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magibrainTitle: Three Times Neal Ran (and one time he was found) – 9. Found
Index Post: [Fic][White Collar] Three Times Neal Ran (and one time he was found) – Index
It's just past dawn in the Seychelles.
The sky is still dripping, and the entire landscape looks soggy, but the clouds have thinned and a gray, diffuse light is seeping through. Neal is walking through the cottage, and stops when he hears something outside – light, pensive footsteps, Kate, maybe, but when he throws open the shutters, no one is there. It hurts. More than he was expecting.
But in his mind is an image of Kate walking alone along the shore, a study in dove-grays, with her hair a bold note marrying the breeze. He could paint that, a dozen times over.
She sells sea shells in the Seychelles.
He's got almost the whole composition worked out when he hears a strange, lopsided jumble of beeping, like the overflow of sound in a hospital hallway. It's their emergency burner – one of those habits Mozzie instilled in him. Always have a safehouse. Always have one way of getting a message out that no one else knows about. Always have your options.
He follows it through the cottage into the livingroom, where a trunk has been stashed in the corner. In the trunk, under his art supplies and Kate's first editions, under the false bottom that conceals just enough space for a phone and some cash and a handful of things only made valuable by sentiment, the burner is still ringing. Neal flips it open.
"Hello?"
And theres a familiar voice on the other end: "Hello, Neal."
"Kate." Even after so long, her name brings a warm rush up his chest. He suspects that this will always be a part of him; an entire world wrapped up in that sound, paved over by time and circumstance and the best and worst intentions, but still indelible. He's smiling before he knows whether or not he has a reason to. "Where are you?"
"That doesn't matter, now," she says.
"Yes, it does," he says, and the smile fades. "Kate, listen – I have a way out, for us." He pauses, waits for a reaction, then forges on. "We can go home. Back to New York. If you turn yourself in to Peter, he'll protect you; I know he will. He's a good man."
"It's too late for that," Kate says, and Neal's throat closes up.
"Why?"
"Neal," she says, "you ever think Mozzie's maybe right about all this? We're con artists. Maybe we just don't get happy endings."
"No." The response is hard, automatic. "I don't believe that. Not for a second."
"Really?"
"Really." He walks to the window, grips the sill. "Kate, please. I know we left it on a bad–"
Note. The word doesn't come. Outside the window there's an airstrip, an explosion, and it's gone. In his peripheral vision Mozzie is picking his way through the twisted, blackened wreckage of a plane, but Neal's alone, and Neal knows he's alone.
He knows exactly where he is.
"Mozzie," Neal says, into the phone. "I thought I got out of here."
"The Suit is capable of many things, my friend," Mozzie's voice says, over the line. The absence of Kate is a silence that gapes wider than the ocean outside. "I think you have to save yourself from yourself, though."
"I don't need saving from myself." His fingers tighten on the phone. "You would never say I needed that."
"Hey, I'm just reading from the script, here," Mozzie says. "If you don't like what it says, try therapy. I can lend you Percy. Yes, he may be just a rat, but I find his understanding of the finer nuances of human psychological states, without judging–"
Neal hangs up.
Then he takes a step back from the window, winds up, and throws the phone out through it. The glass shatters and the phone arcs impossibly far, vanishing against the backdrop of the waves.
One of the things Neal never knew about the Seychelles was that if you walked far enough, out along the beach, you'd wind up at a villa in Cape Verde. He considers just walking past, and makes it down to the beach where he used to run before his momentum stalls out. Another sea, another sky, another place to not call home.
He stands there and watches the clouds thin out, wondering if the rain is letting up in New York, until footsteps crunch across the rocky sand toward him.
Neal doesn't look to see who it is. He knows who it is.
"Hell of a thing, being able to retire to a place like this," Peter says, offering him a bottle of wine – screw-top – with no glass. Neal can't help but smile as he takes it.
"Tried it, once. Didn't work out," he says. "How did you manage to marry the most successful startup event planner in the greater New York area and come away without a single pretension to class?"
"Just lucky, I guess," Peter says, though his smile is fond. He and Elizabeth complement each other, in that sense where complement is like complete, in the way Neal wishes he could have complimented Kate, and Kate went a long way toward complementing him. "If you wanted, I could have grabbed the Bordeaux bottle from your place–"
"No," Neal says, too quickly, then covers it with a chuckle. "No; let's leave the Bordeaux alone. I think it's run its course."
"Hm," Peter says. Now his smile is self-satisfied, like he's just cracked a case. Neal squints at him.
