FIC: "all that we let go" (4/4) NC-17
Title: all that we let go
Author:
hoosierbitch
Rating: NC-17
Series: "Broken Road" Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4
Warnings: References to past noncon, dubcon, and underage noncon.
Word Count: 4,500
Notes: Finally, this series is over (well, okay, I'm still planning an epilogue, BUT STILL). It's taken over a month to write, and the only reason I didn't give up half-way is because
ashcat held my hand, told me I didn't completely suck at writing, and kept encouraging me to keep working on it. This part was also beta'd by themkshrine, who did an amazing job. All remaining mistakes are my fault. Thank you to everyone who's stuck with this series!
Summary: "You don't have to tell them everything. But you do have to be honest."
*
Neal at eighteen had been a revelation. Beautiful and brilliant and bouncing around New York like a blown glass ornament in a pinball machine. Bouncing off of people, from bed to bed to bank, while everyone around him sat back and watched and waited for him to shatter.
Moz had always had soft spots for beautiful things. Beautiful people. A soft spot for Neal, still a bit gangly, with paint perpetually stuck under his fingernails, lube and condoms in his wallet, come-hither smile stuck on his lips, his hands in everyone's pockets.
So he’d made a few calls, pulled a few strings, and picked out a forgery job that Neal would be crazy to refuse, and met him for the first time. The job went off without a hitch. Neal had been professional, smooth, creative - a perfect partner. And after Moz doled out Neal’s share of the take, he’d offered him a place on his couch.
The next night Neal cooked him dinner, lit some candles, and smiled at him like - like Neal wanted him. Moz understood how so many people had fallen prey to his pretty eyes. And when he went into his room that night, still warm and lightheaded from his shower, Neal had been in his bed. Naked. With the faint shine of lube on his ass, that same private smile on his lips, a tremor in his hands that Moz wouldn’t have noticed if he hadn’t been staring at paint, cerulean blue, underneath his fingernails.
Neal made him dinner, Moz told him no, and that was how their friendship started.
Moz had known him for eight years, Kate for six, when Peter Burke took him away.
When Neal was released to Burke’s custody, Moz had been prepared to play every subversive game in the book - learn the FBI’s playbook to use it against them, get access to their files, sabotage their cases - he hadn’t been prepared to play nice. Not without some ulterior motive in mind. And it wasn’t hard, because Burke was brilliant and honest and fair, his smile when he looked at Neal was genuine, he treated him like a partner. Made him happy in a way Moz had never been able to.
The one thing he hadn’t understood was just how easily Neal had been able to sweep four years under the rug. He’d gone to work in the offices of the people who’d imprisoned him, day after day, a smile on his face, like that’s what he would have chosen if he’d had a choice.
Peter Burke calls him at 9pm on a Friday and tells him that Neal needs him. He remembers how good Neal has always been at lying to himself. Remembers how close he’s always been to breaking.
He calls a taxi, picks the lock on the guest house, cleans up the mess, and waits for Neal to wake up.
*
Neal wakes to sunlight. Sunlight and his bladder and his morning wood. He wakes up to the day and his body and the first thing he does is reach towards the other side of the bed. And it’s not Kate he expects to find, no matter how long or loyally he’d loved her. Not Kate or Alex or Moz. When his hand encounters air and then the mattress, grasping for someone he should know better than to expect, it’s Peter he misses. Peter he looks for when he sits up and sees Moz. Peter that echoes through him when he takes stock of himself and adds up the dried tears on his face, the sting in his palms from the red crescents his fingernails had dug, the ache in his throat, and remembers the night before. Peter’s not there. But Moz is.
“Leave,” he tells him, as firmly as he can muster while trying to scrunch the blanket over his lap to hide his erection. Moz doesn’t even blink.
“I just spent an hour scrubbing a very romantic dinner for three off of June’s hardwood floors, Neal. I think I deserve an explanation, at the very least.”
“I’m sorry to be such an inconvenience,” he says with a glare, because maybe if he’s rude enough, Moz will get the hint and leave him alone again.
“The suit called me. Did you give him my number?”
“No,” he says, a bit offended. “Of course not!”
Moz nods and does something to Neal’s phone that makes it beep unhappily. “Are you fucking them?”
“Just Peter,” he says, because it’s easiest to be honest in the morning, before he’s scrubbed the sleep out of his eyes, when everything he shouldn’t have said can later be blamed on dreams. “And not anymore. Not after last night.”
He swings his legs over the side of the bed and grimaces at the wrinkles in Byron’s suit. He really should have taken it off before he’d collapsed. Nervous breakdowns were no excuse for carelessness.
“You’ve got seven missed calls and eight text messages,” Moz tells him. “Do you think you can cut the crap and stop pretending that you haven’t been shtupping the FBI behind my back for months?”
“Not the entire FBI, Moz, just one Agent - ”
“Special Agent.”
“ - and it’s…complicated. And over,” he reminds himself. His bed’s empty and the door’s closed and he feels a lot more trapped by that than he should.
“What did they do?” Moz asks, glaring around the room like he’s already planning his revenge.
“Nothing. It was my fault. It was just a stupid misunderstanding, and I - I blew it all out of proportion.”
“You don’t want it to be over, do you?” Moz asks with a sigh.
“Well - no. But that doesn’t matter, Moz. Even if I hadn’t just blown up at them - I can’t - they can’t want me. Not really. They already have each other.”
“You can be really stupid sometimes,” Moz says. Neal can’t hide his surprise and hurt when he looks up. Moz - Moz is never mean to him. “Get out of bed, put on something pretty, and I’ll drive you to their house. June already said we could borrow the car.”
