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The time had come to run. He had to run, he had to.
So that’s what he was going to do – run far, run fast. He had the reason, the means – he even had his FBI handler’s implicit permission to do so. And he was good at running – had been running all his life. He had everything in place for a quick getaway.
When it came down to the wire, though, Neal couldn’t let Peter take the fall for him.
No, it was more than that. Peter was a big part of it, of course – if Neal disappeared, Kramer would see to it that Peter was destroyed. Forget just losing his job – Peter would end up in prison, and for a long time. Where would that leave Elizabeth? Gentle Elizabeth, who had already suffered more than she should have because of him, the things he’d done. She’d be in the newspapers – both the Burkes would, “Disgraced FBI Agent Aids Fleeing Criminal!” or some such thing. Press parked outside her house, people recognizing her on the street. Her business would go under – or at least would need a re-branding, she would have to dissociate herself from it in order to allow it to survive. Nobody would want their event catered by the wife of a criminal, a traitor. Even Sachmo would have problems – he’d be fretting, whining, wandering the house in search of his master; all-too-aware that something was wrong, and breaking Elizabeth’s heart.
There would be trials to go to, lawyers to see, testimony to give. Hell, with some of the things she’d done, Neal wondered if El wouldn’t face charges herself (though, surely, Peter would take the fall for her as well). Between her absent husband and the legal fees, Elizabeth would be emotionally and financially distraught – she’d maybe have to sell the house, move out of the city, give away the home she’d worked so hard to create.
That would only be the beginning of the nightmare, too. After the sentencing: years of seeing Peter through a pane of glass, rarely even touching him, counting down the days until his next parole hearing.
Neal had been through that with Kate. It got old.
And Peter? He was a fed – there’ s no way he’d be housed in GenPop; he’d go straight to Supermax, for his own protection. Twenty-three hours per day of isolation – half an hour to shower and shave, an hour alone in an empty basketball court. Never seeing anyone but guards or visitors, staring at the walls. Hundreds of days, thousands of minutes, millions of seconds to fill. A man like Peter…it would break him. Peter needs people around him all the time; he needs touch, he needs eye-contact. He sees into other people as though he possesses some microscope for the soul; doesn’t miss a single thing, can see the sin in every saint and the saint in every sinner. It’s one of the first things that Neal noticed about him – that he was the definition of an extrovert, drawing his strength not from solitude, but from companionship. At the FBI, it turned him into a legend. In prison, it would turn him into a corpse.
It wasn’t just the Burkes who would be affected – what about Mozzie, June, Diana, Jones? What about Sara? His desertion would rain chaos down on all of their lives, and they deserved better. After everything they’d given him, everything they’d done for him, they deserved better.
So when Peter gave him “the nod”, with such fear and sadness in his eyes, Neal turned from the courthouse and walked straight back to FBI headquarters. Jones was there – and Neal could feel a sigh of relief pass over his lips at the sight of the man. He’d been to Harvard Law, right? He’d know how to draft the documents Neal needed. Jones would help Neal, as he’d always helped Neal, with the same calm and respect that he always had.
He pushed open the doors that he’d walked through every day, taking a deep breath, pausing for a moment. Everything around him felt false and dreamlike; a vague sense of airlessness. Was he really about to do this? Condemn himself, like this? Disown his freedom – perhaps forever – for the sake of the people he cared about?
It was a shame that the commutation board would never be delivering their verdict. Because finally – finally – Neal actually believed his friends and colleagues: he had changed. Peter was right, had always been right. People could change.
The realization made him feel suddenly light, euphoric, as though anything were possible. And then he remembered: too late, it was too late. So ironic, that the emotional fuel he needed to live an honest life came to him as a result of giving his life, his freedom, away.
Jones, noticing Neal standing dumbstruck in the middle of the office, had furrowed his brows and stood, beginning a careful approach.
“Caffrey. ‘Sup? You okay?”
Neal swallowed, swallowed, and took another deep breath. His final breath, as a free man.
“I need to make to make a confession.”
*
That had been two years ago, now. Neal could hardly believe so little time had passed – it felt more like five years, ten, twenty.
Something he always took for granted, when he worked with Peter, was the ticking clock. Every minute that passed brought him a minute closer to freedom. Four years on the anklet turned into three years on the anklet turned into two, and so on. Working with Kramer…all the clocks had stopped. They still ticked for everyone else, of course – but not him. Not anymore.
It was still better than jail, of course, working in DC. Hell, it was nice, by all standard definitions. Kramer put him up in his own apartment, gave him a stipend to live on and a three mile radius, treated him with (condescending) respect. Kramer was a good agent – he would never hurt Neal, had never intended to, had only the best of intentions for him. But, of course, every road into hell is paved with the best of intentions.
Kramer was a bloodhound – a chilling vision of what Peter may have become, if he had less humanity in him. Kramer would pursue suspects in a way that was cold, calculated, methodical and relentless. He found the people he wanted to find. He recovered the artifacts he wanted to recover. He always, always got what he wanted. One way, or another.
His first day in DC, Neal was given an office and a desk and a wall of bookcases, full of cold case files; he was told that they were his assignment, until further notice. Two years later, his caseload is less than half of what it was, but Neal knows all too well that there must be cabinets and cabinets of other cold cases, just waiting to fill the shelves he’s emptied; a lifetime of discarded work, to keep him occupied. He’s never been called “partner”, here; never been invited to do field work. His role is clear.
One might say he was lucky – to be on probation, to have a job to go to, a place to live. Lucky that Kramer was not cruel to him, that Kramer’s team seemed to accept his existence within their department. Lucky that he still had his suits and his hats and his evenings in which to draw, read, wander the city.
One could say that he was lucky – but he knows, he knows the truth: that he is damned.
He doesn’t care about suits, about four walls and food in his stomach and work to do and diversions. He doesn’t care about safety and courtesy and polite kindness. He would gladly go hungry, be homeless, take beatings – gladly – if it would give him back the things he’s lost.
Of all the losses, of course, the greatest has been Peter. He is not allowed any contact with Peter. This was a condition of Peter’s continued employment with the FBI, a caveat introduced by Kramer during the transfer. Peter didn’t care about any caveats, of course – the first chance he got, he apparently bought a burner phone and called his former CI. It was like a knife in the heart, for Neal – to answer his phone after two weeks away and hear that familiar gruffness on the end, the heartsickness beneath it.
Neal hung up on him. He didn’t answer his phone again, until Peter stopped calling. And he did stop calling, in the end.
He isn’t sure what his former handler (partner? friend?) must think of him. Peter was furious – furious – when he discovered that Neal had confessed to stealing the Nazi treasure, the Raphael, the music box, the Lindbergh baby, the holy grail, and everything else that the feds had suspected of him but never been able to prove. He was furious that Neal had crafted the tale carefully enough so as to implicate nobody but himself in any of his crimes. Absolutely furious, that Neal had Jones draft a document stating that Neal would plead guilty at a bench hearing and refuse to appeal, provided that no charges or investigations were brought against anyone else in connection with his crimes.
Peter’s last words to Neal were: You don’t have to do this, as Neal was being escorted from the White Collar Unit in chains. Neal just looked at him – a deep, searching look that he hoped would convey everything he couldn’t say to his handler, partner, friend; and then he dropped his eyes to the ground and let them take him away.
Peter, he heard, got slapped on the wrist for losing control of his CI. He was suspended without pay, went to a hearing or two, was subjected to the FBI shrink. In the end, though, he kept his job and his life and his family, and that’s what mattered to Neal. That Peter could be happy, live his life, and move on from an era that was over, now.
Peter seemed to have done it surprisingly well – moved on. Save for those phone calls, Neal had not heard from him, but he had his contacts (well, Mozzie) check in on the agent now and then. Apparently he was working cases, going home to Elizabeth, walking his dog. As though Neal had never been there.
This was for the best – Neal knew it was for the best. Peter needed to get as far away from Neal as possible; they couldn’t be friends, couldn’t be partners, couldn’t be colleagues. From the moment Kramer picked up Neal’s scent, got on his trail, Neal’s fate was sealed – but Peter could still be saved. Neal had absolved him of criminal responsibility, and as long as Peter stayed away from Neal…he could be saved. And so Neal had treated him coldly, refused to make contact, refused to break the rules that Kramer had set out for them. He did everything he could to con his former friend, to make Peter believe that he didn’t want to see or speak to him, didn’t care about him anymore– and Peter bought it. Peter believed him.
That was great, right? That was what Neal wanted, right? So why did it hurt so much?
On sensing its imminent collapse, Neal had gone out of his way to dismantle his life in New York as neatly as possible, and get away clean. Like a heist – get in, take anything of value, get out. Don’t get shot, don’t get caught on cameras, don’t leave your men behind to take the fall. Neal had stolen his own life away as neatly as he might a Matisse, or a particularly rare Da Vinci sculpture. He had stolen himself away – had taken the true Neal Caffrey and put him in storage, replaced him with an almost-perfect forgery. His life in DC: an almost-perfect forgery of his life in New York. His smile: an almost perfect forgery of his former happiness.