"How did you find me?"
Peter glances at him. "How do I ever?"
"Well, the first two times, you found Kate," Neal says. "This time..."
"I knew you," Peter says.
Neal raises an eyebrow. "That predictable, am I?"
"Maybe I'm just that good." Peter looks past him, back in the direction Neal had come from. "I thought you'd let go of Kate."
Neal gives a short, bitter laugh, and looks out over the ocean. The Indian Ocean, the Central Atlantic; they both toss their waves on the shore, and they both give the illusion of encircling the world. "Yeah. So had I."
"But it's not that easy," Peter finishes for him.
"No."
He unscrews the winebottle, and takes a sniff. It smells antiseptic, and he grimaces.
"When Kate and I met. When I was working for Adler," he says. "I got pretty close to having everything I wanted. I didn't have to worry about money. I was doing something challenging. Important. At least, it felt important. People cared about what I thought – people cared about me. And even if I wasn't with Kate, I was still with her, you know? She was there." He breathes out. "Except, I was living a lie." He turns to look at Peter, gauge his reaction. "I think sometimes living a lie is the only way to get what you want."
Peter should probably spout a platitude, at this point; argue morality, offer some kind of reassurance that will come across as slightly too wholesome for the reality Neal knows. Instead, he tilts his head, looking at Neal sidelong. "Why are you telling me this?"
Neal gestures with the bottle to his temple. "Because this is all in my mind. None of it is real."
Ah, Peter mouths. Then, with a glance out to the ocean, "You know, you can always talk to me."
Neal looks at the sand beneath his shoes. "Yeah. Yeah, you've mentioned that a couple of times."
"Then why don't you ever take me up on it?"
Neal turns to look at him, framed by the Atlantic and the clearing sky. "I have," he says. "More than you know."
"Less than I'd like," Peter counters. Neal makes a small heh noise.
"Well, we can't all be Peter Burke, pathologically incapable of not telling the truth."
He takes another drink. Mozzie would probably have a field day with the symbolism of him needing hallucinated alcohol to get through a hallucinated conversation with his hallucinated protector,-father-figure,-partner,-handler,-buddy-or-whatever-Peter-is-at-this-point, but Neal chooses not to examine it too carefully.
"You know," he says, "I could have been really happy, here."
And to that, Peter just says, "Nah."
That irks him. Just once, he'd appreciate it if his hallucinations would agree with him. "I could have."
"You like being chased, Neal." Peter makes a grand gesture out across the waves. He's acquired a beer, sometime when Neal wasn't looking. At least his hallucinated friends need alcohol for this conversation, too. "You like having people to outwit. Sometimes, I think you even like being caught."
Neal raises an eyebrow.
"Lets you know you're appreciated," Peter says.
Neal is startled into laughing. "Yeah," he says. "Yeah, because getting a felony conviction is just as good as a medal or an honorary degree."
"It did get you into the FBI," Peter points out.
"Route less recommended," Neal mutters.
"Yeah," Peter agrees, with a laugh. It is a joke, Neal supposes – joke on him, joke on the world, joke on the people who make the rules and the people who live by breaking them. The waves come in, the waves go out, and Peter sweeps out a hand. "You want to go home?"
Neal takes one last look around the island, then down at the wine in his hand. Given more time, he could finish the wine, clean out the bottle, and there are lots of things you can do with bottles – build a ship, send a message. But he doesn't need to. Cape Verde, like the Bordeaux, has run its course.
"Yeah," he says, and turns his back to the ocean. "I think I do."
He walks past Peter, and Peter puts a hand on his shoulder as he goes by.
The absence of a headache when he wakes up is almost as distracting as the headache itself was.
It's too much an absence of everything – like there's a warm fog where the sense of his body should be, and a curious sense of bobbing ease where there should be flight-or-flight fear. It's not unpleasant, but it's gone 'round the other side of pleasant and come out at odd.
He blinks and moves his hand, then his head; the world floats into sense around him: the institutional robins-egg blue of a hospital room, a curtain pushed to one side, light streaming in, and Peter at the window with his back to him, chatting into a phone.
Neal looks down. He's not strapped to anything, though there's an IV going into one arm. A glance up the tubing tells him that whatever they've been draining into him – saline and an antibiotic, it looks like – has mostly drained into him, and thus the IV itself is probably not important for his continued survival.
It'd be difficult – Peter has a decent set of ears on him – but not totally impossible to disentangle himself and slip away.