He blinks. Feels his own forehead for a fever. “Are you - are you serious?”
“I don’t play yenta for just anybody, kid.” Moz puts the cell phone down and starts towards the door. “I’m going to go beg some coffee from June - who is very worried about you, by the way. Be down in five minutes or I’m leaving without you.”
“Leaving without me - to go to Peter’s?”
Moz ponders for a minute. “If you don’t come with me, I’ll break in and bug the dog. And put Saran Wrap over the toilet, just for kicks.”
“Why are you doing this?” he asks.
Moz stops at the door. And he doesn’t turn around. His rings clink against the doorknob as he fidgets. “I’ll never forgive him for what he did to you,” he says slowly. “But I - I won’t forgive myself, either. For letting you take a job you never should have taken, or for not - for not telling you years ago that you should stop copying other peoples’ work and do your own.” He sighs and shifts his weight and, finally turns around. And Neal feels uncomfortable - he and Moz don’t talk like this. Not without a buffer of chess or wine or sleep deprivation. Moz knows him too well. Moz could hurt him too badly.
“Losing you destroyed Kate,” Moz says, and Neal takes an involuntary step backwards. “And I don’t think I’d be able to take it if it happened again.” He looks Neal up and down. He’s clutching the doorknob now, turning it back and forth compulsively. Trying so hard to let go. “He’s good to you?”
“Yeah,” Neal says softly. “They both are.”
“I don’t like him,” Moz says with a glare. “And I never will. But - I do trust him. He may not always make you happy, but he’ll keep you safe. He’ll keep you from going back to prison again. I know this isn’t the perfect ending that you and Kate had planned - you don’t get a new identity and a million dollars and a passport to some foreign country.” He takes a deep breath and opens the door and starts to leave. He pauses outside the door, and god, he looks - lonely. Kate gone and Neal leaving and Moz left behind again.
“Maybe you’re not supposed to start over,” Moz says, and it’s as close to a blessing as Neal’s ever going to get. “Maybe you just - have to keep muddling through. The way you are, with whatever baggage you’ve got with you. You don’t have to be someone else,” Moz says, in a quiet voice that he usually reserves for Ginsberg quotes, “before you get to have a happy ending.” The door swings shut on his smile.
*
“Don’t fuck this up,” Moz says when they’re only a few blocks away. “But don’t bend over backwards for them, either. You don’t have to tell them everything, but you do have to be honest with them.”
“Moz. You sound like a self-help book.”
“Maybe if you actually read some self-help books, I could quote Joyce instead.”
“If you do, I swear to god, I will jump out of this car.”
“Give it a shot,” Moz says, pulling up in front of their house. “If they break your heart, I'll break their knees."
And Neal looks at him and knows that if they hurt him, Moz will break their knees, ruin their finances, steal their dog, buy up the mortgage on their house, and then yank Neal out of the country, anklet be damned.
"My safety net," Neal says softly.
"I prefer 'sidekick,'" Moz corrects.
"Aw, Moz, you know you're my hero," Neal says, and it's the worst lie he's ever told, trying to pretend he doesn't mean it. “What if they don’t want to see me? What if they don’t want to put up with my - with me anymore?” He’d yelled kind of a lot, the previous night. He’d thrown things, for fuck’s sake. He was turning into his father.
“If they don’t, then you and I can give it a shot. I’ve been told I’m a very attentive lover,” Moz informs him, waggling his eyebrows in what he clearly thinks is a salacious manner. “Give them a shot,” he says when Neal gets his nervous laughter under control. “You’ve got a lot to gain and little to lose.”
He looks down at his hands, swallows, and then gets out of the car. He walks up the steps, knocks on the Burkes’ door, and doesn't look back.
*
He pauses on their doorstep. He’s not sure how to act. Angry or contrite or blasé - should he apologize for his behavior, or pretend it never happened? He can’t sort out emotion from self-preservation instinct, can’t tell what’s him and what’s habit.
He rings the doorbell and Satchmo starts up barking immediately. He hears two sets of footsteps running down the stairs and smoothes his suit self-consciously. He has time for one last nervous thought - I should have dressed down - before Elizabeth flings the door open and looks at him like he’s Christmas morning. She and Peter are sleep-tussled and happy to see him. They’re wearing matching flannel pants and Peter doesn’t have a shirt on. Maybe because El’s wearing it, he thinks, looking at the faded ‘Quanitco’ across the chest.
“Neal - oh, thank god,” El says, and her tone’s effusive and her eyes are bright but she doesn’t reach out to touch him. He feels brittle. And appreciates the restraint. “You came over! You’re not - ”
“Are you going to break up with us?” Peter interrupts, and El shoots him a horrified, angry glare.
“Peter, don’t pressure him - ”
“I don’t want to,” Neal says. Satch is banging around his knees. The mail carrier’s whistling half a block away. And there are cars on the street and a woman jogging past and then - Peter’s kissing him. In front of his neighbors and wife and mailperson, his hands cupping Neal’s face, his lips soft and firm, and Neal feels regret blossom in his chest. He’s going to lose this. “I don’t want to,” he repeats. “But you will.”
“Why?” Peter asks. “What are - did you do something?” He holds Neal at arm’s length and examines him like he’s looking for evidence of some new crime.
“Come inside,” El says carefully, pulling her husband away.
Neal doesn’t take off his coat or jacket. He hasn’t been in their house since before the last time he and Peter had sex. It hasn’t changed. Only he didn’t used to feel like a stranger in it.
