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magibrainTitle: The Wind Will Ruin Everything – (ii) NYC to prison
Index Post: [Fic][White Collar] The Wind Will Ruin Everything - Index
(ii) NYC to prison
Sitting in the bus terminal with the sun too hot on his shoulders, gum wrappers idly blowing across the concrete floor, waiting on the line that'd take him back to New York, he told himself Come on. It's not like it was really home, anyway. He wrapped his hands around a paper cup full of fast-food coffee, too bitter, too sour, and told himself You didn't want to move back in anyway; what's the big deal?
He had money, he had ID, he had skills and resources no one could take away from him; it wasn't like he was homeless, wasn't like he didn't know how to find a place to sleep that evening. Hell, he could get mugged for everything he had, and he'd still probably come out okay before too long. Pick a few pockets, find a place to shoot some billiards. What had he lost?
He told himself, No looking back, this time.
It was a long time before he found those last blue flowers in a botanical garden, with a little steel plaque that named them forget-me-nots.
It was no time at all before he realized that he hadn't so much left home as given home half a chance to leave him. And that, it had taken with gusto.
-
New York City didn't seem to give a damn if he came or went, and the first motel he'd stayed in was booked full the second time he tried it – though that was no great loss. By sunset he was flopped on his stomach on a bed somewhere in the Lower East Side, with a carton of Chinese take-out at his elbow, trying to figure out how to purge the name Bennet from the documents the Marshals had sent him. (Not a hero, a murderer, and Neal, not Danny, would be damned if he was going to walk around with that name on his back. He'd take the name of the person who lied to him for most of his life before that. née Caffrey, said the birth certificate, not Brooks, so that would do.)
He thought through the process, read everything he could get his hands on about how names changed, discarded a dozen ideas, and eventually came up with a plan.
The weak point of most systems was their human operators, and a clerk entering data in a DMV in Harlem wasn't going to spend a lot of time chasing down records in St. Louis. He called the St. Louis circuit court and convinced a clerk he was doing a school project on some famous St. Louis resident who'd changed her name, then sweet-talked the guy into sending him a copy of the name change order for a visual aid. Once he got that, it wasn't hard to put together his own. No judge had ever signed off on it, no record of it existed back in Missouri, but it looked official enough.
Neal Bennet had already been casually blotted from existence once, and Danny Brooks had vanished back into the nothing from which he'd been imagined.
Maybe Neal Caffrey could do better.
-
Neal Caffrey's first acts were scrambling to stay afloat. Navigating New York's nightmare housing market, putting together fake paystubs and references, and making sure he was bringing home enough take to pay for hotel rooms and printing equipment and eventually a storage unit to store that in, for cab fare and food and tickets to museums and shows so he could drown out any last thoughts about St. Louis. Keeping constantly, outrageously busy was the only way he kept himself sane.
Later he wasn't able to put his finger on how he'd escalated from pay stubs to bonds, from minor cons in the park to getting dragged into some other guy's plan to bilk several billion dollars from a famous fund manager, any more than he could put his finger on the escalation from making his own bus passes to faking a name change. It always seemed like the natural next step, either in his day-to-day survival or in creating a Neal Caffrey who wasn't a Bennet or a Brooks. But, hey, it worked, and after a few months it was a comfortable routine. Yeah, it bore no resemblance to what he'd had in St. Louis, but that was kind of the point.
And then there was the matter of the FBI agent who was investigating him.
Neal was sitting on a secondhand couch in a drafty studio apartment he kept meaning to patch up with caulk or paint or something – couldn't be that hard, could it? – when Mozzie came in with news that Burke had been looking into every bit of mocked-up life that had been attached to the bank records of Neal's cashed bonds. "Fortunately, he doesn't seem to have made the Dan Brooks-Nick Halden connection," he said.
"Well, that's good to know," Neal said. "What about the Neal Caffrey connection?"
"Oh, that one either," Mozzie said, with a dismissive handwave that suggested that, hey, that name wasn't involved in an active con, it'd be no big loss to burn it. "But he did look into that motel on Division Street, and I hear he's been digging up receipts. You, my friend, definitely have an admirer. Fortunately, he doesn't have much to go on."
Mozzie flipped a folded-up piece of paper through the air at him, and Neal caught it and unfolded it while Mozzie went to pour them each some wine. Sure enough, that was a copy of the motel receipt from when he'd come to New York the second time, and hadn't gotten new ID worked up yet. It wasn't much – just his signature on the bottom of a check-in form – and he doubted the name Daniel Brooks was rare enough that it would yield any useful information, but it was still surreal to think of it getting logged into an FBI report somewhere, one assumed alias for a forger whose real identity was unknown.
