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magibrainTitle: The Wind Will Ruin Everything – (iii) Prison to NYC
Index Post: [Fic][White Collar] The Wind Will Ruin Everything - Index
(iii) Prison to NYC
Prison was not home.
Oh, it got plenty familiar. It had its quirks and its moods just the same as the city had, though compared to New York's glorious cacophony, the prison's moods were sullen and flat and strangely unsubtle for all that they barely distinguished themselves from each other. Neal had a place to put his head at the end of every day, people he saw every day, and a door that closed and locked, and that was where the resemblance to home ended.
Two months passed before he got his first visitor, and his heart almost staged a revolt and emigrated from his chest when the guard escorted him into the little cell of a visiting area and there was Kate, standing uneasily behind the chair.
"Hey," she said.
He could feel that he was grinning like an idiot, but honestly, he didn't care. "Kate," he said, and then his hand was pressing into the prison glass like he could reach through and touch her.
She gave a small, fleeting smile, and sat in the chair. He dropped his hand – too desperate? – and sat in the chair on his side of the wall.
"You came," he said.
"Yeah," she answered, like it was a meaningful exchange instead of a statement of the obvious. "I did."
There was an ill-fit silence, for a moment.
"I didn't think you would," Neal said. "Are you angry that I found you?"
She set her jaw, and didn't quite answer that. "I'm a little annoyed that you brought a dozen federal agents with guns into my space."
Where she'd been forging a Raphael, and who knew what else. Neal grimaced. "Would it help if I said they brought me into your space?"
"Not really." She kept his gaze, eyes absolute and unyielding. "Neal, I didn't want you to find me."
He winced, and looked away.
She hesitated for a moment, and went on: "I didn't want to talk to you. I thought that if I left, I could finally work out how I felt about you. Without you getting in the way."
He made himself smile, forced out a quick facsimile of an acknowledging chuckle. "Did you come to any conclusions?" he asked, looking back up at her face.
Then it was her turn to look down, then back up at him. "No," she said. "Everything – I think this is something we have to talk through. So here I am."
"I'm glad you're here," he said.
"I want to find a way to make this work," she admitted, and his heart did one or two things he wasn't sure it was intended to. "But what we had before? I don't know how honest that was. And if we're going to do this, I need honesty. Between us, Neal. I have to know if you can do that."
He opened his mouth to say yes, I can, of course I can, but Kate's look got sharper, harder, and he closed his mouth on the words. That was the look she had given him ages ago. You just tried to con me.
He knew exactly what she wanted. And promising that wasn't what she wanted to hear.
This was harder than it looked, already.
He let out an uneasy laugh. "I can try," he promised. "Is that good enough? Or–" Do I have to master the zen arts of being honest with myself and others before you'll trust me again?
Kate watched him, studying his face, then dropped her gaze and ran a hand back behind her neck, with a chuckle that was equal parts affectionate and resigned. "We've got," she said, every word in place like a well-organized desk, "three years, and ten months." She leaned forward, resting her forehead on the glass. "And we will work on you, mister."
At that, he grinned, and a moment later Kate grinned, too; he leaned forward and rested his forehead on the cool window, where he could imagine it warmed by Kate's skin.
"I can work with that."
-
One thing could be said for Kate: when she set her mind on something, she stuck to it with the same relentless determination as he'd had in looking for her or Burke had in looking for him. She showed up on his visiting day every week, rain or shine.
The first few visits were awkward; a couple devolved into fights, and ended on rough apologies. But she kept coming back, and after a few months they seemed to be past that, and after a few more, the conversations had eased up out of the past, into the present, and finally up to the speculative future after Neal was out of prison and Kate–
Well, Kate didn't talk much about what she was doing, or what her own plans were. Neal had a feeling that he knew why, and it had everything to do with the camera recording them and the minimal privacy afforded by the visitor booths.
So they talked about the home they were going to make, once he got out – the publicly-digestible face of that home, anyway, with all the details of how they planned to get it carefully elided. Though, Kate had a perfectly legitimate life, once, and if she wanted him to have one, Neal thought he could make that work. Unlike Mozzie, he didn't regard the life of a con as a vocation or a destiny or a moral imperative; just the thing that had been been there for him, and worked, when all the legitimate things fell down around his ears.
They didn't talk about Mozzie, much. Neal was pretty sure that he'd regard his name shaped by either of their lips and captured on the prison tape as the theft of his soul.
