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magibrainTitle: The Wind Will Ruin Everything – (v) NYC to NYC
Index Post: [Fic][White Collar] The Wind Will Ruin Everything - Index
(v) NYC to NYC
It took almost no time at all for him to start catching himself on the splinters of those plans.
Like: he used Sara and he used Christie and hell, he used Diana, dancing his way into her apartment on chutzpah and charm, and didn't get a hell of a lot out of it, and the next day as he was keeping up appearances, Peter walked over and congratulated him on it.
"If you know how Christie and Diana met," Peter said, "you are officially part of the family."
That hurt. It reflected back a microcosm, lies within lies within lies, so far down that he wasn't sure if there was a kernel of truth they clung to, any more. He half-wondered if Peter knew how far down they went – no, he'd just conned his way in like he conned his way into everything; no, there wasn't any family here, and he was on his way out anyway. Half-wondered if Peter was just twisting the knife.
Like: Half a week later, with Peter by then certainly working against his plans for escape and still somehow the only person, Mozzie included, that Neal would trust with Mozzie's life, Mozzie turned back from the balcony and the view of Manhattan which were seeming a bit more ephemeral with every night that passed. Mozzie said, "I know how hard it is to give up everything. I couldn't do it. I kept a part of Jeffries with me, and I know I'm lucky I get to do that." And, with a pointed, sad look, "I know your connection to the FBI. But it's not who we are."
There were plenty of things Neal could have said to that. Maybe, I know, because he could recognize a pattern, after all. Maybe Peter's old standby: People can change. Or, Come on, Mozzie, we can make anything true if we try hard enough. Maybe just, I hate this. This is ridiculous. This isn't fair.
It was probably for the best that he didn't get a chance to say any of them. They were all equally useless, and life was never fair.
Like: he stood as a witness while Peter gave Elizabeth the wedding they should have had, and the sentiment should have had, should have had, should have had ran circles in his mind until he obliterated half a bottle of Syrah and reminded himself that Kate was gone, and she'd never get less gone, and he'd moved on from her, he had. Just like he'd move on from Sara, right? And New York, and everything else he could think of.
Like: Sara drew a line between them. You live in the clouds, she said, and that was that, sentence rendered, there was no hope for them.
-
Like: Keller started sniffing around the periphery of the city like a shark sensing blood in the water. Neal couldn't imagine a time when that wouldn't be the beginning of the end.
-
The difference – one of the many, many differences – between Keller and Mozzie was that Mozzie regarded Neal's life in New York with the kind of reserved, uneasy pity of a friend regarding another friend's terminal disease. Keller regarded it with outright scorn.
Keller also took the nuclear option when it came to blasting that life apart.
-
"You know, I'm disappointed," Keller said, and Neal practiced distant disinterest with every speck of focus he could muster. Arguing with Keller never worked, and ignoring him never worked, so the best strategy was usually to try to weather his abrasiveness and try to keep him from shooting you. It was a strategy Neal was still working on. "I was expecting some fight. Some challenge. You, though – you were a sitting duck."
They were assembling the pieces of what was meant to be a hidden compartment in the back of a military cargo truck, and part of Neal wanted to know where and how Peter was acquiring one. It was a small part, compared to the parts that wanted the situation never to have happened, Keller never to have caught the scent of the treasure, Mozzie to have never stolen it, Adler to have never learned of it, the Germans never to have scuttled it, Hitler never to have risen to power and the Germanic tribes never to have migrated down out of Scandinavia.
"It's like you're not even trying, any more."
"The treasure was never my project," Neal said. It had just... happened to him. In a way that multibillion-dollar scores didn't just happen to most people.
"You knew about it," Keller said. "Why the hell didn't you make it yours?"
"It's that simple, to you," Neal said.
Keller actually stopped work for a moment, a blowtorch hefted in his hands like it was of no particular concern. Neal sidled away on general principle.
"Yeah," Keller said. "Why wouldn't it be?"
Mozzie saw a reflection of himself when he looked at Neal, and tried to nudge that reflection more in line with the choices he had made. Maybe Keller was the same way, except his version of nudging involved more car crashes and bullet wounds and home invasions.
