White Collar Fic: Snowed In (G, 1600 words)
Title: Snowed In
Author: Flora
Rating: G
Characters/Pairings: Diana&Neal
Spoilers/Warnings: None
Word Count: 1600
Summary: This was not how Diana had planned on spending New Year's Eve, jumping off a moving train and hiking through a snowstorm. Written for
frith_in_thorns for wcpairings.
“I thought you said there’d be room service.”
Neal’s only response is an exhausted huff that might be a laugh. The shed is dark, and barely six feet square, a listing uninsulated structure beside a railroad track, overhung with creaking branches weighed down with snow.
Diana puts her weight on her good leg and slides down the wall to sit on the rough wooden floor. It’s the only shelter they’ve found in three hours’ walking; they need somewhere to rest that’s out of the wind and this will have to do.
She and Neal were supposed to meet a suspect on the express train to Boston that afternoon; Wilson insisted on meeting on the train. They should have had a taped confession by now. They should be settling into their seats for a nap while the Bureau office in Boston prepared to meet the train and take Wilson into custody.
They’d put Neal in charge of arranging the meet, which was their first mistake; he’d decided (without consulting her or Peter or anyone, damn him) to tell Wilson to meet them on the overnight local train instead, in the interest of being able to stop and spend the night at an upscale bed-and-breakfast instead of sleeping on board.
Local PD can arrest him just as easily as the feds in Boston, he’d said, and have you seen the website for this place? Would you rather spend the night on the train or in a suite with a hot tub?
He’d even made room reservations for the night.
That was before Wilson pulled a gun and cornered them in a baggage car. She’s pretty sure the outside doors on the train aren’t supposed to open while it’s moving, but Neal got them open somehow, just in time.
The train was passing along a rocky streambed in a forest thick with snow, deep into a cell phone dead zone; she landed hard enough to wrench her shoulder and sliced the back of her right calf open on a sharp rock.
The pain in her shoulder is annoying. Her feet are wet and by now completely numb. Her leg has stopped bleeding but over the past two hours putting weight on it is a breathless sharp pain. She didn't mention either to Neal; they couldn't rest in the open without freezing and she's pretty sure he's concealing injuries of his own.
His right hand is wrapped in a scarf, and he dropped the picks in the snow twice, trying to open the shed. She’d finally broken the latch off with a few sharp blows from a heavy rock.
The GPS watch Neal wears in place of his anklet was smashed in the fall, but she tells herself Peter will see where it stopped transmitting and know where to start looking.
The temperature is dropping but the snow wasn't thick enough to hide the tracks, picking out softly regular shapes of railroad ties; they were fine as long as they kept moving and they couldn’t get lost, but now they're both ready to drop.
“Patience,” Neal says now, stuffing what looks like a bunch of rags against the hole where the latch used to be; it's dark, save for the skittering white beam of her penlight, but it’s quieter, inside, out of the wind. “Blankets first.” He throws a pile of cloth at her, something that feels like rough wool and smells like a wet dog. Something has chewed holes in all the blankets, but if there were rats here once they seem to be long gone. “Then coffee.”
“Okay, that’s just mean.” The wind keens, high and lonely like a train whistle, but she knows no other trains will pass until 6 AM. A piece of roof shingle lifts every now and then with the wind, falling against the ceiling with a startling bang. “You said there’d be a hot tub and a massage. And tiramisu.”
This was not how she'd planned on spending New Year's Eve, jumping off a moving train and hiking through a snowstorm upstate.
He sits beside her, his shoulder warm against hers, and tucks the blankets around them both before pulling something out of his coat. “You’ll need to open this. I don’t think -” He holds up his bandaged hand.
“How bad is it?” she asks.
She feels his half shrug against her side. “Nothing we can fix here.” He presses a metal thermos into her hand. “Go on, open it.”
She unscrews the lid, expecting water - welcome, yes, but the cold would kill them before dehydration set in if they weren’t found before morning - and breathes in fragrant steam and the smell of hot coffee.