Not that he wants to. But it's nice to know the option's there.
"Any chance that's Elizabeth?" he croaks, and grimaces almost immediately. He can taste a chemical tang and stale spit all the way back to his throat, and has to swallow a couple times to get his voice back to something that should come out of a person.
Peter turns back from the window, raises his eyebrows, and looks genuinely happy to see him. "Jones," he says, covering the phone's mic with one hand. "They said they hoped you'd be awake soon. How're'ya feeling?"
"Like I got hit by a bulldozer," Neal says, but makes his tone as chipper as it can be. His throat is still scratchy, and he feels like he's not quite all there. "You brought work?"
"Just wrapping things up," Peter says. "You're kinda messing up my Sunday, Neal."
"Is it Sunday already?" Neal asks. It does make sense. He has a vague recollection of planning to meet up with someone on Friday, get a lead – nothing time-sensitive – that they could follow up on the next week; quick little stop in the park before heading home for the weekend.
And then... and then.
Yeah. Okay, so he supposes he has kinda messed the weekend up.
Peter says something into the phone, then hangs up and comes to stand by the bed. "Glad you decided to join us back in reality."
Neal groans. "I don't like this reality." He moves his arm, and the cool plastic of the IV moves over his skin. "I prefer the ones where I'm not–" He shakes his elbow, watching the vibration propagate up the tube. "–hooked to things."
"You scared a few doctors. Give it a while."
For some reason, that makes him grin.
Reality feels soft and a little distant, and there's a a sneaking feeling of exhaustion that seems like it's ebbed out and may yet flow back in like a tide. He leans back into the pillows, shifts his weight, and–
"Whoa," he says, and moves his leg again. "Tracker's on the wrong foot."
"Well, your usual leg had to get nineteen stitches, and the doctor was very insistent we not let your anklet chafe." Peter is casing the room; after a second, he locates the side chair and starts hauling it over to the bed. "That going to be a problem? I'm not going to catch you toppling over like a half-sheared sheep?"
Neal shoots him a glance. "I think I'll manage," he says. "...have I ever told you that your similes are a little concerning?"
"It's part of my folksy charm," Peter deadpans, and sits down at Neal's elbow. "You okay to talk?"
Well, that's alarming. Neal shuffles through the words for hidden meaning, then says, "Why wouldn't I be?"
"You had a pretty rough night," Peter says, with that kind of careful diction that suggests he's using understatement as a guard against anything blowing up. "You weren't making a lot of sense when we found you. You kept talking about Kate and Adler and Collins."
Right. Those little slices of unreality, and Neal has the feeling that when Peter says You scared a few doctors, he was trying not to say You scared the hell out of all of us. He wouldn't put it past Peter to assume that he was having some kind of stress-induced break from reality, the same way Peter had been watching a little too hard for him to crumble after the plane blew up. But this was the deal; life knocked you around, and you picked yourself up and survived it. And afterwards, you didn't fixate too much on how narrowly you had.
He plays it off like it's no big deal. "Yeah, well, I was also running a fever of–" Neal blinks, and leaves the rest of the sentence open like a blank line on a form. True to expectation, Peter fills it in.
"A hundred and three point six." Peter is still watching him too closely, if his drug-padded brain is reading that right. "Anything you want to talk about?"
Neal feels like he's already said everything he needs to. More than he needs to. Sure, Peter might not think it counts when it's been said to imaginary versions of him – or of Mozzie – but what Peter doesn't know.
"The woman I was with," he says, instead. He fishes for a name, and one surfaces; one that isn't Kate. "Angela."
"We tracked her down," Peter says. "She was shaken up, but they didn't get to her. She went to ground even faster than you did."
Neal chuckles. "Well, to be fair, she has more experience being a CI who's allowed to do that sort of thing."
Didn't need his rescue, after all.
A smile prickles Peter's expression. "Well, you didn't do so badly."
"Old habits," Neal says. "The cop–?"
"Sergeant Richard Dean. Diana caught him taking a call after we left. As it turns out, his pistol had a few bullets unaccounted-for." Peter shrugs one shoulder. "He flipped pretty quickly on Jack Barnes, who was–"
"Their forger," Neal says, and nods. "That's my Collins and Adler."
"The off-brand versions," Peter says, and Neal laughs. He's just about to relax into the banter when he notices that Peter is still watching him, even more a-little-too-closely.
"What?"
"We've already gotten Angela's statement. But. Do you remember anything about last night?"