Mozzie, at least, understood concepts like loyalty. Neither one of them quite got home.
Peter arrived with one large truck – honestly, Neal hadn't known they'd made trucks in those dimensions; except for a brief stint as an admiral at a reception, he tended to stay away from military concerns – and as his soles hit the ground, he looked across the garage to Neal and Keller. There wasn't a lot of differentiation, in that gaze.
When the initial outbursts were over, Peter had been worryingly civil to everyone – him, Mozzie, Keller. Neal suspected it was just that Elizabeth was involved, and nothing, especially not something as paltry as rage, would get between Peter and finding her. Once this was over, he fully expected Keller to end up in jail or dead, and himself – well, hopefully just to end up in jail.
Reliable. He'd chosen to stay in New York. New York didn't give a damn what he wanted.
-
After conning the NYPD and taking a blow to the head and thwarting Keller and getting a busted rib and some really impressive contusions for his trouble, he was almost looking forward to some time alone in the prison infirmary when Peter looked at him with an expression that almost looked lost, and said, You could be a free man. It took some time before that sunk in.
Keller and the US Department of Justice, accidentally colluding to wipe away his sins. He could honestly say he never would have seen that coming.
And yeah, that was conditional, how forgiving was Peter feeling that day, how far did he think the bounds of official responsibility stretched, but then he quietly decided against throwing Neal to the wolves and that was something, at least. Peter always went just a little bit further than anyone else in the system ever had.
Neal was beginning to think he could stay when it all blew up in his face.
-
Well. Not with a bang. The usual whimper. Rather, with a glance caught across a public pavilion, a subtle shake of the head and an expression that said, no chance left here. Get out while you can. And he caught it, and nodded, signaled back message understood, but all the way back to June's house something in his chest was clawing against it. Because that wasn't fair, violation of the rules, cruel and unusual and unexpected because, yeah, home had vanished, home had burned, he'd been removed from home in cuffs, but until now home had never told him to leave.
But there was no mistaking that deep-set rage in Peter's eyes.
So he called Mozzie and gave the word. He slipped the metal snips around the anklet that was supposed to have kept him tethered here – such a flimsy assurance, when he stopped to look at it – and pulled the bag he kept packed out of its hidehole and vanished into the pressing crowds of New York City, his exodus just his arrival in reverse.
Would have been nice if everything could have been so clean. If he could have pulled out the knot of his time there like a needle slipping back out through its hole, leaving no trace of thread behind. Maybe he could just vanish, and Peter would never remember to search for him, and their trail would go cold as a nor'easter pouring along the coast.
Sitting in a hastily-wrangled business-class seat on a flight to nowhere in particular, to some random stopover where they'd toss down a red herring and be on a flight or a boat or a train again, he put his head back and tried to shove everything down inside and Mozzie was kind enough to let him. Part of him wanted to punch out the plane window and get sucked out into the sky, but that was the kind of thing that only happened in movies – and anyway, he wasn't interested in dying at all, and certainly not by hypothermia and asphyxiation at thirty thousand feet. He might want to make something dramatic happen, something dramatic and shattering, but now they were on the run and their success depended on avoiding dramatics whenever possible.
Three draining days later they set up on Cape Verde in a sprawling mansion of a villa which Mozzie promised would be merely the base for their continuing adventures, even if those adventures had to wait three, five, seven years until the heat died down. But this had already been the big score, and Mozzie was talking about retirement in the same breath as those Maybe, five years from now dreams.
Neal was looking at the excess of white marble and thinking that maybe if he stayed too long, something had to happen to push him away. Mozzie kept telling him: people like them didn't get homes and happy endings. He kept not asking what made them different, these things Mozzie offered in their place.
-
Home is where you make it, Mozzie said; and sometimes home is where you hang your hat – you, particularly, and often home is an illusion. But this is a pretty good one. And it was, for what it was.
-
"This isn't healthy, you know," Mozzie said, and Neal raised an eyebrow.
"Says the person drinking at seven o'clock in the morning."