“Sit down,” she says as she and Peter walk into the living room. “I’ll get coffee.” He catches her wrist as she tries to slide by him to the kitchen. “I’m so sorry,” she says, close enough he can see her eyes begin to shine with unshed tears. “For what I said last night. It was stupid and careless of me, and I’m so, so sorry.”
“It was my fault, too,” he says. “I haven’t - I haven’t been honest with you. With either of you. You should know what you’re getting into,” he says with a wry smile.
“You don’t have to tell us anything,” Peter says.
“Yes, I do,” he replies, because it’s not fair to them otherwise.
“Do you - do you want coffee first?” El asks. “I can make coffee. Or do you want me to leave? I can. Or I can make coffee, and then leave - ” He knows she would, too. Would go upstairs or leave the house and never ask him or Peter what he’d said.
“Stay,” he tells her. “Even though we aren’t - we aren’t to each other what we are to Peter,” he says, her wrist soft in his hand, her body close to his and warm, Peter on the couch half a room away, pulling on a sweater and pretending not to eavesdrop. “You’re his wife. You’re a part of this.”
“We’re friends, too, Neal,” she tells him before joining Peter on the couch, and he thinks about how gentle she’d been with him, after that catastrophic night with Peter. She hadn’t asked him any questions he couldn’t answer, but she’d slipped smoothly under his arm like she belonged there when he tried to walk on his own, and settled next to him on the couch, and turned on TCM, and every time he’d frowned or flinched she’d reached over and squeezed his hand.
He looks at them, sitting on the couch in matching pajamas, holding each other’s hands like they’re bracing themselves for a storm. He sits down on the chair across from them but then gets back up. Satch comes over to him and leans against his leg and he sits again so that he can pet the dog. So much for hiding his nerves. “If you change your minds,” he says quietly. “That’s fine. I don’t expect anything from you,” which is a lie. He expects to be hurt. He knows how badly he misses them when he’s alone. “Just - tell me to stop, if it’s too much, okay?”
He pauses and runs his words through his mind like rosary beads, dark and smooth and warm, familiar.
"A lot of thieves start out like Abegnale,” he says. "I didn’t. I couldn’t get away with fraud. I was a poor kid in a rich town," he says with a laugh, because it was nice to have a hurt he’d outgrown. "I stuck out like a sore thumb. If I walked into a store, every security guard's eyes were on me in a second. My clothes didn't fit, my hair was greasy most of the time, I was too skinny - and there were some people who pitied me, but most of them - " Peter's knuckles are white where they're clenched around the arm of the couch, so Neal figures he gets the picture. "Well. I used whatever tools I had."
Peter looks sick. Neal feels sick. Not detached, not like when he’d had to tell Kate or Moz something. It doesn't feel like someone else's story anymore. Because Peter's right there, forcing himself not to look away from Neal. And it matters so much more now. He can't look away from Peter, either. He wants to be looking so that he'll know what part of it is finally too much for Peter to take. Which new revelation will be the straw to break the camel's back.
“The first time, I was eleven. He was my art teacher.” I was alone and lonely. He tells them the same story over and over again. Different people and places and prizes. The same price. He talks until his voice is hoarse and he’s dug up every shameful thing he normally tries to pretend happened to one of his fake identities, to someone else, in another life.. Elizabeth and Peter don’t say a word. And they don’t look away. They both cry but Neal’s eyes stay dry. He talks until he can’t think of anything more. Until he gets to the first time Peter arrested him.
“Then I went to prison, and, well. You know what happened then," he says, and he has to concentrate on not tightening his hands into fists while he’s petting Satchmo.
"No," Peter says, and he looks confused. "I don't know."
Neal's not exactly sure what happens next. He feels like he's in a cartoon. Like Wile E. Coyote going over the edge of a cliff, stuck hanging in the air while his legs frantically move before he stops and realizes he's got nothing under his feet but miles and miles to fall. "Of course you know," he says, and he can't help that it sounds like a question. "I knew everything about you, even in prison - I knew about your cases and your team - and - I followed you, you had to - "
He'd thought. He'd thought that every medical file would have ended up at Peter's desk. The photos paper-clipped to the inside covers. Teeth marks in his flesh, the dried blood still rusty around the edges. The handprint bruises like a belt around his waist. The times they tore his hole and had to stitch it back up. File after file after file. Rope burn on his throat. Bite marks on his dick. His nipples bloody, a patch of his hair torn out. He still flinched whenever he heard a camera go off.
"I had to let it go," Peter says. "After they sentenced you, there was nothing I could do. I had to move on."
"Huh," Neal says. He nods and bites his lip and he can't help that he starts shaking his head, instead of nodding, that he bites his lip too hard and has to look away and the shaking of his head becomes a full-body movement, he starts rocking back and forth Peter hadn't known. Peter had taken him back out of prison and Neal had pretended that he was fine and Peter wouldn't have known to suspect anything different, Neal had lied and Peter had believed him, Peter hadn't known.
“You thought I knew,” Peter says softly. “You thought I knew that you were being hurt and did nothing?”
Elizabeth makes a small, pained sound, and Neal can’t look at either of them. All this means is that he has more to tell. And he’s not prepared for this part. These words aren’t rosary beads, they’re bruises that still haven’t healed, they hurt. He looks at Peter, at Elizabeth, at their twin looks of understanding and concern and tries to figure out where to start.
They auctioned me off, or: sometimes I came, they made me lick it off the floor. Peter, your hand’s not the first that’s split me open.
