Four things Neal never said and one he wished he had.
Title: Four things Neal never said and one he wished he had.
Author: legio_felicia
Pairing: none
Word count: 444
unbetaed
Disclaimer: White Collar and all the characters therein belongs to their creators Jeff Eastin and Travis Romero, not money is being made from this it's purely for fun.
On being a man
"You told me to be the man and not the con, you said that you wanted see the real me, but almost every time that I relaxed my mask and expressed something other than perfect satisfaction with my situation, you told me to cowboy up or asked me if I rather go back to prison."
"That certainly told me that you wanted me to be "on" all the time, that any frustration, sadness, grief or other emotion that didn't belong to "Neal Caffrey: Conman, Thief and Forger extraordinare." wasn't welcome."
On Prison
"I was a good looking young white guy, a non-violent, first time offender, with no gang or mob affiliation, who was sent to a maximum security prison. What the fuck did you think would happen, Peter!"
On the fifth and secrets.
"You are my friend Peter, but you are also "FBI Agent Peter Burke" [the arkeologist] investigator and handler", you have spent years collecting information on me, trying to find the pieces of my past. You never met a puzzle you didn't try to solve, it's part of who you are and I respect and accept that about you."
"But Peter, you don't get to be mad at me for having secrets, for not trusting you with everything, not when you know that whatever you may dig up could very well put me back in prison or the people I love and me in danger."
On Guns
"A thief shooting someone in order to steal something, or someone shooting a thief in order to prevent something from being stolen. To society: one act is justified and lauded, the other despicable and punished. To me, no amount of monetary goods or assets are worth taking a life over, not to gain them nor to prevent someone from gaining them."
On living the dream
"You think that I'm living the dream? I suppose you are right, I have a great place to live, fashionable clothes, work that i enjoy most of the time and people I enjoy working with and people I can call friends. Yeah, I suppose you can call that "living the dream".
"But the clothes that I wear they aren't mine, the place that I live in and the things in it, isn't mine. The work that I I'm doing, as much as I enjoy it, it's not something I would have chosen without the threat of prison hanging over me."
"I wake every day with the knowledge that I work and live in a gilded cage, and if things go wrong, it can be transformed into a cage of concrete."
"So that dream I'm living, it's not mine."