of voices in a language she hadn’t learned yet. She sat on the lip of the fountain pool and watched them, a cluster of dignitaries dancing a bee’s meandering path from flower to flower and Charlie, holding to the edge of the group, moving in clear straight lines.

***

She walks the length of the ward every twenty minutes.

Sixty measured steps. Fifteen to reach the first branching hallway and fifteen more to the elevator bank. A suspicious glance at an orderly waiting beside a laundry cart, faded aquamarine scrubs and a badly-disguised yawn.

Fifteen steps to the nurses’ station and she smothers a yawn of her own. It’s not yet 8 PM, but she slept three hours last night and that was three hours more than the night before.

From here clear sight lines radiate like points of a star; the potted fern beside the night nurse’s chair is too small to hide a shooter, the water cooler too transparent. She can see both ends of the hall, the stairwell door and the numbers crawling upward on the display panel over the elevator.

It’s an old lesson, where to look and what to look for, assessing all approaches.

At Quantico they taped all the students’ practical exercises. It had been the first time she’d seen herself standing guard. She remembers it like a gut punch, sitting in a room with a dozen others while her vision narrowed to a dark tunnel, watching the screen as someone with her hair and her clothes who stood and moved like Charlie came through the door, holding a familiar stance, raising a weapon and holding her aim to cover all access points.

The ding of an arriving elevator surprises her; she restrains a start as the doors open and the laundry cart disappears. She pivots, neat and sharp, beside the water cooler; her reflection passes across the closing doors, a blurred shadow in brushed steel.

The rhythm of walking night watch is older than Quantico. Her eyes are gritty and her ears buzz, a faint hum mingling with the gnat’s whine of overhead fluorescents. But her feet are sure, despite the growing headache pounding an off-beat counterpoint to her steps. Some children count sheep; Diana counted Charlie’s footsteps when she couldn’t sleep.

The hall outside her bedroom in Dubai was twenty paces long. In Pretoria it was thirty. Venice was thirteen and Jakarta twenty-seven. Now the sound of her own steps joins and echoes a primal sense memory, the faint squeak of rubber soles on polished tile like a lullaby or a mother’s heartbeat.

Fifteen steps and she pauses outside Mozzie’s room; the door is cracked and the light dimmed but Neal looks up. She doesn’t ask if she woke him.

Like her, he learned long ago to sleep through the sound of an armed guard pacing just outside the door.

Fifteen steps to reach the lounge. A coffee stain marks the grey carpet, a dark blot shaped like a squid, leftover fragments of someone else’s vigil soaked into the floor beside a low table piled with coloring books.

Twenty minutes ago, she would have said the stain had the grin of a Cheshire cat.

She presses the heel of one hand against her eyes, absently noting a faint tremor, nerve endings overloaded with adrenaline and caffeine. Her shift is nearly over; the beep of an incoming text tells her Agent Smith is on his way up from the lobby.

She wants to go home and do a faceplant at the kitchen table but Christie’s mother is landing at LaGuardia in forty minutes; Christie’s shift doesn’t end for another four hours, and Diana promised she’d play hostess until then.

A reckless promise made six hours ago, in that brief window of triumph and fuzzy exhausted relief, after they go their man and before they let him go again, when she thought everything was going to be okay.

Her phone buzzes and she answers without looking. “Hey, boss.”

“How’s it going over there?”

“The little guy’s been asleep since I got here.” He’d been awake earlier, Neal said; by the nurses’ odd looks when she asks about him, she suspects Mozzie is recovered enough to be his usual bafflingly irritating self. “Christie says that’s a good thing. Neal hasn’t told him -”

Neal hasn’t told Mozzie they let the man who shot him walk out of the federal building mere hours after they brought him in. A week’s desperate searching and no sleep is catching up to them, and now they’re back where they started, only without Peter -

“We’ll get him again.” Peter’s voice is an anchor. “We’ll get through this. It’s not the end of the world.”

It’s a damned good frame job, she wants to say. It’s a board of inquiry and possible criminal charges; it’s a killer on the loose and any one of us could be his next target.

“At least you didn’t -” - shoot anybody this time. She swallows the rest of that sentence as Neal appears in the hall, shutting the door to Mozzie’s room with a soft click.

“Yeah,” Peter says, like he hears what she doesn’t say. “Listen, we’re not going to solve this tonight. Take Neal home when your shift is up. And then get some sleep. You both need it.”

She blinks and sees sparkles overlaid on black beige walls, exhaustion adding color where there is none. Neal has spent the last week glued to Mozzie’s side, when he hasn’t been out hunting for leads. He’s as worn thin as she is and as unlikely to sleep tonight.

She could order him to leave the hospital; she can drag him back to June’s loft in cuffs but short of drugging him she can’t make him relax, can’t make him promise to behave.

But Peter has enough to worry about; she won’t add to that list.

“I’ve got this, boss.” Because someone has to be the steady one, the solid rock when everything falls down. Again. “Now you get some rest, too, okay?”

She hangs up, tucking the phone away as Neal approaches.

Charlie was always the steady one, for as long as she can remember; he made it look easy.

“There’s coffee downstairs,” Neal says. He nods toward the elevators in a vague gesture of invitation and she shakes her head.

It still feels like running into a brick wall, every time she wants to tell Charlie I get it now, every time she remembers that she can’t.

“June has better coffee than this place.” Not that coffee is what they need. They need to crash, to crawl under a pile of blankets and pretend this last week didn’t happen. They need Larssen and whoever he works for behind bars. “I’m taking you home.”

“Diana.” Neal’s practiced fake smile falters for half a second. “I’m fine. Really.”

There are so many things wrong with that statement Diana doesn’t know where to start, so she only goes with, “I think you owe me dinner.”

Neal blinks.

It’s the sort of idea one thinks is brilliant after a week of more espresso than sleep; it’s possible she’ll regret this later.

“Your place,” she says evenly, and his eyes are wary, searching for some hidden catch. “You’re cooking for three. Come on.”

***

The night of her senior prom, Charlie took her to the range and she practiced shooting his HK MP5 rifle until her shoulder ached.

Afterward she lay on the manicured embassy lawn, listening to a symphony of crickets tuning up and the guards’ radios murmuring routine checks from the gatehouse.

Charlie sat beside her, relaxed and alert at once. “Shouldn’t you be studying for the foreign service exam?”

A sickle moon had emerged from thin clouds, frosting the razor wire at the top of the wall with silver glitter. She might have said everyone else was still out dancing; it wasn’t yet midnight.

(The American ambassador’s daughter’s prom date was news, here; the school administrators and her father’s head of PR agreed Rachel Hayes was the kind of news they didn’t need.)

Instead she rolled over, propped herself on her elbows and breathed in dew and newly-cut grass. “I’m not taking it.”

She’d told her father last night; he’d come in wired and jetlagged just before 3 AM, after a month as special envoy on some assignment he wouldn’t discuss.

(When she asked, all he’d say was there’s no peace in this world that isn’t built on shitty compromises.)

“You’d be a competitive candidate,” Charlie said. She’d heard it before. School guidance counselors had been dropping hints since she turned sixteen; she’d lived in ten countries and she could carry a conversation in three languages. “A lot of your father’s friends think so.”

“My father doesn’t have friends,” she shot back; she expected Charlie to be on her side in this. “He has people who owe him favors.”

It would be one of their last arguments.

“His work is important,” Charlie insisted patiently.

“So is yours.”

“Diplomacy is more than those fancy cocktail parties you hate. You don’t see a lot of what goes into it.”

“I’ve seen enough.” She’d watched her father disappear into dark rooms and all-night emergency meetings for years, now, vanishing on last-minute red-eye flights for weeks at a time.

(State secrets, vital to national security, grownup things and you wouldn’t understand and stop asking questions.)

Her father had accepted her decision without question. He thought he understood; he’d started his career surrounded by those who judged him for the color of his skin; he knew some of the pressures and prejudices she’d face.

But it was more than that; she expected Charlie to understand. “I want to do what you do.”

“And what’s that?”

She sat up, rotating her shoulders forward and then back, stretching sore muscles. She tilted her head toward the Marine sentry pacing a crisp square on the roof.

She didn’t say Charlie got to shoot at bad guys, while her father got to invite them for drinks and ask them nicely, please behave.

“Your world is simpler,” she tried to explain, while Charlie watched her with that carefully expressionless look, the one that said he didn’t understand what she was talking about - or she didn’t. “Harder to live in,” she granted, “but easier to understand.”

She wasn’t a child anymore. She knew a polite request over cocktails could carry more weight than a column of tanks, when made by the right person. She understood some things were complicated.

But some things weren’t. Or they shouldn’t be.

***

The bakery two blocks from the hospital is closing when they arrive, but Neal’s smile can still open doors; he jogs up to the entrance, waving, and the clerk halts halfway through pulling down the shade and flipping the sign.

Nothing in his loft is fit to eat, Neal insists. Five minutes later he’s leaning against the counter, like he and the clerk are old friends sharing a secret, and Diana wonders if he’s just conned her into a grocery run outside his radius.

Sometimes Neal reminds her of her father.

The light in his eyes is illusion, diversion; the intimate conspiratorial tone bends rules like so much soft taffy. Even tonight, Neal can almost pull off that smile, the one that’s trying to say the rumpled clothes and three days’ stubble are a deliberate artistic affectation.

Almost.

She knows he’s spent the last six nights in a hard chair beside a hospital bed; he hasn’t been home since they brought Mozzie in.

The sun blazes at a sharp, lowering angle as they emerge into the street, amber splashing against parked cars and sparking green fire from a broken bottle beside the curb; the crunch of glass under her feet sets her teeth on edge.

She’s seen Neal stripped raw in ways she’s never seen her father.

“You’re going to have agents with Moz all night?” Neal’s eyes are soft and fond and worried.

She nods. He stops and sets two paper grocery bags at his feet, tearing a warm roll and handing her half as he scans the street for a cab. The crust is hard and the soft interior smells like spring break in Paris.

If this is a con, she thinks as pigeons flutter-rush the crumbs at her feet, at least she’s getting a nice dinner out of it.

“Any news on Larssen?”

“We’ll catch him,” she says, emphasis on we, and as much false confidence as she can project. “Again.” She has no real answers to offer. “This isn’t over yet.”

“No.” Neal is hard to read; she can only guess what’s going on inside his head. “It’s not.”

Peter promised justice if Neal would step aside, if he’d trust the system, and now that system has failed at the first test.

She tries not to think about the look on Neal’s face as he watched Larssen walk out, barely six hours ago.

“We’re off the clock.” She wonders if he’d postpone whatever desperately stupid thing he’s planning next until sometime after she’s had a good twelve hours’ sleep, if she asked him nicely. “And we have cooking to do. We can think about the rest of it later.”

Her father doesn’t have friends but Neal does, even if he doesn’t know how many, or what to do with them.

It has to be friendship - hers for Neal, hers for Peter and Peter’s for Neal - she’s too tired to trace the pattern, and it doesn’t matter tonight.

“Is this a plot to distract me with awkward social engagements?”

But everything has limits. “You want to talk about awkward social engagements?” She turns and glares at him. “I spent four hours last night having drinks with the Russian cultural attaché - who by the way is a sixty-year-old man who’s known me since I was eighteen and still thinks my name is Daisy - to convince him to lean on the museum about not pressing charges. I think you owe me a few awkward social engagements.”

Neal’s mouth snaps shut and he looks away, raising one hand to hail a cab.

She lets out a slow breath. They’re both wrung out and frayed and frustrated, but it’s not her friend who’s spent the last week hanging two millimeters from death.

“My father helped him out, once.” Her father doesn’t have friends, but she’s grateful for those favors, now. Even if Anatoly Bakunin’s idea of friendly after-work drinks is half a liter of straight vodka and not particularly good vodka at that. “I’m sure you’ve had your share of difficult in-law moments?”

It’s the wrong thing to say. “Her father died before we met.” He doesn’t look at Diana. “If she had any other family, she wasn’t on speaking terms with them.”

A cab stops and the pigeons scatter; Neal’s face is blank once they get the bags settled on the floor beside their feet.

She wants to say it will get easier, that someday remembering Kate won’t make it hard to breathe. The cab accelerates, speeding through a puddle, water rising and falling against the window like a wing catching fire in the last sunlight; she resists the urge to glance behind them, checking for a tail.

She wants to say this will hurt less, someday but tonight she’d give her right arm to talk to Charlie for five minutes.

She finally says, “They’re not.” And when he looks up, blankly: “Going to press charges.”

Because she’s not sure anyone thought to tell him, with everything else that’s happened. Anatoly called at seven this morning, breaking her restless nap, as cheerful as if he hadn’t been up as late as she had and drank twice as much.

Whatever Neal thinks of this stays off his face; after a moment he nods once. Water running down the glass casts strange rippling shadows across his face.

“It’s just dinner, Neal,” she says quietly. His eyes are wary. They’re both wound too tight to remember how to stand down. “No traps. I’m not going to yell at you.”

He looks neither convinced nor reassured.

“I’m not going to try to make you talk about your feelings, either.”

That wins her a brief, twisting half-smile and a fractional loosening of his shoulders. “Pinky swear?”

There were all these reporters at Charlie’s funeral, she wants to say. She remembers being told to let herself feel, to let herself grieve, but only at the appropriate times, in the appropriate ways and in the appropriate places; she had her father’s image to maintain.

She was told many things, in the weeks and months after Charlie’s death, none of them useful; she’s never been sure what, if anything, to tell Neal. Grief is a messy, unstable thing and flows in unpredictable channels; it cuts its own ragged path like a storm surge spilling wide of a riverbank. Memories still loom to trip her when she least expects them, like black rocks long submerged breaking the waterline, shearing ripples through a fragile peace.

She could tell Neal she understands but he knows that; he’s heard the bare facts of the story and she’s not sure what else she can say. She’s never been good at talking about feelings, either.

“So.” He looks at her, finally. “Daisy, huh?”

She glares again, lets it melt into an exhausted laugh as she shakes her head. That he can find any humor in the whole situation is some cause for hope, she decides. “Do not even think about it, Caffrey.”

***

She took up pottery in DC.

The art and the process soothed her, and the raw physicality of it; with her hands on wet clay she felt a control too often absent at work.

She left New York with high hopes; she’d learned a lot, training under Peter Burke, but he didn’t prepare her for the endless tide of politics and paper that came with working in the capital.

She arrived in DC with some idea of bringing justice to the halls of power; four months later the potter’s wheel was a perfect metaphor for her life, spinning an endless circle and going nowhere.

She signed up for the class on a whim. She stayed with it, though she had no particular gift, to shape something that wasn’t paper. To get her hands dirty, watching symmetry take shape under her fingers: a wet grey lump spun and scooped out and passed through fire, turned into something hollow, bright and hard on the other side.

As an art it was deceptively simple. The wheel didn’t stop; one false move and the whole thing spun out of control.

She emailed her father dutifully every week. She had no one else to write - all her relationships seemed to wither into dust the hour she said goodbye. One or two old girlfriends would email out of the blue, but she could never figure out how to respond.

By the time she left Quantico she’d stopped physically typing and then deleting emails to Charlie - we just finished training on ambushes, tell me why you went left instead of right that time in Prague, damn you were right the FN SPR is amazing but I bet you didn’t even notice the weight - but she kept composing them in her head.

DC wasn’t Quantico and it wasn’t New York, and the questions she didn’t type grew more urgent and bitter with each passing month.

Her first big case ended in a multi-million dollar settlement deal that wouldn’t make a dent in her perp’s Swiss account; three months’ careful evidence gathering, long hours spent gaining the trust of frightened witnesses and two days after the bust he walked free with no criminal charges.

He wouldn’t be the last.

Christie made beautiful bowls and tall, graceful vases; she had a surgeon’s hands, strong and delicate and sure. Diana watched her throw clay for three weeks, and finally got up the nerve to ask her to dinner.

After dessert was done they strolled beside the water through a muggy fog, watching streetlights come on, wet cherry blossoms on the sidewalk and grey rain throwing a veil over the Potomac.

Diana had grown sick already of the whirling dance of Washington, where successful crooks had protection at the highest levels, where money flowed in its own circuitous path around the law and basic ethics and her office’s targets were chosen for political expediency.

She dreamed she was wrapped and smothered under reams of paper, weighing her down when she tried to act.

“Imagine you’ve got an ER full of patients you can save,” she told Christie, “and you’re not allowed to go near them with anything more than a band-aid.”

She had nightmares that she’d listened to the counselors, to her teachers, and gone into the diplomatic corps after all; she was tired of the delicate negotiating required to open cases that mattered, of deals made in dark rooms to protect criminals with powerful friends.

When Peter Burke called, eight months after she’d seen him last, to ask if she wanted to come back to New York and help him take down a dirty OPR agent, her answer was a foregone conclusion.

“There’s politics everywhere,” Christie tried to soothe her. Christie thought she was wary of commitment. “You’re not going to fix anything by running away.”

Diana grew up on the move; the oldest fix she knew was still the easiest to reach for. But she wasn’t running from Christie. She wanted to run toward something. She wanted to set fire to the twisted bonds of paper and red tape holding her.

She lay awake, after Christie fell asleep, and thought of her father; she wondered when is it time to stop making compromises?

***

June’s stairs are narrow and perfect for an ambush.

Diana walks up with a grocery bag in her left arm and her right hand hovering near her holster; she touches Neal’s arm as the floor creaks ahead of them, slips past him on the landing to enter the loft first before he can object.

The last time she came through that door she had her gun drawn, expecting Larssen on the other side.

