"And you own me for four years." "Technically, we lease your labor."

[magibrain]

And then circumstances conspired to make me write 2100 words of first scene for a potential treatment of White Collar slavefic. Trust me when I say that this was not what I planned to be doing today.

Basically, the rough idea is that instead of a prison system, most of America's convicts end up in a program called Conditional Citizenship for Criminal Rehabilitation, which means that they get tracker'd and their labor gets leased to private or corporate buyers. (Violent offenders tend to get institutional service, where the government holds their leases directly and makes them work in guarded, prison-like factories or the like.) Instead of sentences of fixed duration, convicts are given Points Toward Freedom –  generally, 300 points should be worked off in one year, with higher rates possible for exceptional service; when all the points are worked off, the convict is once again granted all the privileges and responsibilities of full citizenship. However, in mandated quarterly reviews, supervisors can adjust the number of earned points downward to reflect concerns about a convict's rehabilitation. Earning less than 60 points per year for two or more years can get the supervisor deemed "insufficient to oversee the subject's rehabilitation", which means that the Department of Corrections seizes the subject's lease and puts it to auction, returning a percentage of the final sale value back to the supervisor, but that's not a difficult threshold to manage.

Needless to say, abuse in the system is absolutely epidemic.

There are all sorts of legal runarounds like how, technically, Conditional Citizens are still allowed to avail themselves of the protection of police, but there's no requirement that leaseholders have to provide phone or internet access by which they could seek that protection. And while there are a lot of people who are very, very angry with this whole setup – they call themselves abolitionists, because this is frickin' slavery and they're calling a spade a spade* – they have to fight tiny, piecemeal battles on things like allowable workloads and maximum sentences because at this point the CCCR program is such a cornerstone of the American economy that there isn't a chance in hell of getting even the most sympathetic congress to sign off on outlawing the program outright.

*Brief pause to make sure that phrase doesn't have racist origins. Apparently it doesn't, but I can never keep track of these things. Though "a spatulous device for abrading the surface of the soil" is pretty excellent.

Anyway, in this universe, Neal's position in "acquisitions" for Adler had a rather more illegal bent from the start, and he was on a plane back from Copenhagen when Adler pulled the plug on his Ponzi scheme and left the country. Which meant Neal was picked up at the airport before he knew what was going on, and the prosecution team – deprived of Adler – went with both barrels after any employee of Adler's they could prove was in on any aspect of his illegal operations. So Neal wound up with a 1500-point (forecasted 5-year) sentence, and then not long into it got his lease bought out by someone who realized that he could make a fortune on Neal's work in high-end art restoration.

Then, seven years into this forecasted 5-year sentence, the FBI starts hearing chatter that Vincent Adler is back in the States. And they start looking for someone to consult.

---

Neal's first impression of Special Agent Peter Burke was of carefully-concealed rage.

He was working a church restoration on Third Street with Myrvold Restoration Services when Burke walked into the sanctuary. Neal didn't notice him come in; he was standing on an elevated work platform, bent over backwards to detail the wounds on some Saint or other's hands on the ceiling vault. After five years and change, the awkward positions he had to contort into had mostly become physical background noise; he could hold a brush above his head for an eight-hour day with two fifteen-minute breaks and lunch, no problem.  Sometimes even when he didn't get those mandated breaks and lunch.

Still, it meant that his attention was already occupied when a sharp voice called, "You Neal Caffrey?"

Neal finished the brushstroke, then wiped off the brush and looked down.  It wasn't a good idea to take time to chat with people, but he'd rather keep his situational awareness than dance for the approval of a supervisor who didn't approve of anyone.

The man standing down on the floor looked like the distilled essence of federal law enforcement.  Black suit, red tie, and he sounded angry – the kind of angry that was trying not to sound.  The kind of angry that was easy to suicide-by-cop on.  "Who's asking?" Neal asked.

The man reached into his coat, and Neal tensed despite himself.  If he pulled out a gun, there wasn't much he could do – he could hit the deck, use the bottom of the work platform to block a shot, but any halfway-decent pistol would be able to punch through the corrugated metal platform floor, and even if he did want to jump off the thing and make a run for it, the jump would probably fracture his ankle and any halfway-decent assassin would be able to pick him off while he was falling.  But the man didn't come out with a gun, and it had been a few years since anyone seriously wanted him dead, anyway; it was just a badge, with a picture too small to see from thirty feet up in the air.  "Peter Burke, FBI," the man said.  "I'd like to talk to you.  I've cleared it with your supervisor."