In the non-Kate hours, he occasionally considered sending letters to Ellen, but always decided against it. There was only so much he could do to conceal his identity from behind bars; the prison staff tracked what mail went out, and Neal didn't quite trust any of the ones who were pliable to him not to be pliable to anyone else.
Anyway, his time was pretty well-accounted for between work and inmate politics and navigating the prison economy and learning more than he was supposed to know about the private life of guards and wardens and, on a whim, sending birthday cards to Agent Burke (because they had sort-of had a three-year professional relationship, and really, it cost nothing to be polite). And corresponding with Kate, and visiting with Kate.
He let himself look forward to it. Then he let himself get used to it, then let himself rely on it, because this was Kate, and Kate was so much better at this sort of thing than he was.
It worked well. Until five months before his sentence was up, when Kate walked in, manner stiff and cold, and told him it was over, she was leaving, she was gone.
-
It occurred to him, a few times, while he was planning his escape, that this might be a kind of final exam – test him, see if after all this time he was really willing to not find her when she didn't want to be found. But his gut said No, that's wrong. They'd covered those conversations three years ago, and Kate could be sharp-edged at times, but she wasn't cruel. His gut said something's not right; she's in trouble, she might need your help.
It also occurred to him that he should have had a plan in place from the beginning.
When he did get out it was a month and a half later and he didn't know what he was in for. It was still a gutpunch he didn't expect, coming to someplace which had clearly once been home and had only recently been abandoned. Just an empty room and an empty bottle, a forget-me-not in the language the two of them shared.
It made no sense to him, but life had never felt obliged to.
It was a stupid, bad move, but he was still sitting there when he heard footsteps in the hall and a sardonic voice calling: "I see Kate moved out."
Goddamnit. He should have seen that coming, too. Peter Burke.
Burke walked in and made a few more passing remarks, as if he was trying to make sense of the situation just as much as Neal was. After a while he let out a breath and said, "We're gonna give you another four years, for this." He sounded almost sorry.
"I don't care," Neal said. It'd taken him more time than that to find Ellen again; what was four more years of history repeating itself?
Peter exhaled. There was an oddly Ellen-ish quality to it, a shade of What are we going to do with you?, and Neal looked up at him. With prison's rigidly-uniform days blurring together, it didn't seem all that long since he'd walked into Kate's storage unit, with–
Then something caught his eye, and he found himself laughing. Burke's eyebrows jumped, and as Neal eased himself up off the floor, he said "That's the same suit you were wearing the last time you arrested me."
Constancy, thy name is the FBI. Or my life. One or the other.
"Mm. Classics," Burke said. "Never go out of style."
That's one way of putting it, Neal thought.
Really, he was thinking: wouldn't it be something if all law enforcement types were like that. Reliable. You vanished, and they'd come after you, come drag you back by the ankle if they need to, like there was a place that you belonged and they'd make sure you got there. Not great, when the place you belonged was prison; especially not great – thinking far back, now – if the law enforcement type was a dirty cop who'd killed a man.
Still, wouldn't it be something.
-
Burke was right, and they did give him four more years.
But Neal was also right in gambling on one of Burke's cases and his own carefully-cultivated prison intelligence network, and he polished up his negotiating skills as much as he could in the week he had.
Peter rebuffed his first bid for freedom, and left Neal to his cell. Neal wasn't sure what changed, in the three months between then and the end of his original sentence, but something did – and before he'd come up with a way of making the reward of breaking out of prison again outweigh the risks of breaking out again, a couple of dour-faced US Marshals showed up to fasten a monitoring anklet onto his leg and give him a stern rundown on the ways they'd be displeased if he even thought about circumventing it.
He successfully resisted the urge to make some kind of remark about witness protection – It's been a while since you guys were monitoring my wellbeing, maybe, or I don't suppose any of you guys ever heard of a kid named Danny Brooks? – and let them hand him over to the prison administration, who handed his personal effects back and showed him the door.
Outside, Burke was waiting. To take him to wherever he was meant to be.
Peter, he thought. They were working together, now; might as well get used to the fact.
-
A few days later, with the tracker, yes, on his ankle, Peter was walking in through a door he'd fled through again, though at least he'd got a different suit on, this time.
"You know," he remarked, with a similar sort of satisfied-cat grin, "you're really bad at this 'escape' thing."
"What can I say?" Neal offered, and didn't say You're just about the only person I actually have to escape from. "Cigar?"
