"Put the gun down, Caffrey," Peter yells from behind him, and Neal feels the line of his spine straighten in an involuntary response to this stimuli. His hand flexes around the handle of the gun, now almost hot from contact with his skin, but still just as dry as it was when he lifted it off the plain-clothes-man hours before. Neal's hands don't sweat, or tremble, or weaken or fumble and they never ever let him down, but right now they're far more eager to follow Peter's instructions than the orders from his own brain.
The twitch is buried in a practiced, smooth flexing of all the muscles of his arm, which doesn't allow the muzzle of the gun to waver one bit, but Neal lifts his other hand to support underneath the butt of the gun, holding it properly, just to be sure – he could make this shot one-handed, he could make any shot one handed, but he still really hates guns.
The kidnapper (thiefmobbossdrugtraffickermurderer) keeps his hands in the air, but smirks at Neal like he knows he won't do it.
Thinks he won't do it – the FBI are watching, after all, and anyone watching Neal Caffrey closely enough knows that he doesn't spend enough time covering his tracks where a certain Suit is involved. The kidnapper's not the first criminal to figure out that 'J-Cat' Caffrey isn't so much swinging for the other team as he is slaughtering for them (though he might be the last).
Unfortunately for the kidnapper (and Neal, and Peter), Neal never quite got the hang of morals.
Neal eases his finger off the trigger-guard, curls it in to cradle the trigger against the paint-brush callus inside his knuckle.
"Neal! Put it down!"
Poor, poor, misguided, silly Peter. Neal smiles, the wide one, with the lifted eyebrows and the dancing eyes that never fails to make old-ladies pinch his cheeks and little kids cling to his legs and women fall all over him and on more than one occasion has won an answering smile from Agent Peter Burke (who is, somehow, unable to tell 37% of the time that Neal is faking it, faking this smile, faking everything). The kidnapper fidgets when Neal smiles, tucking his raised hands behind his neck, for the first time showing a trace of unease.
He should be uneasy – he is, in fact, staring down the barrel of a gun wielded by grinning Neal Caffrey, who never quite got the hang of morals.
The safety clicks off, and now even the briefest of flinches in Neal's infallible hands will mean the death of a man.
Not a man – a thing. Really, Neal's just doing them the favour of not wasting their money on a trial.
A symphony of shouts and clicking safeties cascades behind Neal, followed by the belligerent shouting of Peter Burke as he tries to talk down his nervous agents and rogue consultant. His cease fire order must be followed, because Neal doesn't take one in the back.
"Neal. Neal, you need to put it down."
Neal tosses his head, a motion which settles the fedora he's wearing an inch lower on his forehead – just because Neal Caffrey is a man who never quite got the hang of morals doesn't mean that he can look a man in the eyes while he dies (call a spade a spade) while he kills him.
"I'm not going to stop you, Neal."
Neal's brain crashes to a halt.
He doesn't hear the indignant shouting that follows Peter's statement, can't imagine what it will sound like. His mind doesn't work in sounds, it works in images, and flavours – like the way Jones' body will seem to slump around his gun, and though all of his attention is now on Peter, the gun won't waver an inch from its lock on Neal's gun hand (at least, he assumes Jones will be the one to try and take the incapacitating shot). Diana will keep both eyes fixed on Neal – her gun won't waver either, from its target of Neal's kidneyhearthead, because Diana's smart like that and Neal loves her for it.
(Peter's gun will be in his hand because it has to be, but it'll be pointed at the ground. That's disappointing to Neal – he really hates being shot, but he still wishes it would be Peter who shot him.)
I'm not going to stop you, Neal.
No. This isn't how it works.