"Yes, well." Mozzie came around the balcony chair, champagne in one hand and a juicer in the other. Neal guessed that there was an essentially homeopathic amount of orange juice in it; Mozzie had waxed poetic the other night on June's board games and mimosas when he'd had too much rum in him, and now, coming down from that, Neal suspected they both wanted to leave that memory behind them. Almost-straight champagne. Hard as champagne got. "There are no rules left, Neal; might as well enjoy that. You have plans for the afternoon?"
"Thinking of getting to work decorating the place," Neal said, folding his copy of the New York Times. The supplier here got the print copies almost a week behind their release; he was reading news from before they'd left. "I found a great spot for a Girl with a Pearl Earring."
"Oh. I found a great art supplier in Santiago," Mozzie said. "Just tell me what you need; I was going to go over for some whittling equipment later today."
"You're taking up whittling?" Neal asked.
Mozzie shrugged. "I imagine I'll have plenty of time for new hobbies. What about you? Have your eye on any new pastimes?"
"Hadn't thought about it," Neal said. "I don't know. Sailing? Astronomy?"
"Keeping an eye out for little green men," Mozzie said. "A noble pursuit."
Neal gave him a Really? look, which Mozzie was entirely impervious to.
"Do you want me to pick up a telescope while I'm out?" he asked.
"I can get one myself," Neal said. He might as well go out to see what was available, if he even decided to go for it. It might be an idiotic fancy, in any case; it would be nice to think the stars would be constant enough even when he moved from place to place, but the stars were different from the northern hemisphere to the south, and absent in Manhattan altogether.
-
The sun rose over the central Atlantic as impartially as it rose over New York City, chasing away a sky more full of stars and illuminating a city less painted in lights. Ten or twelve sunrises in and Neal found himself settling in without intending to – but Mozzie had said it: there were no rules left, and this place seemed set aside from the rest of the flow of the world. Forgotten and unnoticed, somehow. Who was going to look for them here? The one person who'd managed to track him down before had tossed him out here in the first place.
A happy home is the single spot of rest which a man has upon this Earth, Mozzie said.
Mozzie had a bottomless wealth of quotes about home, and Neal had put up a Girl with a Pearl Earring on a spot where he could see it and the vast blue expanse of an undifferentiated sea, and he was thinking of putting up a Mona Lisa in the library, and if Mozzie pointed out his fondness for portraits of girls with ambiguous expressions, at least Neal wasn't painting Cubist interpretations of the Manhattan skyline.
For Neal's part, he ran along the shore and let the tides wash out his footprints. He talked with the people in the city and left them with never quite enough information to know him. He added pieces of himself to the decoration in the villa, where "pieces of himself" were defined as forgeries, lovingly constructed to be unidentifiable as his own work. And every time he caught himself looking backward he forced himself to look ahead, until one night under a rolling storm when he got a message on the pager Ellen had left him.
-
The lightning was far enough out to be striking the water and not the sand, and the thunder had a degree of threat that Neal wasn't sure was entirely metaphorical. Through all this time Ellen hadn't asked him to contact her this directly, and he couldn't imagine it was for anything good – maybe Kramer had tracked the Raphael back to her, maybe she was going down for receiving stolen goods, maybe Manhattan was burning down behind him and if not for this call he'd only hear about it six days later by the New York Times.
He found the villa's burner and called across the world, waited to hear the click and the static of an open line. "Ellen?"
Ellen was not the one who answered. "Hi, Neal."
He almost had to laugh, at that. Here, he was thinking catastrophe; in reality, it was just Peter Burke, tracking him down again. "I guess this makes you three-and-oh."
"Two-and-one," Peter said. "I haven't found you yet."
There was something grounding and familiar about the quips back and forth, for all that distance and uncertainty changed them, made them not quite as steady, unbalanced the rhythm.
"The DOJ has someone looking for you," Peter said, though apparently Peter wasn't that "he".
"I'm safe here," Neal said. "And I'm happy." He wasn't sure if he was adding that last part for Peter's sake or his own.