(And Neal wonders why she and Peter don’t want to let him out of their sight.)

But it’s only June, standing beside the bookshelf. Diana sets the groceries on the table, flicks a glance around the room and exhales slowly, breathing through a flood of adrenaline.

(They all really need a break.)

June raises an eyebrow at Diana but says nothing, only smiles at Neal and leans in close to kiss his cheek, angled so Diana can’t see either of their faces.

“I’ll be at the hospital if you need me.”

“Tell Moz -”

“I will. If he’s awake.” June would have made a brilliant diplomat, Diana thinks idly; impeccably proper, convincingly warm, and revealing absolutely nothing she doesn’t choose to show. “He should be sleeping. And so should you.” A nod at Diana, gracious and impenetrable: “Don’t keep him up too late.”

Her heels tap across the wood floor as she collects her purse to leave.

“Dessert first,” Neal says as the door closes behind her, and opens a cabinet above the sink. He pulls down three bowls, a whisk and a blowtorch.

“I like the way you think, Caffrey.”

He sets four eggs beside the smallest bowl. “You know how to separate these?”

“Watch me.”

Diana beats the egg yolks with the sugar, a quick rhythm in counterpoint to the slow circles of Neal’s wooden spoon stirring a splash of Grand Marnier in a saucepan of heavy cream. They don’t speak as Neal pours the cream into the bowl, a thin stream as she whisks it all together; there’s a simple elegance in a good crème brûlée, and a soothing satisfaction in creating something with their hands.

Once the ramekins are in the oven Neal cracks the French doors open and pours two shots; the liqueur is heady and smooth, and lays a warm fuzzy glow over the evening.

She sets the table while he makes salad, handfuls of romaine and arugula tossed in a clear glass bowl, a generous scattering of feta and walnuts and sliced strawberries, drizzled with a splash of balsamic vinegar. The pungent smell of garlic fills the loft as he slides three salmon steaks into a frying pan.

A warm breeze stirs the plants on the balcony as Diana brings out dishes and placemats; all the right silver is here, and she knows where to place the salad forks and soup spoons, like they’re preparing for a state dinner. She knows how to fold the napkins into rippling fan shapes, pulling heavy damask into place like the slide on a well-oiled pistol.

Style over substance, she’d scoffed at the protocol officers who’d taught her these things; false glitter, the noise and flash from an empty chamber. But tonight it matters.

She’s doing this for Christie, though Christie won’t be here, and she wants to get it right.

Neal knows the formalities as well as she does; he sets out serving dishes, a wine bottle in an ice bucket and a heavy cut glass vase of gardenias, a rich scent washing over the balcony as the breeze shifts.

She can picture him laying place settings at some high end hotel, in a suave smile and a perfectly-pressed uniform. Some hotel with a safe full of diamonds and -

No.

He used to do this for Kate, she thinks, watching him light twin candle lanterns at the center of the glass-topped table. Preparing everything just so, making sure the evening would be perfect.

He flashes a smile when he catches her watching him, bright as the lights of the city beyond the railing. It’s not terribly convincing.

What did Larssen say to you last night? The question hangs over them in the gathering twilight. What did he offer you? And are you having second thoughts about refusing?

Her cell phone buzzes as Neal goes back inside. “We’re almost ready,” she tells Christie, staring at Neal’s back as he stands over the frying pan. “Wish me luck.”

“It’s just dinner, Di,” Christie says. “Mom doesn’t bite, I swear.”

“We’ll manage,” Diana says, with more confidence than she feels. Christie isn’t her first serious girlfriend; she isn’t even the first to introduce Diana to her family.

She’s seen a range of reactions from those families, from barely-veiled hostility to the hint of a wistful hope that maybe Diana is a phase their daughter will grow out of.

“You’ll be fine,” Christie says, and Diana wonders how much she’s told her mother about these last eight months.

Mom’s not like that, Christie had assured her, over and over. She’s fine with me. She’s not secretly hoping I’ll meet a nice boy someday.

Diana wonders if Christie’s mother thinks her daughter has given up a lot to be with Diana and gotten too little support in return; she doesn’t ask if her mother wishes Christie would find a woman who treats her better.

“How’s it going over there?” she asks instead, breathing in the aroma of sizzling garlic. “You should know you’re missing out on something amazing.”

“Stop teasing me. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve had to remind my residents to look up their drug interactions -” Christie’s voice is a warm anchor; Diana can almost see her exasperated head shake. “I’m getting off at ten,” she says. “Mom’s going to catch a cab from Neal’s place and pick me up at the hospital. That way she’ll be out of your hair before it gets too late, and you and Neal can talk.”

“There’s nothing to talk about.” (An empty closet and a broken window; three security tapes and an antique dagger in a battered duffel, dropped on her doorstep by some clerk Anatoly trusted to be discreet.) “I’m not mad at him, Christie.”

(A cloth to wipe Neal’s prints before she unspooled the tape at her kitchen table, drawing the blade along it like so much curling ribbon and then lighting it all on fire.)

She watches the candle flames jump on the table and she can still smell burning plastic.

She doesn’t want to talk about any of it. She’s reasonably certain Neal doesn’t, either.

“You’re allowed to be, you know.”

“I’m not,” Diana snaps, and it’s a tone Christie doesn’t deserve. She’s been nothing but quietly supportive all week. “Are you mad at him?” A silent pause. “It’s your place, too.”

“Di.” She can picture Christie’s smile, fond and exasperated and oddly gentle. “This has nothing to do with -” Another pause, and a faint dammit, now what? at someone Diana can’t see. “I have to go.”

“Go. I love you.”

“Love you.” She catches the faint sound of Christie kissing the phone receiver before she hangs up.

***

“The guy’s a paper pusher,” Diana had tried to reassure Christie, shrugging into her coat as a cab honked outside their DC apartment. She’d booked the next flight out of Dulles with an available economy seat barely ten minutes after Peter hung up. “I’m not doing anything dangerous, I promise.”

“He’s OPR.” Christie stared at her small wheeled suitcase, standing ready beside the door. Like Diana’s swift packing and the lightness of her baggage meant something profound, but she wasn’t sure what. “He can still end your career.”

Diana didn’t say what good is a career where I can’t make any difference?

If they ended up losing their jobs over this, at least she and Peter would go out fighting a fight that mattered, instead of growing old chasing paper in circles.

She had a cozy apartment, here, one that was just starting to earn the tentative label “home”. She had Christie’s coat in her closet and curtains they’d picked out together to hold in the light; she had an old couch that was Christie’s mother’s, and a woman who loved her to curl up on it beside her as they watched TV.

And justice was still too far distant from the halls of power, and at least one agent in New York wasn’t afraid to do his damn job even when that meant punching upwards - and he was asking for her help.

“I’ll be home in a week,” she said instead. “Ten days, tops.”

Christie looked at her face and said, “No, you won’t.”

It was frightening and reassuring at once, having someone who knew you when you didn’t know yourself.

The last leaves were falling, autumn’s torches guttered and gone cold, bare trees shedding withered scraps of crackling brown like drifts of ash along the sidewalks. Black ice grew in patches along the steps of her hotel; frost glazed the iron railings, and the radios in all the cabs played bright Christmas songs at odds with the mood of grey November.

She really didn’t expect a shootout.

(She didn’t expect a lot of things.)

For half a second she heard Charlie’s footsteps behind her in the parking garage, hard echoes bouncing off water-stained concrete pillars. Peter’s voice startled her; she saw Charlie’s reflection in the side of Fowler’s car, his long shadow at her shoulder, his presence felt like a phantom limb.

Charlie always had a backup piece.

An absurd thought flashed through her mind: the airport line at Heathrow, more than twenty years ago, the bored screener’s eyebrows inching upward as Charlie piled four handguns and a boot knife in a bin beside the metal detector -

Always have more than you think you’ll need, he used to tell her. She raised her arms slowly, eyes moving from Fowler’s gun hand to Peter’s reflection. Peter’s arms were spread, his steps slow and deliberate until he went for her gun.

Peter didn’t push her out of the way.

Her hands were steady; her heart pounded a rising crescendo in her ears but she wasn’t afraid. She had a clear villain in her sights and a rock beside her; she had a straight line on her target and half of her was singing, sharp and fierce, this is what I came here for.

The other half whispered Christie is going to be so pissed.

***

June’s little pug barks sharply as a cab pulls up below Neal’s balcony.

The ER staff is suffering through a flu outbreak or Christie would be here. Christie offered to let her mother have dinner with her coworkers in the hospital cafeteria so Diana could get some sleep, but Diana insisted she was up for entertaining.

Now she’s less certain. She hears the street door open and looks at Neal, as footsteps rise on creaking wood stairs. “Promise you’ll kick me if I start to nod off over the salad course?”

Neal has shaved and put on a clean shirt. The kitchen is tidy, used dishes stacked in the sink and food standing ready on covered serving plates; in the mirror above the mantel both their faces are drawn, eyes hollowed.

He nods once. “I’ve got your back.”

The old smiles and the old masks fall into place as she opens the door; she thinks of her father at his cocktail parties, Anatoly in his silk suit, the carefully polite smile and artistically constructed warmth she’s always received from June.

Christie’s mother is family. She deserves better than the exhausted autopilot version of Diana’s diplomatic mask. But the oldest fix is still the easiest to reach for, and she and Neal are both running on fumes.

The woman at the door has Christie’s eyes and nose and understated makeup; she’s half a head shorter than her daughter, wearing wire-framed glasses and carrying only a small suitcase. “You must be Diana.”

Diana offers a handshake and gets a kiss on the cheek instead, before she’s pulled into a hug. A real hug, not the tentative, formal, awkward sort she’s endured at a hundred embassy receptions. It takes her half a second to figure out how to respond.

“Call me Helen.”

Neal takes Helen’s jacket and her suitcase. Neal gestures toward the balcony in a sweeping, theatrical half-bow and pulls her chair out when they reach the table; it’s delightfully, ridiculously over the top; it’s meant to make Diana laugh as much as charm Helen and it works.

“And you must be Neal Caffrey.”

“Guilty as charged, ma’am.”

“Christie warned me about you.” Helen laughs, catching Diana’s eye. “I’ll bet this one’s trouble.”

You have no idea. But the ice has been broken and the first awkward moment is past. Diana breathes, exhaling slowly. “He keeps life interesting.”

The sun is gone and the last light traces along the edges of the skyscrapers like lines of fire. The horizon is a peach silk ribbon, melting into charcoal shadows.

“I do try.” Neal pours the wine as Diana sits on the other side of the table.

The big stone dragon is a solid shadow at her back. Candlelight sparks in the cut glass vase, kindles a jewel-tone ruby glow from the depths of the wine glasses; the wine is smooth and tastes expensive, a deep warm buzz stealing over her like a thick blanket.

She blinks and sits up straight as Neal’s foot nudges hers. Helen is asking her a question. Possibly for the second time.

“Is he your responsibility?”

“Temporarily.” If she says it with enough conviction, she might make it true. She unfolds the cloth covering the basket of rolls, sets one beside her salad plate and passes the rest to Neal. “While Agent Burke is on - administrative leave.”

“Christie mentioned your boss was suspended,” Helen says, and Diana can feel the ground shifting, unsteady, beneath this conversation. “She didn’t say what for.”

The questioning lift at the end is clear.

Full disclosure is what Peter said, when she asked him how he had managed to make his marriage work for so long. Her father had kept his secrets but not his marriage.

Diana hadn’t planned to keep things from Christie; she hadn’t thought through Christie’s openness with her own family.

But it’s nothing that won’t make the Times. “Evidence tampering.”

The words taste sour, but between wine and fatigue she can’t find a graceful dodge. Helen tilts her head, curious, and Diana realizes too late that Helen expected more outrage on Peter’s behalf, and less resignation.

“Did he do it?”

Diana has no outrage left, only a weary appreciation for the way the light shimmers on the sword of Damocles that’s swung back and forth over their heads, these last eight months. She’s been expecting this, since the night she came home with her clothes reeking of jet fuel and a multi-billion-dollar stolen antique in a duffel under her front seat.

It was only ever a matter of time.

“No,” Neal jumps in smoothly, standing to serve the salad when Diana doesn’t answer right away.

A pair of bats flutter up in a looping circle from higher up the roof. Diana tilts her head back, watches a distant plane trace a curved path across the sky, red light winking a steady, reassuring beat until it vanishes into the cloud layer.

We are the good guys, she told Peter, and she meant it; if a shiver of fear ran through her, locking the music box in her closet that first night, it wasn’t accompanied by any guilt.

“But it’s a convincing frame job,” Neal continues. (It was a small lie, and a tiny step over the line.) “It’s going to take some work to clear it up.”

(A decoy box sealed in an evidence bag, warm wood-grain the color of amber, of good Italian amaretto, and the work of barely a second to sign her name on the log.)

Rules had their place but they had limits; DC was full of rules that got in the way of justice, and Diana was tired of asking the bad guys, please behave.

Christie was furious. You think falsifying federal evidence logs and stealing priceless antiques is going to fix anything?

She’d followed Diana to New York, though she wasn’t happy about moving; she’d signed for an apartment and lined up interviews at two Manhattan hospitals before Diana admitted, even to herself, that they weren’t going back to DC. But Christie never signed up for this.

Christie shook her head and said I won’t visit you in prison. When Diana hung their coats in that closet, Christie moved hers out - and the box of medical license records - and refused to go near it. And when the hospital asked her to work nights she didn’t argue, even though it meant she and Diana saw each other only briefly in the mornings and evenings.

“We’ll clear it up tomorrow,” Diana says firmly, catching Neal’s eye; time to change the subject. “We’re supposed to be relaxing, remember?”

If they get their hands on the real box, Peter said, we’ll never catch them.

The decision wasn’t a hard one. She always knew this would be a risk.

The rough, exhausted edges behind Neal’s smile aren’t faked, but the slip of the mask is deliberate as Helen’s eyes shift toward him, warmly concerned.

(She promised Christie it wouldn’t be dangerous.)

“Enough talk about work,” Helen says, and Diana wonders again how much Christie has told her.

(She promised a lot of things.)

***

She was supposed to meet Christie at LaGuardia the night Kate Moreau’s plane exploded.

The sun had long set but the western sky glowed outside the city, out over the river, before she hit the first roadblock. She’d make it up to Christie later, she thought: once she figured out how to explain she was late because her paper pusher pulled a gun on her.

At the second roadblock she smelled smoke, rolling down her window to show her badge. Beyond distant buildings she saw the arcing spray of a fire hose, feathered gold reflecting flames on the other side of the hangars.

Snow settled on the creases in the dark wool of her peacoat and caught in her hair as she threaded her way through a curious crowd, ducking under hastily-strung yellow tape. A faint popping carried over the sirens, something melting or bursting in the heat.

The pavement was wet. She stepped around shrapnel and charred, unidentifiable debris; puddled chemicals and melted snow reflected the red strobe lights.

But the smell that hit the back of her sinuses wasn’t ash or smoke or filthy city snowmelt, but the metal taste of blood.

She walked up to Peter and gripped his arm, shook him gently; he wasn’t hard to find. He was the only one without a uniform.

“Boss, are you okay?”

“Moreau is dead.” His voice was rough and hard to hear over the sirens.

He wasn’t wearing a coat but even at this distance heat slapped her face. Closer in, the air was muddled quicksilver. The stench of burning fuel covered the smell of whatever else was burning inside the plane, or what was left of it. An ambulance sat idle and forlorn behind the line of fire trucks.

They wouldn’t pull anyone alive from that.

“Caffrey?”

Peter didn’t answer. Following his gaze she saw a knot of blue jackets approaching, two lines of US Marshals, faces grim and hands on their weapons. She almost didn’t recognize Caffrey at the center, weaving blindly as the hands on his arms steered him.

Peter’s coat hung loosely from the younger man’s shoulders, one sleeve flapping loose at the seam. His face was bruised; his eyes stared blankly past her.

“Neal.” Peter stepped toward them and Diana seized his arm, holding Peter still before the Marshals could react; the backs of his hands were black and red with scabbed road rash.

He must have pushed Caffrey down. Out of the way of the blast.

“Neal!”

“He can’t hear you, boss.” She breathed in hot smoke and smelled blood again, stronger than before.

Peter must have pushed him down. (One moment he was on his feet and the next he was on the ground and the roof of the world fell in.) Out of danger.

She stood frozen as the Marshals went by, blue jackets melting into the dark uniforms of her father’s security team.

(She went down hard; she remembered that. Her arm numb where Charlie’s fingers had bit into her bicep, the other shoulder strained from the would-be kidnapper’s grasp. A faint popping sound above her, her palms and her cheek bruised against the pavement and blood all over her shirt. The flood of emergency lights, spilling together in bright confusion. The jostling curious crowd and the cluster of guards closing in tight phalanx about her, a knot of armed urgency surrounding an island of glazed, detached shock -)

“Diana.”

“I’m all right.” Her voice was steady, mechanical; it was only the fumes making her dizzy, black smoke dropping like veil as the wind shifted, falling between them and the Marshals.

“Stay with him.” The sharp, frustrated helplessness in Peter’s eyes dragged her back to the present. He had no badge and no authority here, and they were taking Caffrey away. “Just - stay with him.”

What he thought she could do she could not imagine. If Caffrey wouldn’t hear Peter he certainly wouldn’t hear her. And Peter - she shook her head, turned and strode after Caffrey and his escorts, abandoning Peter in her wake.

It was a simple duty, to shadow Neal and to guard him; as the flames sunk lower the last of the night’s exhilaration drained away, replaced by something fierce and cold: whoever did this was going down.