But forgeries are fragile, they’re designed to be placeholders. That’s the problem. After a few years, they break down; cracks begin to show, pieces fall away.
This is what is happening to Neal, now that years have passed. Peter is gone –Peter has moved on – and Neal isn’t sure if it hurts more that he misses his friend, or that his friend doesn’t appear to miss him. It doesn’t matter, he supposes; the end result is the same.
His other vexation is that he has no set release date. The judge – who seemed as disgusted by him as she might a maggot – assigned him so many consecutive sentences that he’s not sure he has life enough left to serve them all. He was barred parole, in exchange for probation. She slammed down her gavel, and his clocks stopped ticking, and now he lives in a world without time.
Each morning he wakes at sunrise and dresses in his spartan, FBI-owned apartment. He is picked up by Kramer and driven to work, where he sits at his desk and looks over files all day, trying to pick up on the subtle clues that were skimmed over by lesser investigators. Lunch is a sandwich at his desk. At sunset, Kramer takes him home. He busies himself until it’s late enough to sleep. It’s hard, sometimes – to find enough things to do. He attempts to read, but the words all blur together. He attempts to draw, but finds that every time he approaches his easel, he is compelled only to take an oil pastel and color the entire canvas black. He does this night after night, for a while, until his apartment is littered with greasy squares of nothingness, like wormholes to other lives.
They are pictures of the blackness in his mind; or perhaps he is just drawing his sleep, over and over, as he might once have drawn a lover. It’s only sleep – dark, dreamless unconsciousness – that he looks forward to each day. The anticipation of sleep is, strangely enough, the only thing that gets him out of bed some mornings.
The life he leads now will be the life he leads five years from now, and five years after that, and five years after that. The life he leads now is the life he’ll lead until he dies, most likely.
He did it to himself, he knows – and some days he feels such anger about that, that his foolish notions of self-sacrifice have him living in a snapshot, condemned to stagnancy.
Yet, he never tries to escape – has never tried to escape. Some days the thought is tempting, but…no. All it would do is get Peter involved again, there would be the inevitable chase; and the chase can only end badly, this time. To run would be to forsake all the suffering the past two years have brought down upon him, would make his sacrifice meaningless.
And, honestly? He’s too tired. He’s too numbed. He’s getting too old to be playing “Cops and Robbers”, like he used to. There’s no thrill in it this time, not when he’s running away instead of toward.
And so he lives his life – his solitary, stagnant life – and tells himself that it’s better than he deserves.
*
Three years after he moves to DC, the symptoms start.
At first he can’t swallow – starts choking his sandwiches back up in an attempt to breathe (and thank god he eats at his desk, with the door closed). He asks Kramer if he can see a doctor, and the agent gets him an appointment the same day. After all, Neal is his prized possession – of all the artifacts that Kramer has recovered, Neal is the rarest and most precious of them all.
The doctor sticks a tiny camera up his nose and then tells him that there’s nothing wrong with him, that he’s just under too much stress. He throws around words like globus hystericus and pseudodysphagia and writes him a prescription for sleeping pills and tranquilizers. Neal doesn’t argue – in fact, he’s delighted. More sleep, deeper sleep, pills to make him care less – what could be better?
So he takes his pills and can swallow again, and everything’s okay for a while.
Then, the sleepwalking starts.
Of all the experiences he’s had in his life, none have been quite as disconcerting as waking up in a crashed (and stolen) convertible with a bleeding head and six US Marshalls pointing guns at him, voices screaming orders, his anklet blinking an incessant bright red. He tries to explain that he has no idea where he is or how he got there, but it’s not until he gets to the ER that anyone believes him.
The sleeping pills - says the doctor, looking bored as she shines her penlight into his eyes - they do this to people all the time. Sleep-driving. I’ll write you a prescription for another brand.
Kramer walks into his office the next day – the elder man is concerned, in his way. He eyes the sutured wound on Neal’s forehead as he asks how he’s feeling, makes chit-chat that contains veiled threats of what will happen to Neal if he tries to run. Neal reassures him that it was just the drugs, just a side-effect, and waits impatiently for the man to get out of his office.
It turns out, though, that it wasn’t the drugs at all. The next night he wakes up three blocks from his apartment, curled up under a tree. Mercifully, he’s still within his radius, this time – but…it’s unsettling, to say the least. When he gets home, he throws the second box of sleeping pills in the trash, just in case. He figures that regular sleep will have to be enough for him.
Three nights later, he wakes up on his balcony – the wide, cement railing of his balcony, to be precise. He is standing there with his arms spread like a bird, as though he were about to let himself fall. He thinks of all the times he’s taken a swan dive through the air and been saved by a parachute or an awning or the hard cement of an adjacent rooftop. He remembers the euphoria of the leap – that single, perfect moment in the air.
This time, though, there’s no safety net, and when he realizes where he is, the shock almost causes him to fall entirely by accident. He can see people on the street below – antlike beings, whose concerned cries echo faintly up to him. Once he regains his balance, he waves to them – shouts that he’s okay, climbs carefully down.
Kramer sends him to the FBI psychiatrist, but the shrink can’t do much with the very limited information that Neal is willing to give. He suggests that Neal is suppressing things. He implies that all of Neal’s stress and resentment and grief are being pushed down and out and away; but these things don’t just disappear. Nothing in the universe is destroyed, it merely changes form. People have to express the things they feel – and if the emotions can’t come out normally, they often come out…abnormally. That’s what the shrink says.
Then he asks Neal if he feels, or has ever felt, suicidal. Neal shakes his head, rolls his eyes, and walks out of the office.
The truth is, though, that Neal doesn’t know. He cannot keep living this life, and suicide is certainly an attractive alternative; after all, isn’t it just like going to sleep and not waking up? An eternity of blackness and unknowing.
There are things worse than death, for him, and stagnancy is one of them. He wouldn’t call himself suicidal – but lately he has been taking the idea of suicide and examining it, feeling it out, visualizing what it might be like. Just as you might take out a precious piece of jewelry, now and then – try it on, look in the mirror, admire how the light glints off of it - before carefully replacing it in the drawer.
Struggling to swallow his PB&J at lunch (because without the pills, the dysphagia came back), he smiles to himself and wonders if his body is trying to make the decision for him; prompt him unconsciously toward an action he’s not sure he could ever consciously take in the waking world. He wonders if his brain is done with this, ready to go, trying to kill him. He wonders if his brain is trying to kill him.
It’s absurd enough a thought that it makes him laugh. But then, three nights later, there’s the incident at the river.
*
He only wakes when he hits the water.
It is freezing cold, and he plunges down into the depths of it like a stone. Opening his mouth to gasp, he realizes too late that he’s breathing water instead of air – his lungs burn, he can feel his vision fading.
Desperate, confused, he kicks his arms and legs in a frantic, fitful sort of dance – and, mercifully, shoots upward, toward the darkened sky and rippling starlight.
When he surfaces, all he can think about is the foul taste suddenly in his mouth, and he coughs and coughs and chokes and gags. He’s sure he vomits into the water, but he cannot even care about that right now – he cant breathe, can’t breathe, needs to breathe.
Eventually: a high-pitched whoop, followed by another and another. Soon the whoops turn to gasps, the gasps to panting breaths. Then, and only then, does he pay any attention to where he is or what might be happening around him.
He’s in a river, it seems – banks on either side, and his attempt to tread water is being thwarted by a frighteningly strong current. The trees on either side of the water are moving past him, faster and faster, and it takes him a moment to realize that the trees aren’t moving at all – he is moving. The river’s current is dragging him along at an alarming speed, and now that his awareness is growing, he’s suddenly conscious of the ache in his limbs (especially his ankle – sprained?) as he tries – and fails – to fight the tide and keep his body in one place.
Need to get out of the water, his mind whispers to him, you’ll tire quickly and go under again. Need to try and swim toward the bank.
Easier thought than accomplished, he notes with annoyance. Neal is a swimmer – or, at least, he was when he lived in New York. Thrice weekly at the FBI gym, he used to revel in the calm of the neon blue water, let his mind wander.
That was years ago now, though – Neal hasn’t exercised in a long time, he’s been sedentary in his work, and he’s out of shape. More worrisome is that his limbs feel rubbery, strange, like they aren’t his own. None of this helps, as he fights the current that is slamming into his ribs and threatening to drag him down again. His mind was right – he cannot have been in the water more than five minutes, but already he feels like he’s run a marathon, like he can’t go on. It’s getting harder and harder to keep his head above water. He keeps taking accidental mouthfuls of the stuff, and it’s foul and gritty, full of microscopic things that he has no desire to swallow.
It seems to take him hours – hours - to reach the riverbank. But he does reach it – he keeps trying, he keeps moving, because that’s what Neal Caffrey does; he refuses to give up. He demands the last word.
Of course, when Neal Caffrey realizes that the cement banking on either side of the river is too high for him to hoist himself up and out of the water…suddenly his triumph, all those things that Neal Caffey does and all those things that Neal Caffrey refuses to do, they seem….silly. Bravado.