Adler had told him, outside that warehouse, There's nothing sadder than a con man conning himself. At this point, Neal didn't even know what the con was, any more. Home was the con. Neat, thorough endings were the con. Escape was the con. His life was the con.
"We had a good run," he said.
And Peter said, "It's not over."
Damn it.
"New York and I are over," Neal said, ignoring the stacks of Times sitting in the corner of the library, the crumbling sandcastles in the shape of the Chrysler Building, the Empire State, the things he'd left behind. There were only a few ways his partnership with Peter could have ended; there was only one way his life in New York could have come to a close. Absolutely, and messily.
But he could tell that Peter didn't believe that.
He won the battle – he said Goodbye, and Peter said Goodbye, and that sounded final enough, from where he was sitting – but by the tone in Peter's voice, he hadn't won the war. Peter Burke did not know how to let go.
Neal did. It was trivially easy, when the world made it unavoidable.
-
Which still didn't prepare Neal for seeing Peter in El Café Isleño, because what the hell, and even when Peter told him to run he couldn't just let him run, and also how in hell had he tracked him out to Cape Verde in the first place, and also what the hell? Neal was beginning to think he could flee to the International Space Station, and Peter would be on the next shuttle. Or possibly there without a shuttle.
At least he wasn't wearing the suit this time, either.
The next two days – getting a bear hug from Peter, getting shot in the leg, witnessing Peter break into song at the marina and spin out the most outré plan Hughes (sanely back in New York, and Neal envied him) had apparently heard yet – convinced him, more than anything, that Peter was living in a radically different world than the rest of them, which had an edge of irony given the number of times Peter had accused him and Mozzie of the same thing. But this was just deeply bizarre.
He traveled halfway around the world on an unsanctioned manhunt to track us down, and now he's trying to move heaven and Earth to bring you back to New York, Mozzie had said. And while the reasons Peter gave – making things right, balancing the scales, approximating some level of justice – were Peter, through and through, Neal still wasn't sure he understood what had happened by the time he was sitting on a plane and looking forward to professional medical care (with sterilized equipment and everything).
The wound in his leg was throbbing and the rest of his body ached with the unaddressed stress of life without safety, no rest, looking over one shoulder and trying to get away, but at least he could sit down again, now. He wasn't running any more, and even if that was just because he'd been shot, caught, and arrested, the game was up. When that was all you had in the way of downtime, you took it.
He took an aisle seat, because he didn't want to watch Cape Verde shrink to nothing in the window and get left behind, the way everything got tossed behind him. St. Louis, a hundred hotel rooms and flats and villas scattered across Europe, New York – but this was the first leg of the journey back to New York. He kept finding his way back there, and maybe someday he'd have to face the significance of that.
Maybe one of these days he'd have to let it sink in that Peter had talked to Ellen, and the two of them had conspired to drag him back to the city he'd run from. He'd burned St. Louis and any chance at commutation, and yet. The two of them.
It might all be for nothing. History said it would be. Their best efforts couldn't stop Kramer or Collins; never could stop him from jumping into something that burned him, his bridges, and everyone around.
This could still all fall apart.
But wouldn't it be something if it didn't?
He didn't realize he'd been staring at Peter until Peter looked over, raised his eyebrows, and said "You okay?"
"I never thanked you for coming," Neal said. Not once. The closest he'd come was that storage unit, after the first three-year chase: Thank you. I never would have found her without you. And he'd balk at admitting it to Mozzie, but it meant something, knowing he'd be searched for when he disappeared.
Peter got that odd look on his face, like he was half-proud to see Neal employing some facet of proper socialization, and half-embarrassed to be having this conversation. "You don't need to," he said.
"Still," Neal said.
Peter breathed out, gave him a lopsided smile, and reached across the aisle to plant a wordless hand on his shoulder. After a couple seconds he squeezed down and pulled his hand back, like he was worried about violating some unspoken rule of masculinity or FBI-appropriate behavior or them-appropriate behavior or just Peter Burke-ness, and Neal let himself smile and roll his neck so he was staring aimlessly at the ceiling again.
