Chapter Text
By the time they came, there wasn’t anyone left to rescue.
Neal had been certain he would never see Peter again, much less see him stepping through a haze of drywall powder, tailing a battering ram and a group of Polizia stiff in their riot gear like overgrown turtles.
For a moment, the image hovered before him—hazed with dust like the shimmer of a mirage.
The drawn gun in Peter’s hands slid over Neal before his eyes did. Behind him, more police poured through the trampled in door.
The evening sun was framing Neal; it lit the stray edges of his hair in golden halo. He stood. His eyes drifted, in slow confusion, from Peter to the police—waiting, perhaps, for someone to tell him what to do.
Waiting, perhaps, for someone to take a shot.
Peter’s aim withdrew; his nod parted the flood of police officers through the arches of the villa. Their boots thunderous on terracotta tile.
In the interim, Neal had raised his hands. He laced his fingers behind his head, his eyes trailing the Polizia tearing through the adjacent rooms. “She’s not here,” he said.
A chorus, shouted from each space as it was entered—nessuno!—was confirming the assertion.
Peter holstered his gun, and with it all distractions from the man before him. He stepped forward in two great strides and enveloped Neal in a rib-crushing hug.
Neal did not drop his hands, his shoulders stiffened away from the embrace. He looked straight ahead. Only when Peter released him did his elbows sag, his hands sink slowly back to his sides. Hesitant.
“You’re alright?” Peter pulled back and held Neal by his shoulders. “You’re alright,” he determined, with a look over Neal—from sandaled feet to linen shirt to clouded gaze—and a tight squeeze, like Peter intended to root Neal to the ground. To solidify him.
“Do you know where she went?” Peter asked, at the insistence of voices that were throwing phrases at Peter in Italian—telling him chiedigli.
Neal understood better than Peter. But he didn’t answer either inquiry.
“That’s okay,” Peter said, and patted one of Neal’s shoulders. “We’ll find her. Don’t worry.”
-
Sun scorched the Mediterranean scrub and pale orange dirt stirred to settle on the suit fabric around Peter’s ankles.
“It’s beautiful here,” Neal said, with a quiet heaviness that made Peter long to reach his hands out and shake him. Pry from Neal whatever desperate nostalgia had settled in his bones.
Peter was scowling at the same sun that Neal seemed content to bake in. “Yeah, and it takes an hour ferry ride to reach a hospital,” he returned sourly.
He saw no beauty in that.
Neal was urged to settle in the front seat of one of the police vehicles that, at present, were outnumbering the residents of the island—but it was a shock blanket being draped over his shoulders, with a bout of murmured, apologetic Italian, that made Neal start to realize he might’ve misjudged his situation.
He shed both the blanket and his escort at the gangplanks of the ferry.
Peter found him on the outer deck, his arms crossed on the railing, watching the rocky shore slip away to an expanse of crystalline blue.
-
Peter intended to have Neal checked over as a formality. More for his own peace of mind than for any pressing concern. Yes, there were concerns. Neal was thinner, quieter, twitchier. And Peter, despite the expanse of time—22 months and 12 days—that formed the interim, could also not foist from his mind the image of Neal’s blood dripping through his own fingers.
Later, Peter would regret his lack of urgency.
It started as a haze of sweat over Neal’s complexion, a pale tinge to the undertone of his lips as he surveyed Porto Santo Stefano. By the end, he was curled on his side, seemingly unable to move, his hands clutching his stomach and his whole body shaking as he threw up another time.
Peter was certain he was dying
The triage nurse was not as convinced.
Her frown was jaded disgust and her judgement was non-life threatening.
It took Neal’s eventual admission, and a small plastic cup given to his shivering hands, the contents of which were a strip he was told to place under his tongue, and a stilted conversation with a physician whose curt words, in and out of English, conveyed a brutal authority that her stature and tone did not, for Peter to finally understand what was occurring.
Withdrawal.
-
“He’s still detoxing. And I think he’s in shock.” Peter’s voice was low—whispered from the reverse of a hospital curtain, yet audible nonetheless. He was talking to Elizabeth; his very early morning in Tuscany an equivalency to her evening routine in New York.
Neal could imagine it if he tried hard enough, but only in impression, not hyperrealism. Dark hair, and a phone propped against an ear, and the whir of heating leftovers in a microwave.
