Richards had been right. While the guard did end up being gone for the next few days, Smith behaved himself. Andrews was a no nonsense woman who barely said two words to him and never came into his cell. He only caught glimpses of her when he happened to open his eyes at the same time she was dropping off his tray. Her figure was different from Smith's and he noticed it right away. By then he'd migrated from the floor to his bed. The swelling had gone down from his face a bit as well, and he could see out of both eyes again, though one didn't work quite as well as the other at the moment. He hadn't moved much from there, his lungs and body not letting him. He was amazed he'd even been able to pull himself up onto the bed in his state.

Congestion had all but stolen his capacity to breathe and he spent most of his time just reminding his lungs to keep working. It was like working a long con, and he kept finding himself having to come up with clever ways to talk them into doing what he wanted. Andrews' arrival meant time for Neal to try and pull the broken pieces of himself together. It was slow work, but he was managing.

On the night before Richards was due back (Neal was back to regular meal trays and therefore some sense of time), Smith visited his cell.

"On your feet, maggot," the man said, tossing Neal's shoes at his chest. His sling was off and he was able to turn in time to avoid the shoes striking his bad arm. Smith didn't seem to realize or care and stood there with his arms crossed while Neal slipped on his shoes and stood up.

"Turn around. Face the wall. Hands on the rivets." Neal did as he was told, though he knew what was coming next. Sure enough, Smith manhandled his wrists into a pair of cuffs and the pain was enough to make Neal cry out. He was yanked away from the wall by his bad arm and forced out into the hall. The guard station at the end was empty. Shift change. Neal was on his own.

"Where are we going," he ground out around the nearly unbearable pain. It was so intense, Neal was worried he might pass out. At least his legs were free.

"The warden decided it was high time you had some yard time."

Neal was pushed up the stairs and down the empty corridors of the prison. Guards at their checkpoints greeted Smith with varying degrees of emotion ranging from the disgusted to the semi-friendly. The farther they went, the more the prison opened up until Neal could spy barred windows, the darkness outside them indicating night. When they came to a bolted door, Smith fished a set of keys out of his pocket and unlocked it. Neal was immediately hit with a blast of winter wind that made him cough. Still healing cuts began to sting and the bones in his arm started to ache even more, if that was possible.

"Enjoy your yard time."

Smished pushed him forward so violently, Neal lost his footing and fell rather than walked into the yard. The door was slammed shut behind him and suddenly he found himself alone in an open courtyard that appeared to be roofed by chain link fencing. Towers rose up at the east and west corners, their turrets lit from within and patrolled by officers with shotguns. Warning bells went off in Neal's head like tornado sirens as he loosened an object he'd been hiding in one of the sleeves of his jumpsuit for days. It was a paperclip. One of the small ones. Small enough for a pissed off Marshal to miss as it slid into his pocket. Slim enough tuck up against his gums while Brutus conducted his cavity search and was too distracted by Smith to check properly. The one no one had discovered because Smith had rushed him through Intake and he was so very good at hiding things. He used that small little paperclip now to uncuff himself. It was tortuous work with his broken arm, but Neal had a feeling that he wasn't going to be by himself in this yard for much longer. Being cuffed and helpless was not an option.

He shrank into one shadowed corner of the yard where the pools of light the overhead lamps threw did not reach and tried to figure out if he was alone or not.

His eyes played tricks on him, naturally, and matrixed all sorts of images out of the places the light did not reach. One solitary basketball hoop stood sentry over the yard. The tables and bleachers for sitting seemed like animals stalking him in the night, but there didn't appear to be anyone lurking in the shadows. The temperature had to be well below freezing now and pretty soon Neal was shivering. Perhaps that was Smith's endgame. To leave him out here to freeze to death. How long would they have to wait to bury him in the graveyard behind the prison? Spring when the ground thawed? It would be nice to be buried in the spring.

But Smith's endgame was not to have Neal freeze to death in one corner of the yard. It was much more poetic than that. He'd been standing there shivering for about five minutes before the door that he'd been shoved through opened again. Light poured out into the yard and painted a yellow rectangle on the frozen ground. A figure appeared, darkening the doorway, and then stepped through. Smith's voice echoed across the yard.

"He's all yours, Forsythe. Compliments of Leech."

Neal's heart sputtered in his chest as the door slammed shut again and he suddenly found himself alone with the one man he'd been hoping to never see again. A man he betrayed. A man who looked a lot bigger and much more menacing than Neal remembered. He inched himself further back into the shadows, cursing when the fencing moved as well and there was a tinkling of metal. Forsythe was standing in a pool of light and Neal did not miss it when the art thief turned his head in the direction of the sound.

Shit.

Forsythe fished something long and slender out of his pocket and stalked forward. Neal tried to figure out what it was, but couldn't see it properly. Not that he really needed to. He could guess what it was. What else would another inmate have lying around that he could use to murder another prisoner?