It was a long flight home, but they got there, in the end.
Index Post: [Fic][White Collar] The Wind Will Ruin Everything - Index
(v) NYC to NYC
It took almost no time at all for him to start catching himself on the splinters of those plans.
Like: he used Sara and he used Christie and hell, he used Diana, dancing his way into her apartment on chutzpah and charm, and didn't get a hell of a lot out of it, and the next day as he was keeping up appearances, Peter walked over and congratulated him on it.
"If you know how Christie and Diana met," Peter said, "you are officially part of the family."
That hurt. It reflected back a microcosm, lies within lies within lies, so far down that he wasn't sure if there was a kernel of truth they clung to, any more. He half-wondered if Peter knew how far down they went – no, he'd just conned his way in like he conned his way into everything; no, there wasn't any family here, and he was on his way out anyway. Half-wondered if Peter was just twisting the knife.
Like: Half a week later, with Peter by then certainly working against his plans for escape and still somehow the only person, Mozzie included, that Neal would trust with Mozzie's life, Mozzie turned back from the balcony and the view of Manhattan which were seeming a bit more ephemeral with every night that passed. Mozzie said, "I know how hard it is to give up everything. I couldn't do it. I kept a part of Jeffries with me, and I know I'm lucky I get to do that." And, with a pointed, sad look, "I know your connection to the FBI. But it's not who we are."
There were plenty of things Neal could have said to that. Maybe, I know, because he could recognize a pattern, after all. Maybe Peter's old standby: People can change. Or, Come on, Mozzie, we can make anything true if we try hard enough. Maybe just, I hate this. This is ridiculous. This isn't fair.
It was probably for the best that he didn't get a chance to say any of them. They were all equally useless, and life was never fair.
Like: he stood as a witness while Peter gave Elizabeth the wedding they should have had, and the sentiment should have had, should have had, should have had ran circles in his mind until he obliterated half a bottle of Syrah and reminded himself that Kate was gone, and she'd never get less gone, and he'd moved on from her, he had. Just like he'd move on from Sara, right? And New York, and everything else he could think of.
Like: Sara drew a line between them. You live in the clouds, she said, and that was that, sentence rendered, there was no hope for them.
-
Like: Keller started sniffing around the periphery of the city like a shark sensing blood in the water. Neal couldn't imagine a time when that wouldn't be the beginning of the end.
-
The difference – one of the many, many differences – between Keller and Mozzie was that Mozzie regarded Neal's life in New York with the kind of reserved, uneasy pity of a friend regarding another friend's terminal disease. Keller regarded it with outright scorn.
Keller also took the nuclear option when it came to blasting that life apart.
-
"You know, I'm disappointed," Keller said, and Neal practiced distant disinterest with every speck of focus he could muster. Arguing with Keller never worked, and ignoring him never worked, so the best strategy was usually to try to weather his abrasiveness and try to keep him from shooting you. It was a strategy Neal was still working on. "I was expecting some fight. Some challenge. You, though – you were a sitting duck."
They were assembling the pieces of what was meant to be a hidden compartment in the back of a military cargo truck, and part of Neal wanted to know where and how Peter was acquiring one. It was a small part, compared to the parts that wanted the situation never to have happened, Keller never to have caught the scent of the treasure, Mozzie to have never stolen it, Adler to have never learned of it, the Germans never to have scuttled it, Hitler never to have risen to power and the Germanic tribes never to have migrated down out of Scandinavia.
"It's like you're not even trying, any more."
"The treasure was never my project," Neal said. It had just... happened to him. In a way that multibillion-dollar scores didn't just happen to most people.
"You knew about it," Keller said. "Why the hell didn't you make it yours?"
"It's that simple, to you," Neal said.
Keller actually stopped work for a moment, a blowtorch hefted in his hands like it was of no particular concern. Neal sidled away on general principle.
"Yeah," Keller said. "Why wouldn't it be?"
Mozzie saw a reflection of himself when he looked at Neal, and tried to nudge that reflection more in line with the choices he had made. Maybe Keller was the same way, except his version of nudging involved more car crashes and bullet wounds and home invasions.