Hasn’t that always been his problem? All bravado, all fantasy, all champagne on a beer budget. No ability to deal with the mundane, the aggravating, the realistic.
There seems to be some kind of pipe running along the side of the cement bank, and he clings to it for dear life, heart beating in his throat as he tries to figure out what to do. After a moment of useless contemplation, he bursts into tears.
He tried to do the right thing – he tried to take responsibility for what he’d done wrong, tried to be a good man; and look at him, look at where it’s gotten him. Alone, drowning, crying, pathetic. He’s so lost that he literally doesn’t even know where he is or how he got here. And even if he gets out of this river – even if he somehow were to climb out and dry off and find his way home…what’s waiting there for him? Not home – he has no home, not anymore. All he has to look forward to is more indentured servitude, cold courtesy, isolation. Painting sleep, wanting sleep, drugging himself into artificial sleep.
Hiccupping and sniffing, trying not to swallow any water as he does so, he looks at his hands clenched around the rusty pipe. He loosens them just slightly, and a thrill of adrenaline shoots through him – a sudden spark of some strange hope.
He could let go. He could just let go, let the river take him, let himself drown. He’s practically done it already – when he fell in (however it happened that he fell in), he sank like a stone and breathed in by reflex. He could do it again. Flames in his lungs and a few moments of panic, but that blackness swooped in so, so quickly to save him. The same beloved blackness that he greets each night, whose portrait covers his walls. It would come to him again, and he wouldn’t fight it off this time. And that would be it, wouldn’t it? No more hard choices, no more fake smiles, no more missing anyone. Just him, and the black.
He stares at his hands, and he isn’t crying anymore. He closes his eyes, wills his fingers to loosen. He speaks kindly to himself, in his mind – like his mother might have, Ellen, June.
Let go, Neal. You can let go, now. You’ve fought so hard, been so brave, but it’s time to let go. The world is done with you, and you’re done with the world. There’s no need to hold on any more.
He nearly does it – nearly gives in, nearly trusts the murmuring in his mind. At the last second, though, he tightens his grip instead. At the last second, he uses all the strength he has left to use the pipe as a grip by which to pull himself from the water. With a grunt, he manages to swing his leg at the top of the cement riverbank – the first and second time he misses, but the third time his leg connects with solid ground, and he allows his body to follow – rolls his hips, torso, shoulders, head after it, releasing the pipe as he goes. He rolls over and over on the cement, and then he’s on his back, looking up at the long-dead light of the stars.
What now?
It takes him a few minutes – or is it longer? – to even acknowledge that persistent thought. What now, indeed? He sits up – slowly, carefully – and gasps in pain. Everything hurts.
Looking down at himself, he can’t help but laugh – he’s in his motherfucking pajamas, for the love of god. He still has one slipper lodged on his right foot, though his left slipper is lost to the sea. The right has remained in place mostly due to the fact that it is bulging at the seams – his right foot and ankle are swollen to almost twice their size, and what he thought was a sprain may well be a break. His head, too – it hurts, the all-too-familiar ache of a concussion. When he places his fingers to his brow, they come away wet and red with blood.
Looking around him, he seems to be sitting on some kind of jogger’s track, yellow directional lines painted onto the tarmac beneath him. Just in front of him is a bridge – huge, statuesque, a series of arches carved into it.
Surely, he didn’t jump from that – did he? Could he have survived that kind of fall?
More important, more helpful, is a giant sign plastered on the side of the bridge. It reads: Suicidal? 24 hour crisis line, and gives a phone number. Right alongside the sign is a payphone.
Neal clambers slowly to his feet – a painfully slow process of grunting and crying out – and limps (or hops, really) over to the payphone.
He isn’t calling Kramer, nor the suicide hotline. There’s only one man that he could ever call in a situation like this, and he just hopes that Peter hasn’t changed his number.
*
“….Mmmnh? ‘Lo?”
“Hello, this is Sue at 1-800-CALL-ATT. You’ve received a collect call from Washington, D.C. The caller’s name is “Nell Coffee.” This call will incur an initial $10.99 operator assistance charge, and then will be billed at-“
“Fine, fine – just put him through.”
“You’re willing to accept responsibility for these charges, sir?”
“That’s what I said – now put him through, damnit.”
“Thank you, sir. Hold please.”
“Fuck. …..No, hon, it’s okay. I’m on hold, for-”
“….’Told her my name was Caffrey, must’ve told her three times.”
“…Neal?"
“What kind of….stupid name is…’Nell Coffee’, anyway?”
“Jesus, Neal – what’s going on? You okay? You sound-…you don’t sound so good.”
“I’m fine. ….I mean, I’ve been better. I mean-….I-….”
“….You’re what, Neal? Talk to me.”
“I’m-….”
“…Neal, you’re scaring me. What’s going on? Why are you crying?”
“I’m not-…I’m not crying. Geeze, Peter.”
“I can hear you, Neal. What happened to you? Are you…drunk? Hurt? Are you in danger?”
“I….dunno, I dunno what happened, Peter. There was this river, and I haven’t been swallowing, and the pills didn’t work – or maybe they did, I don’t know – and my head-…but I was trying to get it right this time, I was trying to get it right, but I’m so cold now and….and, I want to go home.”
“…Neal, you’re not making sense. Where are you?”
“I dunno. I dunno how I got here-….I don’t even know how I got here! Or why I’m here, or what I was doing, and-…and you answered the phone, you aren’t meant to answer my calls, but you picked up anyway-…and-…I thought you-…I missed you, but I thought-…”
“Neal, Neal – calm down. I will always take your calls – I told you, I don’t care what Kramer says. I’m here for you, okay? But you need to calm down, buddy. Breathe.”
“…’kay.”
“Now, listen: you need to hang up, and call 911, and tell them that they need to come and get y-“
“No, Peter, no police, I can’t-“
“You need an ambulance, Neal, not police.”
“No, no-….I can’t-…I-…I need you, Peter. Please, I need you.”
“I-….I can’t-…I’m in New York, Neal. I’ll be on my way, but you need help now. I can’t get there in time, it’ll take-….”
“I don’t care. I’ll wait. No ambulance.”
“Neal…”
“Please, Peter.”
“…Alright, let’s try and work something out.”
*
The drive from Manhattan to D.C. is 4.25 hours long, and all Peter can think about the entire trip is how he’s going to strangle Neal, when he finally gets his hands on the kid.
Only Neal – stubborn, stupid fucking Neal – would refuse to go to the goddamned hospital when he’s obviously hurt (so hurt, it seems, that he can’t even tell Peter where he’s hurt). Only Neal would suggest sitting out in freezing winter temperatures for four hours, rather than try and catch a cab back to his apartment. Only Neal could call Peter collect, after refusing to talk to him for three years, and still have him speeding on the interstate within a half hour of hanging up.
Peter isn’t sure he’s ever been this worried in his life. Maybe not even when El was taken.
He wishes that Neal had run. It would have hurt – god, it would have hurt – but even three years later, he still wishes that Neal had read the message in his face, as they locked eyes across the front of the courthouse: The only way you can win, this time, is to leave.
That’s what Peter would have said to Neal, if he had the chance to speak to him that day. He would have refused to take “no” for an answer – for god’s sake, he would have given Neal a ride to the airport and frog-marched him onto a plane, if he could have. But instead he went to the commutation hearing and gave useless testimony and stupidly assumed that Neal would run, that Neal was gone, that he was buying Neal time to get out.
He remembers the grief he felt, as he sat before the panel. He was sure that he would never see Neal again. Imagine Peter’s surprise, on returning to the Bureau, to find his CI in handcuffs; accepting his fate. Giving up.
Something in Peter gave up that day, too. He managed to keep his job, in the fallout of Neal’s confession and sentencing, but he found that without Neal…it just wasn’t the same. It didn’t hold the thrill it used to; Peter wasn’t innocent anymore. He knew how the system worked, now – that it was anything but impartial, that cause did not always equal effect - and it killed a part of him, whatever part of him that used to make his head and heart soar at the excitement of tracking down a new suspect.
When he made arrests, these days, he always found himself wondering: Are they really guilty, or is this a set-up? Are they truly a criminal, or did they just piss off the wrong person? If someone just gave them a chance – if someone believed in them, just once – could they change? Could they change, like Neal changed?
And of course, Neal had changed – what other explanation was there for Neal’s metaphorical crucifixion? For the fact that he had never tried to run from his sentence – not once – despite being more than capable of vanishing into thin air. How else could Peter explain Neal’s refusal to break the rules of his probation, so strict that he refused to even say “hello” when Peter had tried to contact him in D.C., make sure he was okay?
Peter was right – had always been right – about Neal. But the price of Peter’s vindication was the loss of his partner. His friend.
He’d never really moved on. He was sure that people thought he had – he hadn’t so much as spoken Neal’s name in years, except for rare conversations with El in which the two of them reminisced about better times and laughed and cried and held each other. Peter knew how important it was that he keep up the appearance of caring less about Neal – he understood the importance of professing that he believed Neal to be better off in DC, away from old temptations and out of the field.