Well, if they were searching for his real identity, all he could think was Good luck with that.
"You know," he said, "this is the most interest I think anyone's ever taken in my life."
Mozzie gave a short, sharp laugh. "Pray it's the most interest anyone ever does."
Neal looked at him. Mozzie set the wine down in front of him, and while it wouldn't be enough to get him fuzzy-headed – he wasn't quite to the point where he trusted himself to be fuzzy-headed around Mozzie, or, more accurately, where he trusted Mozzie to be around him while he was – but just sitting there it was threatening to make him maudlin, for reasons other than the alcohol. Drinking wine just made him think of Ellen, whose strategy to prevent underage drinking seemed to have been showing him that alcohol wasn't really all that exciting and was better in moderation anyway. She'd just about gotten him to the point where he could see why people drank wine, but he remained convinced that beer was a prank someone had pulled on civilization at some point and civilization had never wised up to the joke.
He hadn't told Mozzie that, but Mozzie seemed determined to finish his education anyway.
"We're putting the cap on the level of personal involvement with my life at the level of the FBI agent chasing me?" Neal asked, because that seemed deeply wrong.
"A good con man is a ghost," Mozzie explained. "He sweeps in, stays only long enough to establish himself for his job, then vanishes, leaving none the wiser."
Neal stared for a moment, trying to work out if that was a quote or not, and decided he didn't care. "God, that's depressing. What happens if you want to have a wife and kids some day?"
"Uh-uh." Mozzie didn't even hesitate. "No way. That sort of life is just another con, Neal."
"Having a family and a life is a con?"
"This is a life." Mozzie's finger plunked down on the intel he'd brought in, the pile of collected tipoffs and rumors that Mozzie spent his days collecting so that Neal could know everything, could feed Adler enough to gain his trust. The pile would be burned after Neal went to sleep, and its ashes probably added to the fertilizer regimen for the collection of variously-legal plants Mozzie had given himself stewardship of in various parts of the city.
Mozzie's behavior toward a lot of things was a little suspect.
"Guys like us don't get picket fences," he said. "We get priceless antiquities and excitement and intrigue. We change our names and flit from city to city, leaving no trace of ourselves behind. Because as soon as we do, people like your federal stalker catch up to you, and then the only house you get is the big house."
"Maybe if you're good enough–" Neal began.
"It's not for us," Mozzie said, voice like a door slamming. "It's a fairytale, like the rest of the straight and narrow. We're the ones smart enough to see past it."
Neal didn't bring that up again for a while.
-
Nick Halden wasn't designed to prove Mozzie wrong, but that looked like something he was good for.
Nick Halden got a job paying more in a month than Neal Caffrey, Danny Brooks or the short- and infrequently-lived Neal Bennet had ever seen in one place at once. Nick Halden flirted with a girl brighter and sharper than a cut sapphire and accepted suits and tutelage from New York's most spectacular businessman.
Nick Halden got snowed in under his own reticence and confidence and his whole life disappeared around him. So fuck that.
-
Okay, so Neal Caffrey had some work to do, and little chance of changing Mozzie's mind, but he made a good go of it. He and Mozzie and Kate worked well together, and even if Mozzie regarded any romantic feelings with suspicion and mistrust, he did seem to realize that Kate herself was an asset. Eventually.
And that was great – months went by, and he could relax more into this strange little family he'd accrued around himself. Kate, Mozzie and himself, living by their wits in a world that didn't give a damn about them, dancing through the rhythms of the New York days like the city was made for them, in on their jokes, until one day he relaxed too far and tried to live by his wits with Kate.
This was the way the world always ended: not with a bang but with an empty house, or an "I'm not going to Copenhagen," and an angry "You just tried to con me." Just another gut decision.
Afterward, after Kate refused the Copenhagen job, it occurred to him (too late) that he should have asked Mozzie to come. It was a three-man job, and it fell apart between him and Alex; they shouldn't have been stubborn enough to try, but they were both stubborn and now they were paying for it.
But Mozzie hadn't come, hadn't tried to force his way in, hadn't even blinked when Neal had said goodbye. Just told him, "Good. I hate to say 'I told you so,' but maybe this will be good for you. Think of it as a chance to get your head back in the game. The life is the life, Neal, and if you want to succeed..."
They hadn't succeeded, and he left Alex in a French hospital and barely limped away. And when he finally made it home there was no For Sale sign, but Kate was gone.
Mozzie saw nothing notable in the fact.
She hadn't left forget-me-nots and neither had he, but there was always the chance she'd just run and disappeared too well – that maybe if he didn't sell the house and change his name she'd find her way back for pizza, one day. But even as he thought it he knew it was a forced, false parallel. Mozzie had said that FBI Special Agent Peter Burke had better be the one person in the world most invested in Neal's life, and as much as Neal thought that was crap, the world seemed to be on Mozzie's side.