Mozzie, at least, understood concepts like loyalty. Neither one of them quite got home.
Peter arrived with one large truck – honestly, Neal hadn't known they'd made trucks in those dimensions; except for a brief stint as an admiral at a reception, he tended to stay away from military concerns – and as his soles hit the ground, he looked across the garage to Neal and Keller. There wasn't a lot of differentiation, in that gaze.
When the initial outbursts were over, Peter had been worryingly civil to everyone – him, Mozzie, Keller. Neal suspected it was just that Elizabeth was involved, and nothing, especially not something as paltry as rage, would get between Peter and finding her. Once this was over, he fully expected Keller to end up in jail or dead, and himself – well, hopefully just to end up in jail.
Reliable. He'd chosen to stay in New York. New York didn't give a damn what he wanted.
-
After conning the NYPD and taking a blow to the head and thwarting Keller and getting a busted rib and some really impressive contusions for his trouble, he was almost looking forward to some time alone in the prison infirmary when Peter looked at him with an expression that almost looked lost, and said, You could be a free man. It took some time before that sunk in.
Keller and the US Department of Justice, accidentally colluding to wipe away his sins. He could honestly say he never would have seen that coming.
And yeah, that was conditional, how forgiving was Peter feeling that day, how far did he think the bounds of official responsibility stretched, but then he quietly decided against throwing Neal to the wolves and that was something, at least. Peter always went just a little bit further than anyone else in the system ever had.
Neal was beginning to think he could stay when it all blew up in his face.
-
Well. Not with a bang. The usual whimper. Rather, with a glance caught across a public pavilion, a subtle shake of the head and an expression that said, no chance left here. Get out while you can. And he caught it, and nodded, signaled back message understood, but all the way back to June's house something in his chest was clawing against it. Because that wasn't fair, violation of the rules, cruel and unusual and unexpected because, yeah, home had vanished, home had burned, he'd been removed from home in cuffs, but until now home had never told him to leave.
But there was no mistaking that deep-set rage in Peter's eyes.
So he called Mozzie and gave the word. He slipped the metal snips around the anklet that was supposed to have kept him tethered here – such a flimsy assurance, when he stopped to look at it – and pulled the bag he kept packed out of its hidehole and vanished into the pressing crowds of New York City, his exodus just his arrival in reverse.
Would have been nice if everything could have been so clean. If he could have pulled out the knot of his time there like a needle slipping back out through its hole, leaving no trace of thread behind. Maybe he could just vanish, and Peter would never remember to search for him, and their trail would go cold as a nor'easter pouring along the coast.
Sitting in a hastily-wrangled business-class seat on a flight to nowhere in particular, to some random stopover where they'd toss down a red herring and be on a flight or a boat or a train again, he put his head back and tried to shove everything down inside and Mozzie was kind enough to let him. Part of him wanted to punch out the plane window and get sucked out into the sky, but that was the kind of thing that only happened in movies – and anyway, he wasn't interested in dying at all, and certainly not by hypothermia and asphyxiation at thirty thousand feet. He might want to make something dramatic happen, something dramatic and shattering, but now they were on the run and their success depended on avoiding dramatics whenever possible.
Three draining days later they set up on Cape Verde in a sprawling mansion of a villa which Mozzie promised would be merely the base for their continuing adventures, even if those adventures had to wait three, five, seven years until the heat died down. But this had already been the big score, and Mozzie was talking about retirement in the same breath as those Maybe, five years from now dreams.
Neal was looking at the excess of white marble and thinking that maybe if he stayed too long, something had to happen to push him away. Mozzie kept telling him: people like them didn't get homes and happy endings. He kept not asking what made them different, these things Mozzie offered in their place.
-
Home is where you make it, Mozzie said; and sometimes home is where you hang your hat – you, particularly, and often home is an illusion. But this is a pretty good one. And it was, for what it was.
-
"This isn't healthy, you know," Mozzie said, and Neal raised an eyebrow.
"Says the person drinking at seven o'clock in the morning."