“But I’m sure he’ll come around. Especially once he starts feeling better.”
Peter was not sure—but this was the hope he had to live on. An assurance clung to as a prayer. He knew that Neal had been put through the wringer. He also knew that Neal had to bounce back.
He could not stomach the idea that he may have finally found his friend, only to have lost him altogether.
-
“We’ve got nothing.” Peter’s hands were tight on the rail of the hospital bed. “You’ve got to talk to me, Neal.”
There was pain in his voice. An ache long bit back and allowed to fester. After all, he’d said nothing when the doctor had examined Neal’s side, prodded the angry knot of scar tissue and asked if there was still any tenderness.
He’d said nothing when the nurse had started an IV for hydration, and he’d witnessed for himself the state of Neal’s arms beneath light-weave linen. Scabs and scarring and bruised veins. Peter had merely grit his teeth.
He’d said nothing that night either, because he didn’t have the chance. He’d told Neal not to do it and Neal took the risk anyway. But that lecture, that admonishment, never had the opportunity to make it out of his enraged thoughts.
Neal exhaled slowly at Peter’s words.
His head rolled over and his eyes flicked up—slightly bloodshot, pooling with a regretful but self-knowing expression. One that Peter recognized well and had long since classified away with Kate. One that now was bubbling dread in his stomach. “Don’t tell me,” Peter growled, because he didn’t want to hear it. He didn’t want it to be true.
“I can’t.”
“Don’t tell me you can’t either.”
Neal swallowed, and his watery blue eyes screamed his sincerity, and he said precisely what Peter was afraid of:
“I love her.”
***
Fittingly, the first coherent thought Neal had—amidst the thrum of panic in his ears and the sharp pain in his side—was Proust.
He’d known Rachel was smart. He’d known she was desperate. But he hadn’t considered that where violence was not his first instinct when snared in a trap, it was hers.
Or, maybe, he simply had not cared to consider.
“You know me so well,” she’d spelled out, her hatred unmasked in her gaze, “you know I never turn up without a way out.”
Neal’s attention had flicked down, but he held his voice steady. Deliberate. “Actually, there are three ways out. Through the south window, or one of two doors.”
“You've always underestimated me,” she’d said, “There’s a fourth way.”
Then she’d lowered the gun and fired.
Pain was a hot knife twisting beneath Neal’s ribs: it stole his breath, sent him back a stumbled step that was caught by the clink of the cuff around his wrist. He curled forward. Rachel’s arm, attached to his own, locked around his neck, and the butt of her gun jabbed against his head, but Neal thought of Proust.
It is always thus, he heard recited in Moz’s lofty tone, impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, that we make our irrevocable decisions.
-
Rachel chose the window.
Neal’s free arm was hooked under his ribs. His hand was warm with blood. He made the mistake of glancing down at the fire escape’s wrought-iron, and felt his knees weaken.
He absently determined that this hurt worse—worse than when Collins shot him in the thigh, certainly worse than being hit with a vest on.
“FBI! Stop right there!”
Rachel turned to their pursuers and brought Neal around with her. The cobbles beneath his feet shifting as loose sand.
“Drop your weapons or I’ll kill him!”
At present, Neal was inclined to believe her.
As was Peter. Perhaps more so.
He was near the center of the line of agents: his wide eyes moving from Neal’s grimace, to the gun in Rachel’s hand, to the spot of rust that was growing on Neal’s front. He ordered the team to stand down.
Neal looked back as Rachel prodded him around the red-brick corner. He turned his head over his shoulder and caught a final glimpse. A snapshot of the building’s façade, of Jones reaching back for his gun, of Peter’s ardent attention—before the night wrapped around the scene and yanked it from his grasp.
He had no way to know that that singular moment would haunt a year of sleep, and often waking.
No way to know that in the warp of memory, he would see the expression on Peter’s face and search for meaning in every stance of muscle. Watch it twist from fear to anger, to disappointment, to apathy.
-
“Move over,” Rachel said, and dug her gun into Neal’s shoulder, popping the balloon of adrenaline that had him floating.
“Fucking handcuffs,” she hissed. She dropped down on the lip of the driver’s seat. In the rearview, a man in a hoodie crossed the street to make it clear he was minding his own business. Neal couldn’t blame him.
