Fic: Safe House (White Collar, PG, 2200 words)
Title: Safe House
Author: Flora
Rating: PG
Characters/Pairings: Kate/Neal, Mozzie
Word Count: 2200
Warnings/Spoilers: Season 2
Summary: Nick always seemed too perfect to be real, a body like a Greek sculpture and a random selection of bad habits that were more quirky and artistic than irritating.
A/N: Written for run-the-con. Thank you to elrhiarhodan for the prompt, “a random selection of bad habits”. This turned out more sad than I intended. But there is cuddling!
Nick always left paintbrushes in the kitchen sink.
The thought flickers, a random memory as Kate ducks inside the darkened storage unit. Mozzie chains the door behind them, rusty metal clinking and sliding home as he sets the locks.
This place doesn’t have a kitchen, or a sink, but Neal still leaves bottles of highly specialized inks and chemicals on the floor; one of these days she’s going to kick them over.
He drops the poster tube on Mozzie’s dusty couch, turns to grin at her as Mozzie turns on the light.
Nick came to bed in his painting clothes, half the time; she’d wake to find viridian streaks staining the pillowcase, rose and indigo in rumpled half-dried splotches on the sheets, like she’d spent the night making love to a rainbow or a bleeding sunset sky.
She’s almost stopped calling him Nick, by now.
(It’s been three months.)
The sky is grey and fading fast outside; none of the last light finds its way into the safe house, through Mozzie’s blackout curtains.
Kate sinks onto a stack of crates beside the darkened window, picks up a deck of cards and cuts it once, casual. She tries to shuffle the way Neal taught her but her fingers are numb and shaky; the cards fly out of her hands, laughing whispers as they fall and scatter over the concrete floor.
“I’m fine,” she snaps, at Mozzie’s look.
She was fine this afternoon; she smiled and touched the desk clerk’s shoulder at the museum, slipped two fingers into his suit pocket and lifted that key like she’d rehearsed.
“It’s all hand-eye coordination,” Neal told her, when they practiced. “If you can paint, you can do this.”
Neal approaches theft like any other art; any job worth doing is worth doing with style. (It’s something he shares with his elusive alter ego.)
When Nick worked on a project he took over the entire room, whether he was painting or cooking dinner; he did nothing without throwing all of himself into it; he liked to spread out, to surround himself with his work.
(Nick always seemed too perfect to be real, a body like a Greek sculpture and a random selection of bad habits that were more quirky and artistic than irritating.)
He could make all the mess disappear in minutes, though, stacking papers and folding easels and packing paints away in boxes. That he could take over a space so thoroughly and then as quickly erase all traces of himself used to unnerve her. Something about him was as insubstantial and as powerful as the wind, as necessary as air and as impossible to hold; she half expected he wouldn’t stay long.
(Adler was the closest thing she had to family, then; he was the stable rock after her father died, or so she'd thought.)
“You were brilliant,” Neal says now, behind her; she’s not sure she’d go that far but she did her part today and she did it right. She got the key and now there’s a half-a-million-dollar stolen painting rolled up in a poster tube on the couch.
(But the rock dissolved into sand at the end and all her firm foundations with it, while the wind lifted her in a tornado’s embrace and carried her away, set her down gently when she would have fallen.)
It’s her third job with them, and the first she hasn’t nearly wrecked with some rookie mistake.
“Moz already talked to the fence,” he says. “We’ll lay low here for a day or two and then he’ll be ready to move it.”
She’s twenty-four years old and until three months ago she’d never gotten so much as a parking ticket; she’s waiting for the guilt to hit, but it hasn’t yet.
(She’s not in Kansas anymore.)
Rain falls on the corrugated iron roof, beating like a hundred tiny snares, the heavy smell of it drifting with a cold breeze under the door and mingling with the smell of salt and sludge off the docks. “Laying low” means the three of them in this storage unit in the corner of a warehouse by the water; there’s a restroom with a fairly easy lock on the other side of the building, and a single outlet drawing electricity from somewhere it shouldn’t be, thanks to Mozzie and some clandestine rewiring.
Neal smooths his hands along her shoulders, lifting her hair gently out of the way and digging his thumbs into the base of her neck. She leans back, tense and still shivering; her hands are shaking but his are steady, strong and sure and delicate like he’s shaping clay or marble.
“We’re okay here,” he says softly, planting a kiss on her neck. “Nobody followed us.”
“I know,” she says, and then, again, “I’m fine, really.”