In truth, though, Peter’s head and heart had remained the head and heart of Neal Caffrey’s handler, regardless of whether he was assigned to that role anymore. He kept tabs on what Neal was doing, what cases he was working on, read all of his performance reviews. He was disgusted to see Neal working nothing more than cold cases, but felt a surge of pride every time the magnificent bastard solved one. Only Caffrey could waltz into a team of art theft experts and make them look like idiots, fix all of their mistakes.
And Peter still pulled up Neal’s tracking data constantly – almost every day – to see where he’d been, what he was doing. It was like brushing his teeth or combing his hair – something he was programmed to do on-schedule, every day, without even thinking about it. Mozzie had helped him out, in regard to hiding his activity on the FBI server – installed some little program that must have worked, because nobody had ever questioned Peter as to why he was so interested in Neal’s comings and goings; and at first, he wasn’t. Peter didn’t care so much about what Neal was doing, as much as he just wanted evidence that Neal was…there. That Neal Caffrey was a flesh-and-blood person, that his years working with Neal weren’t merely some kind of strange dream.
As time went on, though, Neal’s movements on the tracking screen drew Peter’s interest more and more. In fact, Peter found them fascinating – then, unsettling.
Neal’s movements never changed. The pattern of his activity – a little red line on the map – was so identical from day to day that Peter could not tell the difference between a map from April or July or December. At first, Peter (ever suspicious) had thought that Neal (or Kramer) was manipulating the data. It wasn’t until he confirmed that there had been no tampering that he realized – with horror – that Neal simply just did the same thing every day.
Neal wasn’t going out, visiting galleries, eating at restaurants, or even running and swimming the way he used to. He was doing nothing more than going to FBI headquarters, and going home. Every single day. For years.
Looking back now, as he does 80 down the interstate, Peter wishes that he had gone to see Neal at that point. Or called Kramer and pushed for a psych evaluation. Done anything to spare his friend the misery and boredom that he obviously felt. All Peter did, though, was tell himself that Neal’s life was none of his business anymore, and brushed it off.
That gut feeling never went away, however – that something was wrong, terribly wrong. It fluttered like a lazy moth inside of him, always there, a soft reminder.
When Peter started getting the medical reports about Neal’s dysphagia, that moth turned into a butterfly. When he heard about Neal’s apparent “sleep driving” incident, the balcony thing, it turned into a bat.
That’s when he’d found that he could no longer let things be – that’s when he’d started looking into what he could do to get Neal back to New York, or at least away from DC. For god’s sake, he was Peter Burke – he never stopped digging, right? Why hadn’t he been digging an escape route for Neal? When was it that he started just…putting up with things, winning the battles but losing the war? There had to be something he could do. Granted, even with Mozzie’s help, he hadn’t come upon any great plans, yet – at least, nothing that Kramer couldn’t veto with a single word; but, there had to be something he could do.
That’s what he’d thought, at least. He hadn’t banked on having so little time, though, before Neal finally snapped. Peter had started too late – he’d waited too long. Why had he waited so long?
With everything he knew about Neal’s situation, he supposes that the phone call tonight shouldn’t have been a surprise – but it was, it nearly made his heart stop. Years away from working with Caffrey, Peter was no longer used to getting emergency calls in the middle of the night. Especially not from forcibly estranged ex-partners who seemed to be either intoxicated or wounded in some way, but were too incoherent to tell you what had happened or where they were; too incoherent to help themselves, or get inside, or know how bad it was. Too emotionally wounded to trust a single person in the world to help them, save for Peter Burke.
Changing lanes, checking his mirrors, Peter shudders again at the memory of Neal’s voice on the phone. It had sounded exhausted and desperate and….drained. Drained of energy, drained of contentment, drained of life. In all the time that Peter has known Neal, he’s never known him to cry like that – and he honestly isn’t sure if the guy even knew that he was crying, if maybe he wasn’t just so far gone that the crying was out of his control.
In all the time that Peter has known Neal, he’s never known him to beg. In all that time, Peter has never known him to use the phrase “I need” or “I miss” in any kind of emotional context, not like he was tonight. It spread a cold, seeping fear through him. Neal’s final “please” – the timbre of it, the choke behind it – turned that fear to ice.
So now, as he finally enters downtown D.C., on the home stretch to his destination, nearly to Neal-…well. It’s hard not to slam his foot down on the pedal, and he has to take a deep breath and remind himself that he won’t do Neal any favors by getting pulled over, or by skidding off the road and crashing the car.
According to the tracking data, Neal is sitting alongside the Arlington Memorial Bridge, over the Potomac River – why he’s there, Peter isn’t even going to waste time at guessing. He had half-hoped that Neal’s “dot” on the tracking screen might start to move at some point during the journey – that Neal might come to his senses, go to the hospital, call the paramedics, anything. When the dot so much as failed to flicker for hours, it was everything Peter could do not to call 911 on Neal’s behalf, ignore Neal’s pleas to keep them out of this, just get professionals there to make sure Neal was alright.
But, then-…Neal’s voice, on the phone. Not to mention that Peter isn’t supposed to even be involved with this; he’s barred from talking to Neal, let alone driving from another state to help him out. Peter doesn’t want to make things worse for the kid, reveal that Neal called him before anyone in D.C., and Peter doesn’t even know what’s wrong yet or how serious the situation is. It could be nothing.
Still, as he finally – finally – parks his car by the bridge, he has the sick and sinking thought that Neal isn’t moving because he’s unconscious, or dead.
Peter steps out of the car and is immediately hit by a gale of bitter wind that attacks his eyes, making him duck and squint. Slamming the driver’s side door and moving to open the trunk, he pulls out the pile of blankets and thermos of coffee that El gave him before he left, balancing them in one hand as he slams the trunk closed with the other.
Then, he goes to find Neal.
He doesn’t have to look very far – the younger man is sitting with his knees pulled to his chin, back against a tree, in the frosted-over nature strip that runs alongside the river’s jogging track. His eyes are wide open, staring at nothing, and there’s ice in his hair. For a moment, Peter halts and his heart falls into his feet, sure that he’s too late and that Neal has frozen to death.
A moment later, however, Neal turns his head slowly to stare at Peter, and suddenly the agent can breathe again. Neal’s forehead is bleeding, and his expression is one of disbelief, as though he’s not sure that Peter is really even there.
Peter says Neal’s name hesitantly, frowning and setting the blankets and thermos on a park bench, stepping carefully toward his friend with a hand out, as though approaching a stray animal. The grass crunches under his feet.
Neal suddenly springs from absolute stillness to forward momentum, so swiftly that Peter starts. The younger man scrambles to his feet, stumbling clumsily over to Peter and throwing his arms around him, clinging to him as though he were some kind of life preserver. Neal inhales sharply, as though he’s about to start crying again – but then seems to swallow his emotion, exhale, and do nothing more than stand there silently with his cheek pressed against Peter’s shoulder, trembling with cold and clinging to him like a vice.
Peter isn’t entirely sure of what to do – he is startled, caught off-guard. It isn’t as though he’s had a lot of experience with this, after all - his enigmatic CI displaying such blatant emotional nudity. God, the last time he saw Neal this shaken up was probably the day that Kate died, and that feels like such a long, long time ago.
Still, he cannot help but wrap his arms around Neal in return, pull him closer, rub a hand up and down his back. It feels…automatic, natural. It’s just the thing that you’re supposed to do, when you see another human being in pain. Peter is only now realizing, with sick guilt and aimless fury, just how much pain Neal has been in all this time.
With Neal close, with Neal in his arms, he can assess the kid’s condition far more accurately than he was able to over the phone; and he’s startled by what he finds. For one, he realizes that Neal is wearing pajamas – blue and white pinstripe – and a single slipper. There’s the head wound, and his leg seems hurt, too – it looks swollen. More alarmingly, Neal is soaking wet – absolutely saturated – moreso than would result from sitting in the frost and cold. It’s almost as though Neal has been…submerged, in some kind of wate-…
Oh. Oh. Peter suddenly realizes what has happened, and he cannot help but glance back at the ornate arches of the bridge behind him, shock and terror and anger and grief all coursing through his bloodstream as his mind races.
Neal was in the river – Neal jumped in the river. Neal, it appears, barely escaped from the river. Could he have jumped from the bridge? Surely not – he would never have survived the fall. But if he jumped off the bank, or even one of the arches-…
Later. There will be time for questions later. At the moment he has a hypothermic, half-drowned, and probably-concussed CI who is bleeding on his shoulder; he needs to address that first. Glancing down at Neal, whose hair is still frosted with glittering ice, Peter can feel an immense tenderness rise within him; a caring that silences the questions, the analyses, and retrains his focus on why he’s here. Reminds him that he’s here as a friend, because Neal is his friend.
“It’s okay, now, Neal. It’s okay. Here.” He keeps his voice low and soft, eager not to break the reverent silence of the pre-dawn twilight. Peter lets go of Neal for a moment, pries Neal gently away from him, and goes about removing his own coat and sweater.