Part 2

White Collar Fic: Snowed In (G, 1600 words)

florastuart — Fri, 28 Jun 2013 05:02:35 GMT

Title: Snowed In
Author: Flora
Rating: G
Characters/Pairings: Diana&Neal
Spoilers/Warnings: None
Word Count: 1600
Summary: This was not how Diana had planned on spending New Year's Eve, jumping off a moving train and hiking through a snowstorm. Written for frith_in_thorns for wcpairings.

“I thought you said there’d be room service.”

Neal’s only response is an exhausted huff that might be a laugh. The shed is dark, and barely six feet square, a listing uninsulated structure beside a railroad track, overhung with creaking branches weighed down with snow.

Diana puts her weight on her good leg and slides down the wall to sit on the rough wooden floor. It’s the only shelter they’ve found in three hours’ walking; they need somewhere to rest that’s out of the wind and this will have to do.

She and Neal were supposed to meet a suspect on the express train to Boston that afternoon; Wilson insisted on meeting on the train. They should have had a taped confession by now. They should be settling into their seats for a nap while the Bureau office in Boston prepared to meet the train and take Wilson into custody.

They’d put Neal in charge of arranging the meet, which was their first mistake; he’d decided (without consulting her or Peter or anyone, damn him) to tell Wilson to meet them on the overnight local train instead, in the interest of being able to stop and spend the night at an upscale bed-and-breakfast instead of sleeping on board.

Local PD can arrest him just as easily as the feds in Boston, he’d said, and have you seen the website for this place? Would you rather spend the night on the train or in a suite with a hot tub?

He’d even made room reservations for the night.

That was before Wilson pulled a gun and cornered them in a baggage car. She’s pretty sure the outside doors on the train aren’t supposed to open while it’s moving, but Neal got them open somehow, just in time.

The train was passing along a rocky streambed in a forest thick with snow, deep into a cell phone dead zone; she landed hard enough to wrench her shoulder and sliced the back of her right calf open on a sharp rock.

The pain in her shoulder is annoying. Her feet are wet and by now completely numb. Her leg has stopped bleeding but over the past two hours putting weight on it is a breathless sharp pain. She didn't mention either to Neal; they couldn't rest in the open without freezing and she's pretty sure he's concealing injuries of his own.

His right hand is wrapped in a scarf, and he dropped the picks in the snow twice, trying to open the shed. She’d finally broken the latch off with a few sharp blows from a heavy rock.

The GPS watch Neal wears in place of his anklet was smashed in the fall, but she tells herself Peter will see where it stopped transmitting and know where to start looking.

The temperature is dropping but the snow wasn't thick enough to hide the tracks, picking out softly regular shapes of railroad ties; they were fine as long as they kept moving and they couldn’t get lost, but now they're both ready to drop.

“Patience,” Neal says now, stuffing what looks like a bunch of rags against the hole where the latch used to be; it's dark, save for the skittering white beam of her penlight, but it’s quieter, inside, out of the wind. “Blankets first.” He throws a pile of cloth at her, something that feels like rough wool and smells like a wet dog. Something has chewed holes in all the blankets, but if there were rats here once they seem to be long gone. “Then coffee.”

“Okay, that’s just mean.” The wind keens, high and lonely like a train whistle, but she knows no other trains will pass until 6 AM. A piece of roof shingle lifts every now and then with the wind, falling against the ceiling with a startling bang. “You said there’d be a hot tub and a massage. And tiramisu.”

This was not how she'd planned on spending New Year's Eve, jumping off a moving train and hiking through a snowstorm upstate.

He sits beside her, his shoulder warm against hers, and tucks the blankets around them both before pulling something out of his coat. “You’ll need to open this. I don’t think -” He holds up his bandaged hand.

“How bad is it?” she asks.

She feels his half shrug against her side. “Nothing we can fix here.” He presses a metal thermos into her hand. “Go on, open it.”

She unscrews the lid, expecting water - welcome, yes, but the cold would kill them before dehydration set in if they weren’t found before morning - and breathes in fragrant steam and the smell of hot coffee.

She blinks, breathing deeply before looking up to stare at Neal’s shadow in the dark; she hears a smile in his voice as he says, “Go on, drink before it gets cold.”

Warmth spreads through her, softening numbed fatigue. “I take back everything bad I’ve ever said about you.”

“Everything?”

“Well, most of it.” She takes another long gulp of coffee and passes the thermos to him.

When the coffee is gone he shifts around to sit facing her. “How bad is your leg?”

“All right as long as I don’t walk on it.” Her muscles have stiffened and locked up in only a few minutes of sitting down. “And I can’t feel my feet.”

Her tone is flat, neutral, as she brushes away melting snow caked around the laces of her shoes.

Neal shifts the blanket away from her feet. She doesn’t really want to see any damage the cold has done, but Neal is gently easing her shoes off and peeling away her wet socks.

Her mind tries to impose pattern and meaning on the sounds of wind tossing the branches outside, to hear in twigs falling on the roof some kind of conscious intent.

When she flicks the penlight toward her feet he wraps his hands around her ankles and says, “Don’t.” She can feel a slight pressure of his fingers against her ankle, but as his hands move lower she feels nothing at all. “It looks worse than it is. Trust me.”

“Since when are you the expert on frostbite?”

“Ask me again in three months and two weeks and I’ll tell you.”

She chuckles wearily. “Is that when the statute of limitations runs out?”

“It’s a good story.” He grins. “I’m looking forward to telling this one.”

She watches his hands, gently massaging one foot and then the other, watches her own breath form clouds in the weak beam of the penlight. After a moment he opens his coat and shifts her legs onto his lap, so her feet are tucked under his shirt against his bare skin.

The cut below her knee twinges at the movement, but she doesn’t feel any warmth in her toes.

“How are your feet?” she asks.

“I didn’t land in the stream.”

He sounds worried, and she tries wiggling her toes; her mind sends the command but she can’t feel if it’s obeyed.

Neal can, apparently; he laughs and says, “See, you’ll be fine.”

“That’s assuming Wilson didn’t jump out after us.” They’d been following the tracks since they jumped, and this is the only shelter but it’s not exactly well-hidden if they were followed.

“He didn’t.” Neal’s confidence surprises her. “Or if he did he’s in worse shape than we are. The train picked up speed pretty quickly just after we got off; we jumped at the slowest part of a curve in the tracks.”

Her brain is moving slowly in the cold, so it takes her a minute to process that. “You looked up the different speeds along the route?” Neal’s only response is a what, didn’t you? look. And then, as the next piece falls into place, “If we’d taken the express it would have been going too fast to jump.”

He nods. “That one slows down in one place, and that’s on a bridge over the river.”

He’s watching her, carefully; in the dim shadows cast by the penlight she still recognizes his look of you might have trusted me.

She sighs, sharp and exasperated. Part of her thinks she could have given him the benefit of the doubt, and not assumed he’d switched trains just to screw with the op for the sake of room service.

And part of her wants to say he might have trusted her enough to tell her what his real concerns were.

“Were you expecting him to try to shoot us?”

She knows that isn’t it before he shakes his head. “I don’t like getting into situations I don’t know how to get out of.”

He likes to keep his cards close, she knows, and he probably assumes some things are too obvious to require stating aloud.

She thinks she can feel her feet tingling. That’s going to hurt like hell soon, but right now it’s a faint prickle and it’s reassuring compared to no feeling at all.

She clicks off the penlight. The search team should be out there soon, she knows. They only have to stay awake for a few more hours.

She nudges Neal with her foot as his eyelids droop and he snaps awake with reassuring suddenness. "I don't want to wait three months and two weeks," she says. "We need to stay awake. Tell me the story."

Because few things will catch Neal's attention and keep him alert like the opportunity to show off.

"Diana." She can hear him grin in the dark, a warm hint of weary laughter. "Are you offering me an immunity deal?"

"Neal, we're alone in a snowstorm and we need to stay awake so we don't freeze to death." She isn't laughing. "I'm asking you to trust me."

He's silent for a long moment, fussing with the blankets before he leans in toward her. "All right. So Moz had this brilliant idea ..."

White Collar Fic: they'll fall to ruin one day (for making us part) (PG, 5700 words)

florastuart — Sun, 02 Jun 2013 13:23:28 GMT

Title: they’ll fall to ruin one day (for making us part)
Author: Flora
Characters/Pairings: June/Byron, Elizabeth/Peter, Mozzie, Ford
Rating: PG
Word Count: 5700
Warnings/Spoilers: Spoilers through 4.16 “In the Wind”
Summary: Some who’ve heard her sing have called June an angel, but she’s never tried to be a saint.
A/N: Written for month_of_june. Huge thanks to frith_in_thorns for feedback and encouragement and to neontiger55 for betaing this! The title is from the Pretenders, “Back on the Chain Gang”.

Byron was arrested on a Sunday.

June sang her last set just before one that morning. She sat in a darkened booth beside the bar for another half hour, listening to his trumpet; warm round notes followed her as she blew him a kiss and slipped away to nap on a couch behind the stage.

She couldn’t know that was goodbye.

“He went out to meet someone at two,” the club owner told her, shaking her out of sleep hours later.

It should have been Byron waking her, a light hand on her shoulder and a gentle whisper in the dark. He should be wrapping her in his coat, bundling her into a cab to take her home.

“Where is he now?”

The catch in her voice could be blamed on a long night’s singing; the words tangled in her throat, raw and scratchy as rough wool. Grey dawn light crept through gaps in the curtains, long fingers picking out stains on the carpet and burn scars on the wood of the bar. They spun a kind of magic in the shadows, she and Byron, but it evaporated with the sunrise like the smell of stale cigar smoke.

“I don’t know, but there’s cops out front and they’ve got a search warrant,” the owner said, and it wasn’t morning sickness twisting a knot in her gut as someone pounded on the door. “What the hell have you two brought down on me now?”

She pulled the worn canvas satchel from the hidden compartment under the bar, the one with the poker chips and the weighted dice and the engraving plate Byron thought she didn’t know about, the one for the ‘54 hundred dollar bill. There was no cash in it; the owner had already paid Byron for last night’s gig, and whatever the take was from the poker room Byron had that on him, too, when he disappeared.

Last night’s gig was supposed to let them make rent comfortably, for once.

She was twenty-four years old and three months pregnant and she was alone; she didn’t know where her husband was but the cops were onto him. She picked up his trumpet case left beside the stage, walked out the back door into the weak light and the smell of snow and car exhaust, with her head up and the satchel under her coat and the sour taste of fear in her mouth.

The streets were nearly empty, save for a pair of grey-green pigeons chasing each other behind a dumpster. Over the idling engine of a patrol car out front she heard church bells, ringing high and cold and distant. The tune was a hymn she half-remembered, but she had no voice left.

***

Her front door shuts behind Bennett with a sharp slam, alerting her even in the back parlor.

Neal isn’t far behind; he meets her by the stairs, messenger bag over his shoulder. The story comes out in a rush.

Pratt is dead. Bennett is a murderer twice over and he’s left Peter to take the fall.

“I have to find him,” Neal says. She’d ask what he’s thinking, following a killer without weapons or backup; she’d ask what he imagines he can say to change his father’s mind but she sees the hard, desperate light in his eyes and she knows he won’t hear her. “He has to confess.”

This time she knows it’s goodbye.

A breath of spring brightens the dark-paneled foyer as the door opens; tiny yellow-green buds are opening on the trees lining the road, and a thin film of pollen drapes a veil over her front steps and along the parked cars at the curb. She’d say God go with you if she still believed in such things; she’d say it will all be all right but that’s a lie.

In the end she says nothing at all, only hugs him hard and holds on for three seconds, maybe four.

By the time the feds arrive she’s tucked the papers back inside the evidence box and hidden it in the hollow space under her vanity table. Calloway’s agents search the house thoroughly, leaving drawers pulled out and overturned from Neal’s loft to the master bedroom and all her closets undone in between, but they’re not thorough enough.

She tells them she has no idea where Neal is, and it’s the truth.

The sun is sinking by the time they leave, a mess of red light staining the skyline. She’s barely started tidying up when the second wave hits, Agents Barrigan and Jones followed closely by Mozzie and Elizabeth.

“Where’s Caffrey?” Barrigan doesn’t bother with a greeting.

“He’s tailing Bennett.” June can’t say more than that, and Barrigan shakes her head in frustration.

“Or he ran.” Elizabeth’s voice is hard. “Do you really think he’s coming back?”

June has spent the last four hours imagining Neal bleeding out in an alley somewhere with his father’s bullet in his lung. She almost snaps: he’s unarmed and he’s alone and Bennett has already killed twice; no, I don’t think he’s coming back.

Instead she calls for coffee and scones, because they’ll likely be up all night and someone has to make sure they all eat something, and retrieves the box from its hiding spot. They turn Neal’s loft into a war room, sifting through the papers together while the sun fades, searching for some hint of a lead as the city lights grow and spread like stars below the balcony.

The housekeeper has long since gone by midnight, so June makes more coffee after the third pot is empty. While it perks she tells Elizabeth, quietly, “There’s whiskey, if you’d rather.”

That wins her a red-eyed attempt at a smile.

It isn’t right and it isn’t fair for Elizabeth to blame Neal for what’s happened - Neal is as much a victim in this as any of them - but there’s something fragile and scared behind the fury in her eyes. It’s not right and it’s not fair but it’s only too human, and June has been where she is.

***

It took her barely an hour to tidy up their apartment, despite the best efforts of the two detectives who’d searched the place.

She and Byron didn’t have much.

They were holding him at Rikers, the officer in charge told her. He gave her a phone number to call about visiting procedures and said a court date hadn’t been set, yet. He said they’d be in touch with more questions for her later.

Her dishes were set neatly in rows on the kitchen counter, with no new cracks or chips in any of them; the detectives hadn’t been careless. She found only a few scratches inside her cabinets where they’d pried at the boards, searching for a false floor.

The mattress and both of the pillows had been opened with long, deliberate knife slashes. Ragged white feathers drifted back and forth across the brown carpet in the bedroom as a breeze stirred the faded yellow curtains.

She refolded the clothes emptied beside the wardrobe, picked up the drawers and slid them back into the battered armoire. When she’d finished straightening the kitchen she put on a pot of tea. Water for two, as if she still expected Byron might come home with that wide grin saying he’d pulled one over on the police yet again. Then she opened the canvas satchel and pulled out the engraving plate, slid down the wall and sat on the scuffed floor and stared at Franklin’s face.

The plate was useless without paper to print the bills on; Byron had got hold of enough to print nearly a hundred thousand, but he’d hidden it inside that mattress and it’s gone now.

He’d hidden cash there, too. The cops told her she might get it back in a few weeks, if they could determine it was neither counterfeit nor stolen.

Rent was due in three days.

You’ll find nothing but trouble, down at those bars, Mama used to say. June could close her eyes and see sorrow and disappointment in her mother’s face, sitting up late waiting for her to come home from a night out dancing.

Mama told her Byron was no good.

She ran her fingers over the plate, along the border and over the seal. Mama told her it would come to this. Mama would remind her, repeatedly, but she wouldn’t turn June away. You don’t turn your back on family.

She could close her eyes and feel the burn of cheap whiskey in her throat and smoke in her eyes, the way the cards came alive and danced in her hands. But it was the music that had drawn her back to the clubs, night after night, the clear notes of Byron’s trumpet and his rich baritone singing.

She stayed there, sitting on the floor and staring at the glass diamond on her hand, until the battered aluminum kettle startled her with a shriek like a siren bearing down.

***

“Well, the caterer decided to be reasonable.” Elizabeth hangs up and drops the cell phone on the coffee table before burying her face in her hands.

Peter has been behind bars for a day and a half. His association with Neal, according to the judge, makes him a flight risk. But the world has not stopped and Elizabeth still has a business to run. Brides who’ve spent nine months and six figures planning a spring wedding aren’t about to delay their big moment because the wedding planner’s entire world fell down around her ears.

The florist for tomorrow’s event had a last-minute scheduling conflict so they’re tying the flower arrangements themselves, Elizabeth and June and Mozzie sitting on the Burkes’ living room floor wrapping white roses and baby’s breath in pink silk ribbons. Place cards for the reception are clustered on an end table, rows of cream-colored linen tents labeled with each guest’s name in flowing calligraphy and embossed with tiny violets.

“Hughes is meeting with someone from NSA this afternoon,” Mozzie says, tucking his own phone back in his pocket. “And he talked to somebody who knows somebody at Metropolitan Correctional, says he’ll keep an eye on the Suit and make sure he’s safe.”

His eyes meet June’s and he shakes his head slightly, a silent message: no word yet from Neal.

Elizabeth’s kettle whistles, high and sharp. Satchmo whines from the kitchen, where he’s been banished until they finish with the flowers. June stands stiffly and slips past the gate across the kitchen door, patting the dog’s head before tearing open three tea bags and pouring water into brightly glazed mugs. The crisp smell of mint fills the kitchen, rising on ribbons of steam; she adds milk to Elizabeth’s mug, stirs a spoonful of honey into her own and two into Mozzie’s.

Elizabeth is gone by the time June returns, but reappears from the powder room off the front hall after a moment with her makeup carefully redone.

June recognizes the armor for what it is.

“Leave your phone,” she says, as Elizabeth is about to tuck it into her purse. And then, “Leave the purse, it’ll be quicker going through security.”

Elizabeth slips her driver’s license into a pocket and glances at Mozzie. “You’ll make sure -”

“I’ll finish up here,” Mozzie assures her, and she squeezes his arm gratefully before following June outside.