Neal was about to get shivved in prison, and he wasn't sure whether he wanted to laugh or cry about it.

Neal slunk along the fence, keeping himself in the shadows as Forsythe reached his corner to find it empty. The overhead lights were harsh and helping to conceal him from his old friend. Forsythe squinted out into the night, trying to decide which way Neal had gone.

"I know you're out there, Caffrey," he said.

Neal knew better than to answer.

"I got a message from Jimmy. Remember him?" Forsythe was turning around in a circle now. "You broke my kid brother's heart. He looked up to you, man. And now he's gonna rot in prison for what you did. I am going to rot in prison for what you did. So it"s time to pay the piper."

Forsythe was looking in the opposite direction of where Neal was headed, but it didn't matter. He felt the need to cough start building in his chest. The cold air was torture on his lungs. Nothing he did now was going to stop it, though he tried, and to the point that his eyes started watering and the moisture slid down his face like tears. He started, and that was all Forsythe needed to zero in on his exact location.

The sound of pounding feet reached his ears and Neal instinctively took off in the other direction. But days and days of endless beatings, sporadic trays of disgusting prison food and his own body were working against him.

Forsythe body slammed into the back of him, sending them both skittering across the gravel. The art thief was able to recover almost instantly, but Neal had his arm to worry about, and cried out into the night as Forsythe landed on it. He was flipped over onto his back where Forsythe repaid him for the scream with his fists. They rained down on Neal, nearly knocking him senseless. This momentary stunned silence was all Forstyhe needed to throw a leg over Neal and straddle him. In some burst of energy from some hidden bit of adrenaline still left in him, Neal flashed out his good arm and caught Forstyhes descending wrist with a hand. The shiv the man now held glinted in the lamplight, long and sharp, promising Neal an agonizing death. How would it feel going in, he wondered.

Immeasurable moments passed as Neal and Forsythe struggled over the shiv, Forsythe trying to push it down, Neal trying to stop it's descent with one trembling arm. But the shiv kept coming, the sharp end hovering just above his heart, in slow motion like a scene from the movies. Neal wasn't sure where the strength came from, maybe that same hidden place that kept telling him Peter might show up any moment now and save him, but he knew it wouldn't last long.

When Forsythe added his other hand to the mix, he knew it was over.

In one last desperate attempt to protect himself, he forced Forsythe's hand to the side and the shiv embedded itself into his shoulder just under his clavicle. Forsythe tried to pull it out and use it again, but Neal somehow beat him to it. He wrapped his hands around the handle, fully intending to pull it out of his own body and stab back into Forsythe's face if that's what it would take. Neal's old friend seemed to understand that this was his intention as well and rolled off of him in a hurry. Forsythe made it as far as the door before the sound of a gunshot split the chilly night air.

The blood coated shiv slipped from Neal's grip, falling to the ground at the exact same time as Kurt Forsythe's lifeless body. There was a bullet hole in the back of his head. Neal could only imagine what his face looked like now. No more shifty eyes or sly smile. Kurt Forsythe was dead.

Snowflakes had begun swirling down from the night sky. Neal turned his face to stare up at them as they lit ever so gently on his face. They landed on his nose and cheeks, as soft and as sweet as kisses. It was more kindness than anyone had shown him in days and he felt his eyes fill at the beauty of it. He'd been at the Bucks County Correctional Facility for seven days, if his calculations were correct, and he hadn't let himself cry over something other than pain that whole time. Not even once. Not after any of the beatings when Smith left him bleeding and battered on the floor of his cell, or the worst of the nights when his fever burned and his body shook with so much pain hallucinations of Peter appeared to try and comfort him. Not even when Richards walked out of his cell two days ago and took with him what really had ended up being Neal's last chance at reaching Peter. He hadn't shed a single real tear through any of it. But he did now. And it wasn't even over something sad. He wept for how beautiful the snowfall looked under the lamps of the prison yard. If he made it to heaven, he was going to tell Kate all about this moment.

"Medical Team to Sector Seven. Medical Team to Sector Seven."

Someone a few stories up had decorated a window with Christmas lights. Neal noticed them as people and voices began filling the yard. He watched them blink as a figure fell to their knees beside him and put pressure on his wound. He never used to care for the blinking ones. His mother had always found them gaudy and Neal had decided at a very young age that he did too. But now as he watched them dance merrily, he could kind of see the appeal. They made pretty shapes when his eyes finally lost focus and he realized he was going into shock. And he knew he would dream of them once the world went away and he was finally free of this living hell.

Neal let go and let the dreams take him. He dreamt of Peter, the real Peter, storming the gates of the prison like the knight in shining armor Neal had imagined, his steed decked out in those blinking lights. Elizabeth was there, too. And Mozzie and Alex. Kate even, though he knew she was dead. They were nice dreams, good dreams, and he didn't want to leave them, not even when people started lifting him up onto a gurney and a calloused hand slapped him hard across the face.