Neal did his best not to grimace.  Generally speaking, when the FBI got involved in his life, his life got worse. "You mind if I clean my brushes before I put them down?"

Burke looked at him for a moment, then said "Go ahead." Neal let out a quiet breath; asking permission for things was always a calculated risk, but he didn't want to be responsible for ruining his leaseholder's property any more than he wanted to annoy the FBI. The FBI could just bring him to trial on something and extend his sentence, maybe get him reclassified from civil to institutional service. His leaseholder could really make his life hell.

He cleaned up with the speed of someone who'd long ago learned that speed could make the difference between a pleasant chat and an insubordination mark on his record, then brought the elevated platform down and stepped off, only to be confronted with Burke's outstretched hand.

It took him a moment to realize he was being offered a handshake.

"Mr. Caffrey," Burke said, when he took the proffered hand.

"Special Agent Burke," Neal said, and tried not to be too far on his back foot, physically or metaphorically. He had to wonder what the catch here was; so far, Burke had been treating him suspiciously like he was a citizen, an actual legal person, not a convict on lease. Being with the FBI, Neal expected him to know better.

And, up close, the anger in Burke's voice was there at the corner of his eyes and the set of his mouth, too. This was not a happy man, for all that he was keeping it under his proverbial hat. For whose benefit? Neal had to wonder.

"If you'll come with me," Burke said, and gestured out of the sanctuary and down the hall.

While it went against all of his better judgement, following an authority figure out of a space with witnesses and down an unused hall, his better judgement had never been so reliable at giving him a workable other choice. For one thing, as an FBI agent, Burke was probably armed. For another, Neal was wearing a steel-reinforced tracker that couldn't be cut, picked, slipped, or hacked, and could trace his position down to the nearest three yards.

Yeah, running had never been an option.

He followed Burke to a small meeting room, probably used for some administrative church function when the church wasn't undergoing renovations, and sat down when Burke indicated that he should. Burke sat across the table from him, still with that muted anger. It wasn't helping Neal feel more at ease.

"What can I do for you?" Neal asked, fixing on a helpful, though not oversaccharine, smile. Had to walk a line, here as everywhere: couldn't come across like he resented this conversation. Couldn't come across like he had something to gain.

Burke cleared his throat. "You were caught up in the sweep of Vincent Adler's employees," he said.

Neal smothered a wince. It had been seven years since his conviction, over seven years since his arrest, and he'd hoped that particular bit of infamy would quietly fade from his life. No such luck, apparently. "I was."

"You got a fifteen-hundred point conviction," Burke said.  "That should have been worked off in six years.  But according to your record, in the seven years you've been in the system, you've worked off barely more than four hundred of those points."

Neal kept his smile fixed, and told the roiling anger at the pit of his stomach to leave it for another time.  Talking back to hostile law enforcement never ended well.  "I've always had a problem with leaseholder satisfaction," he said.

Peter gave him a hard look.  "I'll bet.  Is the problem they're not satisfied enough, or they're too satisfied to let you go?"

And Neal's smile melted like it had never been there.

In seven years, he'd never heard someone call out the situation quite that baldly.

"Myrvold acquired your lease at two million dollars," Burke said.  "It's currently valued at over seven.  That, combined with your suspiciously low quarterly assessments, is enough to get Myrvold a nice IRS investigation, but that's not why I'm talking to you." He folded his hands, leaning forward over the table. Instinct told Neal to pull back; learned negotiation skills told him to lean forward. He did neither.  "I've been asked to acquire your lease for the FBI."

There was a lot Neal could have said to that.  So, why are you telling me? might be a good option, as would The FBI wants an art restoration tech?  But he had a feeling he knew the answers to those – Burke was beginning to ring as an abolitionist, and the FBI probably wanted the skills that landed him in the Conditional Citizenship for Criminal Rehabilitation program in the first place.  "The FBI has seven million dollars to toss around on conds?" he asked, instead. Way too blunt, yeah, but it was worth it just to see how Burke would react. Probably.

"The FBI has eminent domain," Burke said, with a kind of dark, unfunny humor to his tone.

Right.  Neal leaned back, letting out a breath and tilting his head at Burke.  Studying his expression.  Burke certainly looked like he found every aspect of the situation unpalatable, which lent a certain credibility to the abolitionist theory. So, that might answer one question.  "What would I be doing for the FBI?"

