Title: Let the Games Begin

Author: Jedi Buttercup

Rating: T

Disclaimer: The words are mine; the worlds are not.

Summary: In the window of time between their second and third meetings, Neal Caffrey carefully avoided doing any obvious research into the deliciously mysterious Buffy Summers. 2700 words.

Spoilers: Post-Chosen; late S2/early S3-ish for White Collar

Notes: For xgirl2222, for Day 21 in Wishlist 2012, for the prompt of a sequel to "The Truth That is Given Us".

In the window of time between their second and third meetings, Neal Caffrey carefully avoided doing any obvious research into the deliciously mysterious Buffy Summers. He had a feeling she might be expecting it, and he hated to think that a woman who could shift masks with such ease would find a professional such as himself in any way predictable.

Unfortunately, that meant not mentioning her to Peter or Elizabeth. Not yet. He'd given Ms. Summers his current name and his actual phone number, and with that, it would be very easy for her to connect him to his consultant's position at the FBI. If she was as savvy as she'd seemed at first glance, an official inquiry would very swiftly tip her off to his investigation.

Besides, an official FBI background search probably wouldn't be of much use, anyway. While Neal wouldn't put it past the government to actually have an agency or division dedicated to the supernatural, it would certainly be too classified for him to be told about, and whether they did or didn't, secrecy and disinformation would lead to the same result. Whatever Peter might come up with would be sanitized to an implausible degree, carefully shaped to support the plastic and sunshine facade he'd met in the museum. And while the professional in Neal knew both sides of her had to be equally real... the side he wanted to know more about was the goddess who'd saved his life, not the petite, insubstantial beauty with the taste for poetic Western art.

So where to start? With that initial point of contact: why had she been there to begin with? Neal had been attacked by monsters out of myth, and rescued by a woman whose grace and skill belonged in the pages of a fairy tale. If they hadn't been tracking him- and while he couldn't completely rule it out, he didn't think he'd crossed anyone lately who might send goons of any stripe after him, much less actual vampires- then they had to have been staking out that gallery for a reason. Search backward from that purpose, and who knew what he might find?

He opened his laptop, then pulled up the gallery's webpage, and began searching through its publicly advertised exhibits for items with particularly lurid or fantastic attributions.

He was still at it when Mozzie arrived several hours later, attention drawn- once again- to the manuscript that had drawn him there in the first place, prominently displayed under glass in the gallery's main room. Other works of literary art adorned the walls, drawn from the rare book collection of the gallery's owner: hand-painted tarot cards from a bygone era, folding merchant calendars with illustrated lettering, historically significant legal certificates filled out in elegant calligraphy, and early drafts of famous poets' work, to name a few.

Neal was a great admirer of the skill that went into such handcrafted masterpieces, the techniques and attention to detail integral to their creation that had become rarer and rarer with each advance in modern technology. So few people had the time or desire to invest in such crafts any more- leaving the field wide open for those who knew how to seize opportunity when it presented itself. But Neal loved the art for its own sake as well, and among these works, his favorite was definitely the illustrated notebook displayed in the room's center.

He could forge a duplicate, certainly; he even knew the name of a collector that would snap up the original in a heartbeat. An organization known only as the Council had been dredging the literary black market for decades, first to supplement a private archive in London, and in more recent years to replace it after someone had- according to rumor- bombed their first collection to ash. Neal didn't like to think about how much irreplaceable art had been lost to the world that day. But they paid well, and the more fantastical the document, the better. Still... he'd only gone there to look that night, not to take; there was no current bounty on the manuscript worth burning his bridges with the FBI for.

The subject of the notebook suggested a different motive, though, one that made a crazy amount of sense in retrospect. It was filled with inked sketches and elegantly inscribed descriptions of imaginary beings that might best be described as demons. If vampires were real... what other impossibilities were true? Could something in that book be valuable in the right hands... or wrong, as the case may be?

"Earth to Neal," Mozzie interrupted, waving a glass of a fine red vintage under his nose, finally breaking his attention away from the laptop's screen.

"Oh, hey, Moz. Didn't hear you come in." Neal took the wine, noting its distinct bouquet with a certain amount of fond annoyance; Mozzie had found the bottles he'd been hoarding for a rainy day, again. "What's wrong?"

"Shouldn't I be the one asking that question?" his best friend asked pointedly, regarding him over the rim of his glass with a frown. "I've barely heard from you since you scouted that manuscript exhibit a week ago. And what do I find when I finally come to see for myself? You, researching the exhibit, yet again." He gestured with his free hand at the laptop's screen. "What gives?"

