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[Fic][White Collar] Three Times Neal Ran (and one time he was found) – 1. Waking
Title: Three Times Neal Ran (and one time he was found) – 1. Waking
Index Post: [Fic][White Collar] Three Times Neal Ran (and one time he was found) – Index
The crack of a thunderstorm rolling off the mountain slopes wakes Neal from a restless sleep to an empty bed. Sweat has pooled between his shoulderblades; it's late November, in the dark of night and still eighty degrees outside, and Kate has left the windows open to eke out whatever cool air the storm can bring in. The world feels slightly shifted out-of-bounds of reality. But Neal is well-familiar with that, those hinterlands of sleep; good times to ply the power of suggestion, or, as now, to breathe and let the world cast itself into a new and unexpected form.
He stays there for a while, watching the gauzy curtains flutter in like ghosts. No light pollution, outside this window. No city lights, skylines lit up like Broadway acts, no wild architecture stamped in halogen against the rumbling sky.
New York is a long way away, but he never thought he could stay there forever.
The thunder is audible from here, but there's no rain outside the window yet. Neal gets up, hunts through the dark bedroom until he finds a pair of sandals, and heads outdoors.
He finds Kate on the beach, arms tucked around herself, staring out at the night-dark water; she probably hears him, but doesn't turn as he comes up behind her, wraps his arms around her and over hers, and lets her ground him. Years and years, chasing her and getting caught and tried and sentenced, living out his time in prison and then working with the FBI, working the FBI, dancing to Fowler's mad plans, and this – a cottage in the Seychelles, with the forested slopes to its back and the ocean spread out before it – this here is the reward.
"It's beautiful," he says.
Kate makes an affirmative noise. The waves toss themselves onto the beach, and she says "No one is coming for us."
Neal grins. They pulled a con to get themselves out here that turned a division of the FBI into their inside men. When you get law enforcement on your side, that's something to take pride in, surely. "Does that bother you?" he asks, nosing into the warmth of her throat; she smells a bit like the water, that clean salt tang, but there's a richness under it that's life and blood and skin. He can feel the flicker of muscle as she smiles.
"You're the one who likes being chased, Neal. Not me."
"Oh, come on. You had me chasing you for a good, long time."
Kate is silent, and lets the ocean answer for her.
He's silent with her, for a while; the heat of her body is distinct from the intermingling warmth and coolness of the air, and her weight, locked against his, is comforting. Feels like home.
"What are you thinking?" Neal asks, after a while. Kate sighs.
"I was thinking about that FBI agent. Burke." She leans back into him, and his arms tighten instinctively.
"Peter," he says, and dashes the first three thoughts that come to mind out of his mind. "Why are you thinking about him?"
"You said he got a two-week suspension? Because of Fowler?"
"Yeah," Neal breathes, and raises his head to look out over the waves. Saint-Exupery had a line about that – how love wasn't gazing into each other's eyes, but gazing outward in the same direction. Neal can take either form. "Which would put his first day back – well, that would have been today. He's probably still at the office."
"It has to be late, in New York," Kate says. Neal shrugs.
"Couldn't evict him with a backhoe and a three-man team."
Kate shifts her hand, resting it on Neal's wrist. "Think he'll be looking for us?"
"Hey," Neal says, "you said it. That bomb made our getaway untraceable – no one who examines that wreckage will believe we survived. And even if they did, what is he going to do? Come extradite us for going undercover for OPR?"
"So no one is coming," Kate says, again.
"No one is coming," Neal confirms.
Kate lapses into silence again.
Neal holds on to her, but the first drops of water are darting across the beach and the storm is creeping under his collar. He's not shivering yet, but he can feel it coming.
"I have an idea," he says. "You come in, and I'll make torrijas for breakfast, and we can hide under blankets and watch the rain roll out over the ocean."
"Maybe I'd rather be out here," Kate says.
"In the dark, soaked to the bone?"
Kate leans back, and turns toward him. Her eyes have always been striking, and in the night, with the storm–
"It's where you are," she says.
"Ooh," he responds. "And if I were to go back in?"
"Then... I would have to follow you, wouldn't I?" Kate says. He grins, and she presses: "that's what you want me to say? Do you think that I will?"
"Come on," he says, and tugs her back toward the cottage.
Halfway there, the sky opens up above them.