She’s still learning how she fits into this little crime family; some other time she’d be annoyed at the close quarters, but right now she feels safe, staring at Neal and Mozzie and the concrete floor and the blackout curtains and the bare bulb throwing yellow light at the rust and water stains on the walls. It’s a luxury, this feeling, and one she’s never fully appreciated before.
She’s never had anything to compare it to.
“After the job’s done is the right time to get the shakes,” Mozzie says, in that slightly put-out tone she’s starting to recognize as grudging approval. He’s opening a bottle, now, pouring three shots and offering her one. “But that’s an eighty dollar shot of whiskey and if you spill it -”
She doesn’t. As far as Kate can tell, Mozzie spends all of his ill-gotten gains on booze and coffee and Russian military surplus gear; art supplies and decent food come out of Neal’s share.
The coffee and the booze are really good. (She doesn’t know enough about Russian military surplus to judge its quality. She suspects she’s going to learn.)
She remembers her heart jumping into her mouth as they walked past security, one of the museum guards turning to follow her with his eyes. Half her mind has been listening for sirens all day, hyperaware and frayed. But after a second shot the alcohol throws a soft curtain over it all, and Neal’s fingers are slowly wringing the last of the terrified adrenaline from her shoulders.
“We’re okay,” he says again. And then, “You know, you don’t have to help with any of this if you don’t -”
She smiles but there’s an edge to it; he’s said this before. She could take a waitressing job somewhere and he’d keep all his con supplies at Mozzie’s and never bring any of it near her. She thinks Mozzie would even prefer it that way; he might admit she’s made progress but he’s still not happy being held back by an amateur on the team.
And maybe she wants to show Mozzie she can keep up with the best of them. Maybe she has too much integrity to live off of Neal’s illegally obtained wealth while keeping her own hands clean. Or maybe she wants to know Neal, to share all his secrets.
Mozzie pours a third time and then starts shuffling through a pile of DVDs in another crate; he glances up at her as she stands, swaying slightly. “Do you speak Russian?”
“I took French.”
Mozzie gives her a baffled look in reply, as if the thought of only knowing one foreign language makes no sense at all. Maybe he thinks most normal people speak at least twelve. He shakes his head and drops another DVD onto the reject pile. “No subtitles in French, either. That leaves killer robots or government conspiracy files revealed?”
Neal tugs her onto the couch, sitting at one end; she stretches out, settling her head on his lap, draws her legs up to make room for Mozzie to sit at the other end.
“I don’t think she’s ready for Moon Landing: Fact or Fiction? yet, Moz,” Neal says, tolerant and fond, and Kate makes a purring sound of gratitude.
“Terminator it is, then,” Mozzie says. He gets up and turns off the light, props the laptop on a crate in front of the couch, tilting it back and forth until they can all see the screen. He throws a pile of heavy wool blankets at them; Neal pulls them up to her chin and Mozzie shifts her feet out of the way and sits at the other end of the couch.
She’s exhausted, now, and more than a little drunk, weak and wrung-out and buzzing; Neal strokes her hair lightly and her attention drifts in and out as Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese run from the killer robots.
“I wonder if she hated him, sometimes.” Neal speaks carefully, as the closing credits start, but she doesn’t think he’s drunk. “He made her world a lot more scary.”
“He kept her alive,” Kate points out, but she doesn’t think they’re really talking about Sarah Connor, here.
Kate wasn’t a struggling waitress; she was a personal assistant to one of the most powerful men on Wall Street. She had a spacious apartment in downtown Manhattan and she could walk to some of the best museums in the country.
“He didn’t change her world,” she says softly. Now she’s living in a storage unit, and it’s a temporary home at best. But she wouldn’t go back if she could. “He only opened her eyes. I think she’d rather know what’s really out there in the dark.”
She sits up as Mozzie pours more whiskey for both of them; Neal shakes his head, declining.
“The feds came to see me, the day Adler left,” she says, slowly. “Did I ever tell you that?”
Neal nods, and Mozzie looks up; she’s mentioned the fact once or twice, in passing. Adler was gone and all her savings with him; she’d told Neal to get lost, the first time he told her his name. She’d stalked home in tears to find a black car and two men in trench coats waiting at her apartment.
“They were very thorough,” she says, shaping the words precisely. “I gave them my laptop. Showed them all my work files, told them everything I knew about the bastard.” The whiskey burns, fierce and smooth, going down. “Where he liked to go on vacation. His favorite airlines, his favorite hotels in the Caribbean.” She laughs, but it’s soft and bitter and distant. “I remember thinking he’s not getting away with this.”
