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This bust was supposed to be simple. Diana looked between Neal and Porter, one of the people they were supposed to be arresting. Diana had known that the case wasn’t gonna be easy, especially after they figured out that this group had mainly been dealing with stolen alien tech, but she’d thought that they’d gotten through all the hard parts. They were just supposed to arrest the guys now. But no, Porter, the weak link in this chain of thieves, the one who Neal had most easily been able to gain the trust of, had to run to one of the crates of stolen goods as soon as she realized what was going on. Now her hands were shaking around some gun-looking thing, and she was pointing it right at Neal.
“St-stay back!” Her breathing was short and shaky. She looked nervously around at the small group of agents that had surrounded her. “Stay the hell back and let me walk out of here, or I’ll find out what this thing does!”
“Porter, please listen to me.” Neal said, his voice seemed almost inhumanly calm for someone with a strange alien gun pointed in his face. “I need you to take a few deep breaths and put that down before you do something you regret.”
“No, no! Shut up!” Porter’s eyes filled with tears. “I fucking trusted you!”
“I know and I’m so sorry.” Neal nodded. “But please, Ingrid-“
“I said shut up!” Porter’s voice echoed through the warehouse and Diana instinctively covered her eyes against the light of some sort of beam shooting out of the alien-gun-thing. When she looked back up, she vaguely registered that Porter had dropped her weapon and started running for an exit, several agents hot on her tail, but her main focus was on Neal, crouched on the ground and curled in on himself.
“Neal!” Diana rushed to Neal’s side, placing a hand on his shoulder. Neal looked up at him slowly, making room for Diana to see where he’d been hit. There was no wound, Neal’s suit hadn’t even been harmed, instead there was a small glowing spot.
“I honestly expected that to hurt more...” Neal smiled a bit, before his face morphed into a pained grimace. “Oh, there it is.”
“Wha-“ Diana looked back down at the glow on the CIs abdomen. It was expanding, slowly starting to cover Neal’s whole body. She watched helplessly, having absolutely no clue what to do as the glow flashed and blinded her. When she managed to blink the light out of her eyes, Neal was no longer in her arms. In his place was a young, very small, boy, maybe seven or eight. He unconscious, wearing a beanie, a baggy black hoodie, and a pair of worn out jeans that looked too big on him, and there was a camera bag hanging around his shoulders. It took Diana a moment to realize, but he looked a lot like a young Neal Caffrey.
Diana stuck with young Neal the trip back to the office. One of the other agents had found a manifest that described the weird alien gun that he’d been shot with. It was a de-aging ray (Diana had no clue why anyone would ever need that, but sure, go off, aliens), Neal would have no memories of his life after the age he currently was and he would be returned to his real age as soon as the Justice League (they’d been contacted as soon as the FBI realized exactly what their perps were trading) finished reverse engineering the ray. Until then Diana was determined to stay a kid Neal’s side, Neal had always been like a brother to her, and seeing him as this scrawny little kid was making her feel like a particularly overprotective older sister.
Neal was still unconscious, sleeping on the couch in Peter’s office. Peter had been understanding of Diana’s protectiveness, he himself taking a more paternal role towards the now-young con artist. Jones joined them as well, wanting to make sure that not only Neal was okay, but that the others weren’t working themselves up too much with their worry. Overall, the office ended up just a bit crowded, but it certainly made them all feel better to be there when Neal woke up.
The young boy woke up slowly, groaning slightly and rubbing at his eyes. He pushed himself up to a sitting position, and Diana simultaneously wanted to rush to his side and didn’t want to crowd him, she could see her fellow two agents experiencing a similar dilemma. Neal looked over them, he seemed much more quiet and reserved than they were used to seeing him, he looked like he was analyzing their every movement and every aspect of their appearances. His eyes landed on Diana, who sat closest to him, though they sometimes flicked anxiously over to Peter, sat behind his desk and clearly in charge.
“You work for the FBI.” Neal said. He was tense, but seemed certain in his analysis.
“That’s right.” Peter nodded after a moment of shock at the child’s read of them. He got up to move closer to Neal, who kept his eyes on him the whole time he moved. “That’s really impressive, how could you tell that we’re agents?”
“This office, the way you all hold yourselves, your clothes, your umm…” his eyes flickered down to Peter’s feet for a second. “Your shoes.”
“Our shoes?” Jones laughed a little, causing little Neal to direct his attention towards him.
“Mmhm.” Little Neal nodded, slowly getting more confident as he explained his thought process. “Your shoes. They’re very… hm, clean.”
“He makes a good point.” Diana shrugged and looked down at her own heels. To be fair, they were pretty clean. When she looked back up at Neal, he was staring at her with wide eyes. For a second she panicked that she’d said or done something wrong, but then she saw the big smile he was trying to hide. It made her smile a bit too. “What is it?”
“Oh! It’s, uh… no, it’s-I’m not… it’s nothing.” Neal face turned red and he broke off into a series of mumbles, looking down a his hands in his lap.
“Well, that’s alright.” Diana grinned at how shy the conman was when he was young. “You’re right, we do work for the FBI. I’m Diana Berrigan, that’s Clinton Jones, and that guy over there is Special Agent Peter Burke.”