An abortive stab of panic goes through him.
A few mumblings about Collins and Adler and Kate aside, there's no way Peter knows what was going on inside his head. No way.
And then it occurs to him that Peter is asking about the real world, and he feels like an idiot. "Angela and I were going to meet someone who knew who the forger was," he says, and the levity drops out of his voice. "They were operating out of one of the temporary buildings at the construction site on Avenue F–" Lines of CAT trucks, backhoes, shovels; yellow machinery and dug-up gray earth and an overcast sky; he can remember all these things, but not the actual scene; "–but we were meeting at Baretto Point Park." He exhales. "Then Dean and Barnes showed up. They must have had someone watching our contact. Things got nasty pretty fast. I tried to cover for Angela to run, they grabbed me, and – I lose a little time, there."
"We think that at some point you got a rag full of solvent," Peter says, and there's a dark, hard edge to his tone. "Traces of it around your mouth and nose."
That's... disturbing, and Neal doesn't bother to hide it. "I almost wish I didn't know that."
"It's what they had lying around," Peter says. "All right. They took you to the construction site. We can assume that at some point they realized you were wearing a tracker, and they couldn't just keep you around, so they cut your anklet with a sawzall, and they moved you. That's when we lost track of you." And that dark edge is smoldering, now.
"...I almost wish I didn't know that, either." He starts drawing his injured foot up toward him, then catches what he's doing, and stops. Takes a deep breath, and... tries not to think of that. Peter watches him, like he's going to have to back off of that subject, and Neal coughs and tries to find a different one.
Peter finds one first. "How'd you get out?"
"I don't remember," Neal says, and then his wrists twitch. Right. "Cuffs. They had me in cuffs. I slipped them."
"And?"
"And I ran," Neal says. "It gets... jumbled, at that point." He's pretty sure he didn't end up in the Seychelles or on Cape Verde. Manhattan is less absurd, but still not terribly likely. "I think I made a run for the river."
"The river," Peter repeats. "The Bronx River."
"Concealing your tracks in a river is a time-honored method of evading escape," Neal says. Peter groans, and rolls his head back to look at the ceiling. "–what?"
"Nothing," Peter says, though his tone says, God help me. "It's just, I leave you alone for six blocks and two hours, and you start inhaling solvents, getting cuffed to things, and taking open wounds for dunks in the Bronx River."
"It seemed preferable to getting shot," Neal says, quietly.
Peter looks chastised, and waves it off. "Yeah."
Okay. That conversation took a turn.
Neal glances at the window, which offers him a completely generic view of the Upper East Side. If it's at all possible to avoid a serious conversation, he'd like to do that; he's had more serious conversations in the last howevermany hours than he'd budgeted for this week. The fact that a grand majority of them were with himself doesn't actually make that better.
Mostly, it makes him tired.
"They give you any idea when I'd be out of here?" he asks, though the way things are, he's not sure how he'd drag himself out of the bed, much less to his suite at June's. But Peter seems as eager to change the subject as Neal is.
"Shouldn't be long," he says. "They got you off supplemental oxygen this morning, and I gather that that was mostly a precaution. They want you on antibiotics and they'll have a laundry list of care instructions you need to follow, but you're not in any danger." He gives Neal a crooked grin. "You'll be back to work in no time."
Neal groans. "That's really not what I was asking."
"I know," Peter says. "Don't worry. You've earned a couple days off."
The light of day is bouncing off the buildings outside, and fatigue is lapping up the sides of his awareness again. Maybe no one will mind if he takes a quick nap before they release him. "I've earned it, have I?"
"Yeah," Peter says. "You did good."
He blinks in Peter's direction. "If that's your definition of 'good', the standards of the FBI have really–"
"Neal," Peter interrupts. Neal lets him. "You were feverish, slipping in and out of consciousness, and hallucinating, but you kept it together. You got yourself rescued." Peter's mouth quirks up into a thin half-smile. "And you didn't – I don't know. Run for France, or something."
I was already vacationing in the Tropics, Neal thinks. "Doesn't feel like much of an achievement."
"It was one."
Neal might have found something intelligent to say to that, but instead, he yawns.
When he blinks that away, Peter is looking at him with an expression that's slightly knowing, maybe a little fond. "Right," he says. "I'll see if I can catch someone's attention. You, relax, I guess."
"I thought that's what I've been doing."
"Do some more."
Peter's hand lands on his shoulder, and he stands.
"Sleep, Neal," Peter says, so Neal does.
