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magibrainTitle: The Wind Will Ruin Everything – (iv) NYC to nowhere
Index Post: [Fic][White Collar] The Wind Will Ruin Everything - Index
(iv) NYC to nowhere
It scared him, a little, how fast he got used to the tracker. It scared him more how fast it made itself part of his mental landscape – how whenever the little voice started up in his head, saying You could leave this any time, he could move his leg and feel the weight on his ankle and remind himself, No I can't. When it started up with You could disappear; you can always disappear, he could look at Peter pouring over a case file like a dog on a scent and think, No I can't. Every flood of You know better, this won't last, you'll vanish like always, you'll leave everything in the dust, he could drown out with sand in his ears, a steady No I can't, no I can't, no I can't.
If he held onto that thought until the other ones stopped tempting him, or stopped threatening him, he didn't examine, and couldn't say.
-
Of course, there were other parts of his situation which took no getting used to at all.
June came up to eat breakfast with him, most days, on the expansive balcony which connected his rambling fourth-floor suite (and, guest room, really?–she'd been selling the place short, with what Neal came to suspect, getting to know her, was a kind of coyness, because June was as quick as a whip and as sharp as a tack and had a familiar kind of mischief in her eyes when she'd learned that she could take the federal government for seven hundred a month) with the rest of the level, bringing coffee that she pressed herself and pastries that tasted true to France.
It was still a little hard to believe that she could live like this; that he was actually living like this, after years of snatching a night here and there, pretending on some stolen money or other, before darting back into the shadows of some crappy apartment or okay safehouse or barely-habitable bolthole and promising Kate that one day they could wake up in this kind of luxury. Here, he would go to sleep under the glow of the Manhattan skyline, rise to a four-star breakfast with five-star company, dress in a way that would make Adler (the bastard) proud, and all he had to pay was some time working with the FBI.
Not a bad trick. If Kate was there to share it, it'd be just about perfect.
Then again, life had instilled in Neal a deep-seated distrust of nearly-perfect things.
-
Neal had thought that it would take at least three trips off the reservation (and to the Burkes' house) for Peter to note the pattern and either give him an ultimatum or surrender to the inevitability, but the second time he showed up he was greeted by Peter at the door with his cell phone in hand and a bitter expression on his face, who said "You do know I'm encouraged to put you back in prison when I find you casually disregarding the law."
"Just wanted to get started early," Neal said.
"The Bureau is inside your radius. Your desk is inside your radius. Brooklyn is not exactly known as the home of FBI investigation."
Neal shrugged and gave him an innocent look.
From further inside, Elizabeth called "Is that Neal again?", and Peter turned back to give her an exasperated look. At least, that's what Neal guessed; now Peter had his back to him, but his tone certainly supported the theory.
"Yes. The cat came back. He just couldn't stay away."
Elizabeth chuckled, and a moment later she popped into Neal's line of sight. "You want some coffee, Neal?"
"I would love some," Neal said, gave Peter a you see, there's no reason not to be polite look. Peter didn't look impressed, but he stepped back and let Neal over the threshold anyway.
The Burkes' house was homey – the kind of home where you could walk in and feel that it had a years-long history of domestic life going on between its walls. It felt like it and its inhabitants had grown accustomed to each others' shapes. It was entirely different from the safehouses and studios he'd lived in, before. Different from June's carefully-maintained property, with its maids and housekeepers keeping everything squared away. It reminded Neal of St. Louis, and Ellen.
(It had occurred to him, a few times, to get in touch with Ellen again. She might be at the same address, might not have to go fishing with coded messages again. But he told himself it wasn't worth the risk, that if the FBI could have found her when he was running from them and would have found her if he wrote her from prison then they'd definitely find her now that he was working with them, and didn't let himself look at the other reasons he didn't want to contact her. Like not wanting to know her opinions on watching two generations of the men of his bloodline incarcerated before her. He'd started out thinking he'd get away from the lies, the history, his own pathetic yearning to be more like a man he'd never met; he'd ended up walking straight into the man's footsteps again, anyway.)
"Are you fishing for something?" Peter asked. "Are you casing the place?"
"Come on, Peter. We've known each other for, what, seven years?" Well, if you counted investigating and running from as "knowing," that was true; it certainly seemed true from Neal's perspective. "Maybe I just wanted to feel like part of the family."