He attempts to wrestle the sweater down over Neal’s head, only to have Neal push him away irritably, his hands ice-cold.
“I can do it,” Neal says in a prickly mumble, and Peter nods, taking a step back to give him room – but staying close enough to catch him, if he falls; he looks only moments away from doing so, swaying slightly in-place. The younger man dons the sweater and coat, and then wraps himself in one, two, three blankets, taking them as Peter hands them over, one-by-one.
With Neal…reinforced, Peter picks up the thermos and hesitantly puts an arm around Neal’s shoulders – which is, thankfully, accepted – and begins to half-guide, half-carry the man back toward the car. When Neal realizes where they’re going, however, he stops, refusing to go on, stumbling out of Peter’s grasp.
“Neal? What is it?” Peter stares at him, shaking his head, though he’s fully aware of exactly what it is. It unnerves him, that the kid is so paranoid all of a sudden.
“I-…I’m not-…no hospitals. No police. You promised, Peter.” Neal’s blue eyes are wide, but they look hazy. He swallows, looking down.
“Peter, I-….I can’t go back. I can’t go back, I-“
“It’s okay, Neal, we’re not going anywhere,” Peter says, trying not to say: yet. “You just-…I’m freezing my ass off out here, Neal – and you, you look like a damned popsicle. We need the heat. It’s warm in there. …We can sit in the backseat, if you like – I can’t drive you anywhere from the backseat, right? We can just talk. I won’t get fresh.” Peter smirks in desperation, shrugging, looking Neal in the eyes. Trying to seem safe, and familiar, and to plug into that…thing, that bantering thing that he and Neal do so well.
He’s pretty sure that he’s failing, on all counts, when Neal only continues to stare at him warily.
“I’m not your prom date, Peter.” Neal says, voice slick with agitation. He pauses, and then: “Give me your car keys.”
Peter takes a deep breath and blows it out, panicked irritation and frustration flushing his cheeks. After a second of debate, he sighs and reaches into his pocket, pulling out the keys and crossing the distance to the other man. He locks eyes with Neal, and presses the keys into the conman’s hand.
“There. Now, get in the car. Please.”
Neal looks back at him for a moment, furrowing his brows, eyes growing…clearer, more familiar. He nods, and Peter gives him a grim smile.
A few minutes later, they are sitting in the front of Peter’s parked car (Neal in the driver’s seat – at his insistence). The heaters are blowing out warm air at full blast, and Neal is still bundled in blankets, but his lips remain blue.
Peter screws open the thermos and pours a lidful of coffee – hands it to Neal, tells him to drink. Peter repeats this action again, and again – until, after the third cup, the color starts to come back into Neal’s face, and he winces in refusal at the suggestion of drinking any more. Satisfied, Peter leans around to tuck the thermos into the backseat. Neal watches him, raising a brow.
“No devilled ham? I’m disappointed.” His voice shakes even as he tries to joke, and Peter’s heart aches. Sitting back, leaning his head against the headrest, he returns Neal’s nervous smile.
“I wish - no time. Old friend called me at 2am, in all kinds of trouble. Kinda had to rush out.”
Neal’s smile fades, and he turns to look out the frosted window, unwilling to be drawn back into the reality of the situation. Peter understands – hell, he can empathize. How tempting it is, to pretend that he and Neal are just on some stakeout; that they’ll soon be bickering over the radio, or heading back to June’s for a beer. As though the last three years haven’t passed.
But three years have passed. That time is gone, now. They need to figure out what they’re going to do.
Peter can feel a request to call the paramedics rising in his throat again – his friend is hurt, he can’t deal with this situation alone – but he swallows it down, tolerating the silence for as long as he can. Finally, he sighs heavily and lifts his head to look out the windshield, at the bridge.
“….Why d’you wanna die so bad, Neal?”
Peter silently curses himself as his voice breaks softly over the words, a lump rising in his throat. He was going to try and do this calmly, indifferently; but the sudden realization of how this could have gone – at how much worse it could have been – hits him in the sternum like a fist and he can’t get any air in.
Still, he shrugs, trying to maintain a calm, vaguely jovial façade. “You never struck me as a suicide risk. I mean, you don’t even like burning your aliases.”
“People can change, Peter.”
The words are soft and final and hopeless, and they make Peter’s eyes sting. To hear his old catchphrase – his rallying cry in the battle for Caffrey – spoken back to him with such…inversion. He swivels in his seat and leans back, so he can look his friend in the face, meet his eyes. The younger man seems despondent, but more awake – more coherent – and so Peter dares to ask the question burning a hole in his gut.
“Neal, what happened? What happened here, tonight? And why didn’t you call sooner, if things were that bad? I mean, I heard about your joyride in the convertible, but I guess I figured-…”
“…-That it was just me, being me? Yeah. So did a lot of people.” Neal sighs, staring at his hands, fiddling with them slightly.
“You deserved distance, and peace. You put up with me for two years – you did your part. I’m Kramer’s problem, now. You’d-…You’d just-…moved on, Peter. How did I have any right to-“
“No.” Peter sets his jaw, looking at Neal straight on. “I didn’t move on, Neal. I never did – I never could.”
Peter pauses and licks his lips, swallowing and shifting uncomfortably. He hates these kinds of conversations; the intensity unnerves him, they’re like a high-stakes poker game. Ante up, put your heart on the table – or your life, your sanity, your people – and risk losing it all. One wrong word, one bad hand, and the whole thing can go sour. If he’d wanted to talk down jumpers, he would have joined the NYPD. If he wanted to deal with vulnerable, victimized people, he would have gone into violent crimes.
He sighs roughly, glancing back at the river.
“For chrissake, Neal. I mean-….if I walked into work tomorrow, and heard you’d taken a header off the bridge-….and you hadn’t even called me?”
Peter’s warm eyes and rapidly constricting throat warn him to stop speaking, now, before he loses his composure. But after a moment, he looks back to Neal with as much honesty as he can force himself to expose, his tone harsh.
“You think I could ever move on from that, that I’d ever have any…peace? You honestly think that I’d prefer news like that, to a…regular old phone call, asking for help.” Peter rakes his hand back over his face, through his hair, trembling slightly. He can’t even bear to elaborate further.
Neal says nothing, but looks down, biting his lip as Peter takes a deep breath and tries to get ahold of himself.
“I don’t know what happened, Peter. I mean it – I don’t know how I got here, all I remember is hitting the water. They think I’ve been…sleepwalking, or something. I’ve been waking up in weird places. That’s what happened with the car.”
Neal’s voice is soft, like he hasn’t really used it for a while – and he sounds confused, honestly confused. Peter just allows him to speak, frown deepening.
“Peter-….life here-…it’s been-….” Neal shakes his head, apparently lost for words, and Peter nods in understanding.
“So I can’t say the idea hasn’t been there. But I didn’t-…I mean, I didn’t have plans or anything. It was just…a thought. But then, tonight-…I was in the water, and I couldn’t reach the bank, and I couldn’t get out, and I didn’t know what to do. And then I just…I realized I could let go. I could just let myself go, and everything that can’t be fixed-….it wouldn’t matter anymore. Nothing would have to matter anymore.”
Peter stares at Neal for a long, hard moment; he wonders how it’s come to this, how has it come to this? But then he nods, speaks.
“You got out, though. You sat there for nearly five hours without jumping back in.”
Peter points this out in an attempt to rally hope, to recoil from the notion that his best friend in the entire world believes that he’s trapped, and there’s only one way out. Peter points this out in an attempt to soothe his racing heart and dry mouth and nauseous gut, as Neal seems to spiral further and further down even as he speaks.
It doesn’t seem to work, though – Neal doesn’t seem too hopeful. Instead of smiling or realizing that it’s going to be okay, he leans down to rest his face in his hands. His reply is muffled, but the implication is chillingly clear.
“I wish I hadn’t. I wish I had.”
Peter swallows, seeing stars, working his jaw, mentally coaching himself – a deep breath through the nose, slow out the mouth. Neal is safe now, Neal is with him. Neal is here and warm and alive and in the car, and Peter will be damned if he’ll let anything happen to him – by Neal’s own hand, or anyone else’s. But he can’t do this alone. He’s tired and scared, missing his wife and nearing the end of his own rope.
“I’m gonna need my keys back, Neal. I need you to come to the hospital with me.”
These words cause the younger man to look up suddenly. He stutters.
“You-…you promised-…”
“I did – and I’m keeping to it. No ambulances, no police. I’m gonna take you there myself, walk you through. It’ll be okay.”
“No, Peter. I don’t-….you know I hate hospitals. I’ll be fine if I just-… And-…And-….Kramer, if Kramer-“
“I’ll take care of Kramer. I’ll be there the entire time - I’m not going anywhere. But that cut, there, needs to be looked at – your foot, too, I think - and you’ve probably got a bunch of other stuff that needs doing, having been dunked in a river and left out in the cold. And then….when that’s fixed, we need to figure out what’s going on in your head, buddy.”
Neal opens his mouth to protest, but Peter cuts him off – gentle, but firm.
