Work Text:
So, let's fold our atlas into paper planes
Change is slow, but I feel it taking shape
- Sleeping at Last, "101010"
In the end, Neal knows he has only himself to blame for not figuring it out sooner. The timing was entirely too suspicious, the description of the event the same, and Neal should have known better. When Peter told him Elizabeth had asked for his help preparing food for an annual dinner with her college roommate, and that he was welcome to stick around afterwards - understood to mean he would be sticking around afterwards - he should’ve been able to easily connect the dots and figure out what, exactly the whole thing was about. But he didn’t.
Maybe it was just too easy to lose himself in the calm simplicity of the afternoon, and that was why Neal chose not to look any deeper into it for as long as he could. He stands next to Elizabeth in the kitchen, sweater sleeves pushed up to his elbows, having been told in no uncertain circumstances was he to arrive dressed in, as Peter so eloquently put it, ‘regular people clothes’. It turned out to be a good idea, given the amount of cooking they were neck deep in, a swipe of flour from the pie crust chilling in the fridge swooping in a careless arc over the thigh of his jeans. He scrapes absently at the small mark on the denim, mind wandering.
Elizabeth had pureed the creamed pumpkin filling while Neal stood at the counter, rolling the butter into the dough and as he pressed the rolling pin across the wax paper covering the crust, he couldn’t help looking around him, at this house. The pictures on the walls. The throw blankets folded on the corner of the couch. Elizabeth, narrowing her eyes with single minded concentration at the food processor, Peter vacuuming the living room rug. Sometimes it’s so easy to just pretend that this is what his life is like. Chores and cooking and the faint metallic rattle of the dog’s tags on his collar in the hallway by the door.
“Do you want me to take him out?” Neal finds himself asking, when he sees Peter go for the leash. Peter looks a little surprised by the offer, but the look fades quickly. It’s not unusual for Neal to take Satchmo around the block when he’s at the house, and it takes just long enough for Peter to get the leash clipped onto the dog’s collar that Neal has the time to think about how he’s here often for there to be a ‘usual’ at all.
It’s a beautiful day outside, though just on the colder side, prompting him to roll the sleeves of his sweater down to his wrists as the door closes behind him. Satchmo bounds happily down the front steps, stopping at the end of his leash’s reach to look back at Neal with his tongue lolling out sideways, a look like some kind of dopey doggy smile on his little face. Neal regards the animal fondly and jogs down the steps to catch up, and they set off together on their walk.
As they’re returning, just having gone on a brief jaunt around the block and the one adjacent to it, just headed back up the walk to the porch, when one of the neighbors across the street catches Neal’s eye. She’s outside on her own porch, winding a string of lights around her wrought iron railing, and she notices him when she raises her head. The woman lifts a hand in greeting, smiling and waving at him in the way people on like this do, when they see their neighbors. Neal gives her his best dazzling smile and waves back, and wonders, as she turns back towards her task, who she thinks he is. If she’s given him a moment’s thought past ‘the neighbor with the dog’. It’s not the first time he’s seen this woman across the street while walking Satchmo, and he’s starting to see recognition on her face when she looks up and registers it’s him rounding the corner with the yellow lab.
The air inside the house is much warmer than that outside, and it takes a moment for Neal to adjust, letting Satchmo off his leash and rubbing at his sweater-covered arms in an attempt to warm up faster. Peter is setting the table when he wanders in from the front hallway, and he counts the place settings. It’s going to be a crowded night, if the number of plates set out is anything to by. There’s room for eight total, and Peter’s pulled a few extra folding chairs out of the storage closet in the hallway. Before he has time to ask as to what exactly is meant by ‘El’s college roommate and her family’, the woman herself calls out from the kitchen.
“Peter, hon, is that Neal back? Neal, can you come give me a hand? The chicken’s done marinading and I want to get it all going in two pans so it cooks even.”
“Duty calls,” Neal tells Peter, who rolls his eyes and can be heard saying to Satchmo as Neal passes that honestly, it’s like nobody in this house thinks he’s even competent with a frying pan.