She leans back, lets her head fall onto Neal’s lap again; his face is half in shadow, cast in blue and charcoal by the light from the laptop screen. “When they were about to leave I asked, what happens now?”
She can see the two agents in the slanted fall of light from the wide windows in her old apartment; she doesn’t remember their names. They were busy and it was a hard case and she wasn’t the only one who’d lost money, who’d lost everything but rent was coming due in a week and she had nothing. Her father was dead and Adler was gone and her boyfriend was not who he said he was and they were cops and they were supposed to fix this. She didn’t mean to be rude or impatient. She only wanted to know if there was a chance she’d get any of her money back, eventually.
“You know what they said?” She looks at Mozzie and he waits. “They said now we talk to the rest of your co-workers and we go through the files and we see if you’re telling the truth.” She lets out a breath, a soft harsh sound that’s supposed to be a laugh but isn’t. “And that’s when I knew I wasn’t a victim. I was a suspect.”
It shouldn't have been a surprise, not really.
Neal’s eyes are soft and sad; he mourns her lost illusions more than she does, sometimes. The warehouse is silent; in the dark she hears the rustling of sleepy pigeons somewhere near the roof, the low murmur of a passing car's radio fading along the street outside.
“I don’t mind - this,” she says, waving an unsteady hand at the gear spread around the unit. “I was - that girl was an idiot,” she says, remembering her own stunned shock as the agents walked out. “I don’t miss her. If I’m going to be treated like a criminal anyway, I’d rather be the one walking away with the money, and not the one left behind looking like a fool.”
“We’ll get it back,” Neal says, quietly. Mozzie gives her a long look; she half expects him to say something like they're feds, what did you expect? but he only offers a tiny nod that might signal something like respect.
Kate catches Neal’s hand and laces her fingers through his.
“This is home, now,” she says. She doesn’t want her old life back, and she doesn’t want Nick Halden; she wants Neal, and the light of pride and mischief in his eyes when she gets the card tricks right or picks a pocket cleanly; she wants all the secrets he can teach her. She wants to know how to do what he does; she wants to never be a mark again.
“That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t appreciate a safe house with a hot shower next time -”
Mozzie rolls his eyes at that, and Neal laughs, finally.
"Get some sleep," Mozzie says, as Neal tucks the blankets more securely around her. And then, very quietly, like he's not sure he wants her to hear, "You did good today."
Author: Flora
Rating: PG
Characters/Pairings: Kate/Neal, Mozzie
Word Count: 2200
Warnings/Spoilers: Season 2
Summary: Nick always seemed too perfect to be real, a body like a Greek sculpture and a random selection of bad habits that were more quirky and artistic than irritating.
A/N: Written for run-the-con. Thank you to elrhiarhodan for the prompt, “a random selection of bad habits”. This turned out more sad than I intended. But there is cuddling!
Nick always left paintbrushes in the kitchen sink.
The thought flickers, a random memory as Kate ducks inside the darkened storage unit. Mozzie chains the door behind them, rusty metal clinking and sliding home as he sets the locks.
This place doesn’t have a kitchen, or a sink, but Neal still leaves bottles of highly specialized inks and chemicals on the floor; one of these days she’s going to kick them over.
He drops the poster tube on Mozzie’s dusty couch, turns to grin at her as Mozzie turns on the light.
Nick came to bed in his painting clothes, half the time; she’d wake to find viridian streaks staining the pillowcase, rose and indigo in rumpled half-dried splotches on the sheets, like she’d spent the night making love to a rainbow or a bleeding sunset sky.
She’s almost stopped calling him Nick, by now.
(It’s been three months.)
The sky is grey and fading fast outside; none of the last light finds its way into the safe house, through Mozzie’s blackout curtains.
Kate sinks onto a stack of crates beside the darkened window, picks up a deck of cards and cuts it once, casual. She tries to shuffle the way Neal taught her but her fingers are numb and shaky; the cards fly out of her hands, laughing whispers as they fall and scatter over the concrete floor.
“I’m fine,” she snaps, at Mozzie’s look.
She was fine this afternoon; she smiled and touched the desk clerk’s shoulder at the museum, slipped two fingers into his suit pocket and lifted that key like she’d rehearsed.
“It’s all hand-eye coordination,” Neal told her, when they practiced. “If you can paint, you can do this.”
Neal approaches theft like any other art; any job worth doing is worth doing with style. (It’s something he shares with his elusive alter ego.)
When Nick worked on a project he took over the entire room, whether he was painting or cooking dinner; he did nothing without throwing all of himself into it; he liked to spread out, to surround himself with his work.