Rachel started to hot-wire the car while Neal, having shimmied awkwardly to the passenger side, let his limp wrist on the console be dragged about in an act of puppetry. He inhaled slowly through his mouth and willed himself not to pass out.
The car hiccuped to a start. Rachel didn’t take the time to pull the door closed before the tires squealed, and the sharp lurch forward made Neal gasp in pain. Made the landscape of the street he’d walked down, with the intent of making a reckless, but necessary exchange, blur.
Justifiably, Rachel did not trust Neal’s hand to be in any proximity of the steering apparatus: she grasped the gun and the wheel in the same singular hand.
“When’d you learn to do that?” he asked, soft spoken.
Rachel waved the gun in Neal’s direction. “Make yourself useful and get these off of me.”
At the sickening speed with which blocks of Ridgewood were passing by, Neal could find good reason to keep at least one of her hands on the wheel. He unpeeled his sticky palm from the fabric of his shirt, pushed himself up farther in the seat with the heel of his hand. Popping open the console, and rifling through the personal effects of Rachel’s casual grand theft auto victim.
The street lights were flashes in his peripheral.
“Where are we going?” he asked, only once he’d freed Rachel’s tether to him with the help of a gutted pen.
“Away from your friends,” Rachel replied, and careened around a corner that sent Neal’s shoulder smarting against the window glass. “Anything you’ve got on you goes out the window. Including the jewelry.”
Neal took a glance at the pistol resting comfortably in her grip, and decided to listen.
Eventually, Rachel would have to stop—the car would run out of gas, they’d hit a roadblock, she would have to sleep, the FBI would cut them off, something: and that’s when Neal would find his out. He wasn’t keen on testing the accuracy of where Rachel might place the next bullet otherwise.
-
For the length of the drive, their conversation was minimal. Neal observed the time ticking by on the dash clock, and all of the talents that a life of running had afforded his former girlfriend.
Rachel stayed off the interstate; she stayed at the speed limit. Though never a low enough speed that Neal would be comfortable making an unconventional exit. She kept her eyes moving keenly between the rearview mirror and where she’d made it clear that Neal’s hands needed to stay on the dash.
They stopped once. At a gas station where Rachel traded their Audi A6 for a much more inconspicuous Ford SUV; Neal discovered that standing brought blotches to his vision.
The state lines ticked by. The state highways turned to wooded backroads. And as the sky lightened, then burned with sunrise, Rachel finally delivered them to their apparent destination. A cluster of white-sided houses, a church, and a sign that informed Neal he was in Cambridge, Maine, population 462.
“Home sweet home?” he posed.
“Home sweet safe house.”
A woman after Mozzie’s own heart.
The house was on the outskirts of Cambridge—past a shop with a yard littered in broken down cars and a stretch of short pine forest.
It watched Neal with its broad, plain, New England colonial-style face.
-
“Don’t be dramatic, Neal. It’s a flesh wound.”
Neal hissed through his teeth; he dug his fingertips into the lace-covered comforter—the former inhabitants of the house must’ve been in their 80s, Neal had decided—and tipped his head back, torn between the need to watch what Rachel was doing and the compulsion to look away. “It’s a bullet wound,” he replied.
“And it’ll heal, but only if you hold still.”
Easier said than done when the woman who’d shot him had a pair of forceps buried several inches into the hole in his side. Digging around in a way that likely wasn’t aimless, but that certainly felt too blithe on the receiving end.
A wad of lead dropped in an empty porcelain tea-cup on the side table beside them, and Neal let go of the breath he’d been holding.
“There. Not too bad, was it?”
“Speak for yourself.”
“If you’d prefer to do the sutures yourself…”
Neal clamped his mouth shut. He’d sooner keep Rachel playing doctor.
Sutures, he discovered quickly, he had to close his eyes for. He tried not to feel the thread tug through his skin and tried even more valiantly to ignore Rachel’s slight breathy amusement at the whine of discomfort he made.
“All done.”
She sat back, relieving Neal of the weight of her presence—light sweat, spiced perfume, shampoo, and what Neal was convinced were the remnant chemical notes of box dye. He didn’t know how he’d missed them before.
Rachel offered Neal a glass of water. He took it, in spite of his pride. And didn’t thank her, on account of his spite.