They make the last several yards in a run, laughing, Neal extending his arm over Kate and pretending that'll do anything to help her. They slip into the cottage under the yellow light of an outdoor lamp and Kate beelines to the stove, while Neal brushes drops of rain off his bare arms.
Kate fiddles with the stove and gets it to leak out an unhealthy-smelling gas, which sneaks into his nostrils like an unpleasant afterthought. He coughs. "Right. We'd better get that fixed." He walks up to Kate, tucking himself against her. "Okay, rain check on the torrijas. Fresh cut fruits?"
"Now I'm cold," Kate says, lips pulling into a moue. "I think you owe me coffee, at least."
"Oh, I owe you, do I?" Neal asks, though he's generally accepted the proposition that he owes her anything she claims he does. "I was the one who decided to take a walk in the rain?"
"Wasn't raining when I went out," Kate says. She puts her hand on the cool surface of the stove. "Coffee, Neal."
Neal mimes doffing a hat he's not wearing, and goes to rummage through the cottage's closets.
In one of them, he locates the construction-yellow toolkit left behind by the previous owners – the casual, everyday sorts of tools that represented a life spent with different priorities than any that had ever been Neal's. Hammers and screwdrivers; a wrench set; a tackle box full of nuts and washers, nails and screws; a cordless drill; a corded electric saw with a blade that had rusted red. He pokes and prods through it, memorizing the contents by force of habit, then carries it back toward the kitchen.
He really has no idea how to fix a gas stove, but he's learned that most things are simpler than people assume them to be.
Kate is standing at the kitchen window, staring at the falling rain with a pensive, troubled look. She's always had moods which changed freely, if not swiftly. She's always worn them on her face, for all the good it does an observer.
Neal's spent a long time watching Kate, learning the shifts, and it was Mozzie's influence that got him finding and remembering a line from one of the books he'd acquired in prison: with something on her face like a mask – a thick mask, as though her face were the surface of the sea... it possessed not a single color but a multitude, appearing and disappearing and intermingling. That had been a novel about exiles.
He draws up to her, setting the toolbox aside, and wraps her in his arms again. There's always been that urge, the bone-deep certainty that if he's there enough, present enough, he can chase away whatever troubles she has.
These are some of the reasons Mozzie's always called him a hopeless romantic.
Then, Mozzie's not here.
The stove is still idly leaking, the gas scratching his lungs, and he says "What do you see out there?"
"We're going to have to run again," Kate says, voice all dark certainty. "We should already be running."
"What? Why?"
"You know why," Kate says.
A thread of unease travels up his spine, and he coughs. The chemical tang to the air, the fact that after running for years on end leaves you with a certain set of instincts, Kate's quiet insistence – something has him itching to flee, and he digs his heels in. No reason to run. "We're safe here."
"We're not going to be safe anywhere until this is over," Kate says. She presses her fingers into the glass pane of the window, a fragile barrier against the strengthening storm. Neal has the feeling that the storm isn't what she's talking about.
"Until what's over?" His arms tighten around her. "Fowler? The music box? It's done. It's–"
"Not that," Kate says, and turns. Her eyes are as striking here as under gathering storm: eyes to get lost in, eyes to never find your way home from. There's something else in them, now, though; something cornered and hard. She rests her palm against his cheek.
"It is paradise, though," she offers. "While it lasts."
And of course it can't last.
This is when it begins to slip away.
One of the perks – or problems – with retirement is that Neal's mind takes the opportunity to wander.
Neal comes out of a daydream into the central Atlantic sun with a curious lacuna where the memory of the daydream should have been, like he's walked into a room and forgotten what was doing there. There's only the lingering aftertaste of may-still-bes and might-have-beens, and the vague impression of nighttime and rain.
Neal can hear rain, but the air is dry, and it doesn't sound like a Cape Verde thunderstorm anyway. Storms here blow in fast and come down hard, and this is slow, steady, the drops blurred into a kind of anonymity occasionally backed by a distant rumble.
He gets up from the lawn chair he was half-dozing in, and follows the sound to the sprawling library that Mozzie has repurposed as a bedroom.
True to suspicion, Mozzie's noise generator is set to some kind of rain – Thunderstorm, maybe, or Rain Pattering On Corrugated Metal With Blurred Traffic Noises In Background; Neal tries not to pay that much attention to Mozzie's sleep accouterments for a number of reasons, foremost among them not needing to think too hard about what kinds of ulterior purposes they've been designed to serve. Mozzie has long vacated his bedroom and left the door hanging open in a kind of forced carefreeness, though Neal doesn't believe it for a second. Mozzie probably has cameras, pressure plates, and tripwires set up just in case someone finds their villa and walks in. It's a little intimidating, how quickly he adapted this place to serve as home.
