AN: This is the one thing I actually thought three weeks ago I wouldn't finish ever - or even start for that matter. It is a challenge piece for the 'Crossover Challenge' over at the ChitChat on Author's Corner-Forum. The task was easy: Pick a character from another show and they will assign you a CM character to write your story. When I picked my character (Neal Caffrey from White Collar) I kinda had a million ideas for every CM character - except for the one I was assigned, cause I had forgotten about her. And maybe that was the best thing ever that could have happened :)
It was complicated and yet the easiest thing she ever experienced. They were opposites in every possible and impossible way. And yet – they worked. She was the white to his black, and somehow they became grey and everything around them a bit of a blurry line.
He was the one thing she would regret for the rest of her life – and yet not regret at all. He was the one thing she had thought about losing herself in, and making him get lost. For him she might have risked it all – her job, her career, her everything. He was everything she didn't need and yet all she ever wanted. At first it was like a mid-life crisis, at least that's what people always said and thought when she saw their looks. And even she herself wasn't entirely sure what this was. He was everything she couldn't need, her entire opposite. He was what she never thought she needed, he was everything she usually despised and yet he had managed to make his way right to her heart.
She was Erin Strauss, Section Chief of the BAU and had a reputation to loose. He was – nothing and had long lost everything. Their whole relationship was challenging a Frank Sinatra song, like 'Strangers in the night' – that how she felt and that was what they pretty much were. She was well aware that this was never supposed to work, and yet they defied the odds and made it work. None of them thought to find themselves at the point where they would call whatever they were doing a relationship, but yet, this was exactly what both knew it was.
He was Neal Caffrey – Con-Artist and recruited out of prison from the White Collar Unit of the FBI in NYC. Technically he was only a consultant who had a deal for working for the FBI for the length of his sentence in prison, but everyone in the FBI who read his file, the case files to the cases he worked on and got solved and met him in person, knew he was in this for a lot longer. He himself might not know this yet, but everyone else did. He was a charmer, a sweet-talker and enticer, a trickster, a gentleman. He was everything she never wanted and all she now craved. He always got his way, which was the same way Erin Strauss worked.
She got her way as well every time – but her way was power, intimidation if needed and pulling a string or two. His was sweet talking, charming and persuasion. It was like two worlds collided and she never thought this would work, but it did, better than anything she ever had. Even better than her marriage with a judge, with whom she spent more time arguing than anything else. Arguing about everything. It was like arguing became their normal form of communication.
Now with Neal everything changed. He came and pretty much changed the rules of the game, changed her along the way as well. Not that she now was entirely different and no longer the 'Ice Queen' as she knew people under her had nicknamed her – no, she was still the same. But the changes were small ones, barely noticeable for those who didn't know her well, which weren't many to begin with.
Neal was twenty years her junior, he could probably be her own son. And despite the difference in age, he understood her. It was weird like that, but he got her, understood what made her tick and somehow managed easily to go along with it. Maybe she really needed a convicted felon to finally find someone who would understand her and who wouldn't get scared away by her usual icy, tough exterior.
There were moments when she thought that maybe he had tricked or coned his way into her life, that maybe what they had was not the real thing, that there was a bigger plan behind this, that maybe he somehow saw her as his ticket out of the deal he had made with the FBI in New York. Maybe it was sixth sense, maybe she showed it somehow in a way, but usually when she had that thought it seemed like he worked twice as hard to erase the doubts.
She was in Washington and he was in New York – to call their relationship complicated would have been an understatement. Erin Strauss knew about the restrictions that came with his deal – after meeting him she after all had a very thorough read through his file. She knew about his two mile radius he was allowed to move around New York when not being with the FBI. Since Washington was further than two miles outside New York, Erin knew that someone in the FBI – most likely in the New York branch – had to know about something. Or he had come up with some story that someone bought – like it usually happened with him.
She knew about his identities, his past, for what he was arrested, why he tried to flee and was arrested again. She knew every detail about the deal he made with the FBI and she knew about him probably more than she knew about anyone. Despite all the details she knew about him, the things he used to do and the capability he had to talk himself into every possible and impossible situation as well as talk himself out of them as well, she was not the least concerned. There was a feeling of ease he gave her when she was with him, a feeling of freedom and solace she had never thought she'd find.
Maybe all Erin Strauss needed was a little bit of complicated to make her life easier.