Peter makes the rules. He draws the lines in the sand, and Neal walks on them, and sometimes his balance isn't good enough and he falls off one side or the other, and when he falls on the right side he gets to know that Peter is proud of him, and when he falls on the wrong side he gets to know that Peter is disappointed in him, and there are always rewards and punishments and rules and if Peter doesn't make the rules anymore Neal will have nothing to follow and if there is nothing to follow then Neal will have to keep running because something-for-nothing disobeys all the laws of physics and the universe will implode if it all catches up to Neal and –
Peter makes the rules. He tells Neal where the line is, and then Neal decides whether or not to step over.
Peter's never refused to draw the line before. Neal has nothing to step over. Neal doesn't have a decision to make.
Neal's infallible hands tremble, and his wrist tries to collapse, and his left knee won't take his weight properly.
The staccato snap of relief through the fleet of FBI agents behind him is as tangible as an air-bubble under hardwood floors, and Neal feels it like a creak in reality.
"Peter," he gasps, and says nothing else, because Peter needs to say something else – he needs to give Neal more words, because Neal is good at words, and if Peter says even one more thing Neal will know where the line in the sand is and then Neal can step off of it – until then Neal is trapped in limbo, in purgatory, and the fabric of reality will begin to unravel and take him apart from the inside out.
The agents see the tremble in his hands as a sign of indecision (which it is), meaning Peter is successfully talking him down (Peter is taking him apart).
"I'm not going to stop you, Neal."
You shouldn't be stopped.
You need to stop yourself.
Ah. There it is. The line in the sand.
His grip steadies.
Take the shot. Give up the gun.
Step over the line, Neal. Take the shot, or give up the gun.
Take the shot, Neal (Give it up). Take the shot (You can't do this). Take the shot (You know you can't). Take the shot (Walk away, turn your face, and stay with -).
To Neal, it is as simple as stepping off a sidewalk. There is no concept of consequences, no weighing of decisions – no thoughts of prisons and bars and favours bought and collected and paid for in flesh and fire, no thoughts of justice and peace and a puzzle and a home.
Squeezing the trigger would be the easiest thing that Neal has ever done. Easier even than choosing his tie pin this morning (the metallic tone in his vest was very hard to coordinate, and Neal Caffrey had never got the hang of morals).
000000
"Don't be such a baby," Kate murmured, pressing the wet cloth a little tighter against the cut across his temple. Neal still flinched, but he stopped the over dramatic hissing – he should know better than to think such a thing would work on Kate. She wasn't going to be diverted from his more pressing injuries.
"Hold this," she instructed next, so Neal lifted his uninjured hand to hold the cold compress against his poor, bruised head. He knew the cut was bleeding, and he really, really hoped it wouldn't scar. Scars were distinctive. Scars were memorable. Scars got con men caught.
Kate took his smashed hand carefully between both of hers, her graceful fingers achingly light. His hand still throbbed white-hot when the nerves registered sensory input. Kate was too pale, and though her hands never faltered, she was noticeably trembling. Neal didn't blame her; he hadn't been able to look directly at his hand yet without the overpowering urge to vomit.
"Just do it, Kate, please," he panted, drawing in as many deep breaths as he could stand to try and hyper-oxygenate his blood, hoping to stave off shock.
"We should wait for the drugs to spread," Kate replied stubbornly, now staring at his wrist as though she could track the passage of the dirty street drugs through his veins. Neal had fought her tooth and nail on that, not wanting the needles and the drugs anywhere near him, but she'd threatened him with hospitalization if he didn't let her drug him, and the only thing worse than being drugged in the shitty apartment they'd been calling 'home' for the past month was being drugged and trapped in a pristine hospital.
"No time, Kate, please," Neal begged, panic and desperation clawing unpleasantly at his insides, "Kate, you have to, you have to do it, we're already risking bone scarring and nerve damage and muscle death and I can't lose use of my hand, Kate, please, please pleasepleasepleaseplease-"
Kate didn't warn him about what was coming, which he was grateful for – she just pinned his wrist down with one hand and ruthlessly straightened out the thin bones with the other. Neal might have screamed – it wasn't his fault, the drugs were making him sloppy, but they eventually softened the jagged edges of crimson agony.
