White Collar does not belong to me (clearly). Also, the title comes from the saying "Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage." Hope you like it!
Elizabeth is waiting with open arms. Not five hours after he said Goodbye (with a capital G, forever) to her, not ten after he effectively destroyed the business she built from the ground up, she is waiting to take his pain away. He really shouldn't hate her for this, but all he sees are ice blue eyes and sable hair and he hates hates her for not being Kate. Because rational thought had been eviscerated along with so many things and all he can think as she enfolds him is that she doesn't smell right at all. She should smell like coconut shampoo and apple body spray. She should smell like Kate. Should be Kate.
Peter stands in the doorway and watches him with ten kinds of I'm sorry in his eyes, and this probably shouldn't be funny, but he's been shielding Neal from those same pitying looks for hours now, so it is a bit. His laugh might come out sounding like a sob, though, (might have been a sob) because Elizabeth is murmuring oh, Neal, and there are bits of happily-ever-afters clinging to his clothes and skin, and of all the ways he was prepared for this to come crashing down, he never anticipated this.
Of course, he's never known Mozzie to be wrong, and happy endings are not, are not, meant for people like him. For people who lie and steal and take things they don't deserve, haven't earned. But damn it, he had earned Kate, had earned this chance with his blood and his hard work and a partnership and a music box.
He doesn't deserve this.
And for as much as her embrace is suffocating him, as much as her tasteful perfume is making his head spin with not Kate, as much as he wishes she'd just let him go, let him breathe, he is not so far gone that he doesn't recognize it is probably a good thing that her grip is so unrelenting. Because he has no anklet, no Kate to hold him in place, and he has never wanted, never needed, to flee this much in his entire life.
If he could do anything at this moment, short of turning back time, he would run as far and as fast as he could. Would go to some place where he could forget he ever knew Kate, ever knew Peter, ever knew himself. He would bury Neal Caffrey, rightfully, alongside Kate Moreau and build someone new from the ground up. He could do it, too. The same way he built a socialite from a poor kid from the Bronx. He'd become the antithesis of everything he worked so hard to be. Someone who wears jeans and t-shirts and doesn't know a Monet from a hole in the ground. Someone with no connections. With even fewer friends than this present incarnation. Someone with no one to worry him, or worry over him. All he'd have to do was con himself into believing he'd never really miss any of them at all. Of course, if he was able to stop loving someone just like that, he would have been a free man months ago. The bitterness of that irony catches him off guard.
What he wants, now, is to tell Peter that the anklet is a waste of time, a gross misappropriation of government funds. It can never cage him more securely than Elizabeth's compassion, June's understanding, Peter's concern. He let himself be caught, trapped, and never even realized he was giving his freedom, his whole self, away to these people, piece by piece.
That night, bedded down in the Burke house and still struggling to catch his breath, he thanks them for taking care of him. What he is really telling them (because they need to believe it, because he needs to believe it) is that he is grateful for the well-intentioned cage he has let them build around him.
It is the worst lie he's ever told.
Hope you enjoyed my first ever WC fic. Please let me know what you thought of it!