– END –
Index Post: [Fic][White Collar] Three Times Neal Ran (and one time he was found) – Index
(ii)
It's just past dawn in the Seychelles.
The sky is still dripping, and the entire landscape looks soggy, but the clouds have thinned and a gray, diffuse light is seeping through. Neal is walking through the cottage, and stops when he hears something outside – light, pensive footsteps, Kate, maybe, but when he throws open the shutters, no one is there. It hurts. More than he was expecting.
But in his mind is an image of Kate walking alone along the shore, a study in dove-grays, with her hair a bold note marrying the breeze. He could paint that, a dozen times over.
She sells sea shells in the Seychelles.
He's got almost the whole composition worked out when he hears a strange, lopsided jumble of beeping, like the overflow of sound in a hospital hallway. It's their emergency burner – one of those habits Mozzie instilled in him. Always have a safehouse. Always have one way of getting a message out that no one else knows about. Always have your options.
He follows it through the cottage into the livingroom, where a trunk has been stashed in the corner. In the trunk, under his art supplies and Kate's first editions, under the false bottom that conceals just enough space for a phone and some cash and a handful of things only made valuable by sentiment, the burner is still ringing. Neal flips it open.
"Hello?"
And theres a familiar voice on the other end: "Hello, Neal."
"Kate." Even after so long, her name brings a warm rush up his chest. He suspects that this will always be a part of him; an entire world wrapped up in that sound, paved over by time and circumstance and the best and worst intentions, but still indelible. He's smiling before he knows whether or not he has a reason to. "Where are you?"
"That doesn't matter, now," she says.
"Yes, it does," he says, and the smile fades. "Kate, listen – I have a way out, for us." He pauses, waits for a reaction, then forges on. "We can go home. Back to New York. If you turn yourself in to Peter, he'll protect you; I know he will. He's a good man."
"It's too late for that," Kate says, and Neal's throat closes up.
"Why?"
"Neal," she says, "you ever think Mozzie's maybe right about all this? We're con artists. Maybe we just don't get happy endings."
"No." The response is hard, automatic. "I don't believe that. Not for a second."
"Really?"
"Really." He walks to the window, grips the sill. "Kate, please. I know we left it on a bad–"
Note. The word doesn't come. Outside the window there's an airstrip, an explosion, and it's gone. In his peripheral vision Mozzie is picking his way through the twisted, blackened wreckage of a plane, but Neal's alone, and Neal knows he's alone.
He knows exactly where he is.
"Mozzie," Neal says, into the phone. "I thought I got out of here."
"The Suit is capable of many things, my friend," Mozzie's voice says, over the line. The absence of Kate is a silence that gapes wider than the ocean outside. "I think you have to save yourself from yourself, though."
"I don't need saving from myself." His fingers tighten on the phone. "You would never say I needed that."
"Hey, I'm just reading from the script, here," Mozzie says. "If you don't like what it says, try therapy. I can lend you Percy. Yes, he may be just a rat, but I find his understanding of the finer nuances of human psychological states, without judging–"
Neal hangs up.
Then he takes a step back from the window, winds up, and throws the phone out through it. The glass shatters and the phone arcs impossibly far, vanishing against the backdrop of the waves.
(iii)
One of the things Neal never knew about the Seychelles was that if you walked far enough, out along the beach, you'd wind up at a villa in Cape Verde. He considers just walking past, and makes it down to the beach where he used to run before his momentum stalls out. Another sea, another sky, another place to not call home.
He stands there and watches the clouds thin out, wondering if the rain is letting up in New York, until footsteps crunch across the rocky sand toward him.
Neal doesn't look to see who it is. He knows who it is.
"Hell of a thing, being able to retire to a place like this," Peter says, offering him a bottle of wine – screw-top – with no glass. Neal can't help but smile as he takes it.
"Tried it, once. Didn't work out," he says. "How did you manage to marry the most successful startup event planner in the greater New York area and come away without a single pretension to class?"
"Just lucky, I guess," Peter says, though his smile is fond. He and Elizabeth complement each other, in that sense where complement is like complete, in the way Neal wishes he could have complimented Kate, and Kate went a long way toward complementing him. "If you wanted, I could have grabbed the Bordeaux bottle from your place–"
"No," Neal says, too quickly, then covers it with a chuckle. "No; let's leave the Bordeaux alone. I think it's run its course."
"Hm," Peter says. Now his smile is self-satisfied, like he's just cracked a case. Neal squints at him.
