Work Text:
Down
Neal marks time in tallies because the alternatives are terrible.
Kate, he remembers, had been a calendar girl. She'd lift a cheap one from a gas station and hang it on the wall, circle the date she was waiting for in red, make vicious X's to mark her spot. She never used the calendars for anything else, and sometimes they had more than one, if there was more than one thing she was looking toward. "I want to be able to see it," she said, when he asked about it. "I want to be able to feel myself getting close."
Mozzie doesn't like to mark time at all. He forgets things, important things, because of it, but having a countdown makes him feel chained, trapped. Instead he writes dates in strange places--on the insides of book jackets, on the back of Neal's hand. He says that writing it made him remember, no matter how many times it is proven to him that it doesn't.
Peter doesn't need to keep track of time--he has structures (the Bureau, his wife) to do it for him.
And Neal--when Neal was six and his parents were screaming in the kitchen, screaming about the water bill or the heat bill or his mother's new purse, Neal drew a sharp stark line on the back cover of his favorite notebook. The next day he drew another, and another, because it isn't--it has never been about looking forward, for him. If Neal wants something he stares at it and dreams of it and tastes it between his teeth, lives and breathes it. You don't need time for that.
No, Neal keeps tallies so he can look back, so he can prove to himself in his darkest moments that he's already survived.
Down
For fifteen days after Kate dies, Neal doesn't keep any kind of count. He also does not, except in those circumstances that are presented to him as necessary (inquisitorial meetings and debriefings and interrogations, visits to a clinician to check on his burns), leave his apartment. He gets to know the bedclothes of his own suffering intimately, curling amongst the cold sheets and waiting for them to warm. He dreams, when he manages to sleep, of fires he can't put out. He dreams of ghosts in the attic and spectral pilots taunting him and PTA meetings that go up in smoke when he tries to speak.
He dreams of Kate, and Kate, and Kate, a hundred shades of her, a thousand different colors.
On the sixteenth day, Mozzie comes in. He sits on the side of the bed like he did on the second, the tenth, the fourteenth afternoon, and he touches Neal's hair. He says, "It is time to get up now," and when Neal turns his face into the pillow he sighs and goes away.
When he comes back, Peter is with him. "It is time to get up now," Peter says; his voice is firm and authoritative and maybe a little scared. It is the fear that convinces Neal to sit up, and then it is Peter's guiding hands, Mozzie's pointed admonitions to be gentle, that pull him to his feet.
"I don't have bedsores, Moz," he says, and he cracks the faintest of faint smiles. The effort it takes to do so is monumental but the relief that breaks over Mozzie's face is worth it; the small satisfied sigh that slips out of Peter's mouth is worth it. Neal places his feet on the ground and puts one in front of the other until he reaches his wardrobe. Moz and Peter go out on the balcony while he dresses himself, letting his fingertips linger on the overpriced fabric.
He is sure they are talking about him, but he can't bring himself to be bothered.
When they step into the bright sunlight Neal wishes he'd thought to bring sunglasses. Peter hands over his own wordlessly and Neal thanks him, slips them on. He watches Mozzie amble down the street through the tinted lenses as he climbs into the car.
"Where are we going?" he asks, because he thinks he probably should.
Peter shrugs. "Somewhere."
They've been in the car for nearly an hour when the radio station Peter favors gets a request to play "The Boxer." Neal hasn't heard the song in fifteen years and he twists a knob, feeling something like interest spark in his chest. The volume increases and he realizes his mistake instantly, but Peter is already humming along, so Neal tries to think of it like a test. He imagines he's measuring himself against how long he can hold it together, how long he can resist the melancholy twist of it.
It is a failure on multiple levels, then, when a sob escapes his lips on the line "Such are promises."
Peter pulls over to the side of the road and Neal can't look at him, can't look at the city, can't look at his hands or his fancy clothes. He bends down and the sunglasses slide off of his face and he stares at the dirty black floor mat, covered with traces of mud he'd tracked in here before, when things still made sense.
He can't breathe--he can't think--and the sobs tear at his chest, painful and wrenching. Peter puts a hand on his shoulder and then leans awkwardly across the car, draping himself across Neal's heaving back, and Neal is obliquely grateful for the contact. He shudders until the song ends, until he feels like the facsimile of himself he's learning to be, and then he shakes Peter off and sits up, wiping his face.