Entering the kitchen, Neal pushes his sleeves back up and accepts the pan Elizabeth hands him to get set up on the stove. It’s cast iron, the real kind, that’s been seasoned and worn over years of use into a completely unique cooking tool. It’s the kind of minor detail that would be meaningless to most people. It’s just a frying pan. But to Neal it’s something different entirely. It’s a reminder that things here, in this house, they’re stable. They’re settled. Permanent. Elizabeth has made dinner in this frying pan a hundred nights, and Peter has made pancakes in it a hundred mornings, and Neal can’t remember the last time before June’s that he spent a hundred days in the same place in a row.
The table has been set, eight plates and eight sets of silverware, eight water glasses but only five set out for wine. The chicken is cooked, thighs marinated and then fried in a pomegranate orange sauce, sprigs of thyme muddled into the sauce as it sizzled in the pans. In the other room, Elizabeth’s voice sounds on the phone, talking to her friend, her roommate from college, a woman named Yasmin Wright, saying something about how it’ll be ‘so good to see the kids again, I bet they’ve grown a foot since last year’.
That’s the moment when it finally clicks. Peter comes wandering in from the other room right as he puts it together, and Neal looks at him, a little wide-eyed.
“Peter,” he says, the name dragging out a little, his voice apprehensive.
“Neal,” Peter says back, echoing his tone.
“This is Thanksgiving dinner isn’t it.”
Peter tips his head to the side, looking like he’s considering the question. Eventually he says, “Of a sort. I mean, it’s Monday, so not really, but that’s the spirit of it, yes. Every year, some day before or after the actual holiday itself, El’s friend Yaz and her wife and the kids and us, we get together for a big dinner. So yeah, I guess, Thanksgiving.”
Neal would have had to be stupid to not know that by now, to not have realized that was what this was. And Neal is many, many things, but he isn’t stupid. He had all of the pieces, it really couldn’t even be said that he didn’t realize he was helping Elizabeth make a Thanksgiving dinner, just that he wouldn’t realize it, not consciously. So it can be chalked up, ultimately, to willful obtusity and perhaps the fact that he’s actually so pathological he can’t even be honest in the interior of his own mind.
And, now the he has realized it, he’s got to find some way out of it. He’s been in this house that he’s been fairly successfully letting himself feel like is in any way shape or form his all day now, but the moment he’s been savoring and hanging onto is past, and it’s time to be realistic. Because for all that he will walk into their dining room while they’re having breakfast, or take their dog for walks, or stand next to Elizabeth at the counter helping her cook like he’s been doing it all his life, Neal draws the line at actually crashing their Thanksgiving. Peter and Elizabeth, Elizabeth’s college roommate, her wife, and their kids. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that this is an equation he does not fit into.
“I should…” Neal looks around, trying to find a way to exit this situation with some amount of grace. There isn’t one readily available to him. The tips of his fingers tingle faintly, pins and needles of physical anxiety. He takes a step towards the door. Stops. He can’t just leave, not without explaining where he’s going, but his mouth has gone dry and he can’t find the words to smoothly justify a quick retreat.
By now Elizabeth has ended her phone call and come back into the kitchen. She stops and frowns when she notices the direction he’s edged towards, the odd look on Peter’s face, and she turns to Neal with a look that makes him feel guiltier than any judge or police officer ever managed.
“Neal, sweetie, is everything okay? You’re not going somewhere, are you? They’re going to be here in just a couple of minutes.” Elizabeth’s voice is soft and concerned and she calls him ‘sweetie’ and Neal can’t stand that look on her face, so he gives her a deliberate grin, all bright eyes and convincing nod.
“Fine, Elizabeth. Everything is fine.”
She looks relieved, reaching out to squeeze his arm as she steps past him to the fridge to retrieve a bottle of wine. As she walks back out towards the living room, she flashes him a quick smile, and Neal is sure in that moment that he’d do basically anything, if it meant keeping her happy with him. The good opinion of Elizabeth Burke is worth more than gold. Left behind in the doorway, about to follow her into the living room, Peter looks relieved too, an approving appraisal on his face, and Neal has to look away before he has to think about that too hard.
So, he supposes he isn’t going anywhere after all. Peter is looking at him like he’s happy with what he sees, and Elizabeth looks immensely pleased he’s decided to stay, and besides. Neal has never once claimed he is not a selfish man, and if a part of him wants to hang onto this warm house and this feeling of neighbors who wave to him when they see him on the street, well. Thanksgiving with the Burkes and the Wrights. He can do this.