Neal pursed his lips, considering, then fortified himself with a long draught of the wine. "Moz... I know this might sound crazy, coming from me, but bear me out, for a minute. What do you know about vampires?"

"Vampires?" Mozzie's eyebrows arched incredulously up above the heavy black frame of his glasses- but there was a flicker of something in his eyes that convinced Neal he'd taken the right tack. "As in garlic and coffins, I vant to drink your blood, Dracula vampires? Pfft." He flapped a hand dismissively.

"Moz," Neal pressed him. "Come on. I'm serious. Imagine for a minute that someone you know, someone whose judgment you trust, actually saw one. Forget garlic and coffins; think yellow eyes and inhuman strength, instead. Where would such a person look to find more information? If they actually exist, someone has to have encountered them before- and survived to tell about it."

Moz gaped at him, then hurriedly finished off his own glass, throat working nervously. "Someone whose judgment you trust? You can't mean Agent Burke. I'd believe the Suit stumbled into a basement full of hallucinogenic spores before I believed he came to you with tales of vampires."

"Moz..." Neal sighed.

"No." Moz turned up his nose, gathering steam, even as a fine tremor shook the hand holding his glass. "I may have something of a reputation as a connoisseur of conspiracies, but even I don't believe in a secret underworld populated by bloodthirsty revenants and the young girls tasked by destiny to slay them!"

"Ah, but I never mentioned the girl," Neal raised a finger. "You know something. Spill."

"The girl?" Mozzie froze, eyes widening. "Someone- and by someone in this case, I'm now inferring you- actually met a Slayer? Here? What was she like?"

Slayer? Well that confirmed it; that was what the vampires had called her. The title didn't fit the California blonde in the knockoff designer wear- but it did fit the woman in the dark, comfortable clothes who'd knocked him flat on a rooftop and then danced her way effortlessly through their attackers.

"Beautiful," Neal replied, smirking at his friend. "Deadly. And apparently a fan of Breck. I met her on an investigation with Peter, a few days ago, and she's asked to meet me for coffee tomorrow."

"Coffee?" Moz choked, eyes widening further. "You? And a Slayer? On a week day? Oh, this is bad. Neal, you have to call her back and tell you can't go, this instant!"

"You're overreacting, Moz. She might be the best hand-to-hand fighter I've ever seen, and I'll admit the supernatural aspect threw me a little- but we're meeting in public. There shouldn't be any danger. I would have thought you'd be all over this!"

"Maybe if I didn't already know more than I ever wanted to," his friend replied, pacing back and forth in agitation. "I never talked to you about this stuff for a reason, Neal. Didn't you ever wonder why I was on my own when you met me? Or why I've always been so convinced my parents worked for the CIA? It's not just the conspiracies- my people have always been recruited for that sort of work. It comes with what we are. If I hadn't made my own way out into the world- I probably would have become a tool of the Man myself, whether I wanted to or not. And for what? Every time I run across one of those teenage death machines, I have to defend my right to exist, all over again. Again and again and again- because their turnover rate is atrocious. They're danger magnets, Neal; putting yourself in the orbit of one is just asking to put your name on the target list of beings more lethal than you can imagine. You've escaped the shadows this long; I'm not about to let you slip into them now."

It was Neal's turn to sit back, astonished at the frantic run of words. Was Mozzie saying- what was Mozzie saying? Neal froze on that question for a long moment, then shook off the whole 'my people' reference to deal with later.

"What do you mean, teenage death machines? The woman I met wasn't a teenager, Moz."

Mozzie froze in his pacing and turned his head slowly in Neal's direction. "Not a teenager...? Oh no. What did she look like?"

"Green eyes, bottle blonde, California accent? About this tall." Neal demonstrated with a gesture, holding a hand up horizontal to his chin.

"The Slayer?" Mozzie whimpered. "You've actually met her? Buffy Summers? And lived to tell about it?"

"That was the name she gave me," Neal confirmed.

Mozzie tottered over to the chair opposite Neal's, then collapsed into it. "I can see I'm not going to get out of this without explaining everything," he said, faintly. "Oh, my god. We're so doomed."

"We?" Neal repeated, shaking his head. In grasping after the trail of his mystery woman, it looked like he'd laid his hands on the tail of a tiger; good thing he appreciated a challenge.