The Jag idles at the curb, waiting. Hughes pulled more than a few strings to expedite the visitor paperwork; they’re expected downtown. Still, it’s a Byzantine and frightening procedure to navigate alone when one isn’t used to it.

The sky is banded grey and gold, low slate-dark clouds hanging heavy over the horizon, but the sun steals yellow through a thin patch and blazes diamond-bright on the raindrops sliding down the windshield. Streaks of pollen flow in rippling folds with the rainwater along the street like wet crinkled green gauze trailing into the storm drains.

Elizabeth offered to go with her the last time June made the trip up to Sing Sing; it was a well-intentioned and magnanimous gesture, one June had felt would be unwise to refuse.

She remembers grey sleet and dirty snow lying like ash along the highway, the thump of the wipers beating time through an uncomfortable silence; she remembers the burned-out, dead look in Neal’s eyes, the reflections like a thousand whispering ghosts haunting the glass between them, and the way his hands wouldn’t stop shaking.

***

“You know Byron loves you.” Ford came around three days later, crumpling his hat brim in one hand, awkwardly patting her shoulder with the other. “He wanted to take care of you like you deserve.”

He was trying to soften a blow, was working up to something so June decided to cut him off and save them both time. “You’re trying to say whatever they’re charging him with, he’s probably guilty.”

She didn’t tell Ford she’d stood in the rain outside the public defender’s office for thirty minutes, twisting the ring on her hand, waiting for the cross-town bus to take her to her mother’s.

“He had a lot of things going,” Ford admitted.

“And they’ve got enough to prove at least some of it.” Check fraud, multiple counts of grand larceny, operating an illegal gambling establishment and the beginnings of a counterfeiting scheme; these were only the things she knew about. “I know.”

Byron had tried to shield her but she’d kept her eyes open.

She didn’t tell Ford she’d watched that bus pull up to the curb, watched the passengers file off, umbrellas opening one by one like wet new butterfly wings spreading for a first flight.

She had a choice now.

She could go home and forget she had a husband; she could retreat, chastened, and let everything Byron had tried to build for their family collapse; she could accept the place society said was hers, on her knees scrubbing some white woman’s floors.

She’d have a few years, yet, to come up with an answer before the baby would be old enough to ask where’s Daddy?

“What don’t the cops know about?” she asked Ford. There was little use in counting damage already done. “Besides this?” She laid the engraving plate on the counter beside the yellow flowers Byron had picked for her four days ago, now sad and drooping in their coffee can.

She’d watched that bus pull away again, stood on the sidewalk clutching her own umbrella as the tail lights merged into the line of traffic, letting the rain hide her tears. All that glitters, Mama used to say, but there was love in the painted jewels Byron gave her that June wouldn’t trade for any gold.

You don’t turn your back on family.

“Byron didn’t marry a fool.” Ford’s eyes lit and he traced one finger along the border, soft and admiring. And then, mournful, “They took the paper?”

“We’ll have to get more,” she said, surprised at her own determination. “Let me run the poker room next weekend.”

Ford looked up, skepticism and concern and something else calculating in his eyes, like Byron working out a heist. They wove magic out of music every week at the Lenox Lounge, but it was the clandestine game in the back room that brought the real money; she’d sat in once or twice but Byron always ran the table.

“June, you’re -”

“A distraught young woman in a delicate condition who hasn’t slept since her husband was arrested? That’s what they’ll all be counting on.” She lifted both eyebrows, waiting for a flash of Ford’s wide, mischievous grin, so much like Byron’s it made her chest ache. “Easy money, they’ll think. We’ll have a crowd to play on Saturday.”

***

“Keep your head down,” she tells Elizabeth, after a guard waves them on into the general waiting area. She’s heard that gate slam behind her too many times to flinch at the sound now.

The crowd isn’t large today, but noise ricochets off the hard tile walls all the same. She puts a light hand on Elizabeth’s elbow and steers her toward the edge of the room where they can stand with their backs against the wall.

Elizabeth’s face is blank; only her eyes move, watching the other visitors pacing or clustered together in weary knots. A few heads turn, close by, watching her.

June watches the guards. The buzzer sounds again and a child wails in response. She remembers the first time she brought Cindy up to Sing Sing, some two months into Byron’s second stint there; they were both older, by then.

She remembers going over the rules, holding a small cold hand in hers as they walked across the parking lot, don’t talk to anyone and stay close to Mom and Grandma and don’t look at the guards.

Elizabeth is not six years old.

The others can tell she’s new here; they all recognize the combination of pride and fear and the conviction, desperately held, that she doesn’t belong here. That she is too good for this place, that she is better than these people. It’s a conviction everyone clings to, at first; June remembers that, too. Everyone gets over it within the first six months. Or they stop visiting and move on with their lives.

Time alone will tell which group Elizabeth belongs to.

June follows her when they call Peter’s name, into a booth barely bigger than a closet. His eyes light when he sees his wife; they reach for each other and June closes her eyes. The sound of their hands striking glass is enough to make her gut clench.

“Hey, hon.”

Peter’s voice is warm, though hoarse and sleepless; Elizabeth’s face crumples for half a second and she looks away, pressing a fist against her mouth.

“Hey, hon.”

The smiles they trade are brave and fake and only a little bit shaky.

“I talked to the lawyer again yesterday,” Peter says, after they’ve stared at each other for a long moment and tried to start speaking at the same time twice. “He says Hughes has a couple leads. No miracles coming tomorrow, he says, but he’s making steady progress.”

“We’re going to get through this.” Elizabeth lays her hand flat against the glass, deliberately this time.

“I know. It’s just going to take a little while, maybe.” Peter matches the gesture, their fingers pressed together, but June knows the glass allows no warmth to penetrate. “How’s Neal?”

“You’re worried about him now?” Elizabeth demands; the mask cracks, frustrated rage flashing through, hot and choked. “He’s the reason -” She takes a breath, lets it out slowly and swallows the rest of that sentence. “Honey, will you please worry about yourself for once in your life?”

“They didn’t arrest him,” June breaks in quietly. “He’s helping chase down leads to find Bennett.” It’s the truth - several truths, told slantwise and strung together crookedly, and several more left out. “He’s worried about you.”

Peter’s face smoothes in relief and Elizabeth gives June a grateful look. He likely suspects Neal is quietly pursuing his own leads, but he doesn’t need to know Neal is a fugitive, pursuing Bennett without backup while dodging the feds.

“Tell me about your day,” Peter says at last. He reaches for her hand and runs into the glass again. “We’ve got an hour, right?”

June steps outside to give them privacy. Leaning against the wall outside the booth, she offers a smile with as much warmth as she can find for a frightened-looking young mother waiting on a nearby bench, whispering softly in Spanish to a toddler hiccupping against her shoulder.

It isn’t right and it isn’t fair for Elizabeth to hate Neal, but June knows she has to hate someone. Hating this place is like shouting into a well or pounding your fists on solid iron; it will absorb all the rage you can throw at it, and you’ll leave no scar and no mark but your own blood behind.

It’s not right and it’s not fair but it’s only human to direct that rage at a soft target, instead, deserving or not.

***

June pulled her coat closer around her, settling into her seat as the bus to Rikers Island pulled away from the terminal, the acrid smell of exhaust smoke from the laboring motor mingling with the salt wind over the bridge.

Four years, the judge had said. She heard the sound of his gavel coming down, each time the tires thumped over a pothole.

They called it the longest bridge in the world for a reason.

She was showing enough by now to attract a few pitying glances from the older women seated behind her, but their concern only made her feel vulnerable.

Forty-eight months. It had been nearly a week since she’d seen Byron, save for a glimpse across the courtroom. Six days out of one thousand four hundred and sixty; she’d got through them telling herself once she saw him everything would be all right.

Two hundred and eight weeks. Two hundred and eight one-hour visits, out of nearly thirty-five thousand hours apart.

The baby would be walking when he got out.

“Your mama was right,” Byron said when they brought him in. The glass between them was smudged and dirty, but not enough to hide his red-eyed exhaustion.

“If I thought she was right I wouldn’t be here.”

For better or for worse, she’d said, and she’d meant it. Words were their tools, slick and smooth and sharp, bright lies that cut like knives and dissolved like silver mist. But all lies fell apart without some truth at the core, and some promises had to mean something.

“I never wanted to -”

“I know.” She put a hand on her belly without thinking and his eyes followed the motion. “We’ll be all right.”

She didn’t tell him she’d had to beg the owner of the Lenox Lounge to let her pay three months’ rent up front before he’d agree to let her keep the poker room; she didn’t know where Ford found the money and she didn’t ask.

She didn’t tell him the game was still on for Saturday night, or that Ford was looking into another supplier for paper to print the ‘54 hundred.

“Someday it won’t be like this.” He leaned forward, holding her eyes. “It’ll be all right. I’ll make it all right. Someday -”

“I know,” she said again. She didn’t tell him one of the clubs where she used to sing told her to get lost when she showed up last night; the night before, another paid her half what they used to. A third waited until she finished her set before throwing her out without paying her, because they could and they knew they could and what was she going to do, call the cops?

It was the shame in his eyes that she couldn’t take, at the thought of letting her down; if he said he was sorry she knew she’d start crying and she wouldn’t be able to stop.

***

The driver takes her home after dropping off Elizabeth. It’s three in the afternoon but it might as well be near sundown. The traffic lights are out at the end of Riverside and the rain is coming down harder now, as frayed ropes of lightning spark along the horizon; by the time they reach the house all the windows are dark.

June clicks the light switch in the front hall up and down to no effect; the storm has knocked out the power, but she follows a flickering light to the back parlor. Mozzie sits in the nearest leather armchair, his face half in shadow. Two taper candles throw amber light into the cold fireplace, casting wavering reflections in the silver tea service on the end table.

The grate is dark, swept out for the summer. Thunder whispers threats from the open window, breathes wet and heavy against her lace curtains; the low shapes of pink azaleas huddle against the outside wall below, blurred and colorless in the rain.

“Anything from Neal?”

Mozzie shakes his head. Two teacups sit clean and empty on the tray with a plate of untouched shortbread cookies; the tea in the pot will be dark and bitter, steeped too long and gone cold, but he has a bottle of Neal’s fake Shackleton open beside it.

“I told him -” he says, and stops, looking down and muttering something that sounds like, “The one time he actually listens to me -”

He shakes his head, pours two shots and offers one to her as she sits in the other armchair.

“I told him he should give his father a chance,” he says. “Hear him out.”

“We all saw what we wanted to see.” June thinks of Ford, and all the ways they all try to rewrite or recapture the past. James Bennett’s betrayal has hit Mozzie almost as hard as Neal; as much as he’s always believed Neal’s dream of home is a mirage, she knows this time he wanted to be wrong.

You can’t con a mark who doesn’t want to believe you.

“Talked to the Suit’s lawyer,” he says at last. “Seems nobody at the DOJ wants to charge a federal agent with murdering a US senator. They’re ready to give Bennett a really good deal in exchange for clearing Peter and saving them that kind of embarrassment, but that still doesn’t do us any good unless we find him.”

The whiskey is smooth and warm and bright; it’s Neal’s work and as fake as the paste jewels Byron gave her.

She wonders where Ford is tonight.

“How’s he holding up?” Mozzie asks, after another beat.

“As well as can be expected.”

Mozzie sighs. “This could drag out for a while.”

He’s right; federal bureaucracy being what it is, even a best-case scenario won’t see Peter home for a while. (It took them two months to let Neal out again, after that plane went up.)

Bugsy snuffles beside her feet, worrying a toy with focused determination; he misses Neal, too, she can tell. Shadows move against the window, wet lilac branches heavy with tiny flowers. A breeze stirs the curtain, rippling like a flag, and one of the candles gutters and goes dark.

“I want him to know how it felt.”

The words fall, soft and flat, and in the silence that follows she’s aware of the ticking of the clock in the corner, and of Mozzie’s head lifting. He doesn’t speak, only picks up the bottle and pours another shot for each of them.

She will do what is expected of her; she’ll offer what resources she has for his defense, though she knows this time it will (has already) cost her more than a song or a few pink and blue diamonds. She knows he loves Neal; some days, she can almost forget that Peter’s a cop.

But some nights she misses her husband so much it hurts to breathe, and all she can think of are those long years they spent apart. And now they have no more years left.

“I want them all to know how it felt.” The guards and the parole officers and all these agents who walk in and out of her home, now, like they own it; everyone who’s ever put cuffs on someone she loves. She wants them to know what a cage feels like; she wants their families to know the fear and the choking helplessness she knew.

It’s an ugly thing, this rage smothered too long, and she isn’t proud of it; some who’ve heard her sing have called her an angel, but she’s never tried to be a saint. “How we felt.”

***

She started her set at ten and sang until midnight.

She’d never been on this stage without Byron. Ford could make a piano cry, but it felt like flying without a net without the trumpet backing her. She couldn’t think about that; she couldn’t hold the tune or hit the high notes with tears clogging her throat.

All the regulars showed up to play cards at midnight. The cops didn’t know about the poker room; still they were careful, she and Ford, and they didn’t let in anyone they didn’t know.

She waited until everyone was seated, an irregular chorus of metal chairs scraping the wood floor, and shuffled the deck. Cut it, and shuffled again. Ford patted her hand with a reassuring smile and went back out to the stage.

The piano’s voice was a muted whisper, back here with the door shut. It was a delicate dance, guessing how much they’d let her win out of sympathy, and when to lose before any suspected she was better than she let on. It helped that the few tears she let slip weren’t faked.

Don’t let the young men see you’re smart, Mama used to say. You’ll scare them off.

Byron loved her sharp wit, but she’d learned that sometimes it paid to keep your cards close.

She had a lot to learn, still. Byron had taught her the basics of forging signatures, but she knew next to nothing about the sort of paper and ink and presses required to print money, even if they made enough here to pursue them.

But she was stronger than he knew, and she could keep the house while he was gone. She would keep the house, and make sure the house always won. And she would not be broken.

This wasn’t a game anymore.

***

Mozzie and Elizabeth stop by the house at 7:15 the next morning, to pick up boxes of candles and a few of her silk table runners before heading to the reception hall.

June invites them to sit in the breakfast nook, but instead they all stand around the little table, breathing in the smell of strong coffee and watching the wet streets. Elizabeth is elegantly dressed, and only a practiced eye can tell she hasn’t slept.

Mozzie’s concerned eyes shift back and forth between the two of them. He’s harder to read, but June can guess he hasn’t slept either.

At 7:18 the carved wooden cuckoo clock above the sideboard startles them with a bright chime; Elizabeth glances at her watch and June smiles.

“It’s not accurate,” she says; the painted clock face reads 3:44. She’s tried to set it properly more than once, over the years, but within a month it ends up hours ahead or behind. “Byron built that for Cindy, about twenty years ago, now.”

She pours coffee for each of them and sips hers slowly; it’s warm and smooth and comforting.

“She was convinced he’d hidden stolen jewels in the back of it, somewhere. Took it apart enough times, looking for a hidden compartment, that it stopped working eventually.”

Byron had laughed, she remembered, and said Cindy was persistent; some of the scratches are still visible, too deep to be sanded down completely.

“It’s beautiful,” Elizabeth says, tilting her head back to look more closely. “He was very talented.”

“He was a good man.”

The silence is awkward and there’s a line, hardening, between them; June has stepped too close to it, and now she steps back, stands on tiptoe to take the clock down and wind it with a rueful smile.

Elizabeth has no malice in her, but she’s too honest to pretend she doesn’t think jewel thieves and card sharks deserve to go to prison, no matter how much they love their grandchildren.

June is just dishonest enough to pretend she doesn’t mind.

“You’ve been very kind,” Elizabeth says, when Mozzie leaves to take Bugsy outside. “I know -” She lets out a slow breath and there’s steel and sadness, both, behind the half smile she offers. “It’s been hard. I don’t know what I would have done without your help.”

She would have done all right, June thinks. She’s stronger than she looks, stronger than she knows, and she won’t let this break her.

“Peter has a lot of people pulling for him, right now.” June sets her mug down and pours more coffee for both of them. “A lot of people at Justice and inside the Bureau who respect him, and care about him, and they’re not going to let him go down for this.” She keeps her voice kind but firm. “You’ll see.”

She doesn’t say I know how hard this is, though it’s the truth; she doesn’t say I’m always glad to help.

She doesn’t say I didn’t have a choice.

The terms of Neal’s housing arrangement are no longer in force, now that he’s on the run; she would be within her rights to throw Elizabeth and all the feds out, wash her hands of them and change all her locks.

Neal is never coming back to New York either way. The FBI has forgiven much, but they won’t forgive this latest flight; he’ll spend the rest of his life in prison if they catch him now.

But Elizabeth has connections inside the Bureau. Some of those connections are in a position to influence how hard the feds hunt for Neal, or whether and how soon they decide the Bureau’s resources are better spent elsewhere. Elizabeth can still hurt Neal, and June cannot afford to antagonize her.

“If there’s anything else I can do, you’ll let me know?” June says, and she means it; for Neal’s sake she’ll do whatever she can.

It isn’t right and it isn’t fair for June to hate Elizabeth, for all the things she has right now that June didn’t have, in 1959 when she was young and frightened and alone, and first learning what it meant to be an inmate’s wife.

It’s not right and it’s not fair but her husband is dead, and she may never see Neal again, and at the end of the day June is as human as any of them.

Meme!

florastuart — Mon, 20 May 2013 22:16:08 GMT

Borrowed from frith_in_thorns and veleda_k:

The Top 5 Meme: Ask me my top five fannish anything and I'll tell you.