"Take me home," he says, and Peter does.
That night, with a glass of red wine in his hand, with his dinner untouched on the stove, he realizes he needs something to remind him. Something to show him he can do it. Something that says Maybe tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.
He makes 16 bitter tally marks on his wall, feeling sicker and steadier with each one.
Down
On the day he makes his forty sixth tally mark (six weeks since the since the explosion 1575 days since he went to prison eight years since he met Kate), someone forges a piece of Roman statuary. Peter takes Neal to the Met for comparison's sake and his fingers don't even itch; it is like the joy has gone out of them, leaving them bloodless. He longs for the charcoal sticks on the floor of his borrowed room, the twisted therapy of their blurred, temporary epitaph on his flesh.
The curator of the museum is staring at him like he might explode at any moment. He knows she has heard about him, Neal Caffrey the art thief, Neal Caffrey the threat, and he is surprised by how much he wants to disabuse her of the notion. I couldn't steal from you if I wanted to, he would tell her, if only the opportunity would present itself. He stares at her instead, trying to communicate his tacit reticence, but she scowls back at him, and he feels (again, always) like a failure.
"What do you think?" Peter asks.
And Neal wants to say a hundred things. He thinks that he's one of them, the statues he's staring at, armless faceless ruins amidst a splendor of which they can only dream. He thinks that he's the last relic of a dying empire; he thinks that all he wants to do is crawl into a bathhouse, surround himself with bodies that are hard and unyielding, bodies that hold nothing of his soft, sweet remembrance. He thinks he'll wait for morning to crash around him, to fall like Rome and his love and his life, and then maybe he'll be able to draw a proper breath. He thinks that anyone stupid enough to forge something so precious without years of practice is doomed by their own hubris; he thinks that he, of anyone, would know.
He thinks that if he's not careful he's going to curl on the cold tile floor and close his eyes, listening for the high, cold twang of Nero's fiddle.
When he opens his mouth Peter is looking at him like he had in the car that day, like he's terrified, like Neal is going to shatter and crumble, so Neal makes a joke, and then another. He smiles and it hurts, the muscles of his mouth screaming in protest at this lie, but he clings to it. These, after all, are the last vestiges of his own painstakingly built reality--he will not abandon them.
Peter lets it go and Neal remembers the hard twist to his lips, the glint of real fear in his eyes, as he makes that night's dark stroke.
Down
A woman reports an embezzlement scam on the one hundred and fourteenth day; she is too shattered at the loss of her savings to come into the office. Peter and Neal climb into the car and drive to her, winding their way through the grit of the city until they are in the heart of Brooklyn.
"I wouldn't mention what you used to--" Peter begins. Neal shoots him a look with tired eyes, a look that means Do you think I would be so stupid and I am already ashamed of my past and I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. He wishes, with a dull pang, that it meant I never sunk so low as to steal from old ladies, but the truth is he doesn't know.
Still, Peter doesn't finish his sentence, and Neal leans his face into the cool glass of his window and drowns in thoughts of atonement.
When they arrive, the available parking is metered; they're old meters with large handles, the kind Neal had learned to open when he'd been 16 and broke. Peter is digging for his briefcase and so Neal busies himself with examining one, and he notices that there is a spider trapped underneath the glass.
Neal stares at it. He can't imagine how it got in there--there isn't a crack large enough for a spider to slide through, not on this model. Had it been born in there? Blown in as an egg and hatched, captive, surrounded by invisible, unbreakable barriers? It doesn't move, but he's not sure if it's dead or sleeping or staring at him with eight unblinking eyes, begging for freedom.
It is the single saddest thing Neal has ever seen. When Peter claps him on the shoulder, asks in warm, worried tones if he is all right, he wants to explain, but he cannot imagine how. He smiles cheerfully instead and lets the image haunt him until he gets home, until he is safe.