She blinks, breathing deeply before looking up to stare at Neal’s shadow in the dark; she hears a smile in his voice as he says, “Go on, drink before it gets cold.”
Warmth spreads through her, softening numbed fatigue. “I take back everything bad I’ve ever said about you.”
“Everything?”
“Well, most of it.” She takes another long gulp of coffee and passes the thermos to him.
When the coffee is gone he shifts around to sit facing her. “How bad is your leg?”
“All right as long as I don’t walk on it.” Her muscles have stiffened and locked up in only a few minutes of sitting down. “And I can’t feel my feet.”
Her tone is flat, neutral, as she brushes away melting snow caked around the laces of her shoes.
Neal shifts the blanket away from her feet. She doesn’t really want to see any damage the cold has done, but Neal is gently easing her shoes off and peeling away her wet socks.
Her mind tries to impose pattern and meaning on the sounds of wind tossing the branches outside, to hear in twigs falling on the roof some kind of conscious intent.
When she flicks the penlight toward her feet he wraps his hands around her ankles and says, “Don’t.” She can feel a slight pressure of his fingers against her ankle, but as his hands move lower she feels nothing at all. “It looks worse than it is. Trust me.”
“Since when are you the expert on frostbite?”
“Ask me again in three months and two weeks and I’ll tell you.”
She chuckles wearily. “Is that when the statute of limitations runs out?”
“It’s a good story.” He grins. “I’m looking forward to telling this one.”
She watches his hands, gently massaging one foot and then the other, watches her own breath form clouds in the weak beam of the penlight. After a moment he opens his coat and shifts her legs onto his lap, so her feet are tucked under his shirt against his bare skin.
The cut below her knee twinges at the movement, but she doesn’t feel any warmth in her toes.
“How are your feet?” she asks.
“I didn’t land in the stream.”
He sounds worried, and she tries wiggling her toes; her mind sends the command but she can’t feel if it’s obeyed.
Neal can, apparently; he laughs and says, “See, you’ll be fine.”
“That’s assuming Wilson didn’t jump out after us.” They’d been following the tracks since they jumped, and this is the only shelter but it’s not exactly well-hidden if they were followed.
“He didn’t.” Neal’s confidence surprises her. “Or if he did he’s in worse shape than we are. The train picked up speed pretty quickly just after we got off; we jumped at the slowest part of a curve in the tracks.”
Her brain is moving slowly in the cold, so it takes her a minute to process that. “You looked up the different speeds along the route?” Neal’s only response is a what, didn’t you? look. And then, as the next piece falls into place, “If we’d taken the express it would have been going too fast to jump.”
He nods. “That one slows down in one place, and that’s on a bridge over the river.”
He’s watching her, carefully; in the dim shadows cast by the penlight she still recognizes his look of you might have trusted me.
She sighs, sharp and exasperated. Part of her thinks she could have given him the benefit of the doubt, and not assumed he’d switched trains just to screw with the op for the sake of room service.
And part of her wants to say he might have trusted her enough to tell her what his real concerns were.
“Were you expecting him to try to shoot us?”
She knows that isn’t it before he shakes his head. “I don’t like getting into situations I don’t know how to get out of.”
He likes to keep his cards close, she knows, and he probably assumes some things are too obvious to require stating aloud.
She thinks she can feel her feet tingling. That’s going to hurt like hell soon, but right now it’s a faint prickle and it’s reassuring compared to no feeling at all.
She clicks off the penlight. The search team should be out there soon, she knows. They only have to stay awake for a few more hours.
She nudges Neal with her foot as his eyelids droop and he snaps awake with reassuring suddenness. "I don't want to wait three months and two weeks," she says. "We need to stay awake. Tell me the story."
Because few things will catch Neal's attention and keep him alert like the opportunity to show off.
"Diana." She can hear him grin in the dark, a warm hint of weary laughter. "Are you offering me an immunity deal?"
"Neal, we're alone in a snowstorm and we need to stay awake so we don't freeze to death." She isn't laughing. "I'm asking you to trust me."
He's silent for a long moment, fussing with the blankets before he leans in toward her. "All right. So Moz had this brilliant idea ..."