Neal drifted, floating in a greasy cloud of opiates and fading adrenaline. He hated the grungy feeling of pain medications, enough that, had he been alone, he'd have suffered through setting his own bones with nothing to help but a bottle of booze. Kate didn't need to see that, though, she didn't deserve to see Neal shaking and hyperventilating and terrified and crying… The drugs tasted like mould and copper on the back of his tongue, but this was easier for Kate, Kate who was beautiful and harsh and kind and devious and clever and sweet…
"Neal," someone murmured, the quiet surrus of sound accompanied by cool pressure dancing over his brow and cheekbone. Neal bent towards the touch, nuzzling into the gentle fingers, and heard a quiet chuckle above him. He cracked one eye open, grumbling when a Very Bright Thing made it hard to see. The stabbing light was immediately shifted, and Neal blinked against the sunspots dancing in his field of view. He got his eye about half-way open, and decided that was good enough. He could just make out another pair of violently blue eyes above him.
"There you are, sweetie," a voice murmured, the voice that belonged to the eyes, and there was a name that belonged to that voice and those eyes.
"Kate," Neal croaked, letting his eye drift shut again, "You're Kate. You're here…"
"I'm here, Neal," she cooed, and cool fingers slipped up into his hair, stroking and massaging his scalp. "I'm right here, Neal, always. I'm not going anywhere."
The drugs kept Neal under for while – when he resurfaced, the light filtering through the threadbare curtains was the buzzing orange light of street lights, not the buttery yellow of sunshine.
He blinked twice more, and the rest of his surroundings rushed into being, and his mind ticked over all the incoming data with the ease and long practice of a lifetime of harsh wake-ups and immediate action.
The building was quiet and still the way it only is a three in the morning, when the biological rhythms of all the residents (rent-paying and otherwise) were at their lowest – in about an hour, the first year law associate on the floor above them would get up, and stagger around his apartment for a while, then shower and dress and clatter down the stairs with his bike, waking the neonatal resident across from NealandKate, who would begin her morning routine.
But right now, everything was quiet, the apartment was warm, and Kate was curled against Neal's side, head tucked under his chin so her breath fluttered warmly over his collarbone. He sighed, sagging further into the mattress, and tugged Kate closer so he could curl around her a little more securely.
This is what he missed most about the times they worked separate jobs – keeping each other safe meant keeping each other secret, so for the last three weeks Neal had spent on the Wilkes job, he'd slept alone in an echoing hotel room. He didn't sleep well when Kate wasn't breathing next to him, not anymore. Kate's ambient body temperature was naturally a few degrees cooler than normal, and Neal always ran hot when he slept, so sleeping twined together like puppies had become routine, even when they were too [exhausted][strung-out][injured][wired] for sex. Neal pressed his nose into the tangled hair at the crown of her head, inhaling the sweet-grass and honeysuckle scent of her shampoo, and fought off the fog of drug-induced sleep for just a little longer. There was a twitch in his thigh and a hollow sort of nausea in his stomach that spoke of coming down off a high, so apparently he'd slept for a really long time already.
He stretched his leg out to try and ease the twitch, jostling Kate by accident. She stirred, wriggling against him in a manner that would have been highly distracting, if opiates didn't always make Neal a little… slow on the uptake.
She grumbled muzzily, lips catching against the sensitive skin of Neal's throat, and he smiled.
"Good morning," he muttered, kissing the top of her head.
"Ggooo mrrnnnnin," she replied, pressing closer to him before jerking away suddenly, staring at him wide-eyed. "Neal! How are you?!"
He grinned at her. "Fine. Positively spry, considering," he joked, but Kate just glared at him, unimpressed. "Hey, bright side, we have a definitive 'no' on the fractured ribs!"