Index Post: [Fic][White Collar] The Wind Will Ruin Everything - Index
(iii) Prison to NYC
Prison was not home.
Oh, it got plenty familiar. It had its quirks and its moods just the same as the city had, though compared to New York's glorious cacophony, the prison's moods were sullen and flat and strangely unsubtle for all that they barely distinguished themselves from each other. Neal had a place to put his head at the end of every day, people he saw every day, and a door that closed and locked, and that was where the resemblance to home ended.
Two months passed before he got his first visitor, and his heart almost staged a revolt and emigrated from his chest when the guard escorted him into the little cell of a visiting area and there was Kate, standing uneasily behind the chair.
"Hey," she said.
He could feel that he was grinning like an idiot, but honestly, he didn't care. "Kate," he said, and then his hand was pressing into the prison glass like he could reach through and touch her.
She gave a small, fleeting smile, and sat in the chair. He dropped his hand – too desperate? – and sat in the chair on his side of the wall.
"You came," he said.
"Yeah," she answered, like it was a meaningful exchange instead of a statement of the obvious. "I did."
There was an ill-fit silence, for a moment.
"I didn't think you would," Neal said. "Are you angry that I found you?"
She set her jaw, and didn't quite answer that. "I'm a little annoyed that you brought a dozen federal agents with guns into my space."
Where she'd been forging a Raphael, and who knew what else. Neal grimaced. "Would it help if I said they brought me into your space?"
"Not really." She kept his gaze, eyes absolute and unyielding. "Neal, I didn't want you to find me."
He winced, and looked away.
She hesitated for a moment, and went on: "I didn't want to talk to you. I thought that if I left, I could finally work out how I felt about you. Without you getting in the way."
He made himself smile, forced out a quick facsimile of an acknowledging chuckle. "Did you come to any conclusions?" he asked, looking back up at her face.
Then it was her turn to look down, then back up at him. "No," she said. "Everything – I think this is something we have to talk through. So here I am."
"I'm glad you're here," he said.
"I want to find a way to make this work," she admitted, and his heart did one or two things he wasn't sure it was intended to. "But what we had before? I don't know how honest that was. And if we're going to do this, I need honesty. Between us, Neal. I have to know if you can do that."
He opened his mouth to say yes, I can, of course I can, but Kate's look got sharper, harder, and he closed his mouth on the words. That was the look she had given him ages ago. You just tried to con me.
He knew exactly what she wanted. And promising that wasn't what she wanted to hear.
This was harder than it looked, already.
He let out an uneasy laugh. "I can try," he promised. "Is that good enough? Or–" Do I have to master the zen arts of being honest with myself and others before you'll trust me again?
Kate watched him, studying his face, then dropped her gaze and ran a hand back behind her neck, with a chuckle that was equal parts affectionate and resigned. "We've got," she said, every word in place like a well-organized desk, "three years, and ten months." She leaned forward, resting her forehead on the glass. "And we will work on you, mister."
At that, he grinned, and a moment later Kate grinned, too; he leaned forward and rested his forehead on the cool window, where he could imagine it warmed by Kate's skin.
"I can work with that."
-
One thing could be said for Kate: when she set her mind on something, she stuck to it with the same relentless determination as he'd had in looking for her or Burke had in looking for him. She showed up on his visiting day every week, rain or shine.
The first few visits were awkward; a couple devolved into fights, and ended on rough apologies. But she kept coming back, and after a few months they seemed to be past that, and after a few more, the conversations had eased up out of the past, into the present, and finally up to the speculative future after Neal was out of prison and Kate–
Well, Kate didn't talk much about what she was doing, or what her own plans were. Neal had a feeling that he knew why, and it had everything to do with the camera recording them and the minimal privacy afforded by the visitor booths.
So they talked about the home they were going to make, once he got out – the publicly-digestible face of that home, anyway, with all the details of how they planned to get it carefully elided. Though, Kate had a perfectly legitimate life, once, and if she wanted him to have one, Neal thought he could make that work. Unlike Mozzie, he didn't regard the life of a con as a vocation or a destiny or a moral imperative; just the thing that had been been there for him, and worked, when all the legitimate things fell down around his ears.
They didn't talk about Mozzie, much. Neal was pretty sure that he'd regard his name shaped by either of their lips and captured on the prison tape as the theft of his soul.