Author: Flora
Rating: G
Characters/Pairings: Diana&Neal
Spoilers/Warnings: None
Word Count: 1600
Summary: This was not how Diana had planned on spending New Year's Eve, jumping off a moving train and hiking through a snowstorm. Written for
frith_in_thorns for wcpairings.
“I thought you said there’d be room service.”
Neal’s only response is an exhausted huff that might be a laugh. The shed is dark, and barely six feet square, a listing uninsulated structure beside a railroad track, overhung with creaking branches weighed down with snow.
Diana puts her weight on her good leg and slides down the wall to sit on the rough wooden floor. It’s the only shelter they’ve found in three hours’ walking; they need somewhere to rest that’s out of the wind and this will have to do.
She and Neal were supposed to meet a suspect on the express train to Boston that afternoon; Wilson insisted on meeting on the train. They should have had a taped confession by now. They should be settling into their seats for a nap while the Bureau office in Boston prepared to meet the train and take Wilson into custody.
They’d put Neal in charge of arranging the meet, which was their first mistake; he’d decided (without consulting her or Peter or anyone, damn him) to tell Wilson to meet them on the overnight local train instead, in the interest of being able to stop and spend the night at an upscale bed-and-breakfast instead of sleeping on board.
Local PD can arrest him just as easily as the feds in Boston, he’d said, and have you seen the website for this place? Would you rather spend the night on the train or in a suite with a hot tub?
He’d even made room reservations for the night.
That was before Wilson pulled a gun and cornered them in a baggage car. She’s pretty sure the outside doors on the train aren’t supposed to open while it’s moving, but Neal got them open somehow, just in time.
The train was passing along a rocky streambed in a forest thick with snow, deep into a cell phone dead zone; she landed hard enough to wrench her shoulder and sliced the back of her right calf open on a sharp rock.
The pain in her shoulder is annoying. Her feet are wet and by now completely numb. Her leg has stopped bleeding but over the past two hours putting weight on it is a breathless sharp pain. She didn't mention either to Neal; they couldn't rest in the open without freezing and she's pretty sure he's concealing injuries of his own.
His right hand is wrapped in a scarf, and he dropped the picks in the snow twice, trying to open the shed. She’d finally broken the latch off with a few sharp blows from a heavy rock.
The GPS watch Neal wears in place of his anklet was smashed in the fall, but she tells herself Peter will see where it stopped transmitting and know where to start looking.
The temperature is dropping but the snow wasn't thick enough to hide the tracks, picking out softly regular shapes of railroad ties; they were fine as long as they kept moving and they couldn’t get lost, but now they're both ready to drop.
“Patience,” Neal says now, stuffing what looks like a bunch of rags against the hole where the latch used to be; it's dark, save for the skittering white beam of her penlight, but it’s quieter, inside, out of the wind. “Blankets first.” He throws a pile of cloth at her, something that feels like rough wool and smells like a wet dog. Something has chewed holes in all the blankets, but if there were rats here once they seem to be long gone. “Then coffee.”
“Okay, that’s just mean.” The wind keens, high and lonely like a train whistle, but she knows no other trains will pass until 6 AM. A piece of roof shingle lifts every now and then with the wind, falling against the ceiling with a startling bang. “You said there’d be a hot tub and a massage. And tiramisu.”
This was not how she'd planned on spending New Year's Eve, jumping off a moving train and hiking through a snowstorm upstate.
He sits beside her, his shoulder warm against hers, and tucks the blankets around them both before pulling something out of his coat. “You’ll need to open this. I don’t think -” He holds up his bandaged hand.
“How bad is it?” she asks.
She feels his half shrug against her side. “Nothing we can fix here.” He presses a metal thermos into her hand. “Go on, open it.”
She unscrews the lid, expecting water - welcome, yes, but the cold would kill them before dehydration set in if they weren’t found before morning - and breathes in fragrant steam and the smell of hot coffee.
She blinks, breathing deeply before looking up to stare at Neal’s shadow in the dark; she hears a smile in his voice as he says, “Go on, drink before it gets cold.”