I have a new journal header!!! :D

florastuart — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 21:30:17 GMT

Made by the amazing and wonderful and talented elrhiarhodan!!! ♥ ♥ ♥

Isn't it absolutely gorgeous?!?!?! *dances around the room*

and now, 21 last lines, just for fun ...

florastuart — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 17:56:01 GMT

And then, very quietly, like he's not sure he wants her to hear, "You did good today."

Keller is waiting for his next move.

He doesn’t have a sword to salute her with, so he settles for a fraction of a nod as he turns to leave.

Neal only smiles. “She’ll know.”

Her fingers thread lightly through his hair as he lets his eyes close.

After a moment she realizes Christie is waiting for a response, but all she can say is, “I don’t know what I’d do if I lost you.”

If you change your mind, you know where to find me.

Please please please come back I’ll do anything please don’t leave me.

And for now Neal only wants to hold onto this; he wants to hold onto this moment, the light and the window boxes and the crickets under the stoop and Peter’s complete and silent acceptance; he wants to rest here for a while.

“How about we fill up that bottle and I’ll tell you the story?”

“You play chess?”

(She’s gone and he can’t breathe and he’s falling.)

They launch themselves toward the boat, swimming together.

And there is never time enough to say goodbye.

He wishes, desperately, that he could feel nothing for a little while longer.

It wouldn’t be right to get blood on one of Byron’s.

She closes the door quietly and leaves him to the silence.

New York won’t be safe for Neal much longer.

He stays close to her; he’s not at all sure she’s wrong.

But some part of him still wants to be wrong.

For tonight, this was enough.

21 first lines meme

florastuart — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 14:11:03 GMT

Borrowed from several people:

Nick always left paintbrushes in the kitchen sink.

Keller is back.

The Suit answers the door and stares at the potted Gerber daisy in Mozzie’s hands.

“Neal.” Elizabeth folds her arms, with an apprehensive glance at the door to the suite.

Neal remembers water.

“I have had the day from hell.”

“She left a breadcrumb trail to that apartment on purpose.”

They don’t sign their letters.

The back door swings open, releasing a startling flood of light.

Neal Caffrey has been in her house less than a week when June starts to wonder if she’s made a mistake.

The other man is drunk but still dangerous.

He heard a story, once.

“I don’t like this.”

“We should buy a bakery.”

He’s in a cab and halfway to the hospital before he notices the red light blinking on his ankle.

The door to the little shop opens with a soft, discreet chime.

What do you think about cupcakes tonight?

June hears that cane tapping on the stairs outside and it’s like Byron is back; it was his, once, classic ebony with a silver head.

A part of him keeps thinking didn’t we just do this?

Mozzie was twelve years old the day he first learned home and family were things that happened to other people.

He should have listened to Mozzie.

... I'm still kind of amazed I've written more than 21 fics in the last year and a half. *pets the plotbunnies*

White Collar canon question

florastuart — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 00:02:17 GMT

How many times have we seen Diana actually fire a weapon in the line of duty?

The only time I'm remembering is in 2.02 - am I forgetting something?

(This isn't for the big bang fic - this is something else, because the plotbunnies want me to write them all ALL AT ONCE. *attempts to distract bunnies with chocolate and carrots*)

WC Pairings!

florastuart — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 04:13:50 GMT

wcpairings is open for signups for Round 3! You can sign up for romantic pairings or gen friendship pairings, and it looks like a lot of fun! :D

Signups are open until the 15! You can sign up here.

AND THE THESIS IS DONE!!! :D:D:D

florastuart — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 03:13:41 GMT

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE *flails and falls over, exhausted*

I am so very behind on reading fic and commenting on things. Also on schoolwork I've been putting off to work on the thesis, and at some point (ie, now) I need to start actually looking for a job since I'm graduating in May.

But this weekend there was beer and visiting with friends and seeing baby goats (so cute!) and lots of fun.

And now for a poll!

View poll: June!

I was thinking I'd pick a month, and then people could pick a date to post, maybe? Or we could have a thread where people post prompts? I'm not sure what format would work best - any thoughts?

Fic: Safe House (White Collar, PG, 2200 words)

florastuart — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 16:07:13 GMT

Title: Safe House
Author: Flora
Rating: PG
Characters/Pairings: Kate/Neal, Mozzie
Word Count: 2200
Warnings/Spoilers: Season 2
Summary: Nick always seemed too perfect to be real, a body like a Greek sculpture and a random selection of bad habits that were more quirky and artistic than irritating.
A/N: Written for run_the_con. Thank you to elrhiarhodan for the prompt, “a random selection of bad habits”. This turned out more sad than I intended. But there is cuddling!

Nick always left paintbrushes in the kitchen sink.

The thought flickers, a random memory as Kate ducks inside the darkened storage unit. Mozzie chains the door behind them, rusty metal clinking and sliding home as he sets the locks.

This place doesn’t have a kitchen, or a sink, but Neal still leaves bottles of highly specialized inks and chemicals on the floor; one of these days she’s going to kick them over.

He drops the poster tube on Mozzie’s dusty couch, turns to grin at her as Mozzie turns on the light.

Nick came to bed in his painting clothes, half the time; she’d wake to find viridian streaks staining the pillowcase, rose and indigo in rumpled half-dried splotches on the sheets, like she’d spent the night making love to a rainbow or a bleeding sunset sky.

She’s almost stopped calling him Nick, by now.

(It’s been three months.)

The sky is grey and fading fast outside; none of the last light finds its way into the safe house, through Mozzie’s blackout curtains.

Kate sinks onto a stack of crates beside the darkened window, picks up a deck of cards and cuts it once, casual. She tries to shuffle the way Neal taught her but her fingers are numb and shaky; the cards fly out of her hands, laughing whispers as they fall and scatter over the concrete floor.

“I’m fine,” she snaps, at Mozzie’s look.

She was fine this afternoon; she smiled and touched the desk clerk’s shoulder at the museum, slipped two fingers into his suit pocket and lifted that key like she’d rehearsed.

“It’s all hand-eye coordination,” Neal told her, when they practiced. “If you can paint, you can do this.”

Neal approaches theft like any other art; any job worth doing is worth doing with style. (It’s something he shares with his elusive alter ego.)

When Nick worked on a project he took over the entire room, whether he was painting or cooking dinner; he did nothing without throwing all of himself into it; he liked to spread out, to surround himself with his work.

(Nick always seemed too perfect to be real, a body like a Greek sculpture and a random selection of bad habits that were more quirky and artistic than irritating.)

He could make all the mess disappear in minutes, though, stacking papers and folding easels and packing paints away in boxes. That he could take over a space so thoroughly and then as quickly erase all traces of himself used to unnerve her. Something about him was as insubstantial and as powerful as the wind, as necessary as air and as impossible to hold; she half expected he wouldn’t stay long.

(Adler was the closest thing she had to family, then; he was the stable rock after her father died, or so she'd thought.)

“You were brilliant,” Neal says now, behind her; she’s not sure she’d go that far but she did her part today and she did it right. She got the key and now there’s a half-a-million-dollar stolen painting rolled up in a poster tube on the couch.

(But the rock dissolved into sand at the end and all her firm foundations with it, while the wind lifted her in a tornado’s embrace and carried her away, set her down gently when she would have fallen.)

It’s her third job with them, and the first she hasn’t nearly wrecked with some rookie mistake.

“Moz already talked to the fence,” he says. “We’ll lay low here for a day or two and then he’ll be ready to move it.”

She’s twenty-four years old and until three months ago she’d never gotten so much as a parking ticket; she’s waiting for the guilt to hit, but it hasn’t yet.

(She’s not in Kansas anymore.)

Rain falls on the corrugated iron roof, beating like a hundred tiny snares, the heavy smell of it drifting with a cold breeze under the door and mingling with the smell of salt and sludge off the docks. “Laying low” means the three of them in this storage unit in the corner of a warehouse by the water; there’s a restroom with a fairly easy lock on the other side of the building, and a single outlet drawing electricity from somewhere it shouldn’t be, thanks to Mozzie and some clandestine rewiring.

Neal smooths his hands along her shoulders, lifting her hair gently out of the way and digging his thumbs into the base of her neck. She leans back, tense and still shivering; her hands are shaking but his are steady, strong and sure and delicate like he’s shaping clay or marble.

“We’re okay here,” he says softly, planting a kiss on her neck. “Nobody followed us.”

“I know,” she says, and then, again, “I’m fine, really.”

She’s still learning how she fits into this little crime family; some other time she’d be annoyed at the close quarters, but right now she feels safe, staring at Neal and Mozzie and the concrete floor and the blackout curtains and the bare bulb throwing yellow light at the rust and water stains on the walls. It’s a luxury, this feeling, and one she’s never fully appreciated before.

She’s never had anything to compare it to.

“After the job’s done is the right time to get the shakes,” Mozzie says, in that slightly put-out tone she’s starting to recognize as grudging approval. He’s opening a bottle, now, pouring three shots and offering her one. “But that’s an eighty dollar shot of whiskey and if you spill it -”

She doesn’t. As far as Kate can tell, Mozzie spends all of his ill-gotten gains on booze and coffee and Russian military surplus gear; art supplies and decent food come out of Neal’s share.

The coffee and the booze are really good. (She doesn’t know enough about Russian military surplus to judge its quality. She suspects she’s going to learn.)

She remembers her heart jumping into her mouth as they walked past security, one of the museum guards turning to follow her with his eyes. Half her mind has been listening for sirens all day, hyperaware and frayed. But after a second shot the alcohol throws a soft curtain over it all, and Neal’s fingers are slowly wringing the last of the terrified adrenaline from her shoulders.

“We’re okay,” he says again. And then, “You know, you don’t have to help with any of this if you don’t -”

She smiles but there’s an edge to it; he’s said this before. She could take a waitressing job somewhere and he’d keep all his con supplies at Mozzie’s and never bring any of it near her. She thinks Mozzie would even prefer it that way; he might admit she’s made progress but he’s still not happy being held back by an amateur on the team.

And maybe she wants to show Mozzie she can keep up with the best of them. Maybe she has too much integrity to live off of Neal’s illegally obtained wealth while keeping her own hands clean. Or maybe she wants to know Neal, to share all his secrets.

Mozzie pours a third time and then starts shuffling through a pile of DVDs in another crate; he glances up at her as she stands, swaying slightly. “Do you speak Russian?”

“I took French.”

Mozzie gives her a baffled look in reply, as if the thought of only knowing one foreign language makes no sense at all. Maybe he thinks most normal people speak at least twelve. He shakes his head and drops another DVD onto the reject pile. “No subtitles in French, either. That leaves killer robots or government conspiracy files revealed?”

Neal tugs her onto the couch, sitting at one end; she stretches out, settling her head on his lap, draws her legs up to make room for Mozzie to sit at the other end.

“I don’t think she’s ready for Moon Landing: Fact or Fiction? yet, Moz,” Neal says, tolerant and fond, and Kate makes a purring sound of gratitude.

“Terminator it is, then,” Mozzie says. He gets up and turns off the light, props the laptop on a crate in front of the couch, tilting it back and forth until they can all see the screen. He throws a pile of heavy wool blankets at them; Neal pulls them up to her chin and Mozzie shifts her feet out of the way and sits at the other end of the couch.

She’s exhausted, now, and more than a little drunk, weak and wrung-out and buzzing; Neal strokes her hair lightly and her attention drifts in and out as Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese run from the killer robots.

“I wonder if she hated him, sometimes.” Neal speaks carefully, as the closing credits start, but she doesn’t think he’s drunk. “He made her world a lot more scary.”

“He kept her alive,” Kate points out, but she doesn’t think they’re really talking about Sarah Connor, here.

Kate wasn’t a struggling waitress; she was a personal assistant to one of the most powerful men on Wall Street. She had a spacious apartment in downtown Manhattan and she could walk to some of the best museums in the country.

“He didn’t change her world,” she says softly. Now she’s living in a storage unit, and it’s a temporary home at best. But she wouldn’t go back if she could. “He only opened her eyes. I think she’d rather know what’s really out there in the dark.”

She sits up as Mozzie pours more whiskey for both of them; Neal shakes his head, declining.

“The feds came to see me, the day Adler left,” she says, slowly. “Did I ever tell you that?”

Neal nods, and Mozzie looks up; she’s mentioned the fact once or twice, in passing. Adler was gone and all her savings with him; she’d told Neal to get lost, the first time he told her his name. She’d stalked home in tears to find a black car and two men in trench coats waiting at her apartment.

“They were very thorough,” she says, shaping the words precisely. “I gave them my laptop. Showed them all my work files, told them everything I knew about the bastard.” The whiskey burns, fierce and smooth, going down. “Where he liked to go on vacation. His favorite airlines, his favorite hotels in the Caribbean.” She laughs, but it’s soft and bitter and distant. “I remember thinking he’s not getting away with this.”

She leans back, lets her head fall onto Neal’s lap again; his face is half in shadow, cast in blue and charcoal by the light from the laptop screen. “When they were about to leave I asked, what happens now?”

She can see the two agents in the slanted fall of light from the wide windows in her old apartment; she doesn’t remember their names. They were busy and it was a hard case and she wasn’t the only one who’d lost money, who’d lost everything but rent was coming due in a week and she had nothing. Her father was dead and Adler was gone and her boyfriend was not who he said he was and they were cops and they were supposed to fix this. She didn’t mean to be rude or impatient. She only wanted to know if there was a chance she’d get any of her money back, eventually.

“You know what they said?” She looks at Mozzie and he waits. “They said now we talk to the rest of your co-workers and we go through the files and we see if you’re telling the truth.” She lets out a breath, a soft harsh sound that’s supposed to be a laugh but isn’t. “And that’s when I knew I wasn’t a victim. I was a suspect.”

It shouldn't have been a surprise, not really.

Neal’s eyes are soft and sad; he mourns her lost illusions more than she does, sometimes. The warehouse is silent; in the dark she hears the rustling of sleepy pigeons somewhere near the roof, the low murmur of a passing car's radio fading along the street outside.

“I don’t mind - this,” she says, waving an unsteady hand at the gear spread around the unit. “I was - that girl was an idiot,” she says, remembering her own stunned shock as the agents walked out. “I don’t miss her. If I’m going to be treated like a criminal anyway, I’d rather be the one walking away with the money, and not the one left behind looking like a fool.”

“We’ll get it back,” Neal says, quietly. Mozzie gives her a long look; she half expects him to say something like they're feds, what did you expect? but he only offers a tiny nod that might signal something like respect.

Kate catches Neal’s hand and laces her fingers through his.

“This is home, now,” she says. She doesn’t want her old life back, and she doesn’t want Nick Halden; she wants Neal, and the light of pride and mischief in his eyes when she gets the card tricks right or picks a pocket cleanly; she wants all the secrets he can teach her. She wants to know how to do what he does; she wants to never be a mark again.

“That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t appreciate a safe house with a hot shower next time -”

Mozzie rolls his eyes at that, and Neal laughs, finally.

"Get some sleep," Mozzie says, as Neal tucks the blankets more securely around her. And then, very quietly, like he's not sure he wants her to hear, "You did good today."

random crossover thought

florastuart — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 00:33:19 GMT

Is anyone else on my flist watching "The Americans"?

I have seen the first four eps and it is quite awesome. And now I'm wondering if anyone has written the White Collar crossover fic where Elizabeth Jennings is Mozzie's mother?

*hides from the plotbunny*

Meme!

florastuart — Sun, 24 Feb 2013 16:53:05 GMT

Borrowed from veleda_k and frith_in_thorns:

If you give me titles for stories I didn't write, I will respond with details of those non-written stories.

*is procrastinating terribly on schoolwork*

White Collar Fic: Last Resort (PG-13, 2200 words)

florastuart — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 06:55:25 GMT

Title: Last Resort
Author: Flora
Rating: PG-13
Characters/Pairings: Neal, Elizabeth, Peter, Mozzie, Keller
Word Count: 2200
Warnings/Spoilers: Spoilers through 4.12 “Brass Tacks”. Mentions of violence.
Summary: The queen protects the king, and her knight moves in crooked lines.
A/N: I don’t even know what this is. I don’t know where this came from. But it’s one of those ideas that would not get out of my head and let me focus on anything else until I finished it. I almost didn’t post it. This is dark, but it’s a thought I couldn’t let go of until I wrote it out.

Keller is back.

Rain washes Neal’s balcony, splashing on the little table and dripping off the railing; he hears muffled engine noises, a taxi horn complaining through a soft grey curtain.

Half a mug of lukewarm coffee sits beside the sink. He gulps it down and ignores the cold twist in his stomach. His face in the mirror is calm.

The mask he shows the world is drilled down to muscle memory, the classic con’s smile coming without thought or effort.

Everything’s-all-right-I’m-fine-nothing-to-see-here.

He pulls on jeans and a loose jacket, runs a hand through his hair and leaves the hat on the table. Glances at his phone; 9:45 and three missed calls, two from Moz and one from Peter.

He makes up the bed and sets the mug in the sink, futile gestures against the chaos of the loft, this morning’s crumpled papers and snapped pencils and scattered chess pieces all over the floor.

He retrieves a thick towel from the bathroom, lays it on the floor beside the French doors to soak up the water coming in through the broken pane.

Keller has escaped. Again. As Neal always knew he would.

***

This morning Moz came over, just after midnight. He gave up trying to convince Neal to go to bed around six.

“You skipped a move.”

Neal took his hand off the bishop; of course Moz remembered the sequence. The carved mahogany chess set was part of that first heist he and Keller pulled in Monaco. They’d fenced everything else and decided to keep it long enough for a game or two.