He was all smiles when he said it, ribbing and hoping to get a rise out of Peter, but Peter's expression turned troubled and knowing and almost sympathetic, and Neal decided that he was never making that joke again.
-
Peter thought Kate was using him.
Peter thought Kate had either run out on him or was twisting him around to get at – something; Neal wasn't entirely sure on that point, and to be fair he wasn't that invested in hearing Peter's thoughts on the matter. Peter was only seeing the parts that didn't make sense, not the history they'd had together.
Besides, the egg was on Peter's face when Fowler came into the picture. (If anyone was using anyone – really.)
Even when he'd been hunting Neal down, Peter had never been the enemy. There'd been too much respect on both sides, too much awareness that the game was a game. There was none of that with Fowler.
Fowler wanted to destroy them, and whether it was his influence or Neal's, he was good at the task.
-
When this particular life fell apart around him – Peter suspended and probably furious with him, Elizabeth scrambling to put her business back together (Humpty Dumpty, and the best Neal could do was provide a bit of glue), NYPD with an APB out for him for the burn-your-aliases-and-go-to-ground stunt he'd pulled at the consulate, Neal just counted himself lucky that he'd managed to dodge the debris. And yeah, he felt a little guilty that hey'd hit where they'd hit, but.
But.
But Peter, after all – he was an FBI agent; he had the steadiness and stability of someone for whom life wasn't made of fraying ropes and pitted wood. He'd make it through. Without Neal around to break things, to drawn Fowler's fire, to draw scrutiny, he'd be sure to make it through.
(At least, that was the quickest way he found to silence the voice that said, you promised; to stop thinking for a moment that they were going to take Fowler down together. But it was true, wasn't it? He was always the one who burned the house, even if the last time, he had burned it just by leaving.)
But there was something waiting for him. Freedom and another life, the life he'd been angling at for years.
After all the years of things rattling apart, maybe they were finally coming together.
-
Peter was at the airstrip.
When the mess with the music box had finished, Alex hadn't said Don't go. Fowler had said, Have a nice life, Caffrey. Mozzie, Send me a postcard. Elizabeth never said You're sticking around, right? and June just said, Oh, you know I don't believe in good-bye.
Peter showed up at the airstrip.
He said I know you can walk away and You're making the biggest mistake of your life and You have a life right here, you have people who care about you, you make a difference, you do. In the end, though, Neal had to wonder what kind of life you were supposed to find at the bottom of a prison sentence – and besides, he felt at home here. He'd felt at home once before, and given how that ended – him thinking he could be a lawman, and all – he couldn't trust the feeling.
But it was the first time, literally the first, where someone had come after him to drag him back to a place he wanted to be.
Maybe–
Maybe there was a way to have both. Maybe it wouldn't be a problem, to sneak back to New York now and then, under cover of a new identity. Maybe he could have a new life and not completely burn the old. That was what Fowler had offered him with Mentor, wasn't it? A chance to do anything, even this.
He was about to say something approximating that, and got as far as "Peter," and then there was a roar and a percussive force like the hand of God reaching out and knocking that nonsense out of him, and fire, a snarling landbound sun and no no no no no no no
-
No–
-
-
(no)
-
Kate visited him in prison.
Kate had visited him in prison.
Every week, like clockwork, like the rising of the sun, something he could set his watch by. It was the only calendar that meant anything. He'd told Peter once that he'd promised her a better life, and what she got was a guy locked away for four years. And she'd promised him a life on the outside, and what he'd got was to watch her–
Die.
-
Just over a week into his newest prison stay – and he kept coming back here, again again again – the guard said he had a visitor. But it wasn't Kate, there was no chance of Kate, so he declined the visit and turned around and went back to staring at the institutionally white walls.
-
One week later, like the period of a pendulum, he got a visitor again. The guard didn't exactly say he didn't have a choice, but there was something in his voice which wasn't there when these were pleasant social calls, and Neal dragged himself together enough to walk out of his cell.
He had a feeling he knew who this was, anyway.
Sure enough, Peter was waiting for him in the interview room, wearing a new suit and looking decidedly federal. He didn't seem to mind too much that the banter Neal forced out was a little sharper than usual, or that he was holding himself stiff under the prison orange jumpsuit and only trying halfheartedly to make it look casual.
"Listen," Peter said. "There's a chance I can reinstate our deal."