He clamps a hand over his mouth and barely makes it to the bathroom before he pukes. Elizabeth and Peter are close behind him. El strokes his back and Peter wets a cloth to wash his forehead. He’s in his best suit and they’re in their pajamas and he’s trying not to get vomit on their toilet seat cover and he’s never been more acutely aware of the fact that he doesn’t belong.
“The first month,” he says. “They - ” He retches again and El shushes him. Peter puts a hand on his shoulder. “They bid - ”
“You don’t have to tell us,” Peter interrupts.
“I do,” he whispers, glad he can curl around his aching stomach and not have to look at them. “You have to know.”
“You’re not going to scare us away,” El says, naïve enough to believe he’s not about to do exactly that.
“You don’t know what they did,” he explains. “You don’t know what I did - ”
“If you decide to tell us later,” Peter says, “we’ll listen. But you’re literally making yourself sick, Neal! You already told us so much - you thought I already knew about prison - what do you think is going to change our minds?”
He pukes again and all that comes up is bile. It burns in his throat, almost as much as the words that follow. “Me,” he says, and he hadn’t meant to yell but the room is small and they both jump and he thinks me, I’m what you don’t want.
“What do you think is wrong with you?” El asks gently, and he snarls at her, an angry sound past clenched teeth, because he’s not the one who’s confused, here.
“I’m - ” He’s dirty and broken and fucked up, and they’re perfect, it’s obvious, he can’t believe how blind they are. “I’m used,” he says. “I’m great for a fuck, I’m clean - and if you still want to, Peter, I won’t say no, I’ll never say no, I want you - but you can’t want to be in a relationship with me.” From the first time Peter had kissed him until now, he’s known this. “I’m not good enough.”
“Yes, you are,” Peter says, and he sounds angry and tense and like he’s going to cry again, and it’s Neal’s fault.
“You don’t know that,” he insists again.
“I’ve got a proposal,” Elizabeth says, wiping away some tears with the hand not rubbing his back. “You don’t tell us what we want, and we won’t tell you what you want.”
“You don’t understand - ”
“We know who you are,” she says, eyes crinkled, her hand warm and soothing.
“Do you want us to leave?” Peter asks. Neal looks around the bathroom, confused - there’s room for all of them. “Are you trying to get us to break up with you because you don’t want to do it yourself?”
He doesn’t think that’s what he’s doing. But - he’d never thought about what would happen if they didn’t say no. If they didn’t start looking at him with pity or disgust. He tries not to want impossible things.
“Neal. You can tell us anything. You can tell us everything.” Neal wipes his mouth and shakes his head. Peter can’t know what he’s offering. To be his witness, confessor, absolver. There are some things that should stay unspoken, things that can’t be forgiven. But Peter just keeps talking. “You can take your time. Neal, we’re not leaving you. No matter what you say,” he says pointedly. “We. Are not. Leaving you.”
¬
And he knows he should disagree. Knows that just because Peter thinks he’s telling the truth doesn’t mean that he’s right. But something inside him that’s been threatening to shatter since Peter held his hand during the stake-out, some fault line that’s been cracking under the pressure of Peter’s smile and kisses and trust, some fracture in his defenses starts to break. He feels naked and vulnerable and hideous.
El’s stroking his sweaty his hair off his forehead and Peter’s getting him a glass of water and they’re both - they’re both just waiting for him. “I want to believe you,” he says.
“You can,” El tells him. “You will.” He slumps against her and shakes his head and lets her shush him, lets her kiss his forehead, lets her hold him.
“Come on,” Peter says, putting a hand under his elbow and pulling him up. “You look exhausted.”
They walk into the bedroom and Peter sits him down on the bed - on their marriage bed, El’s bed, and she tells him to stop being silly when he tries to get up. “None of us got enough sleep last night,” she says. “So just - just relax, okay?”
She gets him another glass of water and some breath mints and he sucks them until the roof of his mouth burns. She leaves the bedside light on and Peter pushes his shoulders until he lies down and pulls the comforter over them both.
Peter’s right behind him, but he doesn’t wrap himself around Neal like he used to. Just presses his torso against Neal’s. His thighs against Neal’s, his knees tucked into the curve of Neal’s legs, his breath on the side of Neal’s neck. El climbs into bed behind Peter, and they all shift for a few minutes before coming to rest.
He doesn’t fall sleep. Not that night, or the next, which he spends in their bed again. He doesn’t wake up without panicking for months. It’s worse when one of them is in bed with him than it is when he’s alone, but they don’t seem to mind. They tell him they don’t, anyway, and El tells him they’re not lying.
And week after week, month after month, they tell him that it doesn’t matter. That the things that happened to him don’t define him. And week after week, month after month, they invite him to dinner and shows and lunches at the office, and week after week, month after month, they don’t leave.
Moz takes over first his couch at June’s, then the bed, and finally the monthly rent. And if, on some rough nights, Neal picks the lock and slides into bed next to him and bullies him into making breakfast the next morning, well. That’s what friends are for.
And month after month, year after year, he plans to tell them about prison and doesn’t. Never sits them down and flips through his mental files and photos and forces himself to relive it. He doesn’t have to. He tells them in a thousand different ways. In hesitations and flinches and awkward, stilted refusals. In nightmares and forced laughter and old scars. And with every second that they don’t ask about it, he starts to believe that maybe they’re right. Maybe it doesn’t matter.
And sometimes - sometimes, he sleeps through the night and wakes up smiling in the morning and pretends to enjoy El’s fake bacon and watches basketball games he doesn’t understand with Peter, art history book open and ignored in his lap, Peter’s arm around his shoulder. Sometimes, he starts to think that he deserves this. Being happy.