But of all the places they could have ended up, Neal has to admit that he can't think of many better places than this one: beautiful weather, beautiful people, a villa that would be the envy of the kings of some nations. And more than that, it's a secure place, a safe place. That's the point of running.
Well. That's the point of running from something. Running to something is a different kettle entirely.
He finds Mozzie on one of the villa's balconies, reading a newspaper, with a chilled bottle of champagne at his elbow next to a bowl of citrus which looks more for decoration than consumption. "You know, I knew I should have looked up a list of this island's allergens before we came," Mozzie says. Neal raises an eyebrow.
"I'm surprised you didn't. Was there pollen on your window, or something?"
"You sound a little–", and Mozzie wobbles one of his hands. "Maybe you need more vitamin C. Orange?"
"I'm fine." Neal has to wonder if, in the absence of a wider criminal network and the US government and law enforcement – along with whatever conspiracies he's convinced himself are real and walking the streets of New York – Mozzie's finely-honed paranoia has expanded to take in the health of the people around him. He hopes not. Mozzie developing some kind of projective hypochondria sounds like it will make this little island adventure more trying than it needs to be.
He approaches and slides into the second chair, letting the Cape Verde vista spread out in front of him, all whites and blues and sun-reflecting greens. "I have to say. It's no Manhattan, but I could get used to this view."
"'How folly to have feared it,'" Mozzie quotes, without looking up from his newspaper. "'Not the best of all we knew in life can equal this; blending in one the sense of utter rest, the vivid certainty of boundless bliss!'"
It takes Neal a moment of shuffling through the reams of literature Mozzie has made sure to stuff into his head. "Mary Emily Bradley," he identifies, at length. "You know that poem's about death, not retirement, right?"
Mozzie shrugs. "Whatever."
"'The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty – not knowing what comes next,'" Neal counters.
"Ursula K. LeGuin," Mozzie identifies, whip-quick. "Come on, Neal. Not even you can be getting cabin fever this quickly."
"No," Neal says, too quickly. "I was just thinking. In another world, this could all have gone differently."
"Mm," Mozzie says, not impressed. "You could be serving consecutive life sentences on trumped-up charges as a slave to The Man in DC."
Neal shrugs one shoulder. "Or I could be a free man, collecting a paycheck from the FBI and working with you on the side."
Mozzie smiles. "You would make one hell of an inside man," he agrees. "Or, we could have run the instant we had the treasure. No Kramer, no Keller..."
"No goodbyes," Neal says. No realization that Peter would stand up for his freedom, that even Diana would have his back, when the time came, ready and waiting with a getaway car. He'd have gone without a blessing, unofficial as that final blessing was. A shake of the head and a trapped, angry look, smoldering just below the surface.
Run.
"There are never goodbyes," Mozzie says, and his voice is sad and absolute.
Neal sits on that for a moment.
Then he laughs. "It's a beautiful day. Why are we talking about this?"
"Lingering ambivalence about your unplanned escape?" Mozzie ventures. "There was no other way. You knew that. Even the Suit saw that."
Let's say you run from something, and leave someone else to take the fall. Does it matter at all if they told you to go?
"I know," Neal says, and tilts his head back to the sky.
There's a cold breeze coming in across the ocean, and he can still hear Mozzie's noise generator going. He closes his eyes, lets the wind promise to take him back to that drowsy, neither-here state. Freedom means nothing to wake up for on a Monday morning, no schedule to hold him like the anklet held him, nothing but himself and this wide, wide corner of the world. He hasn't built a life here yet to occupy him.
"If there's one thing I know, it's that."
These are the things Neal's certain of:
He's running from something, and he's not the only one. His head hurts, his chest hurts, and his left leg really hurts, but running on his leg and aggravating a fracture or ripping open stitches or whatever self-inflicted damage he'll do to himself is going to be less of an obstacle to his continued survival than being found by whatever has him on the run in the first place.
His immediate environment is dominated by concrete and asphalt, single-story buildings with barred-over doors, graffiti and a chemical smell he can't place. There's a chill to the night air, with rain sluicing down through the gutters.