In the non-Kate hours, he occasionally considered sending letters to Ellen, but always decided against it. There was only so much he could do to conceal his identity from behind bars; the prison staff tracked what mail went out, and Neal didn't quite trust any of the ones who were pliable to him not to be pliable to anyone else.
Anyway, his time was pretty well-accounted for between work and inmate politics and navigating the prison economy and learning more than he was supposed to know about the private life of guards and wardens and, on a whim, sending birthday cards to Agent Burke (because they had sort-of had a three-year professional relationship, and really, it cost nothing to be polite). And corresponding with Kate, and visiting with Kate.
He let himself look forward to it. Then he let himself get used to it, then let himself rely on it, because this was Kate, and Kate was so much better at this sort of thing than he was.
It worked well. Until five months before his sentence was up, when Kate walked in, manner stiff and cold, and told him it was over, she was leaving, she was gone.
-
It occurred to him, a few times, while he was planning his escape, that this might be a kind of final exam – test him, see if after all this time he was really willing to not find her when she didn't want to be found. But his gut said No, that's wrong. They'd covered those conversations three years ago, and Kate could be sharp-edged at times, but she wasn't cruel. His gut said something's not right; she's in trouble, she might need your help.
It also occurred to him that he should have had a plan in place from the beginning.
When he did get out it was a month and a half later and he didn't know what he was in for. It was still a gutpunch he didn't expect, coming to someplace which had clearly once been home and had only recently been abandoned. Just an empty room and an empty bottle, a forget-me-not in the language the two of them shared.
It made no sense to him, but life had never felt obliged to.
It was a stupid, bad move, but he was still sitting there when he heard footsteps in the hall and a sardonic voice calling: "I see Kate moved out."
Goddamnit. He should have seen that coming, too. Peter Burke.
Burke walked in and made a few more passing remarks, as if he was trying to make sense of the situation just as much as Neal was. After a while he let out a breath and said, "We're gonna give you another four years, for this." He sounded almost sorry.
"I don't care," Neal said. It'd taken him more time than that to find Ellen again; what was four more years of history repeating itself?
Peter exhaled. There was an oddly Ellen-ish quality to it, a shade of What are we going to do with you?, and Neal looked up at him. With prison's rigidly-uniform days blurring together, it didn't seem all that long since he'd walked into Kate's storage unit, with–
Then something caught his eye, and he found himself laughing. Burke's eyebrows jumped, and as Neal eased himself up off the floor, he said "That's the same suit you were wearing the last time you arrested me."
Constancy, thy name is the FBI. Or my life. One or the other.
"Mm. Classics," Burke said. "Never go out of style."
That's one way of putting it, Neal thought.
Really, he was thinking: wouldn't it be something if all law enforcement types were like that. Reliable. You vanished, and they'd come after you, come drag you back by the ankle if they need to, like there was a place that you belonged and they'd make sure you got there. Not great, when the place you belonged was prison; especially not great – thinking far back, now – if the law enforcement type was a dirty cop who'd killed a man.
Still, wouldn't it be something.
-
Burke was right, and they did give him four more years.
But Neal was also right in gambling on one of Burke's cases and his own carefully-cultivated prison intelligence network, and he polished up his negotiating skills as much as he could in the week he had.
Peter rebuffed his first bid for freedom, and left Neal to his cell. Neal wasn't sure what changed, in the three months between then and the end of his original sentence, but something did – and before he'd come up with a way of making the reward of breaking out of prison again outweigh the risks of breaking out again, a couple of dour-faced US Marshals showed up to fasten a monitoring anklet onto his leg and give him a stern rundown on the ways they'd be displeased if he even thought about circumventing it.
He successfully resisted the urge to make some kind of remark about witness protection – It's been a while since you guys were monitoring my wellbeing, maybe, or I don't suppose any of you guys ever heard of a kid named Danny Brooks? – and let them hand him over to the prison administration, who handed his personal effects back and showed him the door.
Outside, Burke was waiting. To take him to wherever he was meant to be.
Peter, he thought. They were working together, now; might as well get used to the fact.
-
A few days later, with the tracker, yes, on his ankle, Peter was walking in through a door he'd fled through again, though at least he'd got a different suit on, this time.
"You know," he remarked, with a similar sort of satisfied-cat grin, "you're really bad at this 'escape' thing."
"What can I say?" Neal offered, and didn't say You're just about the only person I actually have to escape from. "Cigar?"