"Consulting on an investigation," Burke said.  "I can't give you many more details unless you agree."

Agree? Neal wanted to ask.  That was not a word which had had any serious application in his life for the better part of a decade.  "I'm not sure if you know this, Special Agent Burke, but you don't actually need my consent to purchase my lease."

"I know that," Burke all but growled.  "That doesn't mean I'm required to treat you as though you're not a human being.  Look."  He gestured over the table, though probably more to dispel his own unease than to illustrate anything.  "The FBI doesn't require your assistance.  But we believe you'd be an asset, and we can offer you a chance at working off the remainder of your sentence the way this law is supposed to function.  Guaranteed four-year maximum sentence, so long as you don't violate the terms of your lease or commit any new crimes."

Neal swallowed, at that. But he couldn't quite let himself buy it. Freedom was always the carrot they dangled, the light at the end of the tunnel that never seemed to get any closer.

"You'd consult for the FBI," Burke said.  "The Bureau would hold your lease, but I'd be your direct supervisor.  A lot of desk work, paperwork.  Fieldwork as appropriate and necessary.  Typical eight-to-five workday, an hour for lunch, evenings and weekends are your own except when casework demands it – which I can't promise is all that infrequent."  He gave a sidelong grimace, and Neal found himself appreciating that, despite himself. Burke seemed to be talking about his own work life, not just things to be inflicted on a new pet convict.  "Quarterly reviews where you'll actually earn those points toward freedom you've been promised.  Federal holidays."

But still.  Neal raised his eyebrows.  "Four years of paperwork, huh?"

Burke waved his hand back at the church.  "You'd rather be doing this?"

Neal shrugged one shoulder.  "I do have an appreciation for classical art."

Burke chewed on that for a moment. "How'd you like to consult on art-theft cases?"

Neal thought about that, for a moment, then voiced an Oh.  "You're that department of the FBI."  Really, what had he expected? Not that it changed anything, but it was another little detail to help him see the lay of the land. And although the prospect of spending for years doing paperwork about stolen art sounded slightly less soul-killing than the prospect of spending four years doing paperwork on anything else, here at least he got to put a brush in his hand.

But as with most things, there wasn't much of a choice to consider.

He could take the FBI's deal and trust that Peter Burke was good for his word... or he could keep scraping by on the minimum points Myrvold had to award him not to be deemed "insufficient to oversee the subject's rehabilitation" and having his lease revoked back into the Department of Corrections' auction pool.  At this rate, it'd be twenty years before he was out.  Twenty years of back-spasming, muscle-cramping labor, of sleeping in bunk beds with guards at the door, of counting his blessings that Myrvold wasn't as bad as he could have been. Had yet to assault any of his leasees, male or female. Varied the menu. Gave them most weekends off. No, he wasn't the worst by a long shot; his corruption was the basic, everyday kind of corruption of a man doing what he could not to give up his power.

And that was assuming Myrvold got through the IRS thing okay, with a slap on the wrist the way most leaseholders came out. Hell, if things went bad there, his lease went back to the DoC auctions anyway, and god knew where he'd end up there.

But even without that threat, if he were to be honest with himself, freedom was a hell of a carrot. He'd always run toward that light.

"Freedom of association?" he asked.

"Anyone not criminal or inciting you to criminal acts," Burke said, without appearing to think about it at all.

That cinched it, as he felt his heart do something he'd hoped to have trained out of it.  Myrvold wasn't much for association, and it had been seven years since he'd had any real contact with some of his closest friends – and, yeah not criminal might be stretching it, but what Burke didn't know.  And it was an open question whether or not any of them were still full citizens, or whether they'd been sucked into the vicious undertow of conditional citizenship like him, but he could hope.

And there was only one way to know.

He made himself grin, an easy, confident grin like he wasn't stepping out of a frypan into a space where god knew whether or not there was a fire. "Where do I sign?"

Which was a joke, of course.  He wasn't legally allowed to sign much of anything.

Comments

[squeemu]

...>_>

<_< I am maybe more interested in this fic than I want to be. Damn you, magi.

[magibrain]

SO FAR I'VE DISCOVERED THAT EVERY IMPLICATION IN IT IS DEPRESSING.