The table is set and the flowers in the vase at the center are beautiful. The food is amazing and Neal ducks his head and feels his cheeks heat up when Elizabeth deflects the praise for it, saying she couldn’t have gotten nearly this much done without such great help. And Elizabeth’s college roommate is a riot. Yasmin Wright is a tall red-haired woman with a dry sense of humor and Neal likes her immediately. She’s an architect for the city and her wife, Bridget, is a florist who Elizabeth had actually introduced her to, way back at the beginning of their relationship. Their kids are well behaved and polite, an older girl maybe sixteen or seventeen, and twins who were barely entering their teen years, a boy and a girl.
All around, the entire thing is a lovely affair. Yasmin asks him questions about a new art installation, and tells him about the new painting program they’ve started at the twins’ school, which sounds like a rather good one, as far as Neal is concerned. Then something tips Elizabeth off on a story about some ridiculous caterer she’d worked with last month, which sends both her and Bridget into comparing notes on their most unreasonable clients since the last dinner. One of them, it turned out, they’d actually both worked with at different times, a wedding in January and a rather extravagant baby shower sometime around August, and by the end of the stories, Neal is deeply glad he’s never had occasion to meet the unfortunate couple.
While dinner is amazing, and Neal has a wonderful time, after dinner is another story entirely. After dinner, Neal starts to feel… odd.
It’s the type of retroactive embarrassed horror a person feels after a long emotional conversation or an offhandedly confessed secret, like you couldn’t believe you’d just said that and now wish you could take it back. He hadn’t meant to talk as much as he did during dinner, intending to be as much of a wallflower as Neal Caffrey was ever capable of being, but he couldn’t help it. It’s like he forgot, after a while, that he wasn’t really supposed to be there.
He remembers now. The walls of the house that had felt so familiar and comforting before now feel foreign and claustrophobic. Accusatory, as if even the house itself knows he’s somewhere he inserted himself unreasonably, involved himself in things he shouldn’t have stuck his nose in. The warmth in the air, the smell of the spices in the cider Elizabeth heated up for the kids, is suffocating.
Neal doesn’t belong here, and he shouldn’t be here, because he’s a fraud playing at a family, and if those neighbors who wave at him when they see him walking Satchmo knew the first thing about him, they wouldn’t wave at him at all. They’d stare and lock their doors and warn their neighbor the FBI agent that there was a criminal skulking around his home.
Neal should leave. Honestly, he should’ve left much earlier, before he had the chance to get himself into this odd, strained situation in the first place. But, since he had caved then, it’s only right he leave now. Before one of the kids has the opportunity to actually ask who he was and why he was here, something they’ve miraculously avoided so far. He edges slowly away from the crowd of people in the living room, heading into the kitchen as casually as possible. The key to not being noticed, Neal has learned by now, is to look like you don’t care whether or not you’re noticed.
It works. Nobody looks up or asks him what he’s doing. Neal makes it to the kitchen and stands there watching them. The adults and the older girl are poring over a yearbook from when Elizabeth and Yasmin were in school together, while the twins are having a blast playing with Satchmo, who seems delighted by the attention. The yearbook soon becomes a photo album Elizabeth pulls from under the coffee table and Neal does not belong here.
If he were thinking right, and planning with the kind of presence of mind he usually plans with, Neal would slip out the door now while they’re distracted and make a clean getaway before anyone notices he’s left. He’ll leave a text for Peter, on the phone he knows is on silent in his coat pocket while they’re totally off rotation at work, following the completion of an extremely time consuming, strenuous case, so they wouldn’t worry. And he’s all set to do exactly that. Right until the moment he turns and walks out the back door instead, slipping out onto the porch and closing the door softly behind him.
The evening air is crisp and bitter, much colder than it had been in the afternoon when he’d taken Satchmo out for his walk. There’s a slight wind that picks up every now and then, piercing through the knit of Neal’s sweater and making him shiver. He walks to the edge of the patio anyway, ignoring the chill, and sits down, pulling his feet onto the top step and folding his arms over his knees. It’s a clear night, and when Neal looks up, the stars stretch out vast and unfathomable.
Neal knows he should go home. He should just get up and go home, but he can’t quite bring himself to rise from where he sits, the chill of the patio under him seeping through the fabric of his jeans. So he stays where he is, outside the Burke family home, looking up.