Neal screwed a mask onto his face and tightened those metaphorical screws until his jaw hurt, and heroically resisted mentioning that they'd done this dance once before, and that had worked out like a hole in the head.
Not that he blamed Peter for that – for the airplane, for his latest incarceration. Not really. Though he did have to breathe around the awareness that he might have been able to see Kate again, hold her, touch her, if Peter goddamned Burke hadn't been there, pressing him, cross-examining him, saving his life.
-
There wasn't really a choice, in the end. Or, there was, but it was a choice between rotting in prison day by day, or slipping through the cracks and hunting down whoever killed Kate while dodging the FBI and the US Marshals at the same time, or putting on the old suits and the old show and the old side projects of him and Mozzie, digging into things beneath Big Brother's watchful gaze. So, really, the choice was trivial at best.
He took Peter's deal and smiled while they went around and showed him that everything was exactly as he left it, yes, down to the book he'd left on his desk at the office; yes, down to the sheets on his bed at June's; down to, yes, Mozzie waiting for him, ready to dive into the question of who'd ruined his life today. It took him a couple nights before he woke up in a cold sweat, frantically trying to separate dreams from reality from remembered reality because June's apartment had already been shuffled into the mental folder marked Past and reasoning out why he was there again took more out of him than he'd admit to anyone.
-
It took–
(Neal, do not do this.)
Okay, so maybe he got a little lost, in there.
Maybe, maybe he looked at the wreckage of the plane and thought fast when the guard there found him, maybe he could remember its gutted shape and the absence of the smell of smoke and the pieces that kept almost looking like charred remains but weren't remains, but maybe those memories were a little crystalline, and maybe they felt like they belonged with someone else.
It took a few months before (you're not a killer) they had Adler in their sights (oh, but wasn't he just), and Adler was almost like Fowler redux, but with bullets where bureaucratic nonsense had been. Bullets and semtex and dynamite and drydocks, and he killed Kate, and (you were the closest thing to a son I ever had).
Neal was developing a few reservations around the concept of "father".
Especially when the next things to come were a concussion of red heat and a gun between his eyes and he didn't even have time to think, not really, before Adler was crumpling in front of him and there came the cavalry, here defined as Peter, once again. Ever reliable. And damn, it was reassuring to have him there right when a little stability would go a long way – except then Peter turned on him, and Neal had no idea why.
One moment he was the same steadying influence as always, a comforting point of reference against the furnace-blast heat of the burning warehouse, and the next Neal was wishing he had that to fall back on because Peter had snapped back to the angriest he'd ever seen him, the framed diamond heist but writ large, Fowler arresting Elizabeth but here Neal was here to see it, like Peter'd read Neal's initials in the plumes of smoke or something.
Like things weren't screwed up enough.
Neal didn't know exactly what he said until he thought back a few days later – thought it was something like go to hell, realized later that prove it was probably worse – and by then he had the warehouse key, knew about the scrap of painting, the casual sacrifice of his things. The realization that, oh, okay, then. Mozzie had framed him. Not intentionally, but the results had been the same.
Even if New York and the deal with the anklet hadn't been completely burned, he could see that it was burning. It was nice, in a way. Usually, he didn't see these things coming.
-
Standing on June's balcony, facing the Chrysler Building and the expanse of Central Park, he nursed a glass of wine and waited for Mozzie to come up with their exit strategy. There was part of him that wanted to be angry, but he didn't feel it. Just a sick sense of inevitability.
Given enough time, the house always burned down.
Home isn't for guys like us, Mozzie liked to say. But we'll take our score, we'll move somewhere in the Tropics, somewhere without a US extradition treaty, where we can sip mai tais on beaches devoid of natural predators, and when the heat dies down after a couple of years...
But it was Peter Burke chasing him already, and he could hear his own voice in his ears: Do you honestly think the heat will die down?
Working day by day, he caught himself thinking Maybe I'm not ready to leave. And the suspicious edge that never quite left Peter's eyes seemed to whisper back, has that ever, ever mattered?
He caught himself thinking, I like it here. This is home.
But home had suddenly meant smiling through a three-hour interrogation and knowing that Peter was working against him and he was working against Peter and that something was already broken. Home was suddenly a dead-end road into jail.
So he smiled, and cracked inside, and made his plans.