It's the first time since the explosion that he's taken out a canvas and paint. He caresses his brushes lovingly, cleaning them, mixing the colors, but when he tries to paint the spider what comes forth instead is Kate. His eyes sting and he tries again, and one spindling leg becomes two becomes three becomes strands of long dark hair and high cheekbones, soft eyes. He paints her as he remembers her in their most exquisite moments, smiling gently with just a hint of wickedness, looking at him and looking at him with her forehead creased slightly in amusement.
It is beautiful when he is finished. He takes the blade he keeps for working with oil paints and makes a hundred and fourteen perfectly spaced slits in the canvas, carving out the shards of his loss until she is just shy of shredded. Then he presses his lips to the image, just once, the wet paint lingering on his lips, the act leaving him unhinged and foolish and lost.
That night he dreams that the tick marks on his walls are spiders, trapped. He tries to free them, but no matter how many times he hurls himself against the glass, it remains unbroken, unbreakable.
Across
It has been two hundred and fifty four days and Kate is not dead and Peter is asking him ridiculous questions, questions that claim to be about plans and futures but are really about trust and loyalty. If it were anyone else, if it were anyone but Peter, Neal would hit him; he'd haul back and loose his fist and relish the sensation of impact. He has not been in many physical fights but he remembers what they are like--the rush of adrenaline, the sick cold wash of rage. It might be nice.
But this is Peter, and where anyone else asking would be an asshole, Peter is just being himself. Neal is almost relieved at the familiarity of his bumbling delivery, his steadfast morality in the face of slippery gray slopes. He leans in when Peter pulls him close. He puts his heavy head on Peter's solid shoulder and breathes in the scent of laundry soap and oatmeal and Elizabeth's perfume, and he says that he's not leaving.
He say that Peter has changed his mind.
It's a lie. He's not leaving--that part is true--but what's changed his mind isn't Peter, exactly. If Kate is still alive then she has betrayed him, sold him out, thrown him under; he knows that, and doesn't want to know. It is actually worse than when she was dead, and Peter is solid and strong under Neal's trembling fingers, and he has never trusted anyone like this, not in his whole life, not even himself.
The idea of never having it again, the idea of spending another 30-odd years without an anchoring force; that is what is keeping him here.
His fingers are balling to fists against his thighs and Peter's chest is tightening against his, like he is readying himself even now to save Neal from his own worst impulses. Neal breaks away and he wants to destroy something, wants to tear down the walls and find the wiring and rip it to pieces with his teeth, wants to kill and kill and kill until his hands feel clean. It is a ridiculous, contradictory impulse, but then Neal is a ridiculous, contradictory man. He thinks of the time he's kept, the hours he's spent spooning his grief like a delicate lover, and he closes his eyes and swallows hard to keep from screaming.
The charcoal is sitting on the counter. He grabs a piece and snaps it in half, rubs it between his palms, and snaps it again. He breaks it until it is smaller and smaller and smaller and dust, until it slips between his fingers like smoke.
"Fuck," he says.
"I don't have many details."
"I don't want them."
When Neal walks back to Peter his hands are black, shades of smudged midnight. He cups the side of Peter's cheek and kisses him, and it is as ragged and raw a thing as he has ever done. And Peter--Peter who perpetually says the wrong thing but always does the right one--Peter groans into his mouth and bites sharply at his tongue and drags him in, gripping him with firm, steady hands.
"I'm sorry," he says, and he sounds like he means it, and Neal laughs into his mouth.
"Of everyone in my life," he bites out, "you have the least to be sorry for."
Peter growls and pushes Neal into the wall and somewhere, down underneath the rush of a thousand shrieking realities, he thinks: oh. Because Peter's slow methodic dissection of him, his relentless gentle force, is really a confession in and of itself. The way Peter is touching him says I would have chased you the way you've chased her.
The way Peter is touching him says I would not have let you go.
Neal leaves charcoal stains on Peter's white shirt and his red tie and his pale skin when they strip down. He leaves black smudges on Peter's face and hands and chest and dick, and when they are finished he touches them wonderingly. They are strange, incongruent. They draw a treasure map Neal is not sure he wants to follow.
"I put you in prison," Peter says quietly, staring at the stuccoed ceiling.
"But you brought me back out," Neal tells him, and then they don't talk anymore.
