Fandom: White Collar
Rating: NC-17 (pre-slash)
Characters: Peter Burke, Neal Caffrey
Spoilers: Pilot
Warnings/Triggers: Brief mention of prison rape
Word Count: ~ 1500
Summary: His only weakness is love. And for love, there is nothing that Neal wouldn't risk.
During his criminal heyday, Neal didn't randomly steal things, every heist, every job was carefully planned. Early on, he learned that food, alcohol, women, sex were all distractions when he was working a job. Pick a pocket just for the hell of it? Not unless you want to bring everything crashing down. No matter how good you are, there's always the risk of the unknown. That's not to say that Neal wasn't above taking advantage of a situation and improvising, but that's a completely different thing.
One would be forgiven for thinking that incarceration took its toll on Neal's self-control. Being in the system, surrendering to the ridged discipline of prison, when to wake, when to sleep, when to eat, movements restricted at every moment, would have worn him down to the point that when he gained some measure of freedom (a wide measure, even with the restrictions and the tracker), Neal would have indulged himself at any opportunity.
That couldn't be further from the truth. Neal still keeps all his appetites under careful control.
His only weakness is love. And for love, there is nothing that Neal wouldn't risk.
Neal couldn’t recall precisely when he fell in love with Peter Burke. It was some time during the first year of their cat and mouse game. The episode in Venice, on the Rialto Bridge may have started it. Peter was so real, so solid – Neal jumped because he could, but he also jumped because in that first instant, he wondered what it would be like to run right into the man’s arms. Then there was the time in Prague, when Peter was literally seconds from grabbing him - the only thing that saved Neal from a long plane ride back to the States in economy and wearing handcuffs was a sturdy awning directly under the window of his third floor apartment. Neal almost didn't take that leap; the expression on Peter's face was ... something.
After Prague, Neal made the conscious effort to forget about that look. He concentrated on the jobs, on Kate, on always staying several steps ahead of the FBI and Special Agent Peter Burke, until Special Agent Peter Burke somehow ended up on the ground floor and two steps ahead of Neal. Maybe Neal fell in love because there was no place to jump out of.
Sitting next to Peter in the back of the FBI-issued sedan, hands cuffed, Neal became embarrassingly aroused. Peter was just looking at him, saying nothing, and when he realized that they were breathing in sync, Neal nearly came in his pants.
He took that moment with him, through the arrest process, the interrogation, which was a major disappointment for Neal, since Peter was not on the interview team once the US Attorney's Office took over, and his trial. The moment and the feelings were completely separate from all the moments and all the feelings he had for Kate. Kate was love obtained - perfect in fulfilled joy. Peter was that which he could never have - and thus much safer to think about behind the steel bars and the foot-thick cement walls.
After the trial and while awaiting sentencing, Neal shut himself down. It was better and safer not to feel anything. Seeing Kate every week kept him sane, but those visits didn't inspire him afterwards. Most prisoners would go back to their cells and beat off for hours after seeing the wife or girlfriend.
Neal didn't - he wouldn’t. At first, because it hurt too damn much to see Kate and then only to have a clichéd substitute for her. Afterwards, after his transfer to maximum security (and what a joke that was), after the rape and the physical recuperation and the isolation, Neal couldn't bear the thought of touching himself. Everything seemed dirty and he didn't want to associate Kate and her beauty and their love with that.
But four years is a long time. Eventually, something within Neal began to recover. Maybe it was playing the long con -- becoming the bad ass who had the pelvis of one rapist crushed, the fingers of another amputated and the right arm of a third ripped clean off -- help restore something of his dignity and his sense of self-worth.
Neal was in prison for fourteen months the first time he woke up with an erection that wasn't simply the morning piss-hard. He couldn't immediately recall the dream responsible for his body's reaction, but it came to him in bits and pieces during the day. It was about Peter.
What Neal remembered wasn’t sex as much as companionship. The doing of ordinary things, the things that Neal didn’t ordinarily do. Mid-morning, he remembered dreaming about walking a dog in a park. Peter was holding the dog’s leash and Neal was holding onto Peter. When he thought about that, Neal imagined Peter owning something big and friendly, like a collie or a golden retriever or a black Labrador. Sometime after noon, Neal remembered a part of the dream where he and Peter went grocery shopping in some large, brightly lit suburban supermarket. They may have argued about buying cereal or star fruit or the merits of premium ice cream or the dangers of pre-packaged ground beef – but the argument was not as important as the feeling of being in that store and pushing that wagon up and down the aisles.
Later in the day, after conferring with some of his “lieutenants” in the yard (being a bad ass meant using others to carry out your commands), more of the dream came back to him. He was sitting with Peter on a couch, watching a movie. They had a big bowl of popcorn between them. There was a woman sitting on the floor, and the dog had its head in her lap. The woman was or was not Kate; all he could see of her was the top of her head and a mane of long, dark hair. They laughed at the movie and threw popcorn at the screen.
In the hour between lock down and lights out, before he made another tally mark on the wall, Neal made a quick pencil sketch of his brightest memory of Peter – the instant when they both realized who the other was – that moment on the Rialto Bridge. He finished it just as Bobby lumbered by and Neal had to turn off the light. In the darkness, he tore the drawing into strips and then each strip into six precisely sized squares. Through the night, Neal rolled those squares between his fingers until the bits of disassociated lines and shadings wore off.
Over the next three years, Neal frequently dreamed about Peter Burke, and he found a way to keep Peter thinking about him. A few packs of cigarettes got him access to an unmonitored computer, and he sent an email to Mozzie. A stolen credit card number bought a personal history report which was delivered, encoded, in a parcel from Kate. The report had everything including Peter’s address, his birthday, his wife’s name and their anniversary and even a listing of his family members and their addresses and birthdays. Neal memorized Peter’s information and destroyed that report, like he destroyed the drawings he made of Peter after each dream. Every year, he sent hand drawn cards to Peter – for Christmas, for his birthday, for his anniversary. The cards said nothing personal, they were just Neal’s insurance that Peter never forgot about him.
Early on, he had made contingency plans for an escape. It was full of holes and despite the horrors he suffered, four years was a lot better than the ten or fifteen or longer that he’d get when (not if) the U.S. Marshals caught him, so he never executed it. But love – his fatal weakness – overwhelmed his self-control, and when Kate said goodbye for good with less than six months left of his sentence, he put that plan into motion.
In the month it took to get the necessary pieces into place – the beard, the uniform (not even Moz could get him a reasonable facsimile of a prison guard badge – which was going to be the biggest flaw in the plan), the Chilton manual for the maintenance truck, Neal dreamed incessantly of Peter Burke. Maybe it was because he knew instinctively that once he got free, Peter would be chasing him again, even though fugitive recovery was the responsibility of the U.S. Marshals and not the FBI.
The stakes were way too high to be this distracted. He needed to find Kate first, and then go to ground. No cons, no scams, no thefts, no breadcrumbs for Peter to follow. His control was going to have to be absolute.
The night before he broke out, Neal had his first vividly sexual dream about Peter, and when he woke to sticky, soaked underwear, he felt doomed. He knew that no matter how far he ran, how well he hid, he’d never escape Peter, because Peter always caught him in his dreams.
FIN
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