He eased himself back against the pillows. “What exactly is your plan?” he asked, and watched Rachel cross to the yellowed tile bathroom to wash the blood from her hands.
She turned off the crystal knob tap. Knotted her hands in a pink towel. “Thanks to someone, I don’t think I’ll be getting my hands on the diamond, not with all the heat that will be on it now. But that’s okay.”
“It is?”
“I told you, it stopped being just about the diamond a long time ago.”
“And I told you,” he bit back, “none of that was real.”
“Haven’t you heard Mozzie’s rants about the Nietzschean perspective? Reality is made.”
Personally, Neal didn’t think Rachel understood Mozzie’s rants about the Nietzschean perspective, and yet, his throat went dry. Neal broke away from Rachel’s gaze, skimmed over dusty porcelain knick knacks and a vase of dried flowers. “So you’re giving up on the diamond?”
“I’m moving on from the diamond,” Rachel corrected, as she began to clean up the glorified field medical kit that was strewn across the bed.
“By kidnapping an FBI consultant,” Neal said. “If I was only your way out, you wouldn’t have brought me here.” She’d have ditched him alongside the first car. Or she’d have killed him.
“You'll be worth your weight.”
“Will I?”
For a beat, Rachel did not answer, but let Neal sit with his own query. Then she patted at his arm. “Hands that could forge straw into gold,” she quipped with a smile.
-
The decor may have been pulled straight from a 1978 copy of Better Homes and Gardens, but the security system was not. Escape wouldn’t be as simple as walking out the back door or cracking open a window, not without Rachel forgetting to arm the system or a convenient power outage first.
“You can never be too careful,” Rachel said, when she caught Neal’s attention on a sensor that was mounted at the top of the bathroom’s window frame. “You understand.”
“I was never this paranoid.”
-
Neal, inevitably, after nearly 36 hours awake and at least a pint of blood loss, slept.
“There’s another bedroom,” he’d pointed out, when Rachel sat down on the bedside opposite him, bouncing the old spring mattress and making Neal wince.
“Yeah, and in that one I won’t hear or feel you making your escape.”
Regrettably, she had a point.
-
Neal woke with a stale flavor in the back of his throat.
If the level of light seeping through ruffled curtains was any indicator, only a few hours had passed. Behind him, he could feel Rachel’s body heat. Her slow, measured breaths. For a while, he listened to the sound, and matched his own breathing.
Neal moved onto his back carefully. Freezing each time he heard a disturbance in the placid rhythm of Rachel’s inhalations.
In the low light, Rachel was only a dark, warm outline, but Neal could feel the bump of hard plastic when he shifted his arm against her leg.
He hadn’t seen a landline in the house, but he had felt a corner-store style burner phone hours earlier when Rachel had been pressed against him on the fire escape. Then, it couldn’t help him. Now it could.
Neal didn’t dare to breathe as he eased the cellphone up from Rachel’s pocket, enough to feel its buttons, while not fully freeing it.
Eleven small clicks, and each felt deafening.
262734 63 228
Or at least, that’s what Neal attempted to type—he couldn’t see the screen. It didn’t matter.
For Peter, Neal trusted that that would be enough.
-
Morning brought pain.
Neal’s few hours of twilight-level sleep had worn off his adrenaline, and left in its wake was the unfocused protest of every muscle that he’d been holding stiff for the last 12 hours along with a spike in his side so sharp that his attempt to sit up blurred his vision.
Neal dropped back against the pillows. He drew in strangled breaths through an open mouth—pushing the air back out through his nose and willing down the bile that was rippling up his throat.
Somewhere beside him, Rachel shifted. “Don’t puke on the bed,” she told him.
He was doing his damnedest not to.
Neal listened to Rachel go through the movements of getting ready for the day with his eyes still pressed closed. Trapped in an amber moment of incongruous domesticity—a twisted revival of what had been.
The sounds of Rachel brushing her teeth, combing her hair back, running the tap to wash her face. As if Neal were back at June’s on an overcast Saturday—Rebecca up for work and Neal avoiding the buzz of Peter’s text messages beneath his pillow. She’d press a kiss on his lips before she left in a cloud of spearmint, still alcohol laden perfume, and kitten heel clicks.
“Come on.”