-
Months passed, and months stretched into seasons, and Neal sent up every flare he could think of, trying to get Kate's attention without catching the attention of the FBI. Mozzie vacillated between praising him for the ever-more-elaborate cons he ran and trying to re-orient his priorities for running them.
He returned to New York City. Against Mozzie's advice, of course, though it didn't stop Moz from following him back, hoping to keep him out of too much trouble on Burke's home turf. But chatter had put Kate in the New York City area, and much as Mozzie was twitching to get out the moment they got in, Neal did what he'd become used to doing, whenever Mozzie expressed concern about his obsessive hyperfocus on Kate. He ignored him.
True to Mozzie's prediction, it took Burke no time at all to start hearing rumors that the quickly-becoming-infamous Neal Caffrey was back in town. It only took three days for the first poster to pop up, and the noose started tightening. The only reason it didn't tighten faster was that Burke seemed unconvinced that these rumors had any more truth than any of the dozens they'd sown all across the world.
Mozzie still had safehouses in the city, and one week in, Neal was pouring over the newspapers, just to keep familiar with the lay of the land. Mozzie was getting ready to run some small job out in Queens and Neal was halfway through the classifieds when one ad jumped out at him.
[Lost painting, "Boy with Policewoman", if found, return to–]
He skimmed the address and hit the phone number before his attention hitched, and he went back to read it again. Then he looked up from the newspaper. "Mozzie," he said, heart now beating fast. "Louisville Avenue. Is there a Louisville Avenue in New York City?"
Mozzie's eyes unfocused for a moment, his mind cross-checking against its own encyclopedic knowledge. "No," he said, after a moment. "Why? Should there be?"
Neal shoved the newspaper at him, stabbing his finger at the classified ad. "That address," he said, and Mozzie caught the newspaper and furrowed his brow at it.
"Louisville Avenue," he read. "With the ZIP code for Roosevelt Island. You think you've stumbled onto someone's coded message?"
"It's a code for me," Neal said. "That address. That's where I grew up." In St. Louis.
Mozzie blinked. "Wait, what?"
"I need a drop box," he said. Mozzie gave him a long, odd look.
"...don't you already have several?"
"A new one," Neal said. "A clean one. And a burner phone." He scrambled off the couch, which pushed Mozzie into an answering scramble, meeting him at the door.
"Neal, your name's been in the papers," he said. "People suspect you're here. And, um, 'Boy with Policewoman?' This could be a trap!"
"No one knows about that time of my life," Neal said. "No one knows what street I grew up on, Moz. And if they saw my name in the paper, only – two, maybe three people would put together 'Neal Caffrey' with the person I was then."
And then he was out the door, down the hall, running for the chance at touching a life he'd had, once upon a time.
-
When he came back Mozzie was already out, which was fine with him. He snatched up the paper again and dialed on his new phone, trying not to hope, the air trapped in his chest.
The number rang long enough to sharpen the tension, tighten his hand on the phone, and then cut, suddenly, to an active line. "Hello, who is this?"
Ellen.
She sounded older, but it didn't matter – five, ten, fifteen, fifty years on, and he was sure he'd recognize her voice.
But he couldn't seem to find his own, and flipped the phone closed.
Two hours later, when Mozzie got back in with a bottle of rosé tucked under his elbow, Neal had already paid off a lady who knew a guy at the newspaper who could dig out whoever had placed that ad, and he'd set up by the window where the good light was with a pack of postcard-sized sheets of watercolor paper, and started a quick, impressionistic piece of a red-brick house with flowerboxes in the yard. He couldn't sign it, obviously; couldn't put anything in words that Ellen could identify him by – computers were sorting the mail, these days, and Mozzie insisted that computers were all programmed to inform for the Man. But the house would be enough. It had to be enough.
"That's, er, more domestic than your usual work," Mozzie ventured.
Neal grinned at him like a loon until he backed away.
"This is worrying, Neal," he said. "Worrying. You know that?"
"Can you address this for me when it's dry?" Neal said. "You've got a wider range of handwritings to choose from than I do."
"Sure," Mozzie agreed. "Want any particular handwriting? I recently perfected a very nice J. Robert Oppenheimer."
"Doesn't matter. Anyone legible." He switched brushes, and added a suggestion of a neighbor's dog. The dog had liked Ellen. Maybe it would be nice to see a familiar form.
"Or I could do an Alfred Hitchcock. Always a fan favorite." Mozzie set the rosé on the counter. "Come on, spill. Who is this, and what's going on? Who am I addressing this to?"