...well, "discovered"; I mean, I knew when I was setting up an economy based on slavery that everything was going to suck. And then I started prodding at psychological effects, like how after seven years Neal does not entirely grok how to make choices for himself any more; or how if someone picks a fight with him he's disinclined to bring up the fight even to the point of, like, getting medical care for a fractured rib, because if something can be construed as a convict on lease assaulting a full citizen, his observations say it will be construed that way, even if the reality was self-defense; or how Neal is intensely uneasy being left unsupervised with Elizabeth for a while, because wow the ways in which you don't want to be left alone with your direct supervisor's wife if there isn't an incontestable body of evidence that you're not trying anything at the ready.

And then at some point, when he's feeling secure enough to have this kind of (potentially interpretable as hostile) conversation with Peter, he asks what a staunch abolitionist is doing in law enforcement, where basically the only sentencing option for most crimes is to shunt people off into the CCCR nightmare. And Peter's answer is more or less that, yeah, this system at times seems irreparably broken, but it's the only one they've got. And when it comes down to it, once a crime's been committed, you have the option of doing wrong by the criminals by subjecting them to a justice system which is patently unfair, or doing wrong by the victims by sparing the criminals the rod. And when it comes down to that, even when it's a great sucking moral mess, he more moral (or less-evil) option is still pretty clear-cut.

[sholio]

Now, see, THIS is the kind of slavefic I'd read in a heartbeat. :D :D :D

I love how you've handled them here, Peter in particular -- especially with the elaboration in the above comment; I can totally see him taking this approach to both law enforcement and slavery in the world in which he lives. (Peter, love him though I do, is definitely a "work within the system even if you know it's flawed" kind of person; he's a "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" type moderate, not the sort of person who agitates for change, generally. But then there's this thing he does where he seems to try to use the influence that he has to form this little safe space around and under him -- like, in canon, it's clear that Diana feels comfortable to be openly out at work with Peter as her boss, and it's also clear that he's not going to tolerate Neal being mistreated on his watch, even by someone who has a legal right to do so, a la Rice or Kramer.)

And I'm also really intrigued by how subtly different Neal is, under these different circumstances -- not at all the ridiculous "being a slave makes you naturally submissive" thing that fandom does in slave AUs all too often (which I HATE HATE HATE LIKE BURNING) but a more nuanced reflection of the habits he's had to pick up in order to survive under the circumstances: the ways in which he can and cannot be like canon Neal. (I suppose that I still would expect Neal to be doing more escape planning and rebelling in small ways, but he also got nabbed a lot earlier in his criminal career, before he had time to pick up a lot of the habits that had become entrenched by the time Peter caught him in canon, so he wasn't quite the Neal we know even when he was captured here.)

tl;dr I would love to read more in this 'verse!

[magibrain]

Poking at how various circumstances emerge from this mess and how characters are shifted around by those is completely fascinating, even when I'm theoretically in the driver's seat. (I've learned that I'm rarely if ever actually in the driver's seat of these things. Or, if I am, the steering is crummy and the acceleration is wonky and there are no brakes.)

One of the fun things I've discovered is that this Peter is politically active, but mostly in a 'write-your-congressman' sort of way; he finds the whole CCCR thing deeply intolerable, and has to tolerate it because it's what there is. But that sort of quietly fixing-the-rules-by-the-rules is how he knows June, and in this universe, he's the one who gets Neal settled in with June, because she's also an abolitionist, because, well, you can just imagine what happened to Byron under this plan.

(Okay, in reality, he probably just made sure that she was one of the people offering contract bids, because I'm sure that the FBI has some kind of contractor requirement that passes everything through a bid system. But June is independently wealthy and can undercut the big industrial Conditional Citizen housing companies and give her tenants a decent place to stay if she wants to.)

And Neal, while he's still maneuvering to the best of his ability to put himself in the best possible position, not only has to deal with less experience on his own/on the wrong side of the law, but also with a society which has a lot more resources dedicated to securing and tracking convicts and a lot more cultural awareness of and resistance to people trying to skip on their sentence. (Hence the much more difficult-to-cut trackers, and the fact that with the GPS in there, even something like an underground railroad would have a much harder time helping anyone. And there's probably some kind of national hotline, with rewards and everything (funded by the labor of increased CCCR points applied for an escape attempt?) for information leading to the recapture of escaped slaves leasees. It's just such an American institution that unless you can get into Canada, or something, you're not going to have a lot of luck. ...and wow, I hadn't thought of needing to clarify Canada's stance on this, but I guess I need to figure that out, now.)