Rachel was standing above him, offering an outstretched hand and a thin bloom of pity: not that belied guilt, the kind that painted Neal as pathetic.
He probably was. He still accepted the help.
Rachel pulled him to his feet; Neal attempted to keep his torso stiff.
Rachel didn’t make any additional snide remarks, maybe she was pleased that Neal hadn’t managed to slip away during the night. Neal, discovering how moving his legs pulled on the ache in his side, decided he was pleased with waiting for rescue this time around rather than orchestrating his own escape. A turn at damsel in distress instead of Houdini.
He leaned on Rachel’s shoulder to make his way down the stairs. The kitchen table was lurid orange oak. Complete with plastic fruit bowl on a hand-laced doily.
Rachel moved into the kitchen. Neal let his spine sag against the spindles of a wooden chair. Movement had coated his body in a cold, clammy sweat.
“Hungry?” Rachel asked, scooping coffee grounds into a yellowed Norelco. Neal shook his head weakly. “It can’t be that bad,” she returned.
“You ought to try it.” Neal’s mouth was watering with nausea and he didn’t manage the venom he set aim for.
“I have.”
“You’ve been shot in the side before?”
“No.” Rachel leaned her hip against the formica countertops, empty mugs gripped in one hand; unassuming in going-on-greasy hair and the under-eye blur of not fully washed off mascara. “Shoulder.”
“How was that?”
“Hurt like a mother...” She cracked a smile, “but I wasn’t this whiny.”
“Who shot you?”
“That’s classified.” Killing a man and holding another hostage were felonies—and that hadn’t held Rachel back.
Rachel slid a mug of coffee in front of Neal without asking if he wanted it. He took a hesitant sip as she dug through a pantry that was stocked like a doomsday bunker and nursed her own steaming mug.
Neal made a face at his coffee’s oily sheen. “This is awful,” he announced, “Shooting me’s one thing—I draw the line at burnt coffee.”
Rachel rolled her eyes at the joke. “You’re still drinking it,” she pointed out.
The bitterness was sating his nausea.
Neal hadn’t known it was possible to dehydrate eggs into a shelf stable powder, he did now know that doing so resulted in a plate of mush which bounced more like rubber than egg. Rachel didn’t seem to mind. She sat at the table beside him, and ate the plate that Neal had declined alongside her own.
They both were uninterested in small talk. The birds outside the curtained windows were loud.
Neal reached for his half-empty mug. He paused, staring up from his own outstretched hand, to Rachel, eyes wide—he could feel his breath tug against the sutures in his side.
The rush that Neal felt was burgeoning horror, the sensation itself was barely perceptible. Not a buzz, more like Neal’s mind had taken a single step back from his body.
“What’s in this?” he asked, his voice stretched tight.
“You were complaining about the pain,” Rachel shrugged.
His hand came down heavy against the table. Silverware rattled. “What’s in it?” he repeated, pushing himself to his feet.
“Calm down. It’ll take the edge off.”
“You—”
Neal’s knees weakened under him, the aftershock of sudden movement, not whatever laced his coffee. Rachel caught him by the shoulder, guiding him towards the living room to sit against the English rolled arm of a loveseat.
“Easy does it.”
Neal clutched a hand against floral, dusty fabric.
“There,” Rachel soothed. Her cool fingers carded through the hair at the back of Neal’s neck.
He jerked his head away. “Don’t.”
But it was Rachel who pulled her hand back like the one wounded. “You need to be careful,” she told him, sitting back on the coffee table, her gaze detached, “You’ll pull the stitches out.”
“You’re insane,” Neal breathed.
“I was trying to help.” Rachel sounded so reasonable that Neal nearly wanted to believe her. She reached into her jacket pocket, rattled an orange prescription bottle against her palm. “Just pain meds,” she said, “Haven’t you ever gotten your wisdom teeth pulled before?”
Pain meds to Neal meant a Tylenol, not 7.5mg of hydrocodone. Then again, if he’d gone to the hospital with a gunshot wound, he’d doubted they’d have stopped at offering him a Tylenol.
Rachel stood, tucking the bottle back into her pocket.
Neal, his mouth dry, watched her cross back to the dining nook, and lift his mug from the table. She pressed the lukewarm coffee cup into Neal’s hand.