"Her name is Ellen," Neal said.
"Ellen," Mozzie repeated. "Old fling? If it gets your mind off Kate–"
"Mozzie. Ew. No." Neal paused with his brush over one of the wells in his palette, so he could shake his head in Mozzie's direction. "She's an old friend. A mentor."
"Ah," Mozzie said. "Should I be jealous?"
Neal gave him a really? look.
"Just asking," Mozzie said.
-
A postcard came back, with a picture of Roosevelt Island and Ellen's familiar, precise cursive. She was avoiding identifying marks, too; it was addressed to the PO Box, not to Danny Brooks or Neal Caffrey, and signed only E., but it was her, unmistakably her.
"You going to visit her?" Mozzie asked, watching Neal's expression as he read and re-read the carefully non-incriminating words. Neal shook his head.
"I don't want to bring her to the attention of the FBI," he said, and was grateful that Mozzie was the sort who'd never question that. And he didn't add and she's probably still being monitored by the US Marshals, because Mozzie didn't need that heart attack, and explaining wasn't something he was over-interested in.
Mozzie sighed, and Neal gave him a questioning look.
"I hate to say it," Mozzie said, "but our window on leaving the city without stuffing you in the trunk of a car is closing. Burke has people keeping an eye out for you at airports, bus, and train stations. The other day, Fiona said she heard a cabbie talking about this hotshot FBI-wanted-list forger who was supposed to be hiding out in the city. A cabbie, Neal."
"Cabbies talk about everything," Neal said. "Hey, I talked to someone, yesterday – said that there had been a few sheets of rare stamps floating around. Kate was good at stamps; can you check it out?
"You're grasping at straws, man."
Neal leaned forward. "Please, Moz."
"It's not going to pay off," Mozzie said. "Look, you can send this 'Ellen' friend the address to a new drop. And maybe it would be best to look for Kate again once the FBI investigation dies down."
"Burke's been looking for me for three years," Neal said. "Do you honestly think the investigation is going to die down?"
Mozzie was silent.
"Everything I need is in New York City, right now," Neal said.
-
It paid off.
Mozzie came back with information on the girl selling stamps, and passed him the tip just as it had been written down for him. Mozzie said it was a trap; Neal had no reason to believe it wasn't a trap, but he went anyway. If Kate wasn't there, well, he was good at running. If she was–
She was.
-
And of course Burke showed up the instant he found Kate again, and Neal couldn't find that surprising. He'd walked into this with his eyes open, and Burke just swaggered in, wearing an off-the-shelf suit and a cat-got-the-cream look, and arrested him.
Neal just let out his breath and shook the man's hand, because he'd known better than to fully trust this too-good luck in the first place, and besides, by this point Burke was as much a part of his life as anyone. In a different week, he might have found that depressing. But despite – rather, because of – Burke's best efforts, Ellen had known to send up a flare for him, and he'd held Kate ever-so-briefly in his arms.
So far as these things went, he'd flown pretty high before his wings had sloughed right off.
-
Neal smiled and sweet-talked through his trial, and scanned the court benches for Kate. (She didn't show up for the first two days. And then she was there, quiet, near the back, a constant fixture with enigmatic eyes. Ellen never appeared, but he hadn't expected her to; people might notice, questions might be asked, and that, that wouldn't be good.) He managed to smile through his sentencing, managed to quip off an "All right, fair enough," before court was dismissed.
Four years.
Right. There was a time when he thought he'd be putting criminals away, like this. That had gotten turned around.
Part of him was happy Ellen wasn't there to see just how turned-around things were.
Neal didn't stand until it looked like the rest of the room was standing, and then motion to the side caught his eye and he turned. Kate was there, eeling through the press of people with the practiced grace of someone who'd learned to get where she wasn't supposed to be, and then he was stepping forward into her and she was wrapping him in a hug and one or the other of them was shaking just enough to be felt, but keeping it under control.
"You bastard," Kate whispered.
He was smiling; he was terrified, trying not to let it show; he'd figure it out. He'd figured this out. "Visit me?"
"You bastard," she repeated again. Then the Court Officer separated them, and led him away.
They passed Burke in the hall, getting a drink from one of the water fountains, and Neal stalled long enough to flash him a smile and say, "Good game."
Burke quirked a bemused smile back at him, and conceded "Well played."
That, Neal expected, would be the end of that. But it had been fun, while it lasted.
Index Post: [Fic][White Collar] The Wind Will Ruin Everything - Index
(ii) NYC to prison
Sitting in the bus terminal with the sun too hot on his shoulders, gum wrappers idly blowing across the concrete floor, waiting on the line that'd take him back to New York, he told himself Come on. It's not like it was really home, anyway. He wrapped his hands around a paper cup full of fast-food coffee, too bitter, too sour, and told himself You didn't want to move back in anyway; what's the big deal?