Add to that the fact that someone like Myrvold can pretty much stick leased convicts into dormitories at night, have private security load them into vans and transport them to a work site during the day, then have those same private security ship them back to the dormitories at the end of the day and guard all the exits, and not be under any obligation to provide anything so much as newpapers, TV or internet, the effect is that you can end up completely isolated from the outside world and under constant surveillance, and the close quarters of dormitory living doesn't even afford as much anonymity as an individual prison cell.

Which leads to an interesting later snippet I've been poking at, wherein Neal is sneaking around June's house one night being very careful not to be seen or heard, and ends up overhearing a conversation between June and Peter, about him. June wants to see if Neal would be eventually amenable to sitting down with a reporter who might be doing a piece on abuses of the points system, because "[...]he's articulate, photogenic, personable, when he lets himself be. And he's received exactly the kind of treatment we're talking about. With a little media training, he could have the whole nation eating out of his hand. He could be a gamechanger." (June in this 'verse seems to be one hell of a media-savvy lady.) And Peter doesn't even want to ask Neal if he'd be amenable, because "I'm his direct supervisor, and you're handling his lodging. I think that no matter how we phrase it, it's going to come across as coercion." And goes on to say that "[...]he's spent a lot of time with the illusion of choice. I can tell when we offer him one, sometimes, he's still looking for the right answer to satisfy me, not thinking critically about the problem. I'm not even sure he knows he's doing it."

Which is more or less when Neal decides that he's heard more than enough of this conversation, and sneaks back up to the penthouse, where he gets to really pissed-off, because okay, yeah, he does that. And he's usually aware of what he's doing, but there's also the thing where a lot of it is conditioned response. If he isn't thinking, that is the behavior that slips out automatically, because that's the behavior that has served him well thus far.

And:

That was one of the things they said – career criminals, by which they meant lifelong leasees, got to watch their critical thinking skills deteriorate; they became domesticated, unsuited to making their own decisions, unsuited for anything but a life under the stewardship and careful direction of their leaseholders. It was propaganda, but everything about conds was propaganda. Peter and June were sitting at the table downstairs deciding whether or not to buy into that propaganda or offer him the choice to make propaganda of his own.

–and besides, if he didn't know how to make his own choices, whose fault was that, exactly? And did Peter intend to fix it by making sure he didn't have choices to make?

And perhaps one of the most painful bits of that entire little knot is that he gets to go up to his apartment and quietly bottle up all the anger (and resolve not to talk about it, because admitting that he was eavesdropping seems like a bad idea) and lock it in the little root cellar in the back of his head, so that he can put on a pleasant, agreeable face for when he has to interact with people again. Because for seven years, there has not been a safe way for him to express or externalize anger.

(...one of these days he's going to blow up at Peter, and damn, that'll be something. He'll probably end up having the Neal Caffrey version of an anxiety attack, while Peter gets to figure out how he's supposed to communicate that, yes, okay, he's pissed too, but not in the way that's going to get Neal reclassified as a violent criminal or extend his sentence or anything. And Elizabeth will probably see it as a breakthrough and bake them a cake. A coffeecake. For their perfectly-routine-totally-not-celebrating-a-breakthrough-or-providing-emotional-support-and-aftercare workin'-on-a-case-at-the-Burkes'-house brunch.)

[sholio]

and wow, I hadn't thought of needing to clarify Canada's stance on this, but I guess I need to figure that out, now

Mmmm, POINT. You know, I can easily see this particular form of slavery being socially acceptable not just in the US but in most Western countries under the justification that people only get it because they've done something to deserve it. (I mean, look at the inequalities that otherwise decent people are willing to condone in the criminal justice system we already have!) So I could imagine that Canada either having something similar itself, or extraditing escaped criminals back to the US. New York is so close to Canada that it seems like Neal, with his penchant for escape, would have a lot more options if it's a possibility than if it's not.

Anyway ... ouch. But also, yes. One thing I've noticed in my own AUs is how, if you change the amount of choice/control that Neal has in his situation, it also changes the overall dynamic between him and Peter -- that is, in canon, it's somewhat out of his hands, but he still has a lot of options (including escape), and the idea was his in the first place. Putting him in a situation where he really CAN'T get away, or where Peter has more direct control over him than he does in canon, makes it necessary to write a version of Peter who uses a lighter hand than canon!Peter can get away with, where they're on more equal footing.