"How did you find me?"
Peter glances at him. "How do I ever?"
"Well, the first two times, you found Kate," Neal says. "This time..."
"I knew you," Peter says.
Neal raises an eyebrow. "That predictable, am I?"
"Maybe I'm just that good." Peter looks past him, back in the direction Neal had come from. "I thought you'd let go of Kate."
Neal gives a short, bitter laugh, and looks out over the ocean. The Indian Ocean, the Central Atlantic; they both toss their waves on the shore, and they both give the illusion of encircling the world. "Yeah. So had I."
"But it's not that easy," Peter finishes for him.
"No."
He unscrews the winebottle, and takes a sniff. It smells antiseptic, and he grimaces.
"When Kate and I met. When I was working for Adler," he says. "I got pretty close to having everything I wanted. I didn't have to worry about money. I was doing something challenging. Important. At least, it felt important. People cared about what I thought – people cared about me. And even if I wasn't with Kate, I was still with her, you know? She was there." He breathes out. "Except, I was living a lie." He turns to look at Peter, gauge his reaction. "I think sometimes living a lie is the only way to get what you want."
Peter should probably spout a platitude, at this point; argue morality, offer some kind of reassurance that will come across as slightly too wholesome for the reality Neal knows. Instead, he tilts his head, looking at Neal sidelong. "Why are you telling me this?"
Neal gestures with the bottle to his temple. "Because this is all in my mind. None of it is real."
Ah, Peter mouths. Then, with a glance out to the ocean, "You know, you can always talk to me."
Neal looks at the sand beneath his shoes. "Yeah. Yeah, you've mentioned that a couple of times."
"Then why don't you ever take me up on it?"
Neal turns to look at him, framed by the Atlantic and the clearing sky. "I have," he says. "More than you know."
"Less than I'd like," Peter counters. Neal makes a small heh noise.
"Well, we can't all be Peter Burke, pathologically incapable of not telling the truth."
He takes another drink. Mozzie would probably have a field day with the symbolism of him needing hallucinated alcohol to get through a hallucinated conversation with his hallucinated protector,-father-figure,-partner,-handler,-buddy-or-whatever-Peter-is-at-this-point, but Neal chooses not to examine it too carefully.
"You know," he says, "I could have been really happy, here."
And to that, Peter just says, "Nah."
That irks him. Just once, he'd appreciate it if his hallucinations would agree with him. "I could have."
"You like being chased, Neal." Peter makes a grand gesture out across the waves. He's acquired a beer, sometime when Neal wasn't looking. At least his hallucinated friends need alcohol for this conversation, too. "You like having people to outwit. Sometimes, I think you even like being caught."
Neal raises an eyebrow.
"Lets you know you're appreciated," Peter says.
Neal is startled into laughing. "Yeah," he says. "Yeah, because getting a felony conviction is just as good as a medal or an honorary degree."
"It did get you into the FBI," Peter points out.
"Route less recommended," Neal mutters.
"Yeah," Peter agrees, with a laugh. It is a joke, Neal supposes – joke on him, joke on the world, joke on the people who make the rules and the people who live by breaking them. The waves come in, the waves go out, and Peter sweeps out a hand. "You want to go home?"
Neal takes one last look around the island, then down at the wine in his hand. Given more time, he could finish the wine, clean out the bottle, and there are lots of things you can do with bottles – build a ship, send a message. But he doesn't need to. Cape Verde, like the Bordeaux, has run its course.
"Yeah," he says, and turns his back to the ocean. "I think I do."
He walks past Peter, and Peter puts a hand on his shoulder as he goes by.
The absence of a headache when he wakes up is almost as distracting as the headache itself was.
It's too much an absence of everything – like there's a warm fog where the sense of his body should be, and a curious sense of bobbing ease where there should be flight-or-flight fear. It's not unpleasant, but it's gone 'round the other side of pleasant and come out at odd.
He blinks and moves his hand, then his head; the world floats into sense around him: the institutional robins-egg blue of a hospital room, a curtain pushed to one side, light streaming in, and Peter at the window with his back to him, chatting into a phone.
Neal looks down. He's not strapped to anything, though there's an IV going into one arm. A glance up the tubing tells him that whatever they've been draining into him – saline and an antibiotic, it looks like – has mostly drained into him, and thus the IV itself is probably not important for his continued survival.
It'd be difficult – Peter has a decent set of ears on him – but not totally impossible to disentangle himself and slip away.