Index Post: [Fic][White Collar] The Wind Will Ruin Everything - Index
(iv) NYC to nowhere
It scared him, a little, how fast he got used to the tracker. It scared him more how fast it made itself part of his mental landscape – how whenever the little voice started up in his head, saying You could leave this any time, he could move his leg and feel the weight on his ankle and remind himself, No I can't. When it started up with You could disappear; you can always disappear, he could look at Peter pouring over a case file like a dog on a scent and think, No I can't. Every flood of You know better, this won't last, you'll vanish like always, you'll leave everything in the dust, he could drown out with sand in his ears, a steady No I can't, no I can't, no I can't.
If he held onto that thought until the other ones stopped tempting him, or stopped threatening him, he didn't examine, and couldn't say.
-
Of course, there were other parts of his situation which took no getting used to at all.
June came up to eat breakfast with him, most days, on the expansive balcony which connected his rambling fourth-floor suite (and, guest room, really?–she'd been selling the place short, with what Neal came to suspect, getting to know her, was a kind of coyness, because June was as quick as a whip and as sharp as a tack and had a familiar kind of mischief in her eyes when she'd learned that she could take the federal government for seven hundred a month) with the rest of the level, bringing coffee that she pressed herself and pastries that tasted true to France.
It was still a little hard to believe that she could live like this; that he was actually living like this, after years of snatching a night here and there, pretending on some stolen money or other, before darting back into the shadows of some crappy apartment or okay safehouse or barely-habitable bolthole and promising Kate that one day they could wake up in this kind of luxury. Here, he would go to sleep under the glow of the Manhattan skyline, rise to a four-star breakfast with five-star company, dress in a way that would make Adler (the bastard) proud, and all he had to pay was some time working with the FBI.
Not a bad trick. If Kate was there to share it, it'd be just about perfect.
Then again, life had instilled in Neal a deep-seated distrust of nearly-perfect things.
-
Neal had thought that it would take at least three trips off the reservation (and to the Burkes' house) for Peter to note the pattern and either give him an ultimatum or surrender to the inevitability, but the second time he showed up he was greeted by Peter at the door with his cell phone in hand and a bitter expression on his face, who said "You do know I'm encouraged to put you back in prison when I find you casually disregarding the law."
"Just wanted to get started early," Neal said.
"The Bureau is inside your radius. Your desk is inside your radius. Brooklyn is not exactly known as the home of FBI investigation."
Neal shrugged and gave him an innocent look.
From further inside, Elizabeth called "Is that Neal again?", and Peter turned back to give her an exasperated look. At least, that's what Neal guessed; now Peter had his back to him, but his tone certainly supported the theory.
"Yes. The cat came back. He just couldn't stay away."
Elizabeth chuckled, and a moment later she popped into Neal's line of sight. "You want some coffee, Neal?"
"I would love some," Neal said, gave Peter a you see, there's no reason not to be polite look. Peter didn't look impressed, but he stepped back and let Neal over the threshold anyway.
The Burkes' house was homey – the kind of home where you could walk in and feel that it had a years-long history of domestic life going on between its walls. It felt like it and its inhabitants had grown accustomed to each others' shapes. It was entirely different from the safehouses and studios he'd lived in, before. Different from June's carefully-maintained property, with its maids and housekeepers keeping everything squared away. It reminded Neal of St. Louis, and Ellen.
(It had occurred to him, a few times, to get in touch with Ellen again. She might be at the same address, might not have to go fishing with coded messages again. But he told himself it wasn't worth the risk, that if the FBI could have found her when he was running from them and would have found her if he wrote her from prison then they'd definitely find her now that he was working with them, and didn't let himself look at the other reasons he didn't want to contact her. Like not wanting to know her opinions on watching two generations of the men of his bloodline incarcerated before her. He'd started out thinking he'd get away from the lies, the history, his own pathetic yearning to be more like a man he'd never met; he'd ended up walking straight into the man's footsteps again, anyway.)
"Are you fishing for something?" Peter asked. "Are you casing the place?"
"Come on, Peter. We've known each other for, what, seven years?" Well, if you counted investigating and running from as "knowing," that was true; it certainly seemed true from Neal's perspective. "Maybe I just wanted to feel like part of the family."
He was all smiles when he said it, ribbing and hoping to get a rise out of Peter, but Peter's expression turned troubled and knowing and almost sympathetic, and Neal decided that he was never making that joke again.
-
Peter thought Kate was using him.