On the basis of the way people often write the Neal-Peter dynamic in fic, I feel as if some people in fandom don't realize that Neal has quite as much leverage as he actually does in canon. The anklet deal was his idea, and escape is always a possibility -- in 2x01, for example, Neal seems to be weighing it as a valid alternative to going back on the anklet. And as we saw in 3x16/4x01, he can actually escape anytime he wants. And, even though Peter can be invasive and controlling at times, he mostly allows Neal a lot of personal freedom as far as the ability to associate with whoever he wants and spend his leisure time in his own way. (Even in the pilot, when he basically has NO reason to trust Neal and every reason not to, he doesn't try to force Neal out of June's, or exert control over who Neal talks to on his own time.)

But in AUs where Neal either can't get away, or Peter is able to control or surveil him more directly, it takes a lighter touch to keep Peter from coming across as a bullying dick. Which is something I like about "your" Peter and Neal in this -- that is, I can see that AU!Peter is aware of his position of power regarding Neal, even if he doesn't quite know how to deal with it, or perhaps doesn't appreciate the impact it has.

[magibrain]

[Mmmm, POINT. You know, I can easily see this particular form of slavery being socially acceptable not just in the US but in most Western countries under the justification that people only get it because they've done something to deserve it. (I mean, look at the inequalities that otherwise decent people are willing to condone in the criminal justice system we already have!)]

And, really, I could see a lot of people arguing that this is a more humane system than the prison systems you see in, like, say, Russia*. After all, people in the CCCR program aren't just tossed in a cell and left to rot; they're given careful supervision (there are all sorts of requirements you have to be able to meet in order to lease convict labor) and actual real-life work experience, they're not totally cut off from society (theoretically, though in reality they often are), and they actually pay back their debt to society instead of just being warehoused off the streets. It would be interesting to play with having good people (possibly even people on the White Collar team) who basically believe that people exploit the system and that's wrong and needs to be fixed, but the system itself, as it's supposed to work, is basically fine. After all, if you commit a crime, you're going to give up some of the rights and privileges of being a full citizen in whatever justice system you look at, and this is basically just community service on steroids, right?

*Discovery: I don't know how to google for information on what country has a prison system most similar to the United States'. My first instincts on search strings just led me to a lot of pages on the US prison system.

CCCR!Neal gets a lot of narrative milage out of the fact that Peter doesn't really know what he's doing, here. For one thing, as such a staunch abolitionist, Peter has had very little contact with people in the system, and less with the actual business aspect of leasing convict labor. So he'll do things like forget, when he's transferring Neal from Myrvold's dormitories to June's place, that all of Neal's clothing is technically owned by Myrvold, and the only thing he has to wear is the orange Department of Corrections jumpsuit that's checked out specifically to him for the duration of his sentence. And Neal will just carefully not say anything, and watch it sink in. Because abolitionists can get kinda ivory-tower: They could debate policy, morality and constitutionality all day, and forget to factor in that newly-acquired convict labor might need things like clothing provided for them.

I have a feeling that so much of this, at least in the early parts, is Neal working all of the minimal angles he's given, and Peter stumbling around and occasionally stubbing his toes on things, trying to figure out how to make this work. And occasionally doing the absolute wrong thing, and often being far nicer than he has any obligation to be, in ways that Neal can't let himself entirely trust.

[sholio]

I think I'm still having a little trouble seeing Neal being this docile, though, despite the changed circumstances. And this is the point I run into with a LOT of slavefic, because ... people aren't like that. I mean, I would expect at the very least an extensive black market dealing in commodities that are hard for CCCR people to get for themselves ... like you have in actual prison -- except more so, because they actually have quite a bit more mobility and freedom than people locked in cells. Not anywhere near as much as free citizens, of course, but it's really a lot more like a halfway house plus tracking anklet than like being behind prison walls. And Neal would be exactly the sort of person who'd get hooked into that kind of system if he could. And I would expect communication between CCCR people would be a big thing, too, with message drops and burn phones and so forth, as well as CCCR'd people snatching every possible bit of advantage that they can get -- people in prison and people under oppressive regimes are SO creative and clever about finding hiding places for things and making their own items to make up for the things they can't get, I would expect it to be likewise in this 'verse too.