He should have been with someone. Should have had someone to watch his back, should have been watching someone's back.
And he's alone.
Index Post: [Fic][White Collar] Three Times Neal Ran (and one time he was found) – Index
(ii)
The crack of a thunderstorm rolling off the mountain slopes wakes Neal from a restless sleep to an empty bed. Sweat has pooled between his shoulderblades; it's late November, in the dark of night and still eighty degrees outside, and Kate has left the windows open to eke out whatever cool air the storm can bring in. The world feels slightly shifted out-of-bounds of reality. But Neal is well-familiar with that, those hinterlands of sleep; good times to ply the power of suggestion, or, as now, to breathe and let the world cast itself into a new and unexpected form.
He stays there for a while, watching the gauzy curtains flutter in like ghosts. No light pollution, outside this window. No city lights, skylines lit up like Broadway acts, no wild architecture stamped in halogen against the rumbling sky.
New York is a long way away, but he never thought he could stay there forever.
The thunder is audible from here, but there's no rain outside the window yet. Neal gets up, hunts through the dark bedroom until he finds a pair of sandals, and heads outdoors.
He finds Kate on the beach, arms tucked around herself, staring out at the night-dark water; she probably hears him, but doesn't turn as he comes up behind her, wraps his arms around her and over hers, and lets her ground him. Years and years, chasing her and getting caught and tried and sentenced, living out his time in prison and then working with the FBI, working the FBI, dancing to Fowler's mad plans, and this – a cottage in the Seychelles, with the forested slopes to its back and the ocean spread out before it – this here is the reward.
"It's beautiful," he says.
Kate makes an affirmative noise. The waves toss themselves onto the beach, and she says "No one is coming for us."
Neal grins. They pulled a con to get themselves out here that turned a division of the FBI into their inside men. When you get law enforcement on your side, that's something to take pride in, surely. "Does that bother you?" he asks, nosing into the warmth of her throat; she smells a bit like the water, that clean salt tang, but there's a richness under it that's life and blood and skin. He can feel the flicker of muscle as she smiles.
"You're the one who likes being chased, Neal. Not me."
"Oh, come on. You had me chasing you for a good, long time."
Kate is silent, and lets the ocean answer for her.
He's silent with her, for a while; the heat of her body is distinct from the intermingling warmth and coolness of the air, and her weight, locked against his, is comforting. Feels like home.
"What are you thinking?" Neal asks, after a while. Kate sighs.
"I was thinking about that FBI agent. Burke." She leans back into him, and his arms tighten instinctively.
"Peter," he says, and dashes the first three thoughts that come to mind out of his mind. "Why are you thinking about him?"
"You said he got a two-week suspension? Because of Fowler?"
"Yeah," Neal breathes, and raises his head to look out over the waves. Saint-Exupery had a line about that – how love wasn't gazing into each other's eyes, but gazing outward in the same direction. Neal can take either form. "Which would put his first day back – well, that would have been today. He's probably still at the office."
"It has to be late, in New York," Kate says. Neal shrugs.
"Couldn't evict him with a backhoe and a three-man team."
Kate shifts her hand, resting it on Neal's wrist. "Think he'll be looking for us?"
"Hey," Neal says, "you said it. That bomb made our getaway untraceable – no one who examines that wreckage will believe we survived. And even if they did, what is he going to do? Come extradite us for going undercover for OPR?"
"So no one is coming," Kate says, again.
"No one is coming," Neal confirms.
Kate lapses into silence again.
Neal holds on to her, but the first drops of water are darting across the beach and the storm is creeping under his collar. He's not shivering yet, but he can feel it coming.
"I have an idea," he says. "You come in, and I'll make torrijas for breakfast, and we can hide under blankets and watch the rain roll out over the ocean."
"Maybe I'd rather be out here," Kate says.
"In the dark, soaked to the bone?"
Kate leans back, and turns toward him. Her eyes have always been striking, and in the night, with the storm–
"It's where you are," she says.
"Ooh," he responds. "And if I were to go back in?"
"Then... I would have to follow you, wouldn't I?" Kate says. He grins, and she presses: "that's what you want me to say? Do you think that I will?"
"Come on," he says, and tugs her back toward the cottage.
Halfway there, the sky opens up above them.
They make the last several yards in a run, laughing, Neal extending his arm over Kate and pretending that'll do anything to help her. They slip into the cottage under the yellow light of an outdoor lamp and Kate beelines to the stove, while Neal brushes drops of rain off his bare arms.
