White Collar - Of Monsters and Men
Disclaimer: White Collar and all of its characters, locations, etc. belong to their respective owners; I'm just borrowing (though I would take a job with this show in a second!). No copyright infringement intended!
Author's Note: This...there was a scene in the season 3 finale where we learn all this stuff about Neal's past, and his father(Which, I admit, gave me quite the fangirl moment while I was watching.). But I sort of sat on it for a while, thinking it over until the past two days, where a) something very tragic happened in my town that gave me all sorts of emotions that I couldn't begin to deal with and had to write out, and b) I found the title for this piece and everything just poured out from there.
Huge thanks to my dear friend who beta'd for me. Any mistakes are mine, not hers. She knows who she is *sends out a hug*. (:
ovovo
Neal rushed into his room, locking the door behind him even though he knew that his mother wasn't home to hear him. He fell to his knees beside the bed and dug underneath for the box that she didn't know was there. Finally, his fingers scrabbled against it, and he pulled it out and ripped off the stained cardboard lid to rifle through the contents.
It was mostly papers, news clippings and faded photographs. Mixed in sporadically were a baseball, some marbles, a pair of cuff links. And at the bottom of the pile, wrapped in an old sock to keep it safe, a badge.
His father's badge.
He pulled the heavy object free of its protection and held it in his sweaty hands, his vision blurred so that he couldn't read the numbers. He allowed memories to wash over him.
His father had given this to him the last time that he'd seen him, when he was still just a kid. He'd said that he had to go undercover, that he wanted Neal to take care of this until he got back. But he never had, and Neal had spent the rest of his life believing that the man was dead. That he'd been killed in service.
That he was a hero.
He'd bragged about his father, to his friends at school; told them what an amazing man he was and that he wanted to be just like him. He'd kept his memory alive and bright, and tried to forget the whispered arguments he'd spied on as a small child that his parents had told him not to worry about. He hadn't worried, but he hadn't forgotten either. The older he got, the more unsettled he became about all of the loose ends. Then today - his eighteenth birthday, of all days - all of the scattered memories made sense, and he wondered why he hadn't seen it all along.
A dirty cop.
Neal couldn't get those words out of his head. Dirty. Corrupt. Oh, and then the kicker, still alive. He ground his teeth, blinked back hot tears. His father had abandoned them. He had looked into the eyes of his own son and said that he would be coming home, then had run as fast as he could the other way.
With a wordless scream, Neal threw the badge as hard as he could across the room. It struck the plastic trophy he'd won for an art show in third grade and sent it to the floor with a splintering crash. He screamed again. He wanted to break something more than a trophy.
Everything that had ever driven him in his life had suddenly been ripped away from him. His father had betrayed him, his mother had lied to him. His whole life, working towards the goal of joining the police force - following in his father's footsteps - it had all been a farce. A joke played on him by a world so much colder than he had believed. After years of believing otherwise, he realized that the last thing he wanted was to be like his father.
He glared at the fallen badge across the room. What did that make him, though? Some things were just in the blood. If the man who he had thought of as a hero all his life was really a monster, was Neal destined to follow in those footsteps? Was he, ultimately, just another dirty cop waiting to happen?
Neal decided in that moment that this would never happen. Whether a hero or a horror, he was going to go out by his own rules, not his father's. And certainly not as a cop.
There was one part of his father's path that Neal was destined to follow, however. That night, he stepped into another Caffrey's shoes and walked away, and never looked back.
fin.