I TOTALLY agree about the ivory-tower abolitionist thing, and it makes lots of sense to me that this is something that's going to come up a lot, with Peter not having thought about the day-to-day realities of being a convict laborer, and Neal just letting Peter go ahead and bash his nose on the glass wall repeatedly. I'd also expect Neal to take advantage of Peter's inexperience in every way possible, possibly even trying to game Peter's understanding of the rules to get more free time and perks for himself.

... and, ha, I hope this doesn't come across as me trying to write your fic for you. *facepalm* I guess it's a pet peeve for me with a lot of slavefic that people under servitude are written in a way that implies they stop acting like people -- they stop wanting things, they stop trying to get things, they stop seeking to better themselves and trying to find a way out -- and people aren't like that. I mean, individual people, yes, but most TV protagonists aren't passive people by nature, and you need to work really hard to sell me on the idea that they would suddenly become passive if they had some of their choices taken away. We have (tragically) SO much evidence from real-world history, from many countries, all the way up to the present day, of the many many ways that people hang onto their dignity and their relationships and their self-ness in those circumstances, all the ingenious ways they find of communicating with each other and sneaking messages to the outside world. And canon!Neal held onto his selfness through four years of prison. I can see him folding under depression and hopelessness if he really doesn't believe there's a way out, though.

[magibrain]

Heh. I'm trying not to have Neal actually be passive, throughout this – a lot more cautious about testing the waters before he takes a step, and less inclined to respond to things with sarcastic remarks and pointed observations, definitely, but still with an eye on his options. (He does contact Mozzie pretty much the moment the option becomes available, and gets Mozzie in on the Adler thing by doing a neat end-run via implication and insinuation around the NDA he's under, and starts his own investigation into this universe's Kate, who's having her own problems. And he gets to be a lot more himself around Mozzie, too.)

Really, what I'm angling for is more of the learned/affected submission you see in some black communities, where kids grow up knowing that you're very polite and agreeable to cops and such because otherwise they will mace you, tase you or arrest you for the crime of walking around being black, while you can drop the act when you're at home/not dealing with them – combined with a sort of "home" environment where it's possible to get things but more difficult to keep them or continue getting them through the same channels, because Myrvold incentivizes a kind of everyone-informs-on-everyone atmosphere and tends to fire guards who might facilitate this sort of thing. (I have it that there's a lot of variation on CCCR housing arrangements – you have big corporations who rent out basic accommodations in more classically prison-like lodgings, and you have people like June who more or less just hire security to meet the program's security requirements and lodge people in a private residence, and you have people like Myrvold who build their own little panopticons and refine their own systems of controls, etc.)

...which may or may not be (a. communicated well, or (b. plausible! I have not dedicated a lot of study to any of these things, and so far this is a lot of rough sketching based on little more than intuition and vague riffing on canon. <_< But, you know, it's in its early stages yet. There's plenty of time for revision.

[sholio]

*nods* This makes a lot of sense to me, especially the dichotomy between public/private -- behavior in front of authority vs. behavior in a safe environment (which he hasn't really had). Actually, a really interesting thing now that I think about it is that Neal in canon, while he's technically a felon, isn't really disadvantaged by it in any major way, and he still acts with, I guess, the unconscious knowledge that he can speak and be listened to. Whereas in this 'verse he's been stripped of a lot of the privilege that accrues to him from being a handsome, well-dressed white male in canon, and is having to act accordingly.

"Cautious and weighing the options" seems like a plausible response for Neal in this situation.

(Also, I hope I'm not being too critical? Mostly it's just that you've really gotten me thinking! :D And I don't really know anything about institutional systems of inequality other than just reading a lot, so I'm basically working off theoretical knowledge rather than firsthand knowledge.)

[magibrain]

(Thinking is always welcome! :D I'm always glad to toss around ideas and plug up plotholes and characterization squooginess. And is probably also evident, I can babble about braintics for a long time.)

One of the things I'm having a lot of fun with is Neal's reaction to his wardrobe; Peter pretty much drives Neal to June's to get him situated, and says he can pic up actual clothes for him, and June says oh, no, he looks like he might fit into some of Byron's old things, and if those don't work, she can have one of her people go fetch things, and Peter should go and not be horribly late for dinner with Elizabeth. You know, just normally late.

So Neal gets the run of Byron's suits, which puts him in a complicated position. On the one hand, they're fantastic social camouflage – they're clearly clothes that put him into a certain assumed class and would get him all the attendant respect of that. Among people who don't know he's a Conditional Citizen. Among people who do, well, let's just say that there are certain social expectations about things which conds should and should not be enjoying as they serve out their sentence, and wandering around in bespoke suits (even if they are hand-me-down bespoke suits) and silk ties is apt to generate a lot of hostility if people can identify him as a cond.