“You’re not going to beat him like this.”

“I’m fine, Moz.” It was the rook, next; he remembered now. “I just need to figure this out.”

He shifted the rook three spaces left. Made a note on the sketchpad at his elbow and turned to a second board on the chair beside him; this one was antique ivory, pieces arrayed in a different combination.

“Neal.” A beat, and Neal looked up. A gust of wind rattled the balcony doors. “It’s me.”

Moz swept his eyes around the loft, at the four chessboards laid out on the table, the one on the chair and two on the floor, the mess of hastily-drawn diagrams beside them. Neal reached out, touched the ivory queen and then took his hand away.

“I’m trying to get inside his head.”

He and Keller never finished their last game; he’d thought it might help to recreate it, somehow, seven chessboards and seven alternate histories, trying to find a different endgame.

“More like letting him get inside yours.” Moz frowned, naked concern in his face. “Look, if he wants the treasure we’ll give it to him.”

“I don’t think that’s it.” Neal moved an ivory pawn two spaces forward, raked a hand through his hair; outside, sleepless lights glittered against a slate-dark cloud layer. “He wants a meeting.”

“With you?” He felt Mozzie’s stare. “Alone? Neal, you’re not going to -”

The third board had the king backed in a corner and most of the pieces gone, casualties carved in heavy green jade lined up on the table. Two pawns and a rook were left in the field, with the king and the queen and her knight.

“I don’t have a choice, Moz.”

He slid the jade knight forward, angled to the left, where it was captured by an opposing pawn; the pieces clicked against the board with a sound like bullets sliding home.

Moz didn’t flinch when Neal hurled the knight through the French doors with a tinkling crash.

He only got up and got the dustpan, swept up the glass shards and said, quietly, “Whatever you’re trying to do, mon frère, I don’t think it’s working.”

Seven boards and a hundred combinations; he’d been at this all night, searching for another way out.

“The Suit knows he’s here.” Mozzie’s voice was calm, though his eyes were alarmed. “There’s a detail on the house. I went over and checked the security yesterday. If Keller tries anything -” He let out a slow breath. “Neal, if he gets too close - look, I know a guy.”

He didn’t go on; he didn’t have to; Neal remembered that ill-advised attempted hit. Mozzie’s look said let me handle this.

Neal looked up; his voice sounded raw and strange in his own ears. “Your guy missed, Moz.”

***

He turns the anklet key over in his hand as the wet grey wind blows through the gap in the glass, pushing discarded papers across the room. He sets his foot on the chair, slides the key into the lock and waits; the tiny LED turns yellow and then green again. In his hand, empty, the anklet somehow feels lighter.

He tosses it onto the bed.

His phone rings, a sharp grating buzz against the wood of the table; he ignores it.

He remembers the morning after they caught Keller the last time. He can close his eyes and see Peter’s face, bruises around his eyes and a soft, painful hope in his voice, saying you’re willing to give up everything?

Neal said yes, then, and he meant it. He was ready to spend the rest of his life in prison, if that was what it took to keep Peter and Elizabeth safe.

He tells himself this is no different.

If he keeps telling himself that, maybe he’ll start to believe it.

***

Last night after dinner Neal and Peter sat up together and watched the streetlights come on from the Burkes’ back patio.

They said little, trying to ignore the agents posted on guard, half-hidden by a fringe of lilac hedge. Keller had been out for four days by now and, if their intel was correct, in New York for two.

The moon was nearly full, filtering through the trees, throwing pale silver light and charcoal shadows on the concrete. The sky was clear and the stars held faint but steady; Neal could lean his head back and trace the patterns Ellen taught him.

“Did Keller contact you again?”

Neal shook his head, turning the beer bottle in his hands without drinking; by now it had gone flat and warm. The wind stirred, a branch scraping the side of the house, a whisper of leaves against brick. Keller didn’t; Neal had contacted him a few hours ago.

Best to get the thing over and done; he hadn’t felt like waiting.

“Would you tell me if he did?”

Neal breathed in the smell of rain and lilacs; he heard distant thunder muttering as the neighbor’s air conditioning unit shut off. “I wouldn’t hide anything that might put Elizabeth in danger.”

Fervent and sincere, it was also a transparent dodge, one he knew Peter would recognize.

“That’s not what I asked,” Peter said with a soft sigh, weary and barely heard. “Whatever deal you’re planning to make with him, Neal - don’t.” It was a plea, one without much hope behind it; Peter knew him too well. “We can catch him. Together.”

The kitchen door opened and closed again; Neal blinked as sudden light washed over him and retreated, pulling back like the tide. Elizabeth wrapped her arms around Peter from behind.

“You forgot your sling again,” she said, dropping a kiss on Peter’s neck as he made some sound of fond apology. “Don’t stay up too late. You know you’re supposed to be resting.”

“I’ll be in soon.” Neal heard the smile in Peter’s voice.

She pulled away, then, turning to Neal and squeezing his shoulder; her other hand slipped something into his pocket. “’Night, Neal.”

Neal’s fingers recognized the hard outline of the anklet key.

When she was gone, Peter said quietly, “You don’t have to do this alone.”

Neal looked up and do what? died on his lips. Peter’s eyes were worn and hurt, frustrated and concerned, and Neal was exhausted and sick of lying.

But the truth, as always, would cost too much.

“Yes,” he said, and it hurt, a sharp ache behind his sternum, cold and spreading. “I do.”

***

Moz thinks Neal is meeting with Keller tomorrow.

The meeting is today, in half an hour; flat-out lies, like anything else, get easier with practice.

Neal takes the 9mm Beretta from the bookshelf; he can’t feel his fingers but his hands know the motions, sliding home the magazine.

He’s pointed a gun at a man exactly twice; the first time all other thoughts were blanked by rage, the second time by fear. Today he has neither to cling to, only a dull cold dread blurring into welcome numbness.

He wonders if he’s already going into shock.

It doesn’t matter. He only has to hold it together for a little while longer. If there’s one thing Keller won’t expect -

He stares at the water soaking into the towel by the door, the cracked jade chessboard overturned on the flagstones before the fireplace. He remembers the sound it made, hitting the floor.

Pis aller, he thinks; he can close his eyes and see the pieces flying, falling in the fireplace and rolling into corners.

The move of last resort.

***

Yesterday morning Elizabeth stopped by the office, bringing Peter’s sling.

“He left it at home. Again.” She shook her head. Peter was in a meeting, Neal told her, and she smiled and patted his arm. “That’s all right,” she said. “I wanted to talk to you.”

Neal’s eyebrows went up but he let her draw him toward the counter and the coffee machine. He poured two cups and dumped three sugars into his, stirring carefully. “Is everything all right?”

The look she gave him said she’d heard the news. “You know Keller’s back in town.”

“Whatever he’s planning, we’re going to stop him,” Neal said, putting all the sincerity he could into it. “He’s not going to hurt anyone.”

“He’s here because of you.” The words were quiet and firm, no accusation, only a simple statement of fact. Neal closed his eyes; he couldn’t argue. “I don’t know what he thinks you have, or what he thinks you can help him get. I don’t care. Maybe he just likes messing with your head, but he’s here for you and he’s figured out he can use us to get to you.”

“I won’t let him hurt Peter.” Neal stared at the sling on the counter. “Or you. Or anyone.”

“Damn right you won’t. This is your mess.” Her eyes were red but she was past crying; he recognized fear and desperation behind the steel in her voice. “You’re the one who brought him into our lives. It’s your job to remove him.”

“We’ll catch him -”

“He’s escaped twice, now.” She glanced up toward the conference room. Peter’s back was turned, a shadow behind glass. Her hand, holding the coffee cup, shook slightly; Neal watched concentric ripples spreading.

He didn’t want to ask the question: “What do you want me to do?”

“You took him down while you were lying on the ground, through Peter’s pants leg, while both of them were moving.” Her voice dropped. “Are you telling me you can’t finish this?”

The little alcove was silent except for the ticking of the coffee machine and the faint murmur of conversation from the bullpen. Neal licked dry lips and tried, twice, to swallow. “Can we talk to Peter about - ?”

She cut him off with a headshake and a fierce glare. Neal looked up and saw Peter turn toward him, a dim shape through dark water, overlaid with blurred reflections.

“I’ll need -” The words trailed off, squeezed flat and strangled; all the air might have been sucked out of the room.

“Tell me what you need. I’ll get it for you.” Her chin lifted and her eyes held his, steady. “I want Keller gone.”

***

Neal’s phone rings again as he shoves the gun in the back of his pants.

He shouldn’t look back but he does, once, and sees Peter’s name on the caller ID; he lets it ring, vibrating across the table’s surface, until it drops off the edge and onto the floor.

Peter will find him. Peter always does, but by then it won’t matter. Peter will win the marathon but Neal commands the sprint, and he only needs to stay ahead for a little while.

He can’t breathe.

Black spots hover at the edges of his vision; he blinks, shaking his head, but he knows it means nothing. Those spots could crowd out all but Keller’s face and he can still hit the target.

His mind might be paralyzed - and most likely will be - but his hands know what to do.

The queen protects the king, and her knight moves in crooked lines.

Keller is waiting for his next move.

White Collar Fic: Every bridge we build we burn (and never learn to swim) (PG, 2200 words)

florastuart — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 06:36:30 GMT

Title: Every bridge we build we burn (and never learn to swim)
Author: Flora
Rating: PG
Characters/Pairings: Mozzie, Elizabeth, Peter
Word Count: 2200
Warnings/Spoilers: Spoilers for 4.12 “Brass Tacks”
Summary: Mozzie knows what it is to be afraid of losing someone. Episode tag for 4.12 “Brass Tacks”.
A/N: Okay, this is the first time in a while that I’ve watched an ep and had to sit down and write a tag right away. The title is from Tom McRae’s “Walking to Hawaii”.

The Suit answers the door and stares at the potted Gerber daisy in Mozzie’s hands.

“Oh, you shouldn’t have.”

Mozzie suppresses a long-suffering sigh. “It’s for Elizabeth.” He holds the glazed terra cotta pot and the wine bottle out of reach as Satchmo sniffs diligently at his shirt, as if he hasn’t visited Casa Suit a dozen times before. “I know all this has been difficult for her, so -”

“You’re bringing my wife flowers.”

It’s a quiet summer evening, a hazy white sky blurring red at the end of the street, copper-gold sunset light blazing farewell along the roofs of parked cars at the curb. The smell of a neighbor’s lilacs mingles with blue charcoal smoke from a cookout up the block.

“I thought about boosting this six-foot stone sculpture I caught her admiring at -”

“Get in here.” The Suit rolls his eyes but he steps back, motioning Mozzie to come in and shooing the dog aside.

“Hon?” Elizabeth calls from the dining room.

“We have a visitor.” Peter shuts the door and abruptly Mozzie has his full attention; it’s just the two of them in the warm yellow light of the foyer. Peter’s brown eyes are sharp and worried and searching. “Is there anything you want to tell me, Mozzie?”

Mozzie knows that look; the Suit suspects. He always does. “What, can’t a guy show up with wine and flowers for somebody else’s wife without getting the third degree?”

Peter’s lips press together in an annoyed look usually reserved for Neal; when he turns his head Mozzie can still see angry red cuts, marks of broken glass at the side of his neck where the sling’s strap rests.

“Oh, Moz.” Elizabeth leans in to sniff the daisy, taking his arm to lead him toward the kitchen. He can hear soup simmering on the stove, and the smell of baking bread escapes in a wash of fragrant steam as she peeks into the oven. “Dinner’s almost ready. Can I get you anything?”

“I won’t be staying.”

She tilts her head to the side and asks quietly, “Did Neal send you?”

“He doesn’t know I’m here.”

She grabs two glasses and a corkscrew, steering him out to the patio quickly enough that the Suit turns to look after them, curious. Mozzie shakes his head, exasperated, as the door bangs shut behind them.

“Seriously, that was amateur.” He sets the flowerpot on the little table between a marigold and a scrubby grey-green rosemary bush. “You could have just waved a flag saying we’re up to something sneaky and suspicious out here. If you’re going to run a con, you should at least try to do it right.”

“I’m not running a con, Moz.” And she looks like Kate when she frowns at him, her mouth set in a tense, frustrated line. “I’m trying to keep Peter out of one.”

“You’re lying to a federal agent about the fact that a convicted felon is violating half a dozen of the terms of his parole agreement on your orders.” Mozzie picks up the corkscrew, carefully opening the bottle. “Congratulations, you’ve officially joined Team Wrong Side of the Law. Welcome to the dark side. We have cookies.” He pours a generous slug of Neal’s best Cabernet into each of the glasses, lifts one and salutes her with it. “Also, we have better booze. How many times have you lied to the Suit, anyway?”

“I don’t see how that’s relevant.” She lifts a steel watering can from under the windowboxes and pours into the drying soil around the daisy; the marigold and the basil in the window get the rest of the water, with the last few drops sprinkled into the rosemary.

“It’s relevant because he’s good.” He pauses. “Don’t ever tell him I said that. I hate to give him credit, but -”

“You think I don’t know that?” She raises the other glass. “You do have better booze. This is nice.”

“It’s Neal’s.” A streetlight flickers somewhere up the street; the moon and Venus are framed in the circle of the Rai stone, a diamond and an ivory sickle claw against a peach velvet sky. “Did you see him with Pratt this afternoon?”

“He got Pratt’s attention.”

“Waved a red flag.” Mozzie didn't see the live feed from the briefcase cam, but Neal told him about it after. “Probably hoping they’ll come after him next.”

Elizabeth only nods; he can see lines of strain around her eyes in the fading light.

He doesn’t tell her he briefly considered putting a hit on the senator. Considered, and discarded the idea; a high-profile target like that would make too much noise. He’s not that desperate yet.

“You know, if there’s one thing Neal doesn’t need it’s lessons in survivor guilt.” Mozzie leans against the wall beside the window as another streetlight comes on. “He’s perfectly capable of blaming himself for what happened without any help from you.”

She doesn’t answer. He turns the wineglass in his hands and thinks longingly of sun and turquoise waves and fine white sand.

Finally he says, “Are you sure keeping the Suit out of this is the way to go?”

“I know what I’m doing.”

“Okay, now you sound like Kate.”

“There’s no need to be insulting.”

“I wasn’t.” He lets a note of steel creep into the words. “Kate was a friend.” For a long moment the only sound is a car radio, a bass beat passing by at the corner. “She was young and pissed at the whole world and she could be an idiot sometimes, but she loved Neal. I don’t care what the Suit told you.”

The Suit believes otherwise because she lied to Neal; Mozzie considers pointing out the implications of this before deciding he’s not here to play relationship counselor. “I don’t think she ever loved anyone else, but she would have killed for him if she had to.”

“I thought you never trusted her.”

“I don’t trust anyone. That’s not the point.” Sometimes Elizabeth reminds him of Kate so much it hurts; she has the same raw potential, the same cold steel nerve and natural talent for the game, despite a conventional and law-abiding early life. She could have made a brilliant con artist. But talent without experience can only take you so far.

“Kate thought she could protect Neal by keeping him in the dark about what was really going on with the music box.” He takes another sip of wine and wonders if he should have brought a bottle of fake whiskey instead. “Obviously that didn’t work out so well for her. Or for him.”

“This is different.”

“No, it’s not.”

Elizabeth folds her arms like she’s cold. “I thought you of all people would rather do this without involving the FBI.”

“First we have to work with the feds, now we have to keep the feds out of it.” He thinks again of white sand and an airy villa, no extradition treaties and no one shooting at them; they’d almost made it, almost left all this behind. “For all I know we’ll be back to working with the feds again tomorrow. At this point I’m getting whiplash.” He shrugs. “I just do what I’m told.”

That startles a real laugh from her, and he can’t help smiling in return. “Of course you do.”

She knows him too well; they’re alike, the two of them, in ways Peter and Neal don’t see.

“The Suit’s suspicious already,” he says. A door opens somewhere nearby; he hears a dog barking, a mother’s voice calling a child home for dinner. “He won’t let this drop.”

“He will.” Elizabeth’s eyes are wet steel. “He has to.”

Mozzie sighs; he could tell her wishes can’t prevent someone you love from being reckless. If they could Mozzie might have saved Neal from any number of desperately stupid mistakes over the years.

He tops off both their glasses and listens to the murmur of a neighbor’s radio, the grumble of a car’s engine starting. The porch light comes on next door, warm amber spilling across the surface of the patio; he can see tufts of dry grass and a bunch of wildflowers struggling through cracks in the concrete, stubbornly trying to fit in where they’re not wanted.

It was an evening like this, the night he ran away.

He remembers the sky at dusk unrolling like a bolt of midnight silk, a hazy pink ribbon border at the horizon and the brightest constellations stitched in silver thread, wavering through industrial smoke. He left with a roll of cash under his shirt, a backpack holding a change of clothes and a battle-scarred stuffed bear; he’d like to say he didn’t look back, but he’d be lying.

He can see the windows along that street like it was yesterday, framed portraits of an inaccessible dream rendered in yellow light and laughing voices, a series of paintings in an outdoor gallery with titles like these things are not for people like you.

He learned that lesson early, from the foster parents who gave him everything and then took it all away. He could have told Neal. You might think you’re part of the family, but there comes a day when they have to choose between you and one of their own, and on that day you’ll find out you’ve always been on the outside looking in.

He really should have brought the whiskey.

“You could tell Neal to run.”

Elizabeth looks up, startled.