Peter thought Kate had either run out on him or was twisting him around to get at – something; Neal wasn't entirely sure on that point, and to be fair he wasn't that invested in hearing Peter's thoughts on the matter. Peter was only seeing the parts that didn't make sense, not the history they'd had together.
Besides, the egg was on Peter's face when Fowler came into the picture. (If anyone was using anyone – really.)
Even when he'd been hunting Neal down, Peter had never been the enemy. There'd been too much respect on both sides, too much awareness that the game was a game. There was none of that with Fowler.
Fowler wanted to destroy them, and whether it was his influence or Neal's, he was good at the task.
-
When this particular life fell apart around him – Peter suspended and probably furious with him, Elizabeth scrambling to put her business back together (Humpty Dumpty, and the best Neal could do was provide a bit of glue), NYPD with an APB out for him for the burn-your-aliases-and-go-to-ground stunt he'd pulled at the consulate, Neal just counted himself lucky that he'd managed to dodge the debris. And yeah, he felt a little guilty that hey'd hit where they'd hit, but.
But.
But Peter, after all – he was an FBI agent; he had the steadiness and stability of someone for whom life wasn't made of fraying ropes and pitted wood. He'd make it through. Without Neal around to break things, to drawn Fowler's fire, to draw scrutiny, he'd be sure to make it through.
(At least, that was the quickest way he found to silence the voice that said, you promised; to stop thinking for a moment that they were going to take Fowler down together. But it was true, wasn't it? He was always the one who burned the house, even if the last time, he had burned it just by leaving.)
But there was something waiting for him. Freedom and another life, the life he'd been angling at for years.
After all the years of things rattling apart, maybe they were finally coming together.
-
Peter was at the airstrip.
When the mess with the music box had finished, Alex hadn't said Don't go. Fowler had said, Have a nice life, Caffrey. Mozzie, Send me a postcard. Elizabeth never said You're sticking around, right? and June just said, Oh, you know I don't believe in good-bye.
Peter showed up at the airstrip.
He said I know you can walk away and You're making the biggest mistake of your life and You have a life right here, you have people who care about you, you make a difference, you do. In the end, though, Neal had to wonder what kind of life you were supposed to find at the bottom of a prison sentence – and besides, he felt at home here. He'd felt at home once before, and given how that ended – him thinking he could be a lawman, and all – he couldn't trust the feeling.
But it was the first time, literally the first, where someone had come after him to drag him back to a place he wanted to be.
Maybe–
Maybe there was a way to have both. Maybe it wouldn't be a problem, to sneak back to New York now and then, under cover of a new identity. Maybe he could have a new life and not completely burn the old. That was what Fowler had offered him with Mentor, wasn't it? A chance to do anything, even this.
He was about to say something approximating that, and got as far as "Peter," and then there was a roar and a percussive force like the hand of God reaching out and knocking that nonsense out of him, and fire, a snarling landbound sun and no no no no no no no
-
No–
-
-
(no)
-
Kate visited him in prison.
Kate had visited him in prison.
Every week, like clockwork, like the rising of the sun, something he could set his watch by. It was the only calendar that meant anything. He'd told Peter once that he'd promised her a better life, and what she got was a guy locked away for four years. And she'd promised him a life on the outside, and what he'd got was to watch her–
Die.
-
Just over a week into his newest prison stay – and he kept coming back here, again again again – the guard said he had a visitor. But it wasn't Kate, there was no chance of Kate, so he declined the visit and turned around and went back to staring at the institutionally white walls.
-
One week later, like the period of a pendulum, he got a visitor again. The guard didn't exactly say he didn't have a choice, but there was something in his voice which wasn't there when these were pleasant social calls, and Neal dragged himself together enough to walk out of his cell.
He had a feeling he knew who this was, anyway.
Sure enough, Peter was waiting for him in the interview room, wearing a new suit and looking decidedly federal. He didn't seem to mind too much that the banter Neal forced out was a little sharper than usual, or that he was holding himself stiff under the prison orange jumpsuit and only trying halfheartedly to make it look casual.
"Listen," Peter said. "There's a chance I can reinstate our deal."
Neal screwed a mask onto his face and tightened those metaphorical screws until his jaw hurt, and heroically resisted mentioning that they'd done this dance once before, and that had worked out like a hole in the head.
Not that he blamed Peter for that – for the airplane, for his latest incarceration. Not really. Though he did have to breathe around the awareness that he might have been able to see Kate again, hold her, touch her, if Peter goddamned Burke hadn't been there, pressing him, cross-examining him, saving his life.