He had money, he had ID, he had skills and resources no one could take away from him; it wasn't like he was homeless, wasn't like he didn't know how to find a place to sleep that evening. Hell, he could get mugged for everything he had, and he'd still probably come out okay before too long. Pick a few pockets, find a place to shoot some billiards. What had he lost?
He told himself, No looking back, this time.
It was a long time before he found those last blue flowers in a botanical garden, with a little steel plaque that named them forget-me-nots.
It was no time at all before he realized that he hadn't so much left home as given home half a chance to leave him. And that, it had taken with gusto.
-
New York City didn't seem to give a damn if he came or went, and the first motel he'd stayed in was booked full the second time he tried it – though that was no great loss. By sunset he was flopped on his stomach on a bed somewhere in the Lower East Side, with a carton of Chinese take-out at his elbow, trying to figure out how to purge the name Bennet from the documents the Marshals had sent him. (Not a hero, a murderer, and Neal, not Danny, would be damned if he was going to walk around with that name on his back. He'd take the name of the person who lied to him for most of his life before that. née Caffrey, said the birth certificate, not Brooks, so that would do.)
He thought through the process, read everything he could get his hands on about how names changed, discarded a dozen ideas, and eventually came up with a plan.
The weak point of most systems was their human operators, and a clerk entering data in a DMV in Harlem wasn't going to spend a lot of time chasing down records in St. Louis. He called the St. Louis circuit court and convinced a clerk he was doing a school project on some famous St. Louis resident who'd changed her name, then sweet-talked the guy into sending him a copy of the name change order for a visual aid. Once he got that, it wasn't hard to put together his own. No judge had ever signed off on it, no record of it existed back in Missouri, but it looked official enough.
Neal Bennet had already been casually blotted from existence once, and Danny Brooks had vanished back into the nothing from which he'd been imagined.
Maybe Neal Caffrey could do better.
-
Neal Caffrey's first acts were scrambling to stay afloat. Navigating New York's nightmare housing market, putting together fake paystubs and references, and making sure he was bringing home enough take to pay for hotel rooms and printing equipment and eventually a storage unit to store that in, for cab fare and food and tickets to museums and shows so he could drown out any last thoughts about St. Louis. Keeping constantly, outrageously busy was the only way he kept himself sane.
Later he wasn't able to put his finger on how he'd escalated from pay stubs to bonds, from minor cons in the park to getting dragged into some other guy's plan to bilk several billion dollars from a famous fund manager, any more than he could put his finger on the escalation from making his own bus passes to faking a name change. It always seemed like the natural next step, either in his day-to-day survival or in creating a Neal Caffrey who wasn't a Bennet or a Brooks. But, hey, it worked, and after a few months it was a comfortable routine. Yeah, it bore no resemblance to what he'd had in St. Louis, but that was kind of the point.
And then there was the matter of the FBI agent who was investigating him.
Neal was sitting on a secondhand couch in a drafty studio apartment he kept meaning to patch up with caulk or paint or something – couldn't be that hard, could it? – when Mozzie came in with news that Burke had been looking into every bit of mocked-up life that had been attached to the bank records of Neal's cashed bonds. "Fortunately, he doesn't seem to have made the Dan Brooks-Nick Halden connection," he said.
"Well, that's good to know," Neal said. "What about the Neal Caffrey connection?"
"Oh, that one either," Mozzie said, with a dismissive handwave that suggested that, hey, that name wasn't involved in an active con, it'd be no big loss to burn it. "But he did look into that motel on Division Street, and I hear he's been digging up receipts. You, my friend, definitely have an admirer. Fortunately, he doesn't have much to go on."
Mozzie flipped a folded-up piece of paper through the air at him, and Neal caught it and unfolded it while Mozzie went to pour them each some wine. Sure enough, that was a copy of the motel receipt from when he'd come to New York the second time, and hadn't gotten new ID worked up yet. It wasn't much – just his signature on the bottom of a check-in form – and he doubted the name Daniel Brooks was rare enough that it would yield any useful information, but it was still surreal to think of it getting logged into an FBI report somewhere, one assumed alias for a forger whose real identity was unknown.
Well, if they were searching for his real identity, all he could think was Good luck with that.
"You know," he said, "this is the most interest I think anyone's ever taken in my life."
Mozzie gave a short, sharp laugh. "Pray it's the most interest anyone ever does."