Kate fiddles with the stove and gets it to leak out an unhealthy-smelling gas, which sneaks into his nostrils like an unpleasant afterthought. He coughs. "Right. We'd better get that fixed." He walks up to Kate, tucking himself against her. "Okay, rain check on the torrijas. Fresh cut fruits?"
"Now I'm cold," Kate says, lips pulling into a moue. "I think you owe me coffee, at least."
"Oh, I owe you, do I?" Neal asks, though he's generally accepted the proposition that he owes her anything she claims he does. "I was the one who decided to take a walk in the rain?"
"Wasn't raining when I went out," Kate says. She puts her hand on the cool surface of the stove. "Coffee, Neal."
Neal mimes doffing a hat he's not wearing, and goes to rummage through the cottage's closets.
In one of them, he locates the construction-yellow toolkit left behind by the previous owners – the casual, everyday sorts of tools that represented a life spent with different priorities than any that had ever been Neal's. Hammers and screwdrivers; a wrench set; a tackle box full of nuts and washers, nails and screws; a cordless drill; a corded electric saw with a blade that had rusted red. He pokes and prods through it, memorizing the contents by force of habit, then carries it back toward the kitchen.
He really has no idea how to fix a gas stove, but he's learned that most things are simpler than people assume them to be.
Kate is standing at the kitchen window, staring at the falling rain with a pensive, troubled look. She's always had moods which changed freely, if not swiftly. She's always worn them on her face, for all the good it does an observer.
Neal's spent a long time watching Kate, learning the shifts, and it was Mozzie's influence that got him finding and remembering a line from one of the books he'd acquired in prison: with something on her face like a mask – a thick mask, as though her face were the surface of the sea... it possessed not a single color but a multitude, appearing and disappearing and intermingling. That had been a novel about exiles.
He draws up to her, setting the toolbox aside, and wraps her in his arms again. There's always been that urge, the bone-deep certainty that if he's there enough, present enough, he can chase away whatever troubles she has.
These are some of the reasons Mozzie's always called him a hopeless romantic.
Then, Mozzie's not here.
The stove is still idly leaking, the gas scratching his lungs, and he says "What do you see out there?"
"We're going to have to run again," Kate says, voice all dark certainty. "We should already be running."
"What? Why?"
"You know why," Kate says.
A thread of unease travels up his spine, and he coughs. The chemical tang to the air, the fact that after running for years on end leaves you with a certain set of instincts, Kate's quiet insistence – something has him itching to flee, and he digs his heels in. No reason to run. "We're safe here."
"We're not going to be safe anywhere until this is over," Kate says. She presses her fingers into the glass pane of the window, a fragile barrier against the strengthening storm. Neal has the feeling that the storm isn't what she's talking about.
"Until what's over?" His arms tighten around her. "Fowler? The music box? It's done. It's–"
"Not that," Kate says, and turns. Her eyes are as striking here as under gathering storm: eyes to get lost in, eyes to never find your way home from. There's something else in them, now, though; something cornered and hard. She rests her palm against his cheek.
"It is paradise, though," she offers. "While it lasts."
And of course it can't last.
This is when it begins to slip away.
(iii)
One of the perks – or problems – with retirement is that Neal's mind takes the opportunity to wander.
Neal comes out of a daydream into the central Atlantic sun with a curious lacuna where the memory of the daydream should have been, like he's walked into a room and forgotten what was doing there. There's only the lingering aftertaste of may-still-bes and might-have-beens, and the vague impression of nighttime and rain.
Neal can hear rain, but the air is dry, and it doesn't sound like a Cape Verde thunderstorm anyway. Storms here blow in fast and come down hard, and this is slow, steady, the drops blurred into a kind of anonymity occasionally backed by a distant rumble.
He gets up from the lawn chair he was half-dozing in, and follows the sound to the sprawling library that Mozzie has repurposed as a bedroom.
True to suspicion, Mozzie's noise generator is set to some kind of rain – Thunderstorm, maybe, or Rain Pattering On Corrugated Metal With Blurred Traffic Noises In Background; Neal tries not to pay that much attention to Mozzie's sleep accouterments for a number of reasons, foremost among them not needing to think too hard about what kinds of ulterior purposes they've been designed to serve. Mozzie has long vacated his bedroom and left the door hanging open in a kind of forced carefreeness, though Neal doesn't believe it for a second. Mozzie probably has cameras, pressure plates, and tripwires set up just in case someone finds their villa and walks in. It's a little intimidating, how quickly he adapted this place to serve as home.