(Nick always seemed too perfect to be real, a body like a Greek sculpture and a random selection of bad habits that were more quirky and artistic than irritating.)
He could make all the mess disappear in minutes, though, stacking papers and folding easels and packing paints away in boxes. That he could take over a space so thoroughly and then as quickly erase all traces of himself used to unnerve her. Something about him was as insubstantial and as powerful as the wind, as necessary as air and as impossible to hold; she half expected he wouldn’t stay long.
(Adler was the closest thing she had to family, then; he was the stable rock after her father died, or so she'd thought.)
“You were brilliant,” Neal says now, behind her; she’s not sure she’d go that far but she did her part today and she did it right. She got the key and now there’s a half-a-million-dollar stolen painting rolled up in a poster tube on the couch.
(But the rock dissolved into sand at the end and all her firm foundations with it, while the wind lifted her in a tornado’s embrace and carried her away, set her down gently when she would have fallen.)
It’s her third job with them, and the first she hasn’t nearly wrecked with some rookie mistake.
“Moz already talked to the fence,” he says. “We’ll lay low here for a day or two and then he’ll be ready to move it.”
She’s twenty-four years old and until three months ago she’d never gotten so much as a parking ticket; she’s waiting for the guilt to hit, but it hasn’t yet.
(She’s not in Kansas anymore.)
Rain falls on the corrugated iron roof, beating like a hundred tiny snares, the heavy smell of it drifting with a cold breeze under the door and mingling with the smell of salt and sludge off the docks. “Laying low” means the three of them in this storage unit in the corner of a warehouse by the water; there’s a restroom with a fairly easy lock on the other side of the building, and a single outlet drawing electricity from somewhere it shouldn’t be, thanks to Mozzie and some clandestine rewiring.
Neal smooths his hands along her shoulders, lifting her hair gently out of the way and digging his thumbs into the base of her neck. She leans back, tense and still shivering; her hands are shaking but his are steady, strong and sure and delicate like he’s shaping clay or marble.
“We’re okay here,” he says softly, planting a kiss on her neck. “Nobody followed us.”
“I know,” she says, and then, again, “I’m fine, really.”
She’s still learning how she fits into this little crime family; some other time she’d be annoyed at the close quarters, but right now she feels safe, staring at Neal and Mozzie and the concrete floor and the blackout curtains and the bare bulb throwing yellow light at the rust and water stains on the walls. It’s a luxury, this feeling, and one she’s never fully appreciated before.
She’s never had anything to compare it to.
“After the job’s done is the right time to get the shakes,” Mozzie says, in that slightly put-out tone she’s starting to recognize as grudging approval. He’s opening a bottle, now, pouring three shots and offering her one. “But that’s an eighty dollar shot of whiskey and if you spill it -”
She doesn’t. As far as Kate can tell, Mozzie spends all of his ill-gotten gains on booze and coffee and Russian military surplus gear; art supplies and decent food come out of Neal’s share.
The coffee and the booze are really good. (She doesn’t know enough about Russian military surplus to judge its quality. She suspects she’s going to learn.)
She remembers her heart jumping into her mouth as they walked past security, one of the museum guards turning to follow her with his eyes. Half her mind has been listening for sirens all day, hyperaware and frayed. But after a second shot the alcohol throws a soft curtain over it all, and Neal’s fingers are slowly wringing the last of the terrified adrenaline from her shoulders.
“We’re okay,” he says again. And then, “You know, you don’t have to help with any of this if you don’t -”
She smiles but there’s an edge to it; he’s said this before. She could take a waitressing job somewhere and he’d keep all his con supplies at Mozzie’s and never bring any of it near her. She thinks Mozzie would even prefer it that way; he might admit she’s made progress but he’s still not happy being held back by an amateur on the team.
And maybe she wants to show Mozzie she can keep up with the best of them. Maybe she has too much integrity to live off of Neal’s illegally obtained wealth while keeping her own hands clean. Or maybe she wants to know Neal, to share all his secrets.
Mozzie pours a third time and then starts shuffling through a pile of DVDs in another crate; he glances up at her as she stands, swaying slightly. “Do you speak Russian?”
“I took French.”
Mozzie gives her a baffled look in reply, as if the thought of only knowing one foreign language makes no sense at all. Maybe he thinks most normal people speak at least twelve. He shakes his head and drops another DVD onto the reject pile. “No subtitles in French, either. That leaves killer robots or government conspiracy files revealed?”
Neal tugs her onto the couch, sitting at one end; she stretches out, settling her head on his lap, draws her legs up to make room for Mozzie to sit at the other end.