“I’m not asking, Neal. This isn’t a debate. This is the part where you just have to trust me.”
Neal goes through a complex series of facial expressions, fiddling and glaring at the wheel and staring out the window as he does so. Finally, though – finally - Peter hears a merciful jangling, as Neal pulls the keys out of the ignition and passes them over; and the thing around his heart uncoils, slightly.
Ten minutes later, after some shuffling and rearranging, they are headed for Georgetown University Hospital, as a golden dawn breaks open the horizon.
*
It takes seven days, phone calls to six different senior FBI agents, five Skype conversations with Elizabeth, four nights spent on a lousy motel mattress, three different doctors, and two evenings of fitful dozing in a hospital chair beside Neal’s bed, before Peter gets any real answers.
Frustratingly, it still seems that – in the end, despite everything - his friend’s fate comes down to one man: Phillip Kramer. The very same Phillip Kramer who made Peter…who he is; or who he thought he was, before all of this. The same Phillip Kramer who is now sitting across the table from his former mentee, glowering at Peter as though he’s an enemy – worse, a criminal. Peter glowers right back at him.
There was a time, years ago, when this mess began…back then, Kramer’s disapproval seemed sudden and without a source. It caught Peter off-guard, and made him feel lost and confused and vaguely guilty; and hurt, really hurt. There was a time when Kramer had really, truly been his friend – had been a decent man. When Kramer first turned on him, Peter’s first reaction was: What did I do wrong? He’d bent the law, he’d told some white lies, but he hadn’t done anything without reason and deliberation and sleepless nights of indecision. It wasn’t as though he was a dirty agent (right?). He wasn’t on the take, he hadn’t hurt anybody. So he wondered, constantly: what had he done that was so wrong, that he made it onto Kramer’s hit list? That Kramer wanted to take everything away from him: Neal, his job, his life as he knew it? That his mentor and friend seemed to be neither, anymore?
It took him a while to get over it, but in the end he concluded that it was Kramer’s problem, not his. And Kramer seemed to have a serious, serious problem – was a shadow of the person Peter knew, had become rigid and obsessive in his work, to the point of being malicious. He seemed to resent Peter’s optimism, Peter’s insistence on justice over protocol, all of the traits that Peter had – ironically – picked up from his mentor in the first place. Perhaps it was just that Peter reminded Kramer too much of his former self, enough that it made him jealous and resentful of the cynic he’d become.
Peter didn’t know – Peter didn’t care. All Peter knew for sure was that Phillip Kramer was responsible for Neal’s condition. Kramer took Neal away and…shut him up in that bland prison of repetition that he called an office, and crushed the kid’s spirit, cruelly snatching Neal away from the lawful life that he had only just allowed himself to embrace.
Peter no longer respected him, admired him, even liked him. In fact, though he rarely threw the word around casually, Peter was pretty sure that he hated Kramer, for what he had done.
He’d destroyed someone’s life, just to pad his bottom line and feel like a god among men. He was no better than the crooks he taught Peter how to catch.
Peter leans back in his chair, allowing his anger to fill him up, form a shield against his former mentor, protect him from any residual ability that Kramer may have to make him feel like less of a person, for giving Neal the chance that he did. They are waiting – in dead, heavy silence – in a hospital conference room. Neal’s psychiatrist has scheduled an appointment with them – was insistent on talking to both of them, something Kramer had obviously thrown a fit about. The man had been trying to get Peter sanctioned and sent back to New York since the moment he was informed about the incident at the river – but with Neal in such poor condition, Kramer was seen to have lost control of him just as badly as – if not worse than – Peter had. So Hughes had fought for him – Bancroft, too, and others – and Peter had been allowed to stay.
This is the first time that Peter and Kramer have seen each other, since Neal’s trial. In any other situation, Peter would be smirking across the table at the glowering agent before him, running his mouth off, reveling in his victory. But Neal Caffrey is in the psych ward after a suicide attempt, and they’re here to meet his psychiatrist, and Kramer is still assigned as Neal’s handler, and Peter still isn’t sure of how to fix any of these problems.
So, he glowers. He grinds his teeth. And after five more minutes of waiting, he can’t stand the silence anymore; bitter vitriol comes bubbling up his throat and he’s forced to spit out words.
“What the hell did you do to him, Phil? How could you let this happen?”
The heat in Kramer’s glare intensifies, and he shakes his head disbelievingly at Peter, his metre slow but his words sharp.
“I gave that boy every opportunity. Every opportunity. He was given everything he asked for. When he started to seem unwell, I called psych services the same day. How dare you blame this on me.”
Peter swallows, blinks, shaking his head. A part of his mind is stumped, at that – because…well, doesn’t Kramer have a point? How could he help Neal, if Neal never asked for help? And things got so serious, so fast-….even Peter didn’t see it coming, despite knowing that something was off. Perhaps he is being unfair, letting his anger cloud his judgment.
But-….no. No. Kramer hurt Neal before he ever tried to help him. If Kramer had left him alone in the first place, they wouldn’t even be here. Peter lets out a rough sigh, as that thought brings the anger and worry and fear back; and his voice is gruff - furious - as he speaks.
“You son of a bitch. You take the kid away from his home, from the people who care about him, from the life he’s trying to make for himself. You put him in jail for the rest of his life, just about, and then make him work cold cases 24/7. You don’t talk to him, or-…or help him make any friends; you probably didn’t even ask how he was each day, before that thing with the car, right? You kept him like some…trophy, like a service award on your wall. And now you’re surprised that Neal doesn’t wanna live anymore? Who wants to live like that? Hell, I feel like eating my gun, just talking about it.”
Peter stops and swallows abruptly to stop his voice from breaking, stands abruptly and turns away and begins to pace the room, so that Kramer won’t see the red in his tired, aching eyes. Kramer says nothing – just watches him – which infuriates Peter even more.
He’s whispering to himself in the privacy of his mind (Get a grip, Burke. Remember why you’re here.) when the door opens and an attractive young woman, with a petite build and a white lab coat, walks in.
“Good morning, Gentlemen,” she says, her voice coated in a thick British accent. “My name is Dr Alana Espenson, and I’m a psychiatrist here at Georgetown. It’s nice to meet you both.”
Peter, still agitated and upset, turns to the doctor and looks her up and down. He frowns – she looks like a goddamned teenager; what is she, two months out of med school? He takes her outstretched hand, shaking it perfunctorily even as he leans over her with a frown, ignoring Kramer for the moment.
“Yeah, about that – why the hell is Neal in the psych ward, all of a sudden? Last I heard he was in the sleep disorder clinic. I mean- …this place is s’posed to be the best, but you’ve got him moving from unit to unit like he’s on some kind of goddamn tour, and I-“
Dr Espenson merely smiles patiently at Peter in a way that eerily reminds him of what Elizabeth does, when confronted with his fear or frustration; and he leans back, instantly reeling himself in and shutting his mouth abruptly. He shouldn’t be jumping on her like this, judging her like this, he knows. None of this is her fault. Though, given her calm reaction, he can’t help but wonder if Neal warned her about both he and Kramer, about what the mood in the room was going to be like.
He shakes his head at her, about to apologize, but she cuts him off, motioning toward the table.
“Please, Agent Burke – if you’ll sit, I’m sure that most of your questions will be answered soon.”
Peter nods, allowing himself to soften slightly – sighs heavily, moves to retake his seat. Once Espenson has done the hi-how-are-you-handshake with Kramer, she sits at the head of the table and neatly opens a file – Neal’s file. She looks up at the men.
“I’ve spent a great deal of time over the past week assessing Mr Caffrey, and he’s given me permission to speak to and share information with the both of you at our meeting today. Unfortunately, it’s not in Mr Caffrey’s best interest to be present at this meeting himself, but I’d ask that you trust me to act as his…intermediary, of sorts.”
When both men nod their understanding, Dr Espenson glances down at Neal’s file and then looks from Peter to Kramer with some hesitation.
“Before…I begin to speak about his case, I need to ask: Does Mr Caffrey have any sort of…trauma history? Especially in childhood – was he ever subjected to abuse, or…neglect? Has he ever been held in long-term captivity? I’m aware that he has come to harm whilst doing field work for the FBI, but is there anything-“
“Yeah,” Peter says, nodding, surprising even himself with his answer. After all, Neal has never shared anything like that with him – and beyond bad guys trying to kill him as revenge for his ripping them off, he has no concrete knowledge of Neal having been mistreated by anyone.
But-…but. There’s the whole thing with Neal’s father – the intensity in Neal’s eyes when he spoke about the man, how it seemed like such a touchy subject for him. Not to mention the mysterious “E. Parker”, who Neal had refused to ever talk about again, after turning himself in. By the time Peter went back to her apartment to talk to her himself, she was gone; nothing but an empty condo, stinking of fresh paint, in her wake. She was in the witness protection program – and Peter would bet anything on the fact that Neal had been, too, at some point in his life. They don’t usually put you in the W.P.P. because you’ve had a happy childhood.