*
(please review if you have the time!)
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Author:
hoosierbitch
Rating: NC-17
Series: "Broken Road" Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4
Warnings: References to past noncon, dubcon, and underage noncon.
Word Count: 4,500
Notes: Finally, this series is over (well, okay, I'm still planning an epilogue, BUT STILL). It's taken over a month to write, and the only reason I didn't give up half-way is because
ashcat held my hand, told me I didn't completely suck at writing, and kept encouraging me to keep working on it. This part was also beta'd by themkshrine, who did an amazing job. All remaining mistakes are my fault. Thank you to everyone who's stuck with this series!
Summary: "You don't have to tell them everything. But you do have to be honest."
*
Neal at eighteen had been a revelation. Beautiful and brilliant and bouncing around New York like a blown glass ornament in a pinball machine. Bouncing off of people, from bed to bed to bank, while everyone around him sat back and watched and waited for him to shatter.
Moz had always had soft spots for beautiful things. Beautiful people. A soft spot for Neal, still a bit gangly, with paint perpetually stuck under his fingernails, lube and condoms in his wallet, come-hither smile stuck on his lips, his hands in everyone's pockets.
So he’d made a few calls, pulled a few strings, and picked out a forgery job that Neal would be crazy to refuse, and met him for the first time. The job went off without a hitch. Neal had been professional, smooth, creative - a perfect partner. And after Moz doled out Neal’s share of the take, he’d offered him a place on his couch.
The next night Neal cooked him dinner, lit some candles, and smiled at him like - like Neal wanted him. Moz understood how so many people had fallen prey to his pretty eyes. And when he went into his room that night, still warm and lightheaded from his shower, Neal had been in his bed. Naked. With the faint shine of lube on his ass, that same private smile on his lips, a tremor in his hands that Moz wouldn’t have noticed if he hadn’t been staring at paint, cerulean blue, underneath his fingernails.
Neal made him dinner, Moz told him no, and that was how their friendship started.
Moz had known him for eight years, Kate for six, when Peter Burke took him away.
When Neal was released to Burke’s custody, Moz had been prepared to play every subversive game in the book - learn the FBI’s playbook to use it against them, get access to their files, sabotage their cases - he hadn’t been prepared to play nice. Not without some ulterior motive in mind. And it wasn’t hard, because Burke was brilliant and honest and fair, his smile when he looked at Neal was genuine, he treated him like a partner. Made him happy in a way Moz had never been able to.
The one thing he hadn’t understood was just how easily Neal had been able to sweep four years under the rug. He’d gone to work in the offices of the people who’d imprisoned him, day after day, a smile on his face, like that’s what he would have chosen if he’d had a choice.
Peter Burke calls him at 9pm on a Friday and tells him that Neal needs him. He remembers how good Neal has always been at lying to himself. Remembers how close he’s always been to breaking.
He calls a taxi, picks the lock on the guest house, cleans up the mess, and waits for Neal to wake up.
*
Neal wakes to sunlight. Sunlight and his bladder and his morning wood. He wakes up to the day and his body and the first thing he does is reach towards the other side of the bed. And it’s not Kate he expects to find, no matter how long or loyally he’d loved her. Not Kate or Alex or Moz. When his hand encounters air and then the mattress, grasping for someone he should know better than to expect, it’s Peter he misses. Peter he looks for when he sits up and sees Moz. Peter that echoes through him when he takes stock of himself and adds up the dried tears on his face, the sting in his palms from the red crescents his fingernails had dug, the ache in his throat, and remembers the night before. Peter’s not there. But Moz is.
“Leave,” he tells him, as firmly as he can muster while trying to scrunch the blanket over his lap to hide his erection. Moz doesn’t even blink.
“I just spent an hour scrubbing a very romantic dinner for three off of June’s hardwood floors, Neal. I think I deserve an explanation, at the very least.”
“I’m sorry to be such an inconvenience,” he says with a glare, because maybe if he’s rude enough, Moz will get the hint and leave him alone again.
“The suit called me. Did you give him my number?”
“No,” he says, a bit offended. “Of course not!”
Moz nods and does something to Neal’s phone that makes it beep unhappily. “Are you fucking them?”
“Just Peter,” he says, because it’s easiest to be honest in the morning, before he’s scrubbed the sleep out of his eyes, when everything he shouldn’t have said can later be blamed on dreams. “And not anymore. Not after last night.”
He swings his legs over the side of the bed and grimaces at the wrinkles in Byron’s suit. He really should have taken it off before he’d collapsed. Nervous breakdowns were no excuse for carelessness.
“You’ve got seven missed calls and eight text messages,” Moz tells him. “Do you think you can cut the crap and stop pretending that you haven’t been shtupping the FBI behind my back for months?”
“Not the entire FBI, Moz, just one Agent - ”
“Special Agent.”
“ - and it’s…complicated. And over,” he reminds himself. His bed’s empty and the door’s closed and he feels a lot more trapped by that than he should.
“What did they do?” Moz asks, glaring around the room like he’s already planning his revenge.
“Nothing. It was my fault. It was just a stupid misunderstanding, and I - I blew it all out of proportion.”
“You don’t want it to be over, do you?” Moz asks with a sigh.
“Well - no. But that doesn’t matter, Moz. Even if I hadn’t just blown up at them - I can’t - they can’t want me. Not really. They already have each other.”
“You can be really stupid sometimes,” Moz says. Neal can’t hide his surprise and hurt when he looks up. Moz - Moz is never mean to him. “Get out of bed, put on something pretty, and I’ll drive you to their house. June already said we could borrow the car.”