The night sky glitters, distant and uncaring, and Neal feels very small, and very foolish.
Elizabeth has gone to find another box of photos from upstairs. Peter’s been immensely enjoying getting regaled with stories from that period of her life by Yasmin, with Bridget chiming in with anecdotes from shared clients every now and then. It’s not often you get to learn new things about the person you’ve been married to for what feels like a blessed forever, and Peter cherishes these moments, where he gets to know this person Elizabeth was when she and Yasmin first met. It’s one of his favorite parts of this annual tradition of theirs.
Only minutes later, Elizabeth reappears at the bottom of the stairs with a box of pictures, which she hands to Yasmin and then ducks into the kitchen to grab a cup of coffee. Peter watches her out of habit, eyes trailing his wife into the kitchen and then back out again, where she stops unexpectedly next to him. Her elbow darts out, digging into his side as subtlely as possible, and he frowns at her, the question asked without words.
“Honey,” she says, voice low and concerned in a way that sets him on edge, “have you seen Neal?”
“Yeah, he’s just…” Come to think of it, actually, no. Peter hasn’t seen Neal. “No, I don’t know where he is.”
With a quick glance into the living room to make sure the Wrights are still sufficiently entertained, Elizabeth ducks her head back into the kitchen, and abruptly stops. She’s looking at something out of Peter’s view, her shoulders slumped down into a dejected curve he hates seeing on her, and her face has gone soft in a way he can’t quite read.
“Hon,” she says, and it’s enough to call him over, stepping next to her and looking in the same direction she is. And then Peter sees what Elizabeth is seeing.
Neal is outside. He’s outside in their backyard, sitting on the patio, face tilted up towards the sky. It’s got to be cold as anything out there, and Peter feels a chill run down his back in sympathy.
Peter feels Elizabeth’s hand, tucking itself through his arm, her fingers curling over the inside of her elbow. He doesn’t look at her, his focus still outside. It’s hard to believe he hadn’t noticed Neal leave, hadn’t picked up on the fact that for god knows how long, he’s been sitting out there alone. Then again, of course he didn’t notice. As bright and gaudy as he could be, a flashy showoff of a man, Neal is only ever noticed when he wants to be noticed. He’s just as good at disappearing, and not the kind involving running from the law, either. No, Neal has a talent for fading into the background, making himself small and invisible, and that is one of the things that, in all honesty, scares Peter about him the most.
“Why don’t you go out there and get our boy,” Elizabeth says, the words falling from her mouth with the easy sweetness of a person who’s never thought to question them, “and bring him back inside, hm?”
Without answering out loud, Peter nods. He swallows hard, briefly covers Elizabeth’s hand with his own, then slips out of her grip, heading for the door.
Carefully, and with the stiffness of a man whose body likes to remind him he’s not as young as he was when he went through training at Quantico, Peter lowers himself to sit on the edge of the patio next to Neal, who doesn’t acknowledge his arrival at all. The look on his face, where Peter now has a clear view of it, is unnerving. It’s open and uncertain, sad and maybe a tinge embarrassed, and it’s Neal. You don’t see Neal too often. You see Caffrey and Nick Halden and a dozen other aliases but this is just Neal, and Peter feels a sudden surge of protectiveness grip his chest so tight he can’t get a breath in completely.
Since Neal came out of prison and into his life on a daily basis, it’s a feeling Peter is growing more and more used to. No matter how used to it he gets, though, it still winds him every time.
They sit on the porch, quiet, together for a long time, while Neal looks at the sky and Peter alternates between looking at the sky and looking at Neal. He’s reminded of an early case they’d worked on together, a case with clay pigeons and a room with no air. A case where he’d ended up sitting on steps next to a rather disarmed looking Neal, feeling as though he might tear a new one in anyone who happened to get too close with even questionably good intent.
“What are you looking for, Neal?” Peter asks after a while. They can’t just sit out here forever, and he’s starting to get cold.
With a shrug of one shoulder, Neal glances back into the house. “You should be inside,” he says, and his voice is a little hoarse.
“I mean,” Peter says, trying to keep the words light and just on the edge of teasing, hoping maybe this will blow over fast. “So should you.”
It’s not going to be that easy. Neal shakes his head, and now he’s looking down at his hands, pale from cold and how tightly they’re knotted together in front of him.