"Yes, well." Mozzie came around the balcony chair, champagne in one hand and a juicer in the other. Neal guessed that there was an essentially homeopathic amount of orange juice in it; Mozzie had waxed poetic the other night on June's board games and mimosas when he'd had too much rum in him, and now, coming down from that, Neal suspected they both wanted to leave that memory behind them. Almost-straight champagne. Hard as champagne got. "There are no rules left, Neal; might as well enjoy that. You have plans for the afternoon?"
"Thinking of getting to work decorating the place," Neal said, folding his copy of the New York Times. The supplier here got the print copies almost a week behind their release; he was reading news from before they'd left. "I found a great spot for a Girl with a Pearl Earring."
"Oh. I found a great art supplier in Santiago," Mozzie said. "Just tell me what you need; I was going to go over for some whittling equipment later today."
"You're taking up whittling?" Neal asked.
Mozzie shrugged. "I imagine I'll have plenty of time for new hobbies. What about you? Have your eye on any new pastimes?"
"Hadn't thought about it," Neal said. "I don't know. Sailing? Astronomy?"
"Keeping an eye out for little green men," Mozzie said. "A noble pursuit."
Neal gave him a Really? look, which Mozzie was entirely impervious to.
"Do you want me to pick up a telescope while I'm out?" he asked.
"I can get one myself," Neal said. He might as well go out to see what was available, if he even decided to go for it. It might be an idiotic fancy, in any case; it would be nice to think the stars would be constant enough even when he moved from place to place, but the stars were different from the northern hemisphere to the south, and absent in Manhattan altogether.
-
The sun rose over the central Atlantic as impartially as it rose over New York City, chasing away a sky more full of stars and illuminating a city less painted in lights. Ten or twelve sunrises in and Neal found himself settling in without intending to – but Mozzie had said it: there were no rules left, and this place seemed set aside from the rest of the flow of the world. Forgotten and unnoticed, somehow. Who was going to look for them here? The one person who'd managed to track him down before had tossed him out here in the first place.
A happy home is the single spot of rest which a man has upon this Earth, Mozzie said.
Mozzie had a bottomless wealth of quotes about home, and Neal had put up a Girl with a Pearl Earring on a spot where he could see it and the vast blue expanse of an undifferentiated sea, and he was thinking of putting up a Mona Lisa in the library, and if Mozzie pointed out his fondness for portraits of girls with ambiguous expressions, at least Neal wasn't painting Cubist interpretations of the Manhattan skyline.
For Neal's part, he ran along the shore and let the tides wash out his footprints. He talked with the people in the city and left them with never quite enough information to know him. He added pieces of himself to the decoration in the villa, where "pieces of himself" were defined as forgeries, lovingly constructed to be unidentifiable as his own work. And every time he caught himself looking backward he forced himself to look ahead, until one night under a rolling storm when he got a message on the pager Ellen had left him.
-
The lightning was far enough out to be striking the water and not the sand, and the thunder had a degree of threat that Neal wasn't sure was entirely metaphorical. Through all this time Ellen hadn't asked him to contact her this directly, and he couldn't imagine it was for anything good – maybe Kramer had tracked the Raphael back to her, maybe she was going down for receiving stolen goods, maybe Manhattan was burning down behind him and if not for this call he'd only hear about it six days later by the New York Times.
He found the villa's burner and called across the world, waited to hear the click and the static of an open line. "Ellen?"
Ellen was not the one who answered. "Hi, Neal."
He almost had to laugh, at that. Here, he was thinking catastrophe; in reality, it was just Peter Burke, tracking him down again. "I guess this makes you three-and-oh."
"Two-and-one," Peter said. "I haven't found you yet."
There was something grounding and familiar about the quips back and forth, for all that distance and uncertainty changed them, made them not quite as steady, unbalanced the rhythm.
"The DOJ has someone looking for you," Peter said, though apparently Peter wasn't that "he".
"I'm safe here," Neal said. "And I'm happy." He wasn't sure if he was adding that last part for Peter's sake or his own.