Not that he wants to. But it's nice to know the option's there.
"Any chance that's Elizabeth?" he croaks, and grimaces almost immediately. He can taste a chemical tang and stale spit all the way back to his throat, and has to swallow a couple times to get his voice back to something that should come out of a person.
Peter turns back from the window, raises his eyebrows, and looks genuinely happy to see him. "Jones," he says, covering the phone's mic with one hand. "They said they hoped you'd be awake soon. How're'ya feeling?"
"Like I got hit by a bulldozer," Neal says, but makes his tone as chipper as it can be. His throat is still scratchy, and he feels like he's not quite all there. "You brought work?"
"Just wrapping things up," Peter says. "You're kinda messing up my Sunday, Neal."
"Is it Sunday already?" Neal asks. It does make sense. He has a vague recollection of planning to meet up with someone on Friday, get a lead – nothing time-sensitive – that they could follow up on the next week; quick little stop in the park before heading home for the weekend.
And then... and then.
Yeah. Okay, so he supposes he has kinda messed the weekend up.
Peter says something into the phone, then hangs up and comes to stand by the bed. "Glad you decided to join us back in reality."
Neal groans. "I don't like this reality." He moves his arm, and the cool plastic of the IV moves over his skin. "I prefer the ones where I'm not–" He shakes his elbow, watching the vibration propagate up the tube. "–hooked to things."
"You scared a few doctors. Give it a while."
For some reason, that makes him grin.
Reality feels soft and a little distant, and there's a a sneaking feeling of exhaustion that seems like it's ebbed out and may yet flow back in like a tide. He leans back into the pillows, shifts his weight, and–
"Whoa," he says, and moves his leg again. "Tracker's on the wrong foot."
"Well, your usual leg had to get nineteen stitches, and the doctor was very insistent we not let your anklet chafe." Peter is casing the room; after a second, he locates the side chair and starts hauling it over to the bed. "That going to be a problem? I'm not going to catch you toppling over like a half-sheared sheep?"
Neal shoots him a glance. "I think I'll manage," he says. "...have I ever told you that your similes are a little concerning?"
"It's part of my folksy charm," Peter deadpans, and sits down at Neal's elbow. "You okay to talk?"
Well, that's alarming. Neal shuffles through the words for hidden meaning, then says, "Why wouldn't I be?"
"You had a pretty rough night," Peter says, with that kind of careful diction that suggests he's using understatement as a guard against anything blowing up. "You weren't making a lot of sense when we found you. You kept talking about Kate and Adler and Collins."
Right. Those little slices of unreality, and Neal has the feeling that when Peter says You scared a few doctors, he was trying not to say You scared the hell out of all of us. He wouldn't put it past Peter to assume that he was having some kind of stress-induced break from reality, the same way Peter had been watching a little too hard for him to crumble after the plane blew up. But this was the deal; life knocked you around, and you picked yourself up and survived it. And afterwards, you didn't fixate too much on how narrowly you had.
He plays it off like it's no big deal. "Yeah, well, I was also running a fever of–" Neal blinks, and leaves the rest of the sentence open like a blank line on a form. True to expectation, Peter fills it in.
"A hundred and three point six." Peter is still watching him too closely, if his drug-padded brain is reading that right. "Anything you want to talk about?"
Neal feels like he's already said everything he needs to. More than he needs to. Sure, Peter might not think it counts when it's been said to imaginary versions of him – or of Mozzie – but what Peter doesn't know.
"The woman I was with," he says, instead. He fishes for a name, and one surfaces; one that isn't Kate. "Angela."
"We tracked her down," Peter says. "She was shaken up, but they didn't get to her. She went to ground even faster than you did."
Neal chuckles. "Well, to be fair, she has more experience being a CI who's allowed to do that sort of thing."
Didn't need his rescue, after all.
A smile prickles Peter's expression. "Well, you didn't do so badly."
"Old habits," Neal says. "The cop–?"
"Sergeant Richard Dean. Diana caught him taking a call after we left. As it turns out, his pistol had a few bullets unaccounted-for." Peter shrugs one shoulder. "He flipped pretty quickly on Jack Barnes, who was–"
"Their forger," Neal says, and nods. "That's my Collins and Adler."
"The off-brand versions," Peter says, and Neal laughs. He's just about to relax into the banter when he notices that Peter is still watching him, even more a-little-too-closely.
"What?"
"We've already gotten Angela's statement. But. Do you remember anything about last night?"