Warmth spreads through her, softening numbed fatigue. “I take back everything bad I’ve ever said about you.”
“Everything?”
“Well, most of it.” She takes another long gulp of coffee and passes the thermos to him.
When the coffee is gone he shifts around to sit facing her. “How bad is your leg?”
“All right as long as I don’t walk on it.” Her muscles have stiffened and locked up in only a few minutes of sitting down. “And I can’t feel my feet.”
Her tone is flat, neutral, as she brushes away melting snow caked around the laces of her shoes.
Neal shifts the blanket away from her feet. She doesn’t really want to see any damage the cold has done, but Neal is gently easing her shoes off and peeling away her wet socks.
Her mind tries to impose pattern and meaning on the sounds of wind tossing the branches outside, to hear in twigs falling on the roof some kind of conscious intent.
When she flicks the penlight toward her feet he wraps his hands around her ankles and says, “Don’t.” She can feel a slight pressure of his fingers against her ankle, but as his hands move lower she feels nothing at all. “It looks worse than it is. Trust me.”
“Since when are you the expert on frostbite?”
“Ask me again in three months and two weeks and I’ll tell you.”
She chuckles wearily. “Is that when the statute of limitations runs out?”
“It’s a good story.” He grins. “I’m looking forward to telling this one.”
She watches his hands, gently massaging one foot and then the other, watches her own breath form clouds in the weak beam of the penlight. After a moment he opens his coat and shifts her legs onto his lap, so her feet are tucked under his shirt against his bare skin.
The cut below her knee twinges at the movement, but she doesn’t feel any warmth in her toes.
“How are your feet?” she asks.
“I didn’t land in the stream.”
He sounds worried, and she tries wiggling her toes; her mind sends the command but she can’t feel if it’s obeyed.
Neal can, apparently; he laughs and says, “See, you’ll be fine.”
“That’s assuming Wilson didn’t jump out after us.” They’d been following the tracks since they jumped, and this is the only shelter but it’s not exactly well-hidden if they were followed.
“He didn’t.” Neal’s confidence surprises her. “Or if he did he’s in worse shape than we are. The train picked up speed pretty quickly just after we got off; we jumped at the slowest part of a curve in the tracks.”
Her brain is moving slowly in the cold, so it takes her a minute to process that. “You looked up the different speeds along the route?” Neal’s only response is a what, didn’t you? look. And then, as the next piece falls into place, “If we’d taken the express it would have been going too fast to jump.”
He nods. “That one slows down in one place, and that’s on a bridge over the river.”
He’s watching her, carefully; in the dim shadows cast by the penlight she still recognizes his look of you might have trusted me.
She sighs, sharp and exasperated. Part of her thinks she could have given him the benefit of the doubt, and not assumed he’d switched trains just to screw with the op for the sake of room service.
And part of her wants to say he might have trusted her enough to tell her what his real concerns were.
“Were you expecting him to try to shoot us?”
She knows that isn’t it before he shakes his head. “I don’t like getting into situations I don’t know how to get out of.”
He likes to keep his cards close, she knows, and he probably assumes some things are too obvious to require stating aloud.
She thinks she can feel her feet tingling. That’s going to hurt like hell soon, but right now it’s a faint prickle and it’s reassuring compared to no feeling at all.
She clicks off the penlight. The search team should be out there soon, she knows. They only have to stay awake for a few more hours.
She nudges Neal with her foot as his eyelids droop and he snaps awake with reassuring suddenness. "I don't want to wait three months and two weeks," she says. "We need to stay awake. Tell me the story."
Because few things will catch Neal's attention and keep him alert like the opportunity to show off.
"Diana." She can hear him grin in the dark, a warm hint of weary laughter. "Are you offering me an immunity deal?"
"Neal, we're alone in a snowstorm and we need to stay awake so we don't freeze to death." She isn't laughing. "I'm asking you to trust me."
He's silent for a long moment, fussing with the blankets before he leans in toward her. "All right. So Moz had this brilliant idea ..."