He blinks. Feels his own forehead for a fever. “Are you - are you serious?”
“I don’t play yenta for just anybody, kid.” Moz puts the cell phone down and starts towards the door. “I’m going to go beg some coffee from June - who is very worried about you, by the way. Be down in five minutes or I’m leaving without you.”
“Leaving without me - to go to Peter’s?”
Moz ponders for a minute. “If you don’t come with me, I’ll break in and bug the dog. And put Saran Wrap over the toilet, just for kicks.”
“Why are you doing this?” he asks.
Moz stops at the door. And he doesn’t turn around. His rings clink against the doorknob as he fidgets. “I’ll never forgive him for what he did to you,” he says slowly. “But I - I won’t forgive myself, either. For letting you take a job you never should have taken, or for not - for not telling you years ago that you should stop copying other peoples’ work and do your own.” He sighs and shifts his weight and, finally turns around. And Neal feels uncomfortable - he and Moz don’t talk like this. Not without a buffer of chess or wine or sleep deprivation. Moz knows him too well. Moz could hurt him too badly.
“Losing you destroyed Kate,” Moz says, and Neal takes an involuntary step backwards. “And I don’t think I’d be able to take it if it happened again.” He looks Neal up and down. He’s clutching the doorknob now, turning it back and forth compulsively. Trying so hard to let go. “He’s good to you?”
“Yeah,” Neal says softly. “They both are.”
“I don’t like him,” Moz says with a glare. “And I never will. But - I do trust him. He may not always make you happy, but he’ll keep you safe. He’ll keep you from going back to prison again. I know this isn’t the perfect ending that you and Kate had planned - you don’t get a new identity and a million dollars and a passport to some foreign country.” He takes a deep breath and opens the door and starts to leave. He pauses outside the door, and god, he looks - lonely. Kate gone and Neal leaving and Moz left behind again.
“Maybe you’re not supposed to start over,” Moz says, and it’s as close to a blessing as Neal’s ever going to get. “Maybe you just - have to keep muddling through. The way you are, with whatever baggage you’ve got with you. You don’t have to be someone else,” Moz says, in a quiet voice that he usually reserves for Ginsberg quotes, “before you get to have a happy ending.” The door swings shut on his smile.
*
“Don’t fuck this up,” Moz says when they’re only a few blocks away. “But don’t bend over backwards for them, either. You don’t have to tell them everything, but you do have to be honest with them.”
“Moz. You sound like a self-help book.”
“Maybe if you actually read some self-help books, I could quote Joyce instead.”
“If you do, I swear to god, I will jump out of this car.”
“Give it a shot,” Moz says, pulling up in front of their house. “If they break your heart, I'll break their knees."
And Neal looks at him and knows that if they hurt him, Moz will break their knees, ruin their finances, steal their dog, buy up the mortgage on their house, and then yank Neal out of the country, anklet be damned.
"My safety net," Neal says softly.
"I prefer 'sidekick,'" Moz corrects.
"Aw, Moz, you know you're my hero," Neal says, and it's the worst lie he's ever told, trying to pretend he doesn't mean it. “What if they don’t want to see me? What if they don’t want to put up with my - with me anymore?” He’d yelled kind of a lot, the previous night. He’d thrown things, for fuck’s sake. He was turning into his father.
“If they don’t, then you and I can give it a shot. I’ve been told I’m a very attentive lover,” Moz informs him, waggling his eyebrows in what he clearly thinks is a salacious manner. “Give them a shot,” he says when Neal gets his nervous laughter under control. “You’ve got a lot to gain and little to lose.”
He looks down at his hands, swallows, and then gets out of the car. He walks up the steps, knocks on the Burkes’ door, and doesn't look back.
*
He pauses on their doorstep. He’s not sure how to act. Angry or contrite or blasé - should he apologize for his behavior, or pretend it never happened? He can’t sort out emotion from self-preservation instinct, can’t tell what’s him and what’s habit.
He rings the doorbell and Satchmo starts up barking immediately. He hears two sets of footsteps running down the stairs and smoothes his suit self-consciously. He has time for one last nervous thought - I should have dressed down - before Elizabeth flings the door open and looks at him like he’s Christmas morning. She and Peter are sleep-tussled and happy to see him. They’re wearing matching flannel pants and Peter doesn’t have a shirt on. Maybe because El’s wearing it, he thinks, looking at the faded ‘Quanitco’ across the chest.
“Neal - oh, thank god,” El says, and her tone’s effusive and her eyes are bright but she doesn’t reach out to touch him. He feels brittle. And appreciates the restraint. “You came over! You’re not - ”
“Are you going to break up with us?” Peter interrupts, and El shoots him a horrified, angry glare.
“Peter, don’t pressure him - ”
“I don’t want to,” Neal says. Satch is banging around his knees. The mail carrier’s whistling half a block away. And there are cars on the street and a woman jogging past and then - Peter’s kissing him. In front of his neighbors and wife and mailperson, his hands cupping Neal’s face, his lips soft and firm, and Neal feels regret blossom in his chest. He’s going to lose this. “I don’t want to,” he repeats. “But you will.”
“Why?” Peter asks. “What are - did you do something?” He holds Neal at arm’s length and examines him like he’s looking for evidence of some new crime.
“Come inside,” El says carefully, pulling her husband away.
Neal doesn’t take off his coat or jacket. He hasn’t been in their house since before the last time he and Peter had sex. It hasn’t changed. Only he didn’t used to feel like a stranger in it.