Adler had told him, outside that warehouse, There's nothing sadder than a con man conning himself. At this point, Neal didn't even know what the con was, any more. Home was the con. Neat, thorough endings were the con. Escape was the con. His life was the con.
"We had a good run," he said.
And Peter said, "It's not over."
Damn it.
"New York and I are over," Neal said, ignoring the stacks of Times sitting in the corner of the library, the crumbling sandcastles in the shape of the Chrysler Building, the Empire State, the things he'd left behind. There were only a few ways his partnership with Peter could have ended; there was only one way his life in New York could have come to a close. Absolutely, and messily.
But he could tell that Peter didn't believe that.
He won the battle – he said Goodbye, and Peter said Goodbye, and that sounded final enough, from where he was sitting – but by the tone in Peter's voice, he hadn't won the war. Peter Burke did not know how to let go.
Neal did. It was trivially easy, when the world made it unavoidable.
-
Which still didn't prepare Neal for seeing Peter in El Café Isleño, because what the hell, and even when Peter told him to run he couldn't just let him run, and also how in hell had he tracked him out to Cape Verde in the first place, and also what the hell? Neal was beginning to think he could flee to the International Space Station, and Peter would be on the next shuttle. Or possibly there without a shuttle.
At least he wasn't wearing the suit this time, either.
The next two days – getting a bear hug from Peter, getting shot in the leg, witnessing Peter break into song at the marina and spin out the most outré plan Hughes (sanely back in New York, and Neal envied him) had apparently heard yet – convinced him, more than anything, that Peter was living in a radically different world than the rest of them, which had an edge of irony given the number of times Peter had accused him and Mozzie of the same thing. But this was just deeply bizarre.
He traveled halfway around the world on an unsanctioned manhunt to track us down, and now he's trying to move heaven and Earth to bring you back to New York, Mozzie had said. And while the reasons Peter gave – making things right, balancing the scales, approximating some level of justice – were Peter, through and through, Neal still wasn't sure he understood what had happened by the time he was sitting on a plane and looking forward to professional medical care (with sterilized equipment and everything).
The wound in his leg was throbbing and the rest of his body ached with the unaddressed stress of life without safety, no rest, looking over one shoulder and trying to get away, but at least he could sit down again, now. He wasn't running any more, and even if that was just because he'd been shot, caught, and arrested, the game was up. When that was all you had in the way of downtime, you took it.
He took an aisle seat, because he didn't want to watch Cape Verde shrink to nothing in the window and get left behind, the way everything got tossed behind him. St. Louis, a hundred hotel rooms and flats and villas scattered across Europe, New York – but this was the first leg of the journey back to New York. He kept finding his way back there, and maybe someday he'd have to face the significance of that.
Maybe one of these days he'd have to let it sink in that Peter had talked to Ellen, and the two of them had conspired to drag him back to the city he'd run from. He'd burned St. Louis and any chance at commutation, and yet. The two of them.
It might all be for nothing. History said it would be. Their best efforts couldn't stop Kramer or Collins; never could stop him from jumping into something that burned him, his bridges, and everyone around.
This could still all fall apart.
But wouldn't it be something if it didn't?
He didn't realize he'd been staring at Peter until Peter looked over, raised his eyebrows, and said "You okay?"
"I never thanked you for coming," Neal said. Not once. The closest he'd come was that storage unit, after the first three-year chase: Thank you. I never would have found her without you. And he'd balk at admitting it to Mozzie, but it meant something, knowing he'd be searched for when he disappeared.
Peter got that odd look on his face, like he was half-proud to see Neal employing some facet of proper socialization, and half-embarrassed to be having this conversation. "You don't need to," he said.
"Still," Neal said.
Peter breathed out, gave him a lopsided smile, and reached across the aisle to plant a wordless hand on his shoulder. After a couple seconds he squeezed down and pulled his hand back, like he was worried about violating some unspoken rule of masculinity or FBI-appropriate behavior or them-appropriate behavior or just Peter Burke-ness, and Neal let himself smile and roll his neck so he was staring aimlessly at the ceiling again.
It was a long flight home, but they got there, in the end.