“If you think he’s putting Peter at risk, tell him to leave.” The moon spills a thin line of silver across the table, a shimmering horned reflection in a darkened downstairs window. “Tell him to cut the chain off his leg and disappear. He’ll do it if you ask him.”

It would tear Neal apart, leaving all this again; Mozzie knows that. It might also save his life. He hates to give any credit to the Suits, but taking on someone with Pratt’s reach without FBI backup is one of the more suicidal ideas Neal has proposed, and that’s saying something.

Sometimes you have to hurt the ones you love to keep them safe.

The band of sunset gold at the horizon frays and blurs, dissolving into the dark; her face is half in shadow as she shakes her head. “They’re in too deep with Pratt already.”

“Neal is dangerous to Peter,” he says quietly. “Peter’s dangerous to him.” You’re dangerous to him. He can’t say no to you; he’ll keep your secrets if it kills him. “They’ll both be safer if we separate them.”

“Peter’s dangerous -” Her voice rises sharply. “Peter would do anything for him.”

“Neal would do anything for you. He’d jump in front of a bullet if you asked him to.” He can close his eyes and imagine Neal walking up to Pratt, with that hard, reckless light in his eyes Mozzie knows only too well. Throwing down a gauntlet and making himself the target. “That’s exactly what you asked him to do, isn’t it?”

People underestimate Elizabeth. Mozzie has always known this; he’s been underestimated himself for most of his life. It’s part of what first drew them together.

“What do you want from me, Moz?” Her chin lifts, and her face shows neither denial nor remorse; he sees fear in her eyes, behind that hard edge. “Peter has risked so much -” She chokes on the last words. “If you’re expecting me to apologize -”

“I’m not.”

She stops and blinks, surprised.

“You’re protecting your family,” he says gently. “I get that.” And he can't judge her; he knows what it is to be afraid of losing someone. “But you should know I’ll do whatever it takes to protect mine.”

Mozzie has grown soft and sentimental, here; the Burkes’ home is every dream of every lonely foster kid, full of warmth and light and delicious smells; it’s the sort of home he once longed to find.

But when the lines are drawn (and in the end they always will be) he knows whose side he’s on.

This is about Neal. Neal who didn’t laugh at his stupid shadow puppets. Neal who was ready to take the fall for Mozzie’s treasure heist, who gave himself up and gave Mozzie twelve hours’ head start to disappear. Neal who was there at the hospital after he was shot.

Neal who was the front man for all their schemes, who took the credit and the blame and paid for his own crimes and Mozzie’s, too, with a steel cage and a leash he still wears.

“Neal is the only family I’ve got. And he’s not jumping in front of any bullets. Not for the Suit. Not for his father. Not even for you.” Mozzie drains the last of his wine and sets the glass on the table. “I won’t let him. If he gets in over his head with this, and I think he needs help, I’ll tell Peter everything myself.”

Her voice drops the temperature several degrees. “You can’t do that.”

He doesn’t want to; going to the Suit behind Neal’s back has always been a nuclear option. But this time Neal might need more backup than Mozzie can provide. “I’m curious how you intend to stop me.”

He doesn’t have a sword to salute her with, so he settles for a fraction of a nod as he turns to leave.

White Collar 4.12 Brass Tacks

florastuart — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 05:37:00 GMT

... aka the one where El starts channeling my Kate.

OH, PETER. *SQUISHES HIM* He looks so hurt, knowing that Neal just lied to his face. And he has NO IDEA that El is lying to him, too. That's the last thing he would ever expect, and it's going to mess him up. And if Neal gets hurt going off on his own because El told him to ... oh, this is going to be a godawful mess.

And part of me wants to be pissed at El - I am extremely defensive of Neal, and when she says "do you know how it feels?" I want to shriek at the screen because OMG YES HE DOES HELLO. But at the same time ... yes, El is absolutely wrong but I think she's totally in character, too.

And Neal is equally capable of doing stupid, wrong things when people he loves get hurt, and I love him all the more for it.

El does have a cold, ruthless streak when it comes to protecting Peter, and she'll sacrifice anyone else she has to to keep him safe. This goes all the way back to 1.09 when she tells Neal to break into the judge's chamber and steal that tape - she knows Neal could go to prison for that and it's a risk she's willing to take. Likewise, when she tells him in 2.14 that she wants him to do "whatever it takes" to bring Peter home, she knows he could end up in prison or getting hurt as a result, going against Hughes' orders, but Peter's safety is her priority and she's willing to sacrifice Neal if that's what it takes.

Because here's the thing about Neal and El - she trusts him. I think she's the only character who does, completely. She trusts him more than she loves him (which is the opposite of every other character on the show). She tells him what to do, here, and she absolutely trusts that he will obey her. When she says "when it counts, you can trust him" this is what she means - she can order him to break the law to protect Peter and she knows he'll do it. And that trust is something Neal doesn't really get from anyone else.

(And the other reason why I like El in this is because she's totally channeling my Kate. In my head Kate is exactly the same way about Neal; she has that same coldness in her, and that same willingness to do anything to protect Neal, and both Neal and Peter see Kate and El as sweet and perfect and innocent and incapable of hurting anyone.)

Part of me is just delighted that El gets to be wrong and stupid and sharp-edged and not perfect. I like that she gets to have flaws, and screw up because she's hurt and scared. And I like that Peter and El's relationship is not perfect. They're going to have trust issues, after this.

I just hope the writers are going to actually deal with the fallout from all this, between the ~~three~~ four of them (because if anything happens to Neal because El told him to lie, that's going to affect El and Mozzie's relationship, too *hides from the plotbunny*).

And another WC observation

florastuart — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 05:52:49 GMT

... after rewatching 4.10 - in the scene where Neal rescues James from the beating that might or might not have been staged, not only can you see two glasses, briefly, but you also clearly see a view of Flynn from the back and he's got the same gun (or one that looks just like it) from the whiskey box stuck in the back of his pants.

We only get a brief glimpse of Flynn running away across the rooftop a minute or so later, through the window, but after watching it a couple times tonight I'm fairly certain the gun is not still tucked into the back of his pants as he's running away.

He could be holding it in his hand (view isn't clear enough for me to tell in that scene) or it could be a continuity error, but it seems almost like the writers/director went out of the way to call attention to that gun earlier as Neal is sneaking in and then out with James, both by showing it clearly and having Neal tell Peter "he's armed" as Peter arrives.

I don't know what that would mean, or why Flynn might have left it behind, or hidden it - James wouldn't have had any opportunity to grab it in that scene. I don't know if or how this is significant, but it's something I noticed, and now I'm remembering Flynn saying someone planted the gun in 4.11, and also how James talked about how the guys who set him up stole his spare pistol out of his locker to use it to frame him.

I don't trust James. He's still hiding something and it's something big, I think.

Just a thought I had tonight.

White Collar 4.11 Family Business - SPOILERS

florastuart — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 10:35:44 GMT

JUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUNE!!!!!!

High stakes Candyland! June and Mozzie! ♥♥♥

To get over there that fast you know Peter ran out the door to go to Neal’s and make sure he’s okay as soon as Neal hung up on him.

And Peter asks Neal if he’s okay and Neal says no, I’m not. Oh, Neal. Which shows not only how messed up he is but also how much he really has come to trust Peter.

Neal and Mozzie getting drunk on counterfeit whiskey = ♥♥♥ And this, along with Peter’s reaction, fits in with my personal headcanon that Neal only allows himself to get really drunk when it’s for necessary work-related reasons.

Neal has his own ideas about what Ellen deserves, and what her killer deserves, and he’s willing to go off-book on his own if Peter doesn’t agree. This failed to blow up into a source of conflict in this episode, but I expect it’s going to come back later in the season. (At least he’s not shooting at people this time. Yet.)

I don’t trust James. And I remember thinking at the end of 4.10 that if Neal embraced his father quickly then he’d turn out to be evil by the end of the season, whereas if he kept pushing him away in 4.11 they’d change it around by the end of the season and have Neal and James tearfully reconcile. I remember thinking the first impression is going to be the wrong one, and the first impression we get with this episode is that James is a good guy who’s made mistakes but he loves his son and wants to be a part of his life.

Whatever happens this is going to end badly. Neal wants to trust James; he’s resentful at first but he jumps on the first scrap of evidence suggesting that James is telling the truth and clings to it. I hope James is evil, at least partly because I think he’s either going to be evil or he’s going to end up dead and this thing where they kill off ALL of Neal’s loved ones is getting old. Having his dad turn out to be evil would be a different variety of Neal angst.

(Anyone else think it’s suspicious that Sam would have given James Ellen’s PO box information? Sam would have no reason to trust James, and I’m half wondering if James killed Sam and stole his identity. Also, was James on that short list of people who knew where Flynn was?)

Also, now I really have to write that fic about that time Kate went to Ellen and didn’t take the Raphael. And then the two of them had a conversation about partners, and lies, and trust, and forgiveness.

At the same time, though, I really hope they don’t try to draw explicit parallels between James’ crimes and Neal’s. For one thing, that has the potential to slide too far into heavy-handed moralizing, which I’m not a fan of. But also I feel like Neal and James are very different people with very different life stories and the parallels don’t actually work. I don’t think their character flaws are at all alike and I don’t think their situations or their crimes are all that comparable. James’ story (if his story can be believed, and I’m by no means convinced it can be, but taking it at face value for the moment) really doesn’t work as a moral cautionary tale for Neal.

James portrays himself as basically a decent guy with weak morals who let temptation get the better of him and did something he knew perfectly well was wrong, and after that everything snowballed out of his control and he ended up doing more and more things he knew were wrong, and hating it and himself the whole time, but he couldn’t see a way to extricate himself.

And I’m going to argue that Neal has very strong morals. Neal’s problem is more a lack of imagination - he doesn’t think through the greater ethical implications of what he does if it isn’t immediately obvious that it’s going to hurt someone right in front of him - and major trust issues and a failure to consistently think through the long-term consequences of his actions. Which is a problem, but understandable given the circumstances in which he grew up - he spent most of his childhood in a very unstable situation, which would have taught him not to plan ahead or think about the future but to grab whatever opportunities were in front of him in the present.

Neal’s moral code is limited and incomplete - it doesn’t include things like “you shouldn’t take other people’s stuff”, for example - but it’s very strong. We’ve seen Neal take great personal risks and make great sacrifices because he believes it’s the right thing to do, even before he started working for the FBI. (This is the guy who went up against Ryan Wilkes and nearly got killed for it because “he was going to hurt people”.) Neal gets in trouble when he doesn’t think or he can’t figure out what the right thing to do is in a certain situation; it’s very rare that Neal does something knowing that it’s wrong.

Neal enjoyed his life of crime. He loved the challenge and he was proud of his skills. And I don't think it was all roses and cappuccino in the clouds - I'm sure it was a hard life, in a lot of ways - but I don't get the impression he felt guilty about it at the time. Whereas James seemed like he hated what he was doing the whole time and wanted out but couldn't figure out how to get out.

In James’ defense - and as another example of how James’ situation and Neal’s are completely different - once he took the cash it would have been very hard for him to walk away from the Flynns. James had a wife and a three-year-old son to support, and he didn’t know how to make enough money to support them without a salary or how to hide them from the Flynns without help from WitSec. When Neal was running cons he would never have worked with people like the Flynns, but if Neal ever found himself mixed up in a job he didn’t want to be a part of he could always run. People like the Flynns couldn’t have blackmailed Neal into working for them by threatening his family because Neal’s family was Kate and Mozzie, both of whom were career criminals and perfectly capable of taking care of themselves and totally comfortable with living on the run and changing their identities when they needed to; if anyone tried anything like that the three of them could leave town and disappear together.

But James knew taking that cash was wrong. And he didn’t feel like he had no other options. A cop’s salary isn’t a lot but it didn’t seem like he and his family were in desperate poverty. He didn’t think what he was doing was harmless; he says he was constantly afraid of his family and Ellen finding out he was a dirty cop. It wasn’t a situation where he didn’t realize he’d screwed up until people started getting hurt.

So I really hope they're not going to try to turn this arc into an object lesson for Neal about how stealing and lying are bad and will screw up your life. Because James, as he's been portrayed in this episode, doesn't work as a "there but for the grace of God" version of Neal; their situations were entirely different.

Random White Collar canon question

florastuart — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 00:57:55 GMT

How old is Samantha (June's younger granddaughter)? Does canon ever say? It's been a while since I watched "Vital Signs" and I don't remember if her age is mentioned.

Fic: Wedding Presents (White Collar, G, 900 words)

florastuart — Sat, 12 Jan 2013 18:48:23 GMT

Title: Wedding Presents
Author: Flora
Rating: G
Characters/Pairings: Elizabeth, Neal, Diana/Christie
Word Count: 900
Warnings/Spoilers: Through 2.02
Summary: Like so many of Neal’s ideas, it had seemed harmless at first.
A/N: Written for embroiderama for fandom_stocking.

“Neal.”

Elizabeth folds her arms, with an apprehensive glance at the door to the suite. Neal only makes a distracted “hmm?” around the paintbrushes in his mouth.

“You said we were here to hide Diana’s wedding present.”

Like so many of Neal’s ideas, it had seemed harmless at first.

He drags an olive brocade ottoman across the sitting room and slips his shoes off before standing on it, bringing his eyes (and the lockpick in his hands) level with the top of the picture frame hanging on the wall.

It’ll be a surprise, he’d said, with that delighted-little-boy grin that meant he was about to make someone else happy while breaking half a dozen rules in the process.

The armchair and matching ottoman clash terribly with the walls, which are painted an unfortunate shade of mauve. In the bedroom, the giant four-poster bed is covered with silk sheets and a ruffled bed skirt and lace curtains. The bathroom has tiny bottles of vanilla-scented bubble bath and hand soaps shaped like delicate seashells.

Christie is out of vacation days for the year, so she and Diana are going to take a longer honeymoon next summer. But Diana’s father had somehow arranged for them to have a luxurious hotel suite for New Year’s weekend, right here in Manhattan.

Neal had somehow, against her better judgment, convinced Elizabeth to help him sneak into the suite the day before the wedding to hide a present.

(He said he only wanted to surprise Diana, and they wouldn’t be doing anything illegal.)

The round table in the dining nook holds a potted poinsettia, dark green and deep red in front of the balcony doors. Outside tiny white Christmas lights still wrap around the railing. The view, Elizabeth thinks, more than makes up for any shortcomings in the decor; as the last sunlight fades to a strip of red at the horizon she can see glittering lights spread out below.

(Actually, what he said was they wouldn’t steal anything, and that Diana would love it, and she’s belatedly realizing that’s not precisely the same thing.)

She’d told the desk clerk she’s considering holding a wedding reception here next year. It’s the truth - she had been eying the place for a wedding in April - or she never, ever would have gone along with this.

“Please tell me we’re not stealing that painting.”

“We are not stealing this painting,” Neal responds agreeably as he continues working on the screws holding it in place.

Surely he wouldn’t pull anything that obvious right in front of her. And besides -

“Honestly, Neal, I thought you had better taste.”

The painting he’s expertly detaching from the wall mount is a thoroughly banal oceanscape, flat turquoise water tracing a shallow curve along a spotless beige shoreline, with an improbably symmetrical palm in the foreground and a tiny dot of a sailboat hull-down at the horizon.

“Got it!”

Elizabeth isn’t sure what to expect - a safe set into the wall, maybe, or a lost sketch of Monet’s tucked into the back of the frame. But he lays the frame face-down on the table and there’s only plain cardboard backing; the wall underneath shows only a rectangle of slightly darker paint unfaded by the sunlight.

“Tell me I’m not going to have to call my husband to come bail us both out of jail before this is over.”

Neal looks up with a sparkling grin. “I’m about to let you in on a secret.”

Which isn’t any kind of assurance at all, but despite herself she’s curious.

He’s pulling a book out of his bag, now, opening it to a page marked with a torn scrap of paper. Beside it, on the table, he opens a tube of black paint.

“We’re not defacing hotel property, are we?” She’s not at all sure she likes where this is going.

“No one’ll know it’s here.” He grins at her again. “Except Diana and Christie. And they’ll love it.” He turns the book toward her, now, and says, “You were there, remember, when she told the story about -?”

And suddenly she does remember, looking down at the page - it’s a library book, something on modern art and there’s a picture of a painting on the left side of the page.

It was a holiday party at the Bureau last week, and Diana talked about visiting a gallery with Christie for their second date, describing a painting they’d bonded over. We looked for prints in the gift shop, Christie had said, but they were sold out.

The gallery was a small one, and closed down not long after, and neither one of them could remember the name of the painting, Diana had told them. But apparently Neal had recognized it from her description.

It’s a black-and-white silhouette, a dancer caught in mid-pirouette, one arm in a graceful curve above her head, captured in broad brushstrokes that convey movement and energy more than detail. Neal turns the book again, glancing at the picture before dipping his paintbrush; he works quickly, his hands moving with a fluid grace matching that of the dancer spinning to life on the blank wall.

It’s beautiful, and completely invisible once Neal screws the original painting into place, after allowing the paint to at least partially dry.

“How is she going to know it’s here?” Elizabeth asks, as Neal stows the book and paintbrushes in his bag and moves the ottoman back to its original place with the armchair.

Neal only smiles. “She’ll know.”

Fic: Anchored (White Collar, PG, 2000 words)

florastuart — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 02:41:17 GMT

Title: Anchored
Author: Flora
Rating: PG
Characters/Pairings: Neal/Kate, Mozzie
Word Count: 2000
Warnings/Spoilers: Through 2.11
Summary: The job should have been simple, safe, easy - perfect for a beginner.
A/N: Written for veleda_k for fandom_stocking.