But of all the places they could have ended up, Neal has to admit that he can't think of many better places than this one: beautiful weather, beautiful people, a villa that would be the envy of the kings of some nations. And more than that, it's a secure place, a safe place. That's the point of running.
Well. That's the point of running from something. Running to something is a different kettle entirely.
He finds Mozzie on one of the villa's balconies, reading a newspaper, with a chilled bottle of champagne at his elbow next to a bowl of citrus which looks more for decoration than consumption. "You know, I knew I should have looked up a list of this island's allergens before we came," Mozzie says. Neal raises an eyebrow.
"I'm surprised you didn't. Was there pollen on your window, or something?"
"You sound a little–", and Mozzie wobbles one of his hands. "Maybe you need more vitamin C. Orange?"
"I'm fine." Neal has to wonder if, in the absence of a wider criminal network and the US government and law enforcement – along with whatever conspiracies he's convinced himself are real and walking the streets of New York – Mozzie's finely-honed paranoia has expanded to take in the health of the people around him. He hopes not. Mozzie developing some kind of projective hypochondria sounds like it will make this little island adventure more trying than it needs to be.
He approaches and slides into the second chair, letting the Cape Verde vista spread out in front of him, all whites and blues and sun-reflecting greens. "I have to say. It's no Manhattan, but I could get used to this view."
"'How folly to have feared it,'" Mozzie quotes, without looking up from his newspaper. "'Not the best of all we knew in life can equal this; blending in one the sense of utter rest, the vivid certainty of boundless bliss!'"
It takes Neal a moment of shuffling through the reams of literature Mozzie has made sure to stuff into his head. "Mary Emily Bradley," he identifies, at length. "You know that poem's about death, not retirement, right?"
Mozzie shrugs. "Whatever."
"'The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty – not knowing what comes next,'" Neal counters.
"Ursula K. LeGuin," Mozzie identifies, whip-quick. "Come on, Neal. Not even you can be getting cabin fever this quickly."
"No," Neal says, too quickly. "I was just thinking. In another world, this could all have gone differently."
"Mm," Mozzie says, not impressed. "You could be serving consecutive life sentences on trumped-up charges as a slave to The Man in DC."
Neal shrugs one shoulder. "Or I could be a free man, collecting a paycheck from the FBI and working with you on the side."
Mozzie smiles. "You would make one hell of an inside man," he agrees. "Or, we could have run the instant we had the treasure. No Kramer, no Keller..."
"No goodbyes," Neal says. No realization that Peter would stand up for his freedom, that even Diana would have his back, when the time came, ready and waiting with a getaway car. He'd have gone without a blessing, unofficial as that final blessing was. A shake of the head and a trapped, angry look, smoldering just below the surface.
Run.
"There are never goodbyes," Mozzie says, and his voice is sad and absolute.
Neal sits on that for a moment.
Then he laughs. "It's a beautiful day. Why are we talking about this?"
"Lingering ambivalence about your unplanned escape?" Mozzie ventures. "There was no other way. You knew that. Even the Suit saw that."
Let's say you run from something, and leave someone else to take the fall. Does it matter at all if they told you to go?
"I know," Neal says, and tilts his head back to the sky.
There's a cold breeze coming in across the ocean, and he can still hear Mozzie's noise generator going. He closes his eyes, lets the wind promise to take him back to that drowsy, neither-here state. Freedom means nothing to wake up for on a Monday morning, no schedule to hold him like the anklet held him, nothing but himself and this wide, wide corner of the world. He hasn't built a life here yet to occupy him.
"If there's one thing I know, it's that."
( )
These are the things Neal's certain of:
He's running from something, and he's not the only one. His head hurts, his chest hurts, and his left leg really hurts, but running on his leg and aggravating a fracture or ripping open stitches or whatever self-inflicted damage he'll do to himself is going to be less of an obstacle to his continued survival than being found by whatever has him on the run in the first place.
His immediate environment is dominated by concrete and asphalt, single-story buildings with barred-over doors, graffiti and a chemical smell he can't place. There's a chill to the night air, with rain sluicing down through the gutters.
He should have been with someone. Should have had someone to watch his back, should have been watching someone's back.
And he's alone.