Down
Neal stops making tally marks on the wall when he starts sleeping with Peter. This is because Peter worries about him; Neal sees it in the deepening lines around his mouth, in the way his hands linger without carrying innuendo. It makes him feel guilty (he takes so much from Peter, borrows with no intention to return--his strength and his time, his reputation, his sanity), and so he retires his charcoal and leaves the existing marks there, a testament. Peter notices after a week and he doesn't comment, but he smiles, the side of his mouth lifting up like a white flag. Neal kisses and kisses the curl of it, trying to forget.
He stops making tally marks on the wall. He does not stop making tally marks.
They're in places Peter wouldn't think to look for them; Peter knows Neal better than anyone, so Neal has to start thinking like someone else. He takes a leaf from Mozzie's book and marks them inside of playbills, on the backs of old receipts, carved into the wooden underside of June's least favorite chair. He takes a leaf from Kate's book and buys a pocket calender; the dated squares make him want to be sick, so his count is nestled in the address section, filed painstakingly under "X."
He takes a leaf from no one's book and drops charcoal nibs into an old wine bottle, one by one by one.
It is 63 days since Kate rose (because that is how he thinks of it; when he dreams now she is clawing her way out of a shallow grave, dirt beneath her fingernails) when Neal starts to cheat. He doesn't need the count to be accurate--he knows, will always know, how long it's been. And really every day feels like months, years; really every day he feels he has aged impossibly, expects to see himself wizened in the mirror.
So he cheats. He scratches a tally mark in each hidden place and then elsewhere; in cordoned off patches of drying cement, in the dirt of low-lying window boxes. He makes line after line after perfect line, counting the days he feels it has been, while Peter smiles at his unchanged wall and kisses him in the darkness.
It is not honest, but Neal has never been honest.
Down
Neal wasn't a thief until he was eight years old.
His father had taken him into Manhatten one Sunday afternoon, an apology for his bender the week before. They'd traipsed around like tourists, and after the ice cream and the visit to F.A.O Schwarz (look, don't touch), he'd seen it--the tiny toy jaguar perched on the hood of a car.
At six, hell, even at seven, Neal might have pointed. He might have said "I want that," asked for it, begged. But he was eight now, old enough to understand the basic tenants of reality--if he asked, he would not receive. So he stared at it, calculating as best he could how to make it his own as his father gripped his hand too tightly and dragged him towards a dirty storefront.
"I'll be right back," he said, and Neal looked at the XXX in the window, the grubby, dirty hands of the men slipping out the door, and nodded.
Really, taking the tiny cat was easy. Neal just walked by the car and reached out a hand and yanked; it resisted a little more than he expected it to but he bore down on it, careful to keep himself from panicking. He pulled and pulled and the second he felt it come free he was moving, slipping in next to a woman with dark hair.
The car alarm started wailing, but no one looked twice at the little boy out shopping with his mother.
Neal took that toy everywhere with him for years and years. He never stole another hood ornament--he didn't have to. The heavy silvered thing rested in his pocket as he biked up and back down Astoria Boulevard, as he listened to the harsh, raw sounds of his parents fighting. He caressed it with his thumb as he kept his tally count on old notebooks, aced tests--things he could dare to call his own.
He took it to his first small heist, his first big heist. His first fuck. It was lucky, he decided, and so he packed it with him everywhere. In his business, luck wasn't something to be taken lightly.
In Cannes one summer, pretending to be an up-and-coming producer, slipping into film premiers with Kate glowing on his arm, he lost it. He'd placed it carefully beneath his soap, above his favorite boxers, and somewhere between the high of being somebody and the exquisite low of Kate pulsing beneath him it had vanished. He searched for hours and hours and Kate had laughed and cupped his chin and told him to forget it, so he had.
And none of this would matter except for the small trinket, a clay tiger, sitting on the Burkes' mantlepiece as he waits for Peter to come home.
"Take it," Elizabeth says, startling him. He jumps and she laughs, light and easy, handing him a glass of wine. "It was Peter's, when he was a kid; I found it in an old box and I keep it there to bother him. His mother told me carried it everywhere, called it Growly--hilarious, isn't it?"