Neal remembers water.

He remembers sun striking ice-bright sparks from cobalt waves; he remembers the flare of golden light blinding him, reflecting off brass fittings at the end of the boom. He remembers the shadow of the yacht leaning hard over, a dark shape against the water, dipping toward a foam-fringed wave.

He can’t remember where Moz said he got the intel for this job; he knew once but the memory is lost down a black well. It should have been simple, safe, easy - perfect for a beginner. Nothing dangerous. O’Reilly wasn’t supposed to be on the island; he certainly wasn’t supposed to own the goddamn island -

The last few hours come back in ragged patches, badly-sewn together and tangled in grey haze and Neal realizes he’s been drugged.

He feels like he’s floating, a gentle rocking motion, watching sparklers twist and dance; he might be lying on his back in the ocean. The water is warm and he’s watching fireworks, maybe, or heaving patches of phosphorescent plankton swirled and broken by the waves. In some dusty back corner of his mind an alarm bell is ringing.

Two years ago O’Reilly was lieutenant to a mob boss; he’d been a dangerous mark but Neal got away clean, that time. He never thought they’d cross paths again.

Neal opens his eyes and there’s a lamp swaying on a chain, shining directly in his face. He’s alone.

He has a dim memory of agony clamped around his right forearm, of being shaken like a rag doll before everything went dark and cold.

But they escaped. All three of them. He remembers that; he’s sure of it.

He’s still on the boat; he’d spun a story to get all three of them on board. It was their best, their only chance of escaping the island before O’Reilly found them and Kate said of course she could play bored trophy wife for the seven hours it took to reach the mainland. She’d smiled bravely and tried to pretend she wasn’t in over her head and terrified.

He squeezes his eyes shut again. He hears, muffled, the creak of sails somewhere above the low ceiling overhead. He’s on a narrow cot under a thin blanket.

Where is everybody? Where’s Moz? Where’s - ?

He tries to sit up, in sudden panic, and his head reels like a balloon, like it’s about to float away from the rest of his body and he has to lie down and hold onto it with his good hand.

Kate was never supposed to be within a hundred miles of someone like O’Reilly.

He can’t tell if it’s day or night; there’s a shade drawn over the tiny porthole. The rhythmic rush of water on the other side of the wall is distracting, but the monster that tore up his arm has settled down to a dull gnawing ache.

He remembers the whoosh of canvas and the boom swinging toward him; he remembers flinging one arm up to protect his face and blue water dissolving in a red wave of pain.

The tiny hatch opens, then, barely three feet from the end of the cot and he sees her first, ducking her head to come in. She’s upset, strained lines around her mouth and sleepless shadows making her blue eyes huge.

“Kate -”

His tongue feels thick and heavy and his mouth is lined with fuzz, but numbed or not his lips know her name.

Kate freezes. Moz is behind her, his face blank like his mind is racing. Coherent thought gropes through thick veils of fog; finally Neal sees the other man behind her and he thinks, shit.

Kate isn’t her name, of course, and Neal Caffrey isn’t his. The man behind her only goes by Junior but Neal remembers him; he owns the yacht and his father owns the island. Junior’s never met Neal; he had no idea Neal ever stole from his father and no reason to suspect they aren’t who they say they are.

No reason until Neal just gave him one.

Junior has a reputation, too, and the last guy who crossed him ended up in several pieces at the bottom of the bay.

Junior’s frowning, confused, and Neal needs a plan. Damage control. Some plausible reason for calling her by the wrong name that isn’t we’re trying to get away from your dad before he finds out I conned him out of half a million two years ago and has us all shot but his mind is dull and smothered under layers of drug-soaked fuzz and all he can think is Kate wasn’t supposed to be here.

Kate’s learning and she’s smart but it’s only been three months since she was working for Adler in an office and now he’s blown her cover and Junior’s going to kill her and -

He can see her standing at the rail in a light sundress with a shawl around her shoulders, obviously unhappy for anyone at a party on a yacht in the Caribbean. Junior was suspicious at first; he asked her what was wrong and she said she got seasick. But she walked the deck and balanced like a sailor and she didn’t look seasick, she looked tense and angry and afraid, and the lie only made things worse.

Neal covered for them both by flirting outrageously with every other woman on board, offering a plausible reason for her obvious distress. Start from the truth and build the lie from there, he’s always told her, and the truth was Kate did not want to be on this boat with these people, not Junior or his thugs or any of his party guests.

He’s still reaching for something slick to say but his tongue is lead wrapped in cobwebs and all his brain offers is horrifying and completely unhelpful visions of Kate and Moz being shot. Or do they still make people walk the plank these days?

And then she steps forward, quick and furious, and slaps him hard across the face.

“Who the hell is Kate?”

That’s how he finds out his face is numb, too, though some reflex still makes him blink at the impact.

“I knew it!” she snaps, and Neal tries to raise both hands, surrender or apology or both and he realizes his right arm is strapped to his side in a sling.

“Baby -” he tries in his best pleading voice; she hates pet names but he can’t remember her alias right now. He can’t remember his own. He thinks it was Nick but he can’t be sure.

He says, vaguely, “I love you.” Moz is shaking his head, looking exasperated, and Junior -

Junior looks mildly amused by the whole scene.

“Who is she?” And now she rounds on Moz, who makes the catch as smoothly as if they’d rehearsed the scene, stepping back with both hands raised. “Give me his cell phone!”

“You’re amazing,” Neal tells her, because she is. And he owes her an apology. He owes her a thousand of them. She’s a far better actress than he gave her credit for, all hard lines and broken glass and incandescent spitting fury.

“Don’t even try that with me, you -” And she sells it. She sells it beautifully. “How long have you been seeing her?”

She’s brilliant, he thinks, and he says so, in a voice that’s both muzzy and too loud in his ears.

“I watched you almost drown!” She’s not done. “I’ve been worried sick for a day and a half thinking you hit your head and you’re not going to wake up, you worthless asshole -”

She’s not acting. Or she is, exactly the way he taught her, start with the truth and build the lie from there but she really is furious and he wonders how long it’s been and if he really did almost die.

He tries to sit up and there’s two of her, glaring, and his head does that thing where it tries to float away again. He hates this, even the jangling fear is dulled, wrapped in a haze he can’t fight through, like sticky grey cotton candy smothering him.

But Moz is here, Moz steps forward and takes her arm and says, “Alice, calm down.” Neal thinks Alice, and thank you, Moz. “It’s only been three hours -”

“Don’t tell me to calm down!” Her voice rises and she steps closer to the cot, close enough that she can wrap her fingers around Neal’s, hard, without anyone seeing. She turns just enough to glare at Junior and doesn’t falter for a second. “And what are you looking at?”

Junior only gives him a shark’s grin and says, “You’re on your own here, Nick.” And he turns and walks out, sliding the hatch shut behind him.

But he’s not. (On his own.)

The realization hits Neal in a shaky flood of terror and relief. One drugged slip of the tongue and he’d nearly killed all three of them, would have if Kate hadn’t thought faster than he could.

“You’re brilliant,” he says again, weakly. “And beautiful.”

“Shhhhhh,” she says. “You’re all right.”

“Bewitching,” he goes on, and she’s rolling her eyes but he’s on a roll, here, and there’s a hint of a smile twitching one corner of her mouth. “Bedazzling. Bewildering …”

And that’s not quite right but now she does crack a real smile, just for a second, wavering. “They’ve got you on the really good drugs.”

He’s shaking his head, now, carefully like it might fall off. The drugs are not good, not good at all. But he’s not alone.

He knows that and he lets his eyes close. Only for a few seconds, then he’s lost and floating and disoriented again. His eyes open and he squeezes Kate’s hand tighter; she’s glaring again but her other hand is fussing with the edge of the blanket, tucking it up under his chin.

“What happened?” he asks quietly.

“You were leaning out over the side and the boom swung around and knocked you overboard,” Moz says grimly.

He remembers pain, and falling, a dizzy spin and the black outline of the yacht silhouetted against the sky before dark water closed over his head.

He’d been trying to snap a picture; the image comes back to him suddenly. He’d pulled out a camera, hooking one arm around the rail, leaning far out. He’d wanted to take a picture of the sails, wide dark canvas against the amber setting sun. Something Kate could paint, later. He’d hoped it might cheer her up.

He thinks maybe he shouldn’t mention that right now.

“The boom slammed into your arm and broke the bone,” Mozzie says, which explains the pain lurking beneath the drugged haze. “You’re damn lucky it didn’t crack your skull. One of the guests here claimed to be a doctor; he set it and shot you full of -” He waves a hand in the air. “- whatever.”

Most likely Moz had stood over the doctor the whole time, glaring and suspicious. Neal is absurdly warmed, thinking about it.

And then, turning to Kate, Mozzie says, “Nice catch, there.”

She blinks and Neal realizes she’s still shaking. Mozzie pretends not to notice.

“Okay, get some sleep, mon frère,” he tells Neal. “I’ll go entertain our host with tales of your romantic misadventures until we get to the dock. Shouldn’t be more than an hour.”

Kate sits on the edge of the cot as he leaves; Neal brings her hand to his lips and kisses it, twice, before they both start talking at once.

“I’m sorry -”

“Don’t you ever -”

Finally, after a silence, she ventures a weak smile and says, “I was good, wasn’t I?”

“You were amazing,” he says again. “Even Moz thinks so.” And Mozzie had not been thrilled about adding a third to their team. “I’d say you have a future in this business.”

“Go to sleep,” she says. Her fingers thread lightly through his hair as he lets his eyes close.

Fic: Lifelines (White Collar, PG, 1600 words)

florastuart — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 23:47:34 GMT

Title: Lifelines
Author: Flora
Rating: PG
Characters/Pairings: Diana/Christie, Peter, Neal
Word Count: 1600
Warnings/Spoilers: Through 2.09
Summary: Diana is all right, or she will be. She has to be because no one else is, tonight.
A/N: Written for frith_in_thorns for fandom_stocking.

“I have had the day from hell.”

Christie’s voice is sharp and frayed; she picks up on the second ring and doesn’t bother with a greeting. Diana leans back against the wall, shuts her eyes briefly, and thinks it’s the most beautiful thing she’s ever heard.

“I’m not even supposed to be on tonight,” Christie says, and Diana thinks she should focus, she should search for words of sympathy or commiseration but instead she lets the sound wash over her. “I told Dr. Thompson I’d trade with him. I didn’t say I’d cover Alice’s shift, too.”

Diana tries to blink away fatigue scraping like sand in her eyes. For a moment she can let herself imagine Christie is in the break room off the ER downstairs, instead of at a completely different hospital halfway across town.

The lounge is quiet save for the faint hum of vending machines in the corner, the soft murmur of Peter’s voice and the occasional irregular squeak of the night nurse’s shoes on white linoleum. The floors are clean and polished and too bright.

Diana’s free hand still twitches, adrenaline buzzing tense and shaky just beneath her skin.

“I’m on break and a good thing, too,” Christie goes on. “I was about ready to start screaming, I swear.”

Diana makes some noise vaguely approximating I’m listening, but the words fade in and out. She’s still keyed up on high alert. But it’s the sound of Christie’s voice that matters.

It’s been six hours.

The intercoms are silent. The OR is out of sight, further down the hall past a row of closed doors along the quiet ward. The night nurse said someone will come find them when there’s any news.

At some point she and Peter shifted by unconscious mutual need into guard positions, each of them covering one of the two hallways leading into the lounge. They’ve long since given up trying to get Neal to sit down, to rest, to eat something.

He accepted a cup of coffee a few hours ago; he gulped half of it and spilled the rest, his eyes drifting past her when he looked up, shocky and huge and not tracking at all.

Now he stands facing the blank wall, unnaturally still; she and Peter can guard the hallways all night but they can’t reach him.

“And I came in half an hour early,” Christie is saying. “And he’s screaming at me, where have you been, all because he forgot to look at the damn schedule which clearly says I’m on late shift tonight and does he apologize?”

Outside the sun has set, the city shifting from day to night while they’re cut off in a suspended bubble. Waiting. In here the lights are harsh and steady, white walls without windows, only a single framed painting of a seashell hung beside that round hard clock face.

Christie is working up to a crescendo. “Does he say anything? He says well you’d better get ready ‘cause we’re short-handed tonight. And it’s only gotten worse from there. I swear even Alice says he’s worse than usual, tonight, and I should have you come down here and bust some heads.”

The clock on the wall reads five minutes to midnight. Her father is in Bahrain; in a few hours he’ll be awake.

(He knows some people at the Russian embassy; he’s got more than a few favors he can call in.)

On this side of the Atlantic the day isn’t over, and Diana is afraid to wonder what it might yet have left to throw at them.

When Christie finally runs out of steam, she stops to take a breath and Diana says the first thing that comes into her mind: “I love you.”

Diana was there one night when a patient knocked Christie down and pulled a knife. She’d been picking Christie up at the end of her shift; she’d seen the whole thing and reacted before she could think. She saw the knife and the next thing she knew she had the guy pinned to the floor.

She hears silence, now, on the other end, and a long breath released as whatever new tirade Christie was about to launch is cut off. Her tone is completely different, quietly concerned. “Di?”

The guy was drunk, she remembers, and hadn’t offered much resistance once she disarmed him. It was nothing impressive; she’d reacted the way she was trained. Still it had drawn attention. It’s been a running joke over in that ER ever since: don’t mess with Christie or Diana will kill you.

(It was never really all that funny.)

She wants to say I’m fine everything’s all right. She hears the question in her name, Christie’s own frustration forgotten in an instant at something that showed through in Diana’s voice. She wants to say keep talking I just need to hear you. Because Christie ranting about the various frustrating patients and difficult doctors and clueless residents she has to deal with is so refreshingly normal and this is what she needs right now; it’s a line and an anchor, holding her. She wants to say go on I didn’t mean to interrupt.

Instead, after a beat of concerned silence from the other end, she says, “I held a gun on a friend today.”

She has a sudden flash of memory, bright and sharp: sitting beside a black marble fountain in some hotel lobby in eastern Europe somewhere, trailing her hand in the water to catch sparks of light reflecting from the giant glass chandelier and telling Charlie she wanted to be a cop when she grew up.

Another pause, shorter this time, and Christie says, “Where are you?”

She didn’t want to be a diplomat, she told Charlie; she wanted to be like him. Because when you’re a cop you always know who the bad guys are.

“I’m at Lenox Hill. I might not be home for a while, the little guy’s gonna be in surgery for -”

Six hours and no news. She trails off and can’t finish.

“You shot Mozzie?”

She doesn’t even like the little guy. He’s obnoxious and stubborn and he makes no sense half the time and -

She’s shaking her head before she realizes Christie can’t see her. “No. No, that was a different -” She lets out a shaky breath. “Oh God, Christie, it’s been a hell of a day.”

Charlie didn’t laugh at her. She remembers that, though even then she could tell it was an effort.

She misses Charlie now with a fierce ache she hasn’t felt in years. All she ever wanted was to be like him; she went into this job to protect people, and today she came this close to shooting a friend to protect a man like Fowler and she can’t think about that right now because this day still isn’t over yet and -

“Listen,” Christie is saying. “I can call Sam to come in and cover the rest of my shift. I’ll take a cab. I can be there in half an hour -”

Diana looks up and her eyes meet Peter’s across the room; he’s standing against the opposite wall with his own phone against his ear, looking as tense and wrung out as she feels. His eyes hold hers only briefly before sliding away toward Neal.

“No.” She shakes her head again. “No, you don’t need to come over here. I’m all right.”

“You don’t sound all right.”

But she is, or she will be. She has to be because no one else is, tonight. Peter is a wreck; he looks like he’s aged ten years in the last twelve hours, and Neal is -

Neal is hardly aware of either of them. She can still hear his voice, a raw scream calling Mozzie’s name at that park. They’d had to cuff him again to get him in the car; he wouldn’t stop fighting to get to Mozzie, he didn’t hear Peter’s voice, you can’t help him and they’re taking him to the hospital and let the paramedics do their job.

When they got to the hospital Neal was quiet; he said nothing as the night nurse explained what they knew, which wasn’t much; Diana wasn’t sure he heard any of it but when she ended with we’re doing everything we can Neal said thank you, soft and broken and heartfelt and then he turned away and would have walked into a wall if Diana hadn’t stopped him.

“Finish your shift,” she tells Christie. “And then stop by -” She stops, flailing for a name and coming up with nothing. “- what’s that Thai place with the noodles we liked - ?”

“I remember,” Christie says, and then, “You’re sure?”

“And get an order of those little spring rolls, too?” Neal likes those. She doubts he’ll touch anything, but it can’t hurt to try.

(Peter told her he’d tried to run to Kate. Peter said he’d tried to run into the fire after her, and after today Diana believes him.)

Peter is talking to Elizabeth. She knows this despite overhearing nothing; she sees it in the way he leans against the wall, sees her own weary heartfelt gratitude reflected in his eyes when he looks over at her. They each know just how much of whatever strength gets them through days like this comes from the voice on the other end of that phone.

(This is what Neal has lost.)

“I love you,” Christie says and Diana closes her eyes and lets the words sink in, a salve and a lifeline and an anchor. “I’ll be there soon, okay?”

Diana’s eyes hold Peter’s; his hand holds that phone tightly enough she’s afraid it’s going to crack. (It takes another heartbeat to realize she’s holding hers the same way, squeezing it until her fingers ache.)

After a moment she realizes Christie is waiting for a response, but all she can say is, “I don’t know what I’d do if I lost you.”