Neal looked at him. Mozzie set the wine down in front of him, and while it wouldn't be enough to get him fuzzy-headed – he wasn't quite to the point where he trusted himself to be fuzzy-headed around Mozzie, or, more accurately, where he trusted Mozzie to be around him while he was – but just sitting there it was threatening to make him maudlin, for reasons other than the alcohol. Drinking wine just made him think of Ellen, whose strategy to prevent underage drinking seemed to have been showing him that alcohol wasn't really all that exciting and was better in moderation anyway. She'd just about gotten him to the point where he could see why people drank wine, but he remained convinced that beer was a prank someone had pulled on civilization at some point and civilization had never wised up to the joke.
He hadn't told Mozzie that, but Mozzie seemed determined to finish his education anyway.
"We're putting the cap on the level of personal involvement with my life at the level of the FBI agent chasing me?" Neal asked, because that seemed deeply wrong.
"A good con man is a ghost," Mozzie explained. "He sweeps in, stays only long enough to establish himself for his job, then vanishes, leaving none the wiser."
Neal stared for a moment, trying to work out if that was a quote or not, and decided he didn't care. "God, that's depressing. What happens if you want to have a wife and kids some day?"
"Uh-uh." Mozzie didn't even hesitate. "No way. That sort of life is just another con, Neal."
"Having a family and a life is a con?"
"This is a life." Mozzie's finger plunked down on the intel he'd brought in, the pile of collected tipoffs and rumors that Mozzie spent his days collecting so that Neal could know everything, could feed Adler enough to gain his trust. The pile would be burned after Neal went to sleep, and its ashes probably added to the fertilizer regimen for the collection of variously-legal plants Mozzie had given himself stewardship of in various parts of the city.
Mozzie's behavior toward a lot of things was a little suspect.
"Guys like us don't get picket fences," he said. "We get priceless antiquities and excitement and intrigue. We change our names and flit from city to city, leaving no trace of ourselves behind. Because as soon as we do, people like your federal stalker catch up to you, and then the only house you get is the big house."
"Maybe if you're good enough–" Neal began.
"It's not for us," Mozzie said, voice like a door slamming. "It's a fairytale, like the rest of the straight and narrow. We're the ones smart enough to see past it."
Neal didn't bring that up again for a while.
-
Nick Halden wasn't designed to prove Mozzie wrong, but that looked like something he was good for.
Nick Halden got a job paying more in a month than Neal Caffrey, Danny Brooks or the short- and infrequently-lived Neal Bennet had ever seen in one place at once. Nick Halden flirted with a girl brighter and sharper than a cut sapphire and accepted suits and tutelage from New York's most spectacular businessman.
Nick Halden got snowed in under his own reticence and confidence and his whole life disappeared around him. So fuck that.
-
Okay, so Neal Caffrey had some work to do, and little chance of changing Mozzie's mind, but he made a good go of it. He and Mozzie and Kate worked well together, and even if Mozzie regarded any romantic feelings with suspicion and mistrust, he did seem to realize that Kate herself was an asset. Eventually.
And that was great – months went by, and he could relax more into this strange little family he'd accrued around himself. Kate, Mozzie and himself, living by their wits in a world that didn't give a damn about them, dancing through the rhythms of the New York days like the city was made for them, in on their jokes, until one day he relaxed too far and tried to live by his wits with Kate.
This was the way the world always ended: not with a bang but with an empty house, or an "I'm not going to Copenhagen," and an angry "You just tried to con me." Just another gut decision.
Afterward, after Kate refused the Copenhagen job, it occurred to him (too late) that he should have asked Mozzie to come. It was a three-man job, and it fell apart between him and Alex; they shouldn't have been stubborn enough to try, but they were both stubborn and now they were paying for it.
But Mozzie hadn't come, hadn't tried to force his way in, hadn't even blinked when Neal had said goodbye. Just told him, "Good. I hate to say 'I told you so,' but maybe this will be good for you. Think of it as a chance to get your head back in the game. The life is the life, Neal, and if you want to succeed..."
They hadn't succeeded, and he left Alex in a French hospital and barely limped away. And when he finally made it home there was no For Sale sign, but Kate was gone.
Mozzie saw nothing notable in the fact.
She hadn't left forget-me-nots and neither had he, but there was always the chance she'd just run and disappeared too well – that maybe if he didn't sell the house and change his name she'd find her way back for pizza, one day. But even as he thought it he knew it was a forced, false parallel. Mozzie had said that FBI Special Agent Peter Burke had better be the one person in the world most invested in Neal's life, and as much as Neal thought that was crap, the world seemed to be on Mozzie's side.
-
Months passed, and months stretched into seasons, and Neal sent up every flare he could think of, trying to get Kate's attention without catching the attention of the FBI. Mozzie vacillated between praising him for the ever-more-elaborate cons he ran and trying to re-orient his priorities for running them.