She made sure to put extra emphasis on Peter’s title, kids always got a kick out of stuff like that, but Neal’s attention snapped back up to her when she said her name. He squinted at her for a second, analyzing her again like he had when he’d first woken up, then his eyes widened again, before settling into some sort of of understanding.
“You said you were Diana Berrigan?” He asked her. She nodded and Neal nodded back at her. “Okay… is this a time travel or de-aging situation?”
All three agents started silently at the little boy. He looked up expectantly at them, waiting for an answer to his question.
“De-aging,” Jones finally answered for the group. He held up a hand for a high five that Neal hesitantly accepted. “Nice job, little man! How’d you figure that one out?”
“Well, um…” little Neal blushed again and tapped his fingers nervously against his knee. He looked back over at Diana. “She, um, said her name was Diana Berrigan, and last I remember Diana Berrigan was only a couple of years older than me, not, y’know, a full grown FBI Agent. There’s also… well, you guy keep calling me…. It’s mainly just that one thing.”
“Wait a second,” Diana held up he hand, trying to take a moment to process what Neal had said. “Do you know who I am?”
“Yes, you’re Diana, daughter of Nathaniel and Teresa Berrigan. You father is a British diplomat and your mother is a retired artist and model. Your father is British, but your mother is American, and you technically have duel citizenship.” Neal listed several things about her that Peter and Jones didn’t even know, things that Neal had certainly pretended not to know about her when they met. “I don’t know how I didn’t realize who you are earlier, you look a lot like your mom.”
“Wow, that’s a whole lot.” finding out that Neal had lied about not knowing her hurt a lot more than she was willing to show in front of the kid. He was a con artist, she shouldn’t be shocked when he lied to her, but knowing the number of times she opened up to him and it was something he probably already knew because he knew about her parents, that really pissed her off. Still, for now this was just a kid, she couldn’t get mad at him for something he hadn’t done yet. “Could I ask why exactly you know all that about me?”
“My parents said you and your family were good people to be close to, so they wanted us to be friends so that they could be friends.” Neal explained, and yeah, that was a familiar story to her. Diana remembered all the kids that her parents tried to push her to be close with because it would be “good for them.” Apparently Neal’s parents took it a step further. “I’m pretty sure that’s actually code for they wanted me to see if you would tell me anything bad about your parents that my parents could use against them. But that didn’t actually work because your parents didn’t spend time with you, so you didn’t know anything bad about them.”
Diana winced at the way he phrased it, even if it was true it still hurt a lot to think back on that way. She could she that Peter was frowning and she could hear Jones muttering something about how the kid hadn’t quite developed that classic Caffrey charm yet. Neal didn’t seem bothered by their reaction, he just kept talking.
“I still liked spending time with you though,” he said. “And I got to know Charlie who was really nice to me. You were always so confident and happy and I remember once I slipped up in front of my parents and you yelled at them for me. Of course after that they wouldn’t let me be friends with you, especially after you started dating Carly Dylan. They said you were a bad influence, which I don’t think is true, but they still wouldn’t let me see you.”
Diana frowned, Carly Dylan had been her first girlfriend, and the first time that she’d been publicly open about her sexuality. A lot of the high society assholes she grew up with, including her parents early on, really didn’t like the way she had been openly herself. Neal had mentioned past boyfriends and he was relatively open about being bi, it must of been hard for him to watch her when she was younger and be told that that was wrong.
It was strange though. When she first came out, Diana had a lot of screaming matches with rich pricks, but she mostly had to defend herself. You’d think she’d remember yelling at a young boy’s parents for him. It made her wonder what exactly he meant when he said he’d “slipped up.” Plus, of all those rich kids she’d been forced to be friends with, almost none of them ever acknowledged Charlie, her bodyguard, the man who really raised her, as anything more than a prop in the background.
“I feel really awful that I don’t remember you.” Diana admitted. Neal just nodded, seemingly resigned to being forgotten.
“That’s alright, I try really hard to stay in the background.” He mumbled. He fidgeted his hands a bit, rubbing at the back of his neck and pulling on the edge of his beanie. Eventually he pulled off his hat, allowing the hair under it to fall freely out. A long black ponytail fell out, it was tangled, Neal clearly not caring enough about the hair to take care of it.
All at once, Diana finally remembered the kid in front of her. She remembered the Drake kid who her parents pushed her to make nice with. She remembered listening to him complain about the dresses they had to wear to galas and how he fantasized about chopping all of his tangled black hair off. She remembered sitting with him and brainstorming new names for him that didn’t make his stomach feel all twisted up and his chest feel a little too tight to breathe. She remembered being there when he asked his parents if he could wear a suit to the next event, she remembered how they’d chastised him and how she’d screamed at them that they had no right to say anything about the son they clearly didn’t care about.
“Tim?” She breathed out. The kids face lit up at the name that only she and Charlie knew to call him.
“You do remember me?” He asked, voice laced with weary hope. Diana couldn’t help it, she moved over and wrapped him in her arms around him. Tim tensed for just a second before absolutely melting into her hug.
“Of course I do, buddy.” She pulled back a little to see the face of the kid her parents had scolded her for calling her little brother. He was smiling ear to ear, pulling his hands close to his chest so he could shake them excitedly in the way he only ever let himself do around her, the way that Neal was much more open about. “You’re unforgettable.”