“Sit down,” she says as she and Peter walk into the living room. “I’ll get coffee.” He catches her wrist as she tries to slide by him to the kitchen. “I’m so sorry,” she says, close enough he can see her eyes begin to shine with unshed tears. “For what I said last night. It was stupid and careless of me, and I’m so, so sorry.”
“It was my fault, too,” he says. “I haven’t - I haven’t been honest with you. With either of you. You should know what you’re getting into,” he says with a wry smile.
“You don’t have to tell us anything,” Peter says.
“Yes, I do,” he replies, because it’s not fair to them otherwise.
“Do you - do you want coffee first?” El asks. “I can make coffee. Or do you want me to leave? I can. Or I can make coffee, and then leave - ” He knows she would, too. Would go upstairs or leave the house and never ask him or Peter what he’d said.
“Stay,” he tells her. “Even though we aren’t - we aren’t to each other what we are to Peter,” he says, her wrist soft in his hand, her body close to his and warm, Peter on the couch half a room away, pulling on a sweater and pretending not to eavesdrop. “You’re his wife. You’re a part of this.”
“We’re friends, too, Neal,” she tells him before joining Peter on the couch, and he thinks about how gentle she’d been with him, after that catastrophic night with Peter. She hadn’t asked him any questions he couldn’t answer, but she’d slipped smoothly under his arm like she belonged there when he tried to walk on his own, and settled next to him on the couch, and turned on TCM, and every time he’d frowned or flinched she’d reached over and squeezed his hand.
He looks at them, sitting on the couch in matching pajamas, holding each other’s hands like they’re bracing themselves for a storm. He sits down on the chair across from them but then gets back up. Satch comes over to him and leans against his leg and he sits again so that he can pet the dog. So much for hiding his nerves. “If you change your minds,” he says quietly. “That’s fine. I don’t expect anything from you,” which is a lie. He expects to be hurt. He knows how badly he misses them when he’s alone. “Just - tell me to stop, if it’s too much, okay?”
He pauses and runs his words through his mind like rosary beads, dark and smooth and warm, familiar.
"A lot of thieves start out like Abegnale,” he says. "I didn’t. I couldn’t get away with fraud. I was a poor kid in a rich town," he says with a laugh, because it was nice to have a hurt he’d outgrown. "I stuck out like a sore thumb. If I walked into a store, every security guard's eyes were on me in a second. My clothes didn't fit, my hair was greasy most of the time, I was too skinny - and there were some people who pitied me, but most of them - " Peter's knuckles are white where they're clenched around the arm of the couch, so Neal figures he gets the picture. "Well. I used whatever tools I had."
Peter looks sick. Neal feels sick. Not detached, not like when he’d had to tell Kate or Moz something. It doesn't feel like someone else's story anymore. Because Peter's right there, forcing himself not to look away from Neal. And it matters so much more now. He can't look away from Peter, either. He wants to be looking so that he'll know what part of it is finally too much for Peter to take. Which new revelation will be the straw to break the camel's back.
“The first time, I was eleven. He was my art teacher.” I was alone and lonely. He tells them the same story over and over again. Different people and places and prizes. The same price. He talks until his voice is hoarse and he’s dug up every shameful thing he normally tries to pretend happened to one of his fake identities, to someone else, in another life.. Elizabeth and Peter don’t say a word. And they don’t look away. They both cry but Neal’s eyes stay dry. He talks until he can’t think of anything more. Until he gets to the first time Peter arrested him.
“Then I went to prison, and, well. You know what happened then," he says, and he has to concentrate on not tightening his hands into fists while he’s petting Satchmo.
"No," Peter says, and he looks confused. "I don't know."
Neal's not exactly sure what happens next. He feels like he's in a cartoon. Like Wile E. Coyote going over the edge of a cliff, stuck hanging in the air while his legs frantically move before he stops and realizes he's got nothing under his feet but miles and miles to fall. "Of course you know," he says, and he can't help that it sounds like a question. "I knew everything about you, even in prison - I knew about your cases and your team - and - I followed you, you had to - "
He'd thought. He'd thought that every medical file would have ended up at Peter's desk. The photos paper-clipped to the inside covers. Teeth marks in his flesh, the dried blood still rusty around the edges. The handprint bruises like a belt around his waist. The times they tore his hole and had to stitch it back up. File after file after file. Rope burn on his throat. Bite marks on his dick. His nipples bloody, a patch of his hair torn out. He still flinched whenever he heard a camera go off.
"I had to let it go," Peter says. "After they sentenced you, there was nothing I could do. I had to move on."
"Huh," Neal says. He nods and bites his lip and he can't help that he starts shaking his head, instead of nodding, that he bites his lip too hard and has to look away and the shaking of his head becomes a full-body movement, he starts rocking back and forth Peter hadn't known. Peter had taken him back out of prison and Neal had pretended that he was fine and Peter wouldn't have known to suspect anything different, Neal had lied and Peter had believed him, Peter hadn't known.
“You thought I knew,” Peter says softly. “You thought I knew that you were being hurt and did nothing?”
Elizabeth makes a small, pained sound, and Neal can’t look at either of them. All this means is that he has more to tell. And he’s not prepared for this part. These words aren’t rosary beads, they’re bruises that still haven’t healed, they hurt. He looks at Peter, at Elizabeth, at their twin looks of understanding and concern and tries to figure out where to start.
They auctioned me off, or: sometimes I came, they made me lick it off the floor. Peter, your hand’s not the first that’s split me open.