Kate's eyes flicked to the bare inches between them, and she flushed slightly. "Good," she murmured, running a hand down his chest, "You're always so whiney when your ribs are fractured."
"One time, Kate, okay, it was one time," he protested, smiling when she rolled her eyes at him.
"Idiot," she muttered fondly, settling back against him, tossing her hair across his chest when she rested her head on his shoulder. Usually, he would pull his fingers through the messy strands, 'combing out the tangles' as an excuse to play with her silky hair. He glared down at his splinted hand, and had to settle for pressing his face against her hair instead. Kate twined her fingers around his uninjured ones, and rested their hands on her stomach.
Neal was just about to drift off again, in the comfortable stillness of a familiar room, when Kate asked, "What happened with Wilkes, Neal?"
He stiffened so suddenly it was almost a jerk, and several of his deeper bruises twinged.
"What's the matter, Caffrey," Wilkes chuckles, "Not feeling squeamish, are we?"
Wilkes leans harder onto his leg, pressing more weight down on Neal's shin. Neal swears he can feel the bone creak, and he desperately buries a whimper in his chest. Wilkes pulls back before the bone snaps, and this time Neal can't hide the noise of relief he makes. Escaping would have been so much harder with a broken leg -
"Oh, you know," Neal said, shaking off the memory, "I was myself, he took exception to that, and then I escaped."
"No, Neal," Kate said, exasperated, "Why did Wilkes decide to beat you up? I thought you said you were safe, that he needed you too much to do anything to you?"
"Yeah, well, that was true before I screwed him over."
"Neal!"
"It wasn't like that, Kate!" Neal protested, "I had to! They had guns, you know how I feel about guns. He was going to hurt people."
"Neal," Kate groaned, "You know most of that is for show, Wilkes just likes to scare people-"
"Well, I don't!" he broke in.
"Neal." This time Kate sighed his name, like she was disappointed in him.
"No, Kate, it isn't okay."
She sighed again, more staccato and annoyed this time. "You and your arbitrary morals, Neal Caffrey."
Neal scoffed. "Morals, Kate, really? I lie, cheat, and steal for a living. I think it's safe to say I don't have any."
"You care about people, Neal," Kate said, and the unspoken too much, sometimes is obvious in the weight of his name, "What could be more moral than that?"
"Kate," Neal said warmly, amused, "You're not serious, are you? My daily hobbies would be enough to get me arrested by every government in the world. I am the farthest thing from a moral person."
Kate sat up to stare at him incredulously. "Really, Neal? That's your standard for acceptable behaviour?"
He shrugged. "That many people can't be wrong about what constitutes morality."
She raised an eyebrow at him. "You know people use the same argument about religion, right?"
Neal just shrugged.
"No way," Kate breathed, disbelief evident in her tone, "Seriously, Neal? I knew you were a romantic, but I didn't think you were religious."
"I'm not," he replied evenly.
"But you do believe in God?" Kate pressed, apparently unable to decide between bemusement and disbelief at this new revelation.
Neal hummed. "No, I don't think so. Maybe, I don't know."
Kate was frowning now. "So what do you believe in?"
"People."
"People?" Now she looked a little bewildered, and Neal wondered if he was saying the words he thought he was saying, because she looked like nothing he was saying was making any sense at all.
"Yes, people. If people can create something as beautiful as art, then that seems like something worth believing in to me."
"Art, Neal, really?"
Neal shrugged again. "'If art doesn't make us better, than what on earth is it for?'."
Kate groaned. "You're quoting at me again, aren't you?"
Neal grinned at her (the wide one, with the lifted eyebrows and the dancing eyes that never fails to make escorts blush and bank tellers hand over their ID cards and old rich men give him their money and has on more than one occasion made police-men forget they ever laid eyes on him), and she kissed him, just like he knew she would (87% of the time this smile ends in a kiss, 7% it ends with him pinned to the bed, 6% of the time it makes her angry enough that they have really good hate-sex).