"Yeah," Neal says, even though his throat is getting tight, even though he is beginning to panic. "I had something kind of like it, once."
Elizabeth's eyes are clear and open and she says, "Take it, I can see you want it, Peter won't mind," and Neal has to tell her, she's too kind for this, she's too--
"I'm sleeping with your husband," he says, running his hand down the clay back of the small tiger for luck.
"Oh honey," El replies, and she is suddenly too close, pressed into Neal's personal space. He lifts his arms and puts them around her even though he feels like he is drowning. She says "I know."
"I'm so sorry," Neal whispers, stiffening. He's not sure if he means I'm so sorry I am sleeping with Peter or I'm so sorry but please get off of me, I can't handle--I can't bear--, but it's a moot point. She steps away from him, the smooth soft lines of her putting the requisite distance between them.
"Don't apologize," she tells Neal. Her hand twitches like she wants to touch him, and he is grateful that she resists the urge. "It isn't--I'm not worried. He loves me, and he loves you, and we love you. And I though that, maybe..."
Neal wants to keep his face from displaying his dismay, but he cannot help himself. It's not that he can't see himself loving Elizabeth, eventually--she is brilliant and funny and gentle and kind, and he thinks the world of her. It is just that he is already in love with two people and the idea of three is terrifying; the cacophony of it, the howling, unending chaos--
"Neal," Elizabeth says, and Neal realizes he has been holding his breath. He releases it and she sighs, giving him a sad little smile. "I don't mean now. Of course you're not ready, please don't--I shouldn't have said anything. I just meant, if you're ever--"
"Thank you," Neal says, "but I have to go."
He takes the tiger with him and tries not to think of the look on her face as he runs, up and down a thousand streets, until he finally feels he is far enough away to catch a cab ride home.
Down
They catch Kate with Fowler's blood on her hands, with Fowler's body stretched across her bed like an offering for the gods. She does not apologize as she is drawn away. She does not cry or laugh; she does not indicate any emotion. She just smiles, a small, beautiful smile that carries into her mug shot, that follows Neal around for days after he looks over the reports he's stolen from the FBI, stolen and papered his room with.
She looks in that photo, small and strange and caught up in her own pathos, like he'd thought she might look on their wedding day.
"Don't go and see her," Peter says; his eyes are dark and horrified at the tremble that has made a home in Neal's hands.
"They wouldn't let me in anyway," Neal replies, and Peter gives him a look that says he knows all, that says he isn't fooled.
"Don't go and see her," Elizabeth says. She is soft and sweet and has not killed anyone, and Neal cannot bring himself to answer her.
All Mozzie says is "Don't," and it takes him almost two months to come up with the necessary disguise.
It is the second time Neal Caffrey, prisoner, becomes Neal Caffrey, prison guard. No one sees it but Mozz, who sighs, long and low, as he fixes the hem of the pantline to cover the tracker. "I've slipped you into the rotation," he says, "but this is a terrible--"
"Don't," Neal tells him, and he's choking and sinking and drowning on it, so Mozzie doesn't say anything more.
The place that they're keeping her is different that Neal expected it to be. He'd thought a woman's prison would be nicer than the one he'd been kept in, but it is filthy, strange. The prisoners whisper and fuck as he passes them, stilling when they see the telltale blue of his uniform.
If he were being smart about this, he'd play the part and reprimand them. But then, if he were being smart about this, he wouldn't have come.
She is awake when he gets to her cell. She smiles up at him, long hair swinging down her back, looking equal parts ravaging and ravished in orange.
"Oh Neal," she says, and she sounds like a dream, like a fucking dream as she stands and walks toward him. For a moment he imagines it falling away, the explosion and the betrayal and all the motherfucking tally marks, counting down from an apocalypse that never was. He imagines the two of them as they once were, bright and strong and only a little bit depraved--only dark enough to get the job done.
But murder slams behind his eyes like the prison bars between them, and he knows the apocalypse is nigh after all.
"I knew you'd come," she says, breathily, excited; he realizes with a sudden turn of his stomach that she thinks he means to break her out. That after all of this, she still thinks she holds enough sway to--
--he is grabbing the front of her jumpsuit and pulling her into the bars before he can stop himself. "Why," he growls, and he means Why did you do this to me, why did you leave me, why did you kill him.