It’s only a gut feeling, but Peter trusts his gut. Something bad happened to Neal, at some point. Something that stopped him graduating high school, that estranged him from his parents, that has lead him to spend his life pretending to be anyone but who he really is. Not an excuse for his crimes – but, maybe, a reason behind them.
Kramer ruffles, as Peter speaks, and shakes his head.
“We don’t have anything in the files about his childhood. There’s no real record of him being…anywhere, before he popped up on our radar at eighteen.”
“I’d say that’s as big a red flag as you can get, though – wouldn’t you, Phil?” Peter gives Kramer a faux-friendly smile, an antagonistic edge to his voice. “After all, people don’t just...appear out of nowhere. The kid must’ve come from some kind of background.”
Kramer glowers at Peter, but he ignores it, turning back to Espenson and taking a breath. He attempts to control his hostility, looks at her honestly.
“I’ve worked with Neal a long time. He’s never said much to me – I know as much as you do, I reckon – but…there was something. I’m sure of it.”
Espenson, who has been watching the two men bicker with some interest (and making notes on her legal pad), meets Peter’s eyes and nods – understanding.
“The reason I ask is that…Neal’s pathology, it rarely presents without background trauma. He has, however, been unwilling to volunteer any information about his past, which has muddied the diagnostic waters somewhat; until now, at least.”
“What’s wrong with him?” asks Kramer, and the man sounds…concerned? Be it for his job, the FBI’s reputation – Peter isn’t sure. Surely, the guy isn’t concerned for Neal, though. Why now, and never before?
Still, Peter looks to Espenson, raising his eyebrows to soundlessly echo the other agent.
“It-…It’s rather complicated to explain. The diagnostic process in Mr Caffrey’s case has been complicated and – in truth – one of exclusion. The diagnosis given to Mr Caffrey previously – after an incident of supposed…”sleep driving”, I believe? After that incident he was diagnosed by an emergency room physician as suffering from a parasomnia – possibly secondary to sedative use. This appears to have been a misdiagnosis, however. Mr Caffrey’s sleep lab studies show no abnormality of the slow-wave sleep stages, and-“
“Doctor,” Peter says, cutting the woman off and motioning impatiently between Kramer and himself, “We aren’t shrinks. Could we get a-…short, Caffrey-For-Dummies kind of explanation of what’s wrong?”
Espenson smiles, despite herself, before furrowing her brow. She nods.
“Of course – the long and short of it is that we believe Mr Caffrey has been suffering, not from sleepwalking episodes, but rather from dissociative fugue states.”
Peter’s heart beats a little faster, as a spark of recognition flickers in the back of his mind. “I’ve heard of those – that’s what happened with that missing teacher in Manhattan a few years back, right? She just wandered off one day and turned up three weeks later in the river. She had no idea who she was the whole time.”
Espenson nods. “Yes, you’re right. Sufferers of dissociative fugue states suddenly lose all knowledge and concept of their identity, and…wander off, on some kind of journey; sometimes for hours, sometimes for years. In rare cases, sufferers have even taken on a new identity, and set up entirely new lives for themselves.”
Peter nods, feeling cold, the seriousness of the diagnosis, of the situation, settling into his bones. He swallows thickly.
“Is he-…psychotic? I mean, is this like schizophrenia or something? Or…?”
“No,” Espenson replies quickly, and firmly. She pauses for a moment, looking down at Neal’s file, and then back again.
“Dissociative disorders…they’re strongly correlated with trauma, especially with having experienced trauma at a young age. To put it in extremely lay terms…they’re almost like a coping mechanism gone awry. A person is so unable to cope with the trauma of their situation that their brain…compartmentalizes things, separates itself from reality, even conjures alternate identities, in an attempt to allow the person to survive. In the case of a dissociative fugue-…for want of a better explanation: A fugue ordinarily occurs when a person is stuck in a situation that is so intolerable that they’re unable to cope with it, but refuse to leave it, for whatever reason. So the brain, in an attempt to protect the person, takes control and leaves the situation on their behalf.”
Peter stares at her a moment, and then….laughs, humorlessly, at the utterly absurdity of the whole thing.
“You’re telling me that Neal’s brain hated D.C. so much that it forced him to run?”
“Essentially, yes.”
Peter blinks, shaking his head. Psych stuff has never been his strong point, but-…to even think that such a thing is possible, that the human brain can control the body to such an extent, is…unnerving, gives him a chill.
“Mr Caffrey wasn’t being traumatized in D.C., Dr Espenson. Whatever he may have told you – he was being treated well, given work to do. I personally saw to it that he was given everything he needed. Nobody was…hurting him, not in any way. We took care of him; we consider him an asset. A valuable one.”
It is Kramer who speaks, this time, and he sounds…offended, defensive. Dr Espenson is quick to turn to him, give him a soothing half-smile, nod emphatically.
“Mr Caffrey has reported as much, and has nothing but good things to say about your department, Agent Kramer. However, he’s also made me aware of…the circumstances that surrounded his sudden departure from New York, and some of the conditions of his probation; the fact that he was prohibited from doing field work, and was barred contact with Agent Burke, for example.”
Kramer stiffens, his mouth a straight line, but Espenson continues – with, Peter notes, an impressive amount of authority.
“It’s my clinical opinion that the sudden loss of his life in New York – which was very dear to him, especially considering the lack of structure or stability he seems to have suffered earlier in life – was traumatic enough to eventually lead to the events that have transpired. It seems that Mr Caffrey has been suffering from quite severe clinical depression for some time, now – possibly since he commenced work with you, Agent Kramer – and this depression became severe enough to cause suicidal ideation; though Mr Caffrey had very little insight into his state of mind, at that time, and may not have realized just how depressed or suicidal he was. I believe that the fugue states were a response to this ideation. The first seems to have been an attempt to flee the city – thus, negating the need for suicide. And the most recent – the near-drowning incident - seems to have been an attempt to act on the ideation, and seek a…different kind of escape, from his intolerable circumstances.”
Peter sits back, feeling ill, letting the doctor’s words…absorb, connect, make sense. He’s about to ask about treatment, when Kramer speaks up from the opposite side of the table.
“Is it possible that Mr Caffrey is merely...feigning this condition? He is, I’m sure you’re aware, a very skilled con artist. Could he be…pulling one over on us, trying to shirk his probation?”
Peter’s throat tightens with anger, cheeks flushing, and he sends a glare in Kramer’s direction that could melt steel. Espenson speaks before he can do so much as splutter, however – her voice emotionless, blinking coldly at the elder agent.
“I’m very good at my job, sir, and I have a lot of experience in the forensic setting. I’m more than capable of identifying a malingerer; Mr Caffrey isn’t one. I’m confident in my diagnosis.”
Peter can’t help but smirk, the tiniest bit, at the steel that underlies Espenson’s words; he’s impressed, and slightly ashamed for misjudging her on first impression.
Kramer, for his part, sighs heavily and nods to Espenson, knowing that he’s defeated – a strange sort of agitation comes over his face for a moment, and then he purses his lips and stares at her.
“I’m sure then, doctor – given your confidence in your diagnosis – that you can suggest to us an acceptable treatment scenario for Mr Caffrey’s afflictions? After all, he is a convicted felon – and he’s currently serving out a lengthy prison sentence, albeit in the FBI’s custody. We can’t just brush aside the facts of the situation.”
“I agree,” Espenson says coolly, “Which is why I’ve called this meeting in the first place.”
She pauses, glancing down at Neal’s file, seeming to need to gather her thoughts. The bats in Peter’s stomach flap their wings.
Espenson looks up again, eyeing each man, before speaking.
“Merely mentioning the possibility of returning to his position at the FBI’s D.C. office, over the past week, has been enough to give Mr Caffrey a panic attack so severe that he’s required sedation. Given this - and the fact that I believe the move to D.C. was largely the catalyst for the onset of his dissociative condition - I’m unfortunately unable to give him medical clearance to return to work in your department, Agent Kramer.”
Espenson pauses for breath, looking Kramer in the face, but continues before he can open his mouth to argue.
“I’m also unable to give Mr Caffrey medical clearance to return to any kind of prison environment. He’s in no way able to cope with the stressors of prison in his current condition, and I cannot foresee a time in the future at which prison would become an acceptable environment for someone with Mr Caffrey’s vulnerabilities.”
Kramer’s face has gone beet red, by now, and he regards Espenson with disdain, blurting words in a way that is almost rude.
“We can’t just let him run free, doctor – the man is a criminal.”
“I’m aware of that,” Espenson says calmly. She pauses a moment, glancing furtively to Peter, and then back down to Neal’s chart.
“There are two recommendations that I can make. The first is that Mr Caffrey has his probation revoked; and that he be committed to a maximum-security forensic psychiatric hospital, for the remainder of his sentence.”
Peter balks audibly at this, a chill wave of horror breaking over him, and his voice is rough and incredulous when he speaks.
“What, like the place they put the Bronx Butcher?”
Neither Kramer nor Espenson say anything, and Peter’s words hang noxiously in the air. After a moment, Espenson sighs.