-
There wasn't really a choice, in the end. Or, there was, but it was a choice between rotting in prison day by day, or slipping through the cracks and hunting down whoever killed Kate while dodging the FBI and the US Marshals at the same time, or putting on the old suits and the old show and the old side projects of him and Mozzie, digging into things beneath Big Brother's watchful gaze. So, really, the choice was trivial at best.
He took Peter's deal and smiled while they went around and showed him that everything was exactly as he left it, yes, down to the book he'd left on his desk at the office; yes, down to the sheets on his bed at June's; down to, yes, Mozzie waiting for him, ready to dive into the question of who'd ruined his life today. It took him a couple nights before he woke up in a cold sweat, frantically trying to separate dreams from reality from remembered reality because June's apartment had already been shuffled into the mental folder marked Past and reasoning out why he was there again took more out of him than he'd admit to anyone.
-
It took–
(Neal, do not do this.)
Okay, so maybe he got a little lost, in there.
Maybe, maybe he looked at the wreckage of the plane and thought fast when the guard there found him, maybe he could remember its gutted shape and the absence of the smell of smoke and the pieces that kept almost looking like charred remains but weren't remains, but maybe those memories were a little crystalline, and maybe they felt like they belonged with someone else.
It took a few months before (you're not a killer) they had Adler in their sights (oh, but wasn't he just), and Adler was almost like Fowler redux, but with bullets where bureaucratic nonsense had been. Bullets and semtex and dynamite and drydocks, and he killed Kate, and (you were the closest thing to a son I ever had).
Neal was developing a few reservations around the concept of "father".
Especially when the next things to come were a concussion of red heat and a gun between his eyes and he didn't even have time to think, not really, before Adler was crumpling in front of him and there came the cavalry, here defined as Peter, once again. Ever reliable. And damn, it was reassuring to have him there right when a little stability would go a long way – except then Peter turned on him, and Neal had no idea why.
One moment he was the same steadying influence as always, a comforting point of reference against the furnace-blast heat of the burning warehouse, and the next Neal was wishing he had that to fall back on because Peter had snapped back to the angriest he'd ever seen him, the framed diamond heist but writ large, Fowler arresting Elizabeth but here Neal was here to see it, like Peter'd read Neal's initials in the plumes of smoke or something.
Like things weren't screwed up enough.
Neal didn't know exactly what he said until he thought back a few days later – thought it was something like go to hell, realized later that prove it was probably worse – and by then he had the warehouse key, knew about the scrap of painting, the casual sacrifice of his things. The realization that, oh, okay, then. Mozzie had framed him. Not intentionally, but the results had been the same.
Even if New York and the deal with the anklet hadn't been completely burned, he could see that it was burning. It was nice, in a way. Usually, he didn't see these things coming.
-
Standing on June's balcony, facing the Chrysler Building and the expanse of Central Park, he nursed a glass of wine and waited for Mozzie to come up with their exit strategy. There was part of him that wanted to be angry, but he didn't feel it. Just a sick sense of inevitability.
Given enough time, the house always burned down.
Home isn't for guys like us, Mozzie liked to say. But we'll take our score, we'll move somewhere in the Tropics, somewhere without a US extradition treaty, where we can sip mai tais on beaches devoid of natural predators, and when the heat dies down after a couple of years...
But it was Peter Burke chasing him already, and he could hear his own voice in his ears: Do you honestly think the heat will die down?
Working day by day, he caught himself thinking Maybe I'm not ready to leave. And the suspicious edge that never quite left Peter's eyes seemed to whisper back, has that ever, ever mattered?
He caught himself thinking, I like it here. This is home.
But home had suddenly meant smiling through a three-hour interrogation and knowing that Peter was working against him and he was working against Peter and that something was already broken. Home was suddenly a dead-end road into jail.
So he smiled, and cracked inside, and made his plans.
no subject
Date: 2013-07-31 04:43 am (UTC)Mozzie had framed him.
Oh ouch. But also, ACCURATE.
I also like how this slides in and out and around the edges of canon, sliding past the things we've already seen to show us what we haven't.
no subject
Date: 2013-07-31 06:00 am (UTC)...there is a reason I have that Neal Caffrey tag. <_<
no subject
Date: 2013-07-31 06:05 am (UTC)