An abortive stab of panic goes through him.
A few mumblings about Collins and Adler and Kate aside, there's no way Peter knows what was going on inside his head. No way.
And then it occurs to him that Peter is asking about the real world, and he feels like an idiot. "Angela and I were going to meet someone who knew who the forger was," he says, and the levity drops out of his voice. "They were operating out of one of the temporary buildings at the construction site on Avenue F–" Lines of CAT trucks, backhoes, shovels; yellow machinery and dug-up gray earth and an overcast sky; he can remember all these things, but not the actual scene; "–but we were meeting at Baretto Point Park." He exhales. "Then Dean and Barnes showed up. They must have had someone watching our contact. Things got nasty pretty fast. I tried to cover for Angela to run, they grabbed me, and – I lose a little time, there."
"We think that at some point you got a rag full of solvent," Peter says, and there's a dark, hard edge to his tone. "Traces of it around your mouth and nose."
That's... disturbing, and Neal doesn't bother to hide it. "I almost wish I didn't know that."
"It's what they had lying around," Peter says. "All right. They took you to the construction site. We can assume that at some point they realized you were wearing a tracker, and they couldn't just keep you around, so they cut your anklet with a sawzall, and they moved you. That's when we lost track of you." And that dark edge is smoldering, now.
"...I almost wish I didn't know that, either." He starts drawing his injured foot up toward him, then catches what he's doing, and stops. Takes a deep breath, and... tries not to think of that. Peter watches him, like he's going to have to back off of that subject, and Neal coughs and tries to find a different one.
Peter finds one first. "How'd you get out?"
"I don't remember," Neal says, and then his wrists twitch. Right. "Cuffs. They had me in cuffs. I slipped them."
"And?"
"And I ran," Neal says. "It gets... jumbled, at that point." He's pretty sure he didn't end up in the Seychelles or on Cape Verde. Manhattan is less absurd, but still not terribly likely. "I think I made a run for the river."
"The river," Peter repeats. "The Bronx River."
"Concealing your tracks in a river is a time-honored method of evading escape," Neal says. Peter groans, and rolls his head back to look at the ceiling. "–what?"
"Nothing," Peter says, though his tone says, God help me. "It's just, I leave you alone for six blocks and two hours, and you start inhaling solvents, getting cuffed to things, and taking open wounds for dunks in the Bronx River."
"It seemed preferable to getting shot," Neal says, quietly.
Peter looks chastised, and waves it off. "Yeah."
Okay. That conversation took a turn.
Neal glances at the window, which offers him a completely generic view of the Upper East Side. If it's at all possible to avoid a serious conversation, he'd like to do that; he's had more serious conversations in the last howevermany hours than he'd budgeted for this week. The fact that a grand majority of them were with himself doesn't actually make that better.
Mostly, it makes him tired.
"They give you any idea when I'd be out of here?" he asks, though the way things are, he's not sure how he'd drag himself out of the bed, much less to his suite at June's. But Peter seems as eager to change the subject as Neal is.
"Shouldn't be long," he says. "They got you off supplemental oxygen this morning, and I gather that that was mostly a precaution. They want you on antibiotics and they'll have a laundry list of care instructions you need to follow, but you're not in any danger." He gives Neal a crooked grin. "You'll be back to work in no time."
Neal groans. "That's really not what I was asking."
"I know," Peter says. "Don't worry. You've earned a couple days off."
The light of day is bouncing off the buildings outside, and fatigue is lapping up the sides of his awareness again. Maybe no one will mind if he takes a quick nap before they release him. "I've earned it, have I?"
"Yeah," Peter says. "You did good."
He blinks in Peter's direction. "If that's your definition of 'good', the standards of the FBI have really–"
"Neal," Peter interrupts. Neal lets him. "You were feverish, slipping in and out of consciousness, and hallucinating, but you kept it together. You got yourself rescued." Peter's mouth quirks up into a thin half-smile. "And you didn't – I don't know. Run for France, or something."
I was already vacationing in the Tropics, Neal thinks. "Doesn't feel like much of an achievement."
"It was one."
Neal might have found something intelligent to say to that, but instead, he yawns.
When he blinks that away, Peter is looking at him with an expression that's slightly knowing, maybe a little fond. "Right," he says. "I'll see if I can catch someone's attention. You, relax, I guess."
"I thought that's what I've been doing."
"Do some more."
Peter's hand lands on his shoulder, and he stands.
"Sleep, Neal," Peter says, so Neal does.