“I don’t think she’s ready for Moon Landing: Fact or Fiction? yet, Moz,” Neal says, tolerant and fond, and Kate makes a purring sound of gratitude.
“Terminator it is, then,” Mozzie says. He gets up and turns off the light, props the laptop on a crate in front of the couch, tilting it back and forth until they can all see the screen. He throws a pile of heavy wool blankets at them; Neal pulls them up to her chin and Mozzie shifts her feet out of the way and sits at the other end of the couch.
She’s exhausted, now, and more than a little drunk, weak and wrung-out and buzzing; Neal strokes her hair lightly and her attention drifts in and out as Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese run from the killer robots.
“I wonder if she hated him, sometimes.” Neal speaks carefully, as the closing credits start, but she doesn’t think he’s drunk. “He made her world a lot more scary.”
“He kept her alive,” Kate points out, but she doesn’t think they’re really talking about Sarah Connor, here.
Kate wasn’t a struggling waitress; she was a personal assistant to one of the most powerful men on Wall Street. She had a spacious apartment in downtown Manhattan and she could walk to some of the best museums in the country.
“He didn’t change her world,” she says softly. Now she’s living in a storage unit, and it’s a temporary home at best. But she wouldn’t go back if she could. “He only opened her eyes. I think she’d rather know what’s really out there in the dark.”
She sits up as Mozzie pours more whiskey for both of them; Neal shakes his head, declining.
“The feds came to see me, the day Adler left,” she says, slowly. “Did I ever tell you that?”
Neal nods, and Mozzie looks up; she’s mentioned the fact once or twice, in passing. Adler was gone and all her savings with him; she’d told Neal to get lost, the first time he told her his name. She’d stalked home in tears to find a black car and two men in trench coats waiting at her apartment.
“They were very thorough,” she says, shaping the words precisely. “I gave them my laptop. Showed them all my work files, told them everything I knew about the bastard.” The whiskey burns, fierce and smooth, going down. “Where he liked to go on vacation. His favorite airlines, his favorite hotels in the Caribbean.” She laughs, but it’s soft and bitter and distant. “I remember thinking he’s not getting away with this.”
She leans back, lets her head fall onto Neal’s lap again; his face is half in shadow, cast in blue and charcoal by the light from the laptop screen. “When they were about to leave I asked, what happens now?”
She can see the two agents in the slanted fall of light from the wide windows in her old apartment; she doesn’t remember their names. They were busy and it was a hard case and she wasn’t the only one who’d lost money, who’d lost everything but rent was coming due in a week and she had nothing. Her father was dead and Adler was gone and her boyfriend was not who he said he was and they were cops and they were supposed to fix this. She didn’t mean to be rude or impatient. She only wanted to know if there was a chance she’d get any of her money back, eventually.
“You know what they said?” She looks at Mozzie and he waits. “They said now we talk to the rest of your co-workers and we go through the files and we see if you’re telling the truth.” She lets out a breath, a soft harsh sound that’s supposed to be a laugh but isn’t. “And that’s when I knew I wasn’t a victim. I was a suspect.”
It shouldn't have been a surprise, not really.
Neal’s eyes are soft and sad; he mourns her lost illusions more than she does, sometimes. The warehouse is silent; in the dark she hears the rustling of sleepy pigeons somewhere near the roof, the low murmur of a passing car's radio fading along the street outside.
“I don’t mind - this,” she says, waving an unsteady hand at the gear spread around the unit. “I was - that girl was an idiot,” she says, remembering her own stunned shock as the agents walked out. “I don’t miss her. If I’m going to be treated like a criminal anyway, I’d rather be the one walking away with the money, and not the one left behind looking like a fool.”
“We’ll get it back,” Neal says, quietly. Mozzie gives her a long look; she half expects him to say something like they're feds, what did you expect? but he only offers a tiny nod that might signal something like respect.
Kate catches Neal’s hand and laces her fingers through his.
“This is home, now,” she says. She doesn’t want her old life back, and she doesn’t want Nick Halden; she wants Neal, and the light of pride and mischief in his eyes when she gets the card tricks right or picks a pocket cleanly; she wants all the secrets he can teach her. She wants to know how to do what he does; she wants to never be a mark again.
“That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t appreciate a safe house with a hot shower next time -”
Mozzie rolls his eyes at that, and Neal laughs, finally.
"Get some sleep," Mozzie says, as Neal tucks the blankets more securely around her. And then, very quietly, like he's not sure he wants her to hear, "You did good today."