He returned to New York City. Against Mozzie's advice, of course, though it didn't stop Moz from following him back, hoping to keep him out of too much trouble on Burke's home turf. But chatter had put Kate in the New York City area, and much as Mozzie was twitching to get out the moment they got in, Neal did what he'd become used to doing, whenever Mozzie expressed concern about his obsessive hyperfocus on Kate. He ignored him.
True to Mozzie's prediction, it took Burke no time at all to start hearing rumors that the quickly-becoming-infamous Neal Caffrey was back in town. It only took three days for the first poster to pop up, and the noose started tightening. The only reason it didn't tighten faster was that Burke seemed unconvinced that these rumors had any more truth than any of the dozens they'd sown all across the world.
Mozzie still had safehouses in the city, and one week in, Neal was pouring over the newspapers, just to keep familiar with the lay of the land. Mozzie was getting ready to run some small job out in Queens and Neal was halfway through the classifieds when one ad jumped out at him.
[Lost painting, "Boy with Policewoman", if found, return to–]
He skimmed the address and hit the phone number before his attention hitched, and he went back to read it again. Then he looked up from the newspaper. "Mozzie," he said, heart now beating fast. "Louisville Avenue. Is there a Louisville Avenue in New York City?"
Mozzie's eyes unfocused for a moment, his mind cross-checking against its own encyclopedic knowledge. "No," he said, after a moment. "Why? Should there be?"
Neal shoved the newspaper at him, stabbing his finger at the classified ad. "That address," he said, and Mozzie caught the newspaper and furrowed his brow at it.
"Louisville Avenue," he read. "With the ZIP code for Roosevelt Island. You think you've stumbled onto someone's coded message?"
"It's a code for me," Neal said. "That address. That's where I grew up." In St. Louis.
Mozzie blinked. "Wait, what?"
"I need a drop box," he said. Mozzie gave him a long, odd look.
"...don't you already have several?"
"A new one," Neal said. "A clean one. And a burner phone." He scrambled off the couch, which pushed Mozzie into an answering scramble, meeting him at the door.
"Neal, your name's been in the papers," he said. "People suspect you're here. And, um, 'Boy with Policewoman?' This could be a trap!"
"No one knows about that time of my life," Neal said. "No one knows what street I grew up on, Moz. And if they saw my name in the paper, only – two, maybe three people would put together 'Neal Caffrey' with the person I was then."
And then he was out the door, down the hall, running for the chance at touching a life he'd had, once upon a time.
-
When he came back Mozzie was already out, which was fine with him. He snatched up the paper again and dialed on his new phone, trying not to hope, the air trapped in his chest.
The number rang long enough to sharpen the tension, tighten his hand on the phone, and then cut, suddenly, to an active line. "Hello, who is this?"
Ellen.
She sounded older, but it didn't matter – five, ten, fifteen, fifty years on, and he was sure he'd recognize her voice.
But he couldn't seem to find his own, and flipped the phone closed.
Two hours later, when Mozzie got back in with a bottle of rosé tucked under his elbow, Neal had already paid off a lady who knew a guy at the newspaper who could dig out whoever had placed that ad, and he'd set up by the window where the good light was with a pack of postcard-sized sheets of watercolor paper, and started a quick, impressionistic piece of a red-brick house with flowerboxes in the yard. He couldn't sign it, obviously; couldn't put anything in words that Ellen could identify him by – computers were sorting the mail, these days, and Mozzie insisted that computers were all programmed to inform for the Man. But the house would be enough. It had to be enough.
"That's, er, more domestic than your usual work," Mozzie ventured.
Neal grinned at him like a loon until he backed away.
"This is worrying, Neal," he said. "Worrying. You know that?"
"Can you address this for me when it's dry?" Neal said. "You've got a wider range of handwritings to choose from than I do."
"Sure," Mozzie agreed. "Want any particular handwriting? I recently perfected a very nice J. Robert Oppenheimer."
"Doesn't matter. Anyone legible." He switched brushes, and added a suggestion of a neighbor's dog. The dog had liked Ellen. Maybe it would be nice to see a familiar form.
"Or I could do an Alfred Hitchcock. Always a fan favorite." Mozzie set the rosé on the counter. "Come on, spill. Who is this, and what's going on? Who am I addressing this to?"
"Her name is Ellen," Neal said.
"Ellen," Mozzie repeated. "Old fling? If it gets your mind off Kate–"
"Mozzie. Ew. No." Neal paused with his brush over one of the wells in his palette, so he could shake his head in Mozzie's direction. "She's an old friend. A mentor."
"Ah," Mozzie said. "Should I be jealous?"
Neal gave him a really? look.