He reached for the wine bottle, then carefully topped off both their glasses and fixed his friend with an intent look. "All right, then. Hit me with it."

"Buffy, what possessed you to give this man your name, much less ask him on a date?" Giles frowned at her as she tied the navy scarf around her throat as a jaunty accent to her sober, professionally styled dress- and incidentally, a deliberate reminder of a certain encounter on the rooftops of New York. "He's a confidence man, a convicted felon; and he's currently working with the White Collar division of the FBI as a consultant. If he chooses to turn the eyes of that agency upon your activities in the city..."

"He won't," she said, turning away from the mirror with a smile. "Actually, I was thinking about recruiting him. That compendium at the gallery? The last thing we need is another Moloch getting loose in the Internet; everything's so much more interconnected than it was back when Willow was scanning the Sunnydale library. If we could get him to forge a copy, then lock up the original..."

"Were you not listening?" Giles threw up his hands. "What's to stop him from reporting your offer, then claiming that the original is itself a forgery and disposing of it for his own unscrupulous purposes?"

"I rescued him from vampires, Giles," she scoffed. "He's not going to turn me over; he might be a criminal, but he's not that kind of guy. And besides, he was already scoping out the book. If we want to get our hands on it before the local Master gets fed up with sending goons and just outright steals it, then I think our best chance is to work with someone like Neal Caffrey."

"And you're certain you're not blinded by the man's attractiveness?" Giles raised a knowing eyebrow at her.

Buffy flushed. Okay, so she might have a bit of a thing for morally grey guys who wore their hearts on their sleeves, particularly when their eyes were so blue and their clothes so well tailored to such an amazing body... but she had learned better than to mistake lust for trust without further evidence. Spike had been an object lesson for her in a lot of ways- as had Riley, and the Immortal, and even Angel for that matter, not that Giles ever fixated on any of them when he got all lecture-y.

"Aw, Giles; I didn't know you swung that way," she replied, lightly. "I could set you up with him for a date instead, if you like." She batted her eyelashes.

Giles spluttered. "That is not what I... oh, for heaven's sake." He reached up as though to whip his glasses off, forgetting he wore contacts these days, then stared at his hand with a dismayed frown. "I'm simply concerned that you might be treading more dangerous waters than you know."

"Not to worry. I'll make sure Willow and the Slayers on duty know where I am at all times." She took the slim bangle bracelet Willow had enchanted for her out of her purse, then clicked it about her wrist, activating its tracking capabilities. She wasn't a big fan of having her every movement followed, but sometimes, the costs were outweighed by what she gained in return.

She wondered idly if Mr. Caffrey felt the same about his current career; then shook her head and settled the purse strap back on her shoulder. "So. How do I look?"

"Stunning, as always," Giles sighed, then endured a careful, heartfelt hug. "Be careful, my dear."

"The careful-est," she replied lightly, then walked out the door of the Council House to signal a cab.

He was already waiting when she reached the café; she'd expected as much. Slightly more unexpected was the faint sense of demonic essence that cramped at her gut as she walked in: a man in dark glasses, nondescript clothing, and a hat cowered behind a newspaper in a corner behind the nattily dressed con man. A friend of Neal's? But if he was- then why had Neal been so surprised to see vampires when she'd literally tripped over him scoping out the Travers notebook?

Curiouser and curiouser. She made the executive decision to temporarily ignore the observer, pending evidence that he was an actual threat, then approached Neal's table with a radiant smile.

Neal smiled back without hesitation as he rose to his feet, warm and welcoming and dazzling enough to make her nerves tingle from head to toe... and then his eyes dipped to the scarf, and the smile deepened, taking on shadows and layers enough to drown in.

He did know- knew something, at least. Buffy could see it in him now, sparking a frisson of danger along her nerves to keep the arousal company.

"Miss Summers," he said courteously, moving to pull out her chair for her.

"Mr. Caffrey," she replied, graciously. "It's good to see you again."

"Likewise," he replied, settling across from her; and of course, that was the moment when she noticed the navy handkerchief square in his suit pocket. "I was thrilled to receive your call."

Giles had been right: these were dangerous waters. But if Buffy had learned anything over her long career as a Slayer, it was that she needed a little spice to keep her going- despite the risks and painful past experiences- to keep her from getting ground flat under the weight of her destiny.

So carpe librum, then... and maybe a little carpe diem, while she was at it.

"I have a few more days in the city," she said, opening the conversation, "and it occurred to me that I should pick your brain about other artwork I should see before I go..."

-x-