“Not really, no,” he murmurs. He’s speaking almost absentmindedly, like he’s not entirely aware he’s saying it out loud. “I should be back at my apartment and not…” With a slow, stiff tug, he disentangles his hands and waves one of them around, indicating the situation and general and what in particular Peter doesn’t know. What’s obvious is that Neal is upset, and trying to act like he isn’t, which is at least less concerning than if he was being open about it.
“Not what, Neal?”
A shake of his head is all Neal gives in response. No verbal answer. He doesn’t say anything again for a long, long moment. His hands lace back together over his knees and a small shiver runs through his shoulders.
Slowly, Peter raises a hand, then hesitates and lowers it. He’s not sure what to do, how to handle this situation he’s found himself in, where there is obviously something wrong with Neal and Neal isn’t talking, but Peter has a pretty good idea he’s worked out at least part of what’s going on anyway. Peter doesn’t know how to handle this, how to help things or make any of it better. He knows what his instinct is, and what he’s good with, and those are ‘to hand it off to someone else better equipped’ and ‘a lot of things but not this’. But it’s Neal. It’s Neal, who is his responsibility, and his on top of that, and so he’s going to have to figure it out.
So, Peter Burke tells himself that it’s time to cowboy up and learn how to be soft. Because sometimes what people need from you is soft, and there is clearly no amount of buck up speeches or giving Neal the tools to figure it out himself that’s going to work this time.
Raising his hand again, Peter puts it gently over the back of Neal’s neck, right at the base, at the top of his spine, his thumb grazing over the tense muscle leading down into his stiff shoulder. His skin is colder than Peter had been expecting and he winces, squeezing and settling his grip into a light hold. He says nothing at first, trying to find a way to say what he needs to, just leaves his hand there and looks up the stars. Neal shivers under his palm, once, twice, and it’s almost possible to believe it’s just from the cold. Peter moves his thumb in slow, gentle strokes, trying to soothe some of the rigidness out of Neal’s neck. It’s going to give him a headache if he keeps sitting here like this.
Finally, Peter, looking up at the same stars Neal is still staring at, skin finally warming under his touch, lands on what he wants to say. It’s the most direct thing possible, something he’s wanted to say to Neal time and time again, and has tried to in various ways, all except actually saying it.
“Come home,” he says simply, two words that carry a novel’s worth of intent behind them. Peter has never been good with words, so he hopes that two words can do the work of that novel, because he can’t find that novel in him just yet.
Neal looks over at him like he doesn’t understand, and Peter repeats himself. He says again, gently but firmly, accompanied by another squeeze of his neck, “Come home, Neal. Okay? Come back home.”
Giving it a few more moments of steadily holding his gaze, Peter withdraws his hand and heaves himself slowly upwards, feeling the repercussions of sitting in such a compacted position in the cold night for as long as he had. He holds the same hand out, and for a moment it doesn’t seem like it’s going to work. Then, though, Neal reaches up and takes it, allowing himself to be pulled to his feet.
They walk back inside together, Neal shepherded in front of Peter, with a slight smile pulling at his mouth, sheepish but also faintly pleased. There’s no fanfare over their arrival, a fact for which Peter is grateful. The last thing he needs is for a big deal, with questions and curiosity, made of Neal’s temporary absence.
Rather, as soon as he enters the living room, Neal is pulled immediately into a card game of some kind just beginning between the children present, tugged to sit on the floor between the twins. He goes along with it willingly, and accepts the deck handed to him, shuffling it with ease and evident practice. The kids are obviously impressed and Peter shakes his head, walking over and leaning against the doorway where Elizabeth has been watching.
She tucks herself under his arm and nudges his side, to which he pushes lightly at her shoulder, a wordless exchange that says as much as words could have. They watch the scene together, Neal Caffrey in all his polished glory with his hair falling down over his forehead, sitting cross-legged on the carpet in jeans and a sweater, dealing cards to a trio of fascinated kids. Over his head, Peter makes brief eye contact with Yasmin, who flashes him an amused smile, that he returns easily.
The oldest Wright child begins explaining the rules of the game to a serious, attentive Neal, who nods at all the right moments, completely involved in the task at hand. Outside, far above the house, the stars in the night sky glitter and shine, exactly as they are supposed to, exactly where they are supposed to be.