"Just asking," Mozzie said.
-
A postcard came back, with a picture of Roosevelt Island and Ellen's familiar, precise cursive. She was avoiding identifying marks, too; it was addressed to the PO Box, not to Danny Brooks or Neal Caffrey, and signed only E., but it was her, unmistakably her.
"You going to visit her?" Mozzie asked, watching Neal's expression as he read and re-read the carefully non-incriminating words. Neal shook his head.
"I don't want to bring her to the attention of the FBI," he said, and was grateful that Mozzie was the sort who'd never question that. And he didn't add and she's probably still being monitored by the US Marshals, because Mozzie didn't need that heart attack, and explaining wasn't something he was over-interested in.
Mozzie sighed, and Neal gave him a questioning look.
"I hate to say it," Mozzie said, "but our window on leaving the city without stuffing you in the trunk of a car is closing. Burke has people keeping an eye out for you at airports, bus, and train stations. The other day, Fiona said she heard a cabbie talking about this hotshot FBI-wanted-list forger who was supposed to be hiding out in the city. A cabbie, Neal."
"Cabbies talk about everything," Neal said. "Hey, I talked to someone, yesterday – said that there had been a few sheets of rare stamps floating around. Kate was good at stamps; can you check it out?
"You're grasping at straws, man."
Neal leaned forward. "Please, Moz."
"It's not going to pay off," Mozzie said. "Look, you can send this 'Ellen' friend the address to a new drop. And maybe it would be best to look for Kate again once the FBI investigation dies down."
"Burke's been looking for me for three years," Neal said. "Do you honestly think the investigation is going to die down?"
Mozzie was silent.
"Everything I need is in New York City, right now," Neal said.
-
It paid off.
Mozzie came back with information on the girl selling stamps, and passed him the tip just as it had been written down for him. Mozzie said it was a trap; Neal had no reason to believe it wasn't a trap, but he went anyway. If Kate wasn't there, well, he was good at running. If she was–
She was.
-
And of course Burke showed up the instant he found Kate again, and Neal couldn't find that surprising. He'd walked into this with his eyes open, and Burke just swaggered in, wearing an off-the-shelf suit and a cat-got-the-cream look, and arrested him.
Neal just let out his breath and shook the man's hand, because he'd known better than to fully trust this too-good luck in the first place, and besides, by this point Burke was as much a part of his life as anyone. In a different week, he might have found that depressing. But despite – rather, because of – Burke's best efforts, Ellen had known to send up a flare for him, and he'd held Kate ever-so-briefly in his arms.
So far as these things went, he'd flown pretty high before his wings had sloughed right off.
-
Neal smiled and sweet-talked through his trial, and scanned the court benches for Kate. (She didn't show up for the first two days. And then she was there, quiet, near the back, a constant fixture with enigmatic eyes. Ellen never appeared, but he hadn't expected her to; people might notice, questions might be asked, and that, that wouldn't be good.) He managed to smile through his sentencing, managed to quip off an "All right, fair enough," before court was dismissed.
Four years.
Right. There was a time when he thought he'd be putting criminals away, like this. That had gotten turned around.
Part of him was happy Ellen wasn't there to see just how turned-around things were.
Neal didn't stand until it looked like the rest of the room was standing, and then motion to the side caught his eye and he turned. Kate was there, eeling through the press of people with the practiced grace of someone who'd learned to get where she wasn't supposed to be, and then he was stepping forward into her and she was wrapping him in a hug and one or the other of them was shaking just enough to be felt, but keeping it under control.
"You bastard," Kate whispered.
He was smiling; he was terrified, trying not to let it show; he'd figure it out. He'd figured this out. "Visit me?"
"You bastard," she repeated again. Then the Court Officer separated them, and led him away.
They passed Burke in the hall, getting a drink from one of the water fountains, and Neal stalled long enough to flash him a smile and say, "Good game."
Burke quirked a bemused smile back at him, and conceded "Well played."
That, Neal expected, would be the end of that. But it had been fun, while it lasted.
no subject
Date: 2013-07-29 01:44 am (UTC)You know, one thing this fic made me think about is Neal's comment to Peter in season 3 that even Mozzie doesn't know the whole story of his past (the WITSEC and Ellen part, specifically). I don't think it had really hit me before that Neal would have had very good reasons, at least early on, for not telling Mozzie that he'd spent his entire childhood being monitored by the feds and might conceivably still be on their radar. Mozzie would have been out of there so fast he'd have left a shadow imprint in the air like a cartoon character. It's interesting to think that Mozzie's really changed a lot too, looking back on how he was around the FBI in the first season or two, versus his relative comfort level with them now.
no subject
Date: 2013-07-29 05:25 am (UTC)