"Because you love me," she says, perplexed, and it is a minute wading through sickening guilt before he realizes she is answering a different question.
He throws her back anyway, putting all of his weight into it, relishing the small victory of being fucking right when her eyes go cold as she hits the ground.
"Loved," he spits, and goes.
Down
Neal does not attend Kate's trial.
He tells June he's past it, that it would only open old wounds. He tells Mozzie that Peter has forbid it. He tells Elizabeth that he has seen a therapist who insisted against, and he tells Peter the truth. It's a little note, the truth, a piece of notebook paper and three lines in a flowing hand he knows too well.
Neal,
I never wanted you to see me like this.
-Kate
"That bitch knows just how to get to you, doesn't she." Peter holds the note a moment too long, like he is thinking of tearing it, and then sighs and hands it back. "Do you want me to--"
"There are ways I don't want you to see me," Neal tells him, quietly, and Peter smiles sadly at him.
"It's a phone call, Neal," he says. "You to me. The distance, I mean."
"I know," Neal manages, and Peter kisses him harshly and goes.
Mozzie's at the funeral--at the trial. The trial, because Neal's buried her too early once and he'll be damned if he buries her too early again, no matter how close to death this feels. He thinks about how much he hates her, and about how much he's loved her, and how fine the line is, and he's just considering getting properly drunk when Mozzie's text comes in.
It reads: "Life."
Neal gets up. He takes off his black hat and his black tie and his black shirt and, bare-chested, raw, he shoves the couch into the door. He leans over it and does all the locks and then, barricaded, he rubs his hands together.
"Now," he says, "I can bury her."
He lights a fire in the grate and finds them--the playbills, the receipts, the pocket calendar. He fans the flames and burns alive the charting of his agony, each slow scrape of pen on paper: she's gone, she's gone, she's gone. He finds the painting of her, which burns prettily, the heavy oiled pigment sparking in the flames. He finds every letter she'd ever written him, every scrap of their old code he's been able to garner, every meager photograph, and when it's all reduced to ash he grabs the wine bottle.
It is nearly full, charcoal nibs and paper scraps, letters he has written to her in single syllables. He tops it off with the remains of his current bottle for poetry's sake, a 2006 Grenache noir that would have been beneath her.
"To you," he says, and he grips the thing by the neck and smashes it bitterly against the wall.
It shatters in his hand, and there is wine trickling down the wall, and Neal feels something stutter and break inside his chest, something that has been keeping him alive. He feels the dam crumble as the glass cuts into his hand, and he falls to his knees in the quiet of his blocked off apartment, and it is only then--six hundred and ninety four days after she died the first time, a thousand black marks smudged across his heart--it is only then that he lets himself cry.
Across
When Peter comes back it is nearly dawn, and Neal has unlocked the door. He's sitting on the couch, left askance in the middle of the room, and he is staring at the bandages on his hand like they are some kind of code.
"I brought what you wanted," Peter says. He lifts the bucket of paint, the tray, the roller; he looks at the wall with wide, wary eyes. "Do you want me to--"
"No," Neal says. He is calm as he stands. He takes the paint and pries the lid off with a screwdriver; he dumps the thick white substance into the tray. It is viscous, and he has to resist the urge to dip his fingers in it, to cover himself.
But it is up. That time is up, now.
"Hand me the roller," he says. Peter does, and Neal coats it once, twice, and puts it to the wall. He tears an aching blank spot through his careful count, through the sticky remains of the wine, through the agony that has been nearly two years of his life. He tears one aching blank spot and then cannot bring himself to continue, and he feels the failure yawning in him, threatening to engulf him, threatening to--
--and then Peter is behind him, his palm resting against Neal's bandaged hand. "You can," he murmurs, guiding Neal forward, "you can, I know you can," and they paint the whole thing over like that, Peter holding Neal up.
When they are done the sun is almost risen, white-hot in a cold sky. "I'm sorry," Neal says, though he doesn't know why.
"I'm not," Peter whispers, and the sun crests the skyline in a burst of color, and Neal closes his eyes against the impression of blinding, blinding white.