Neal whined when she pulled away, but it only won him a few butterfly-kisses. Kate looked at him steadily.
"So. God, religion, people, whatever you want to say you believe in… It's all… Real… to you?"
"Yeah, Kate," Neal sighed, and he can't look at her anymore, "It is. Always has been."
"Why does that make you sad?" Kate murmured, ducking to press kisses to his jaw and neck, as though she can draw out his sadness through her lips.
"Because… because I just believe, Kate. I've never… had faith. Not in anything."
000000
"You killed a man, Neal," Peter says slowly, a growl rumbling through his vowels that sounds like betrayal.
Neal came down on the wrong side of the line. Now, in the aftermath, is when he can process emotional input: Regret. Sorrow. Disappointment. Self-loathing.
All of them are familiar. Neal isn't worried, not about the way he feels about himself – he has no particular 'personal code of behaviour' to aspire to. Neal Caffrey never got the hang of personal morals.
He has much loftier aspirations.
Peter's approval is such a vicious motivator. Sweeter than the grungiest Mexican black tar heroin, more rewarding than the endorphin rush of really, really good sex, or a particularly difficult puzzle solved. Peter is an enigma wrapped in a mystery disguised as a simple man with simple desires and a ruthlessly stalwart moral compass, but Neal knows better, because Peter might be even better than art, he's that interesting, and nothing so simple and steadfast as Special-Agent-Peter-Burke-FBI could be worthy of all of Neal's attention – and Peter is worthy of so much more than Neal can give. Neal just needs more time.
If Neal got to choose to have one thing in his cell for the rest of his life, and he was going to live there and die there and he only got to look at one thing… Before meeting Peter, Neal probably would have asked for a Da Vinci.
"What on earth were you thinking, Neal?"
Neal smiles (smirks, really) because Peter doesn't sound exasperated, doesn't sound tired or annoyed or like he's given up on Neal even a little bit, and that's really all Neal needed to know.
"'And in the end, we were all just humans'," Neal sighs, still staring at the ceiling of the FBI holding cell, stretched out across the bench. He has the cell to himself tonight. "'Drunk on the idea that love, only love, could heal our brokenness'."
"That's great, Neal, really, it is," and now Peter is angry, "but I was hoping for something a little more substantial."
Neal tilts his head from one side to the other, slowly. He's trying to deduce whether the cell is unoccupied because Peter cleared the cell, or because the FBI really had no one else to be brought in tonight, without looking away from the ceiling.
"Anything I say can and will be held against me in a –"
"Damnit, Neal, this is me you're talking to, just tell me –"
"And I haven't quite decided how I'm going to plead yet so I'd like not to limit myself –"
"Plead, Neal, wha-what are you, are you insane, half the FBI saw you kill him and you think you can decide how to plead –"
"Don't be ridiculous Peter, if I wanted to plead insanity there isn't a jury in the world that wouldn't believe it."
Peter actually scoffs now, forgetting his holier-than-thou self-righteousness long enough to laugh incredulously at Neal. "You're not insane."
Neal chooses not to point out that Peter himself called Neal insane not ten seconds ago. "There is no place in the universe where 'the whole world is a stage' is more true than in court, Peter."
"And you've always been a performer," Peter spits, sounding a bit disgusted, but also like he doesn't believe it. Silly Peter. Neal's been a 'con-man' longer than he's been a 'man'. If anyone knows who Neal is anymore, it isn't him, and it certainly isn't Peter.
"Peter," Neal soothes, amused at his [friend][partner][companion][handler], "I've never been anything but a performer."\
[Hello, fair readers! Thanks for stopping by, I hope you enjoyed your stay! Please, let me know what you think! I liked this story too much to let it fester in my Uncompleted Works folder, even if it isn't yet the grand story I wanted it to be. That being said, there may, at some indeterminate time in the future, be more to the story so... stay tuned?]