...that quandary is sharpened a little by the fact that obscure governmental regulations mean that when Neal gets his lease seized by the FBI, the responsibility for tracking him moves from the Department of Corrections to the US Marshals, so the usual tracker (which is a big, ugly grey kludge which necessarily fits under most pant legs, because otherwise how would you dress, but does tend to leave noticeable bulges) gets replaced by a next-generation model with a more accurate GPS which looks more or less like the tracker from the series, S2 and on. So it actually can slip under a trouser leg unobtrusively, and might not be something which people would immediately connect to the public image of a CCCR shackle. So he gets to obliterate a lot of the friction he deals with in everyday interactions... in exchange for setting himself a lot more friction to overcome at work, and anytime he meets someone in a professional capacity where they know he's in the system.

In the beginning the choice is more or less made for him, because that's what he's provided, but as he does get the opportunity to get different clothes if he feels the need to, he eventually decides that he can work with that tradeoff. In large part because Peter has enough weight in the department that people who have a problem with Neal are going to have that sentiment mediated through Peter. And Peter seems to regard this with a kind of Well, this is what happens when you leave someone alone with June resignation, and doesn't have so much of his pilot-episode snippiness about how things are earned in the real world. (He still finds it ridiculous, but it's a different kind of ridiculous.) (It is really fun, playing with Peter and June being friends before Neal meets either one of them.)

[yetregressing]

Have I mentioned I love your brain? Because I do.

[magibrain]

Hah.

...I feel like I was going to quiz you on historical stuff that could be messed with to have made this sort of current society plausible, but I can't remember any of the specific questions I was going to ask.

[thebestman]

and now i'm back here re-reading all of this and going HEY DID YOU EVER WRITE MORE OF THIS FIC OR DO I HAVE TO JUST IMAGINE IT BC THIS IS AWESOME.

I remember it being awesome over the summer and it's still awesome now.

[magibrain]

I did, actually! It's up to about 19,000 words, and I keep hoping to work it up into something postable, it's just that... I have scaffolding for eight chapters all neatly lined up in a row at the beginning, and then scaffolding for the very last chapter in season one, and I have no idea what goes in the middle. Because I am good at this.

...do you actually watch White Collar? XD Was I aware of this? Do I just have the worst memory ever?

[thebestman]

/chinhands I WILL GLADLY TRY TO HELP YOU FILL OUT THE MIDDLE (badly) BY READING WHAT YOU'VE GOT? OuO?

lol I'm so bad at plot don't look at me.

Yeah, I do! Well, did. I watched s1 and half-to-all of s2? And then fell hella behind and haven't caught up? ...wait, the first four seasons are on Netflix, I SHOULD WATCH THOSE.

(much like Castle, it was a show I adored but failed at watching every week, and then despaired of catching up on. ...I should catch up on Castle, too. At least I'm through like s3 of Castle...)

[magibrain]

Oho!

Well, you know me and how I can never just adore a show, but I'm invested in it enough to fic a whole slew of fic for it! (I can also rant for days about stuff that annoys me, but come on, this is me.) I came into it while, I think, seasons 1-3 were on Netflix and basically binged my way through it, because I don't think I've actually caught TV shows on air when they've aired since, um... highschool? But yes. ♥ White Collar. ♥ Diana.

And, hah, the slavefic is actually just an AUified version of season 1 and 2's events, so I have a fairly good idea of what the macro-level plot needs to be. It's just the little scene-level stuff that's all up in the air right now. If you wanted to look at it, I could compile the document and send it your way, but (again, 'cause this is me) it's a whole bunch of disconnected bits and bobs with sentence fragments just hanging out and scenes that are entirely skeletal and eighty bajillion places where I just couldn't be assed to write in dialogue tags and reactions and so the conversations are interrupted every line with >s. But if you really wanted 19k words of chewed-up fic...

[thebestman]

Please, I've read some of your more... esoteric DP fics. I can handle a plot that's less full of time travel and weird psychological mind fuckery. ;)

[magibrain]

Yeah, but weren't those usually complete? XD

Aight, you asked for it. I'll send you today's backup file. :P

[thebestman]

Not all of them! :D

[magibrain]

Aight then! (See also: my horrible memory. XD )