“Finish it.” Rachel’s voice was razor-laced.
“Why?”
“Because. You’re pathetic like this.”
“It has nothing to do with keeping me incapacitated?”
“If anything, I think it’s doing the opposite. That—” she jabbed a finger towards Neal’s ribs and he flinched back on instinct “—is what’s keeping you incapacitated.”
He glanced at the curtain’s awful eggshell white ruffles. He thought of the board room of the Federal Building’s 21st floor—flurried activity and Peter’s determined frown.
Rachel watched him down the remainder of the mug, even the last swallow containing a dissolving bitter lump that stuck to Neal’s tongue.
-
It did help.
A half an hour or so after the cup of coffee was gone, and Neal felt—not better—but numbed enough to draw in a full breath again, to relax the muscles of his back without a stab of fiery pain.
He was tired. Rachel was cleaning the kitchen.
“How long are we staying here?” he asked. Even unaware of the text message, Rachel had to know that they were on a tight clock. She didn’t know Peter like Neal did, but she knew him enough.
“A few days.”
Neal held back his relief from his voice. “What’s the hold up?”
“It takes time to call in old favors.”
“I’m worth burning goodwill over?”
“You’ve not given me much of a choice.” Maybe Rachel meant her escape, maybe she meant falling in love with him in the first place.
She was still in love with him. It hung in the air like a volatile fume, oppressive, ready to ignite.
“I wouldn’t recommend the debtor’s life,” Neal murmured. He gingerly turned, lifting his legs onto the couch and settling into the cushions. Eyelids heavy.
-
Neal didn’t remember drifting off. He remembered finally feeling warm, and then there was afternoon light filtering ochre through his eyelids and pain gripping around his ribs like a vice. The soft weight of a hand on his shoulder.
A hazy but familiar shape standing over him. “...Becca?” he mumbled.
Warm lips pressed against Neal’s forehead. Tendrils of hair brushed over his cheeks.
“Hi, Neal,” a soft voice said.
Reality crashed back into Neal. He stiffened.
But Rachel retreated enough to somewhat soothe his unease. “Have a nice nap?” she asked.
Neal’s mouth was sticky and bitter, his eyes swung to Rachel lazily. “Couch isn’t bad,” he replied, his voice rough with sleep.
“Neal,” Rachel hummed. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Do you think I’m stupid?”
Neal’s stomach filled with ice. He made a face, and noise, of confusion—even as his heartbeat started up a rapid tap at the back of his jaw.
Rachel’s weight dipped into the edge of the couch cushion. “Do you think I’m stupid?” she repeated, each word set out of her mouth like a dropped stone.
“No?” he replied, incredulous.
He wasn’t certain if Rachel knew him well enough to see his fear. If the things he couldn’t control—the flare of dilation to his pupils and where his fingertips were pressing a little firmer into the fabric of the couch—were glaring.
Rachel’s hand ghosted over Neal’s ribs. He drew in a breath like it was going to sink him through the couch.
Weight dropped down onto the heel of Rachel’s hand. Neal saw a wash of white. The lance of pain catching at his breath. Then Neal’s hands were at Rachel’s shoulders, and he was shoving her back. Hard enough he heard her knees knock against the rug. Neal sagged, gasping. Frozen in place by a lurch of dizziness.
Blood was seeping a new wet blotch on his shirt.
Rachel was back on her feet before Neal could halt the room’s careening. Her heavy breathing thunderous in Neal’s ears. She slid the phone from her pocket and threw it on the coffee table. Neal blenched.
He wanted nothing more than to run. To dive through the closest window.
But Neal didn’t trust his legs to hold him, and he did trust Rachel’s pistol aim well beyond 25 yards, and even more so Neal trusted her dark expression—Rachel was a woman with nothing left to lose, and Neal suddenly felt not only like he had everything to lose, but also like he was very close to losing it.
“No bars,” Rachel said, venom pooling in her eyes. “Your little SOS didn’t even go through.”
Neal swallowed stiffly. “Was worth a shot,” he joked, hoping that honesty could defuse where lies would not.
“I told you not to try anything.”
“You had to know I would.”
“And you have to know that now the kid gloves are coming off.”
Neal grimaced. Thinking of the pressure of a gun’s barrel against his scalp. “Is that a non-negotiable?”