“My second recommendation – my…preferred recommendation – is that Mr Caffrey be transferred back to New York, to complete his probation in Agent Burke’s custody. Not only is this something that Mr Caffrey has expressed a vehement desire to do, but I believe that being reunited with his support network in New York-…it would improve his prognosis. Considerably. I still wouldn’t be able to clear him for field work, in New York – not in his current state, at least – but I have several colleagues at Columbia University who specialize in rare dissociative disorders, and would be extremely interested in taking over Mr Caffrey’s treatment.”
“It’s out of the question,” says Kramer, barely giving Espenson time to finish, before he speaks.
The doctor nods, bites her lip. She looks to Peter, then Kramer, and then shuts Neal’s file with a soft slapping of paper.
“Obviously, the decision making process is out of my hands. Thus, I’ll take my leave at this point, give you time to discuss your…options.”
Dr Espenson looks down at the cover of Neal’s file, lost in thought for a moment – and then she picks it up, stands, and looks back at the two agents.
“I would…urge you to be very careful, in your considerations. I believe that Mr Caffrey – Neal – has the potential to make a full recovery, if provided with the proper treatment, in the right environment. However, there’s also the possibility that he could deteriorate rapidly, if his treatment isn’t well-managed.”
Espenson seems to want to say more – but stops, swallows, nods to them both, and leaves the room.
Peter rakes his hands back over his face, which feels clammy and sore, letting out a long sigh and leaning back in his chair. He feels…exhausted, suddenly, as though the last three years have caught up with him all at once.
Kramer, on the other hand, is pink-cheeked and fixated on Peter, staring at him from across the table. He frowns.
“You’ve done this – you and Caffrey, you’ve come up with this together. To get him back to New York.”
Peter lifts his hands away from his face, glancing sidelong at Kramer, incredulous.
“You really think that – don’t you, Phil? You think it’s all some big conspiracy.”
Peter sighs, shaking his head, sitting up. All the anger he felt before the meeting has been leeched out of him – when he looks at Kramer, now, he suddenly just feels…pity.
Peter’s sudden weariness catches Kramer off-guard, and the elder agent stands and begins to pace; Kramer’s turn, now, to be agitated. Peter sighs, leaning forward over the table, toward his former mentor.
“Phil, I don’t know about you, but I have a department to run. I haven’t had time for conspiracies; and before last week, I hadn’t spoken to Neal for three years – since he left for D.C.”
Kramer stops pacing, stares at Peter, as though trying to read his mind. Peter shrugs.
“Aside of that – you know as well as I do, if Caffrey didn’t want to stay in D.C., he wouldn’t be here. I mean – the kid’s a goddamned escape artist. He doesn’t need to fake an illness, to get away.”
There is a long silence, as Kramer allows Peter’s words – undeniably true – to sink in. Then, he too seems to deflate slightly, sitting heavily in a chair.
“I thought that Caffrey would flourish, in D.C.”
Peter looks Kramer over carefully, suddenly feeling….compassion for the man. Suddenly seeing him as an old, stubborn agent who is past his prime – whose own CI betrayed him in a way that Neal would never betray Peter. Looking at Kramer, Peter can suddenly understand how Kramer saw Neal as an opportunity – an opportunity for Kramer to fix his past mistakes, to reclaim some of his former glory, to re-live the past. And – though his concern and care for Neal still tempers his compassion for Kramer with anger and resentment – Peter can suddenly understand how Kramer justified it to himself, what he did to the CI. How he saw himself as someone who could give Neal more complex cases, more discipline, keep him on the straight and narrow. Kramer honestly had just failed to see how fundamentally he’d misjudged Neal’s character, priorities, talents – at least, perhaps, until now.
There’s a long, long silence between the men; as Kramer seems to suddenly understand how badly he’s mishandled the situation with Neal, and Peter seems to suddenly understand where Kramer has been coming from.
Something in the back of Peter’s mind suddenly stands at attention, senses the weakening of Kramer’s resolve, and says: This is it. This is your chance to fix things. Don’t screw it up.
Peter pauses-…pauses; and then catches Kramer’s eye. He takes a deep breath.
“Back…years ago – when you came to take Neal away. What you kept saying, back then, was that…you wanted him transferred to D.C. for his own good, and for mine. And-….I believe that. When it comes down to it, I think…you were just doing what you thought was right.”
“I was. I did.” Kramer’s voice is still slightly irritable, as though Peter’s calm is grating on him – but Peter presses on, shaking his head and motioning to the room.
“Look around us, Phil. Think about what the doc just said. Do you really still believe that all of this is in Neal’s best interest? Or are you ready to admit that you were wrong?”
“I did what I thought was right,” Kramer repeats, his face inscrutable.
“I know – but…you were wrong. We all get it wrong, sometimes – even the best of us. You taught me that, remember?” At this point, Peter offers a grim smile – an echo of their past rapport, their ruined friendship, the memory of which still twists a sliver of glass in his heart.
Kramer just looks at him, but Peter can sense him softening, so he continues.
“You can make this right, though. You may have been wrong, but you can fix it. Let Neal come back to New York. It’d be easy – you’d just have to sign off on the transfer. You have that power.”
Kramer stiffens, and for a moment Peter fears that he’s lost his connection with the man – but then Kramer sighs, glancing back to look Peter in the eye.
“What makes you think that he’ll do any better there, than here? What makes you think you can control him more effectively now, than you did before?”
Peter sits back, shaking his head. “Phil, he doesn’t need controlling. I don’t know if you noticed, but Neal confessed to all those crimes he’s paying for, now. Voluntarily. He could have run, instead – he had ample opportunity. But he didn’t. He came to D.C., and he’s been here all this time – even though he’s been miserable, he’s stayed. He’s obeyed every rule of his probation. I know you’re a cynic about recidivism, but I don’t think you can get more reformed than that.”
Kramer cannot argue with this, and Peter doesn’t stop speaking long enough to give him the chance.
“Besides, Phil – New York is his home. It’s been his home base since he was 18 – even during his crime sprees, he always went back there. He has friends there. He had a life there, and he could rebuild it if you gave him the chance. And he’d be getting treatment - Columbia is no slouch when it comes to weird psych stuff, or so I’ve heard.”
Kramer remains silent, avoids Peter’s gaze, and Peter can feel desperation beginning to creep into his throat. It’s in this desperation that he leans forward and takes Kramer’s wrist, forcing the man to look him in the face. Kramer looks conflicted, reluctant. Peter frowns at him, furrowing his brow.
“You know as well as I do, Phil – Neal doesn’t belong in some psych prison ward, with murderers and god-knows-who-else. He’s not crazy. He just wants to go home.”
A pause, and then: “It’s the right thing to do.”
Kramer grunts slightly, pulls his wrist away, and looks out the window, eyes unfocused.
It’s three days before Kramer gives Peter the official “Yes” on Neal’s transfer back to the Manhattan office, but Peter already knows in that moment – as Kramer turns away, as his shoulders slump in resignation – that he’s won the man over. That things will turn out okay. That Neal will soon be back where he belongs.
*
Four months after Peter escorts his CI back to New York on a secured flight - and two weeks after Neal is released from his lengthy stay in the inpatient unit at Columbia-New York Presbyterian Hospital - Neal walks into the New York Federal Building, rides the elevator up to the FBI’s White Collar Crime office, sits down at his old desk, and begins work for the day.
He’s still not yet approved for field duty – though Peter has him looking over active cases, rather than cold ones - and he’s a little more quiet than he used to be. Otherwise, though...it feels eerily as though Neal never left. Peter had warned the team not to be too effusive in their ‘welcome back’ – no cakes, no bunting – so as not to make Neal feel like too much of an outcast, a charity case, whatever. But everyone is glad to see him, and that mere fact is obvious enough that Neal spends most of the day with a smile on his face, making jokes over his shoulder with Diana; who continually seems to get caught up in the banter for a moment, despite herself, before reminding Neal to get back to work.
At 4pm, Peter leans against Neal’s desk and tells him to go home, get some rest, come back tomorrow. Tells Neal that he’s done a good job, that day. Asks if he’s settling back into June’s okay (and thank god for that old lady, that she takes Neal back again and again) and whether he’s seen Mozzie around. Chit-chat – but god, Peter has never been so grateful for chit-chat in his life.
He never believed that he could have this again. Neither did Neal. Yet, here they are.
As Neal shrugs into his jacket, Peter bids him a final, joking farewell, and then begins to head back up to his office.
“Peter?”
Peter pauses, turns, looks quizzically back at the younger man.
“Yeah, Neal?”
Neal pauses for a long moment, looks around the office. Then he meets Peter’s eyes, gives him a small nod.
“Thanks.”
Peter’s throat is suddenly thick, warmth and gratitude flooding through him – but he just smirks at Neal, nods back, moves to give him a slap on the shoulder.
“You’re welcome. Tell June I said ‘hi’.”
With a smile, Neal nods, and walks through the department’s glossy double doors, into the elevator.
Peter tries not to be too obvious about it, but he can't help watching him leave, can’t seem to avert his eyes until Neal is gone. Going home, just like he would after any other day at the office.
Neal's going home.
He's finally home.