He clamps a hand over his mouth and barely makes it to the bathroom before he pukes. Elizabeth and Peter are close behind him. El strokes his back and Peter wets a cloth to wash his forehead. He’s in his best suit and they’re in their pajamas and he’s trying not to get vomit on their toilet seat cover and he’s never been more acutely aware of the fact that he doesn’t belong.
“The first month,” he says. “They - ” He retches again and El shushes him. Peter puts a hand on his shoulder. “They bid - ”
“You don’t have to tell us,” Peter interrupts.
“I do,” he whispers, glad he can curl around his aching stomach and not have to look at them. “You have to know.”
“You’re not going to scare us away,” El says, naïve enough to believe he’s not about to do exactly that.
“You don’t know what they did,” he explains. “You don’t know what I did - ”
“If you decide to tell us later,” Peter says, “we’ll listen. But you’re literally making yourself sick, Neal! You already told us so much - you thought I already knew about prison - what do you think is going to change our minds?”
He pukes again and all that comes up is bile. It burns in his throat, almost as much as the words that follow. “Me,” he says, and he hadn’t meant to yell but the room is small and they both jump and he thinks me, I’m what you don’t want.
“What do you think is wrong with you?” El asks gently, and he snarls at her, an angry sound past clenched teeth, because he’s not the one who’s confused, here.
“I’m - ” He’s dirty and broken and fucked up, and they’re perfect, it’s obvious, he can’t believe how blind they are. “I’m used,” he says. “I’m great for a fuck, I’m clean - and if you still want to, Peter, I won’t say no, I’ll never say no, I want you - but you can’t want to be in a relationship with me.” From the first time Peter had kissed him until now, he’s known this. “I’m not good enough.”
“Yes, you are,” Peter says, and he sounds angry and tense and like he’s going to cry again, and it’s Neal’s fault.
“You don’t know that,” he insists again.
“I’ve got a proposal,” Elizabeth says, wiping away some tears with the hand not rubbing his back. “You don’t tell us what we want, and we won’t tell you what you want.”
“You don’t understand - ”
“We know who you are,” she says, eyes crinkled, her hand warm and soothing.
“Do you want us to leave?” Peter asks. Neal looks around the bathroom, confused - there’s room for all of them. “Are you trying to get us to break up with you because you don’t want to do it yourself?”
He doesn’t think that’s what he’s doing. But - he’d never thought about what would happen if they didn’t say no. If they didn’t start looking at him with pity or disgust. He tries not to want impossible things.
“Neal. You can tell us anything. You can tell us everything.” Neal wipes his mouth and shakes his head. Peter can’t know what he’s offering. To be his witness, confessor, absolver. There are some things that should stay unspoken, things that can’t be forgiven. But Peter just keeps talking. “You can take your time. Neal, we’re not leaving you. No matter what you say,” he says pointedly. “We. Are not. Leaving you.”
¬
And he knows he should disagree. Knows that just because Peter thinks he’s telling the truth doesn’t mean that he’s right. But something inside him that’s been threatening to shatter since Peter held his hand during the stake-out, some fault line that’s been cracking under the pressure of Peter’s smile and kisses and trust, some fracture in his defenses starts to break. He feels naked and vulnerable and hideous.
El’s stroking his sweaty his hair off his forehead and Peter’s getting him a glass of water and they’re both - they’re both just waiting for him. “I want to believe you,” he says.
“You can,” El tells him. “You will.” He slumps against her and shakes his head and lets her shush him, lets her kiss his forehead, lets her hold him.
“Come on,” Peter says, putting a hand under his elbow and pulling him up. “You look exhausted.”
They walk into the bedroom and Peter sits him down on the bed - on their marriage bed, El’s bed, and she tells him to stop being silly when he tries to get up. “None of us got enough sleep last night,” she says. “So just - just relax, okay?”
She gets him another glass of water and some breath mints and he sucks them until the roof of his mouth burns. She leaves the bedside light on and Peter pushes his shoulders until he lies down and pulls the comforter over them both.
Peter’s right behind him, but he doesn’t wrap himself around Neal like he used to. Just presses his torso against Neal’s. His thighs against Neal’s, his knees tucked into the curve of Neal’s legs, his breath on the side of Neal’s neck. El climbs into bed behind Peter, and they all shift for a few minutes before coming to rest.
He doesn’t fall sleep. Not that night, or the next, which he spends in their bed again. He doesn’t wake up without panicking for months. It’s worse when one of them is in bed with him than it is when he’s alone, but they don’t seem to mind. They tell him they don’t, anyway, and El tells him they’re not lying.
And week after week, month after month, they tell him that it doesn’t matter. That the things that happened to him don’t define him. And week after week, month after month, they invite him to dinner and shows and lunches at the office, and week after week, month after month, they don’t leave.
Moz takes over first his couch at June’s, then the bed, and finally the monthly rent. And if, on some rough nights, Neal picks the lock and slides into bed next to him and bullies him into making breakfast the next morning, well. That’s what friends are for.
And month after month, year after year, he plans to tell them about prison and doesn’t. Never sits them down and flips through his mental files and photos and forces himself to relive it. He doesn’t have to. He tells them in a thousand different ways. In hesitations and flinches and awkward, stilted refusals. In nightmares and forced laughter and old scars. And with every second that they don’t ask about it, he starts to believe that maybe they’re right. Maybe it doesn’t matter.
And sometimes - sometimes, he sleeps through the night and wakes up smiling in the morning and pretends to enjoy El’s fake bacon and watches basketball games he doesn’t understand with Peter, art history book open and ignored in his lap, Peter’s arm around his shoulder. Sometimes, he starts to think that he deserves this. Being happy.
*
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