A Walk-In Closet in My Heart, Part 1/2
Title: A Walk-In Closet in My Heart
Rating: PG (this part, NC-17 overall)
Summary: Peter doesn't really know how people can spend so much energy on clothes, but it keeps El and Neal happy so he's not going to rock the boat any time soon.
Word Count: 3000
Characters/Pairings: Peter, Elizabeth, Neal (this part, will be P/E/N next part)
Warnings/Content: this part is very gen; next part will contain an explicit threesome
Beta: None :(
Notes: A very late gift for arithilim. And my first foray into White Collar fandom, yikes!
~*~
Peter never liked shopping - he comes from a family of pragmatists, and if it was comfortable and presentable, they were good to go. Sometimes he put in more effort, but usually for the sake of impressing someone else.
Then El walked into his life, and shopping went from something he didn’t care about into a nightmare.
It wasn’t the bill that wasn’t a big problem - after all, El earned more than he did and they were both fine with that arrangement. No, the problem was that when he got married, he had never signed up to being a giant dress-up doll.
“I’m not a mannequin,” he said often when they went.
“You’re my husband,” she said, cinching his belt and patting his rump. “That’s close enough.”
And then he’d sigh, and let her stuff him into whatever shirt or pair of pants or stupid accessory he’d never wear anyway that she’s stumbled across.
While he did like the way she ate him up with her eyes while wearing some of her choices, it wasn’t worth the grief.
It got even worse when one day, he’d been staring forlornly at clippings and cut-outs of pictures of various designer clothes in a case file spread out across the dining table, and Elizabeth had stopped by and said, “Honey I thought you hated shopping?”
“James Bonds doesn’t,” he said.
She laughed, bending down and shifting through them. “Well he does have impeccable taste.”
“They make him look like a cartoon character,” he complained.
“Baby, they’re classics,” she said, leaning over to kiss his forehead. “And you can’t beat the classics.”
He sighed, shaking his head as he compared El, in her formfitting and flowing clothes, to James Bonds’ tailored three-piece suits, usually dark and almost...nostalgic in nature. There was probably a fashion word for it but Peter never needed that sort of thing for his job, so he didn’t bother knowing it.
“You’d get along fine with El,” Peter grumbled at the file as he continued shifting through his forger’s purchases.
So of course, about half a decade later, when Neal was comfortable enough with the Burkes to break into their house without knocking first and his only response to Peter’s simmering anger was, “Don’t worry, I didn’t ruin my suit,” Elizabeth laughed.
“Oh, you should’ve seen his face when he was trying to go through your clothing purchases the first time he was chasing you around,” she said.
“What about it?”
“He works with designer clothing all the time, and he hates them,” she said, still laughing. “Oh, he kept complaining about how he had enough clothes to deal with from shopping with me and working the occasional knock-off case, he hated that you gave him more clothes to work with from your shopping sprees. He hates shopping.”
“What’s wrong with shopping?” Neal asked in confusion. Genuine confusion.
“What isn’t wrong with shopping?” he asked incredulously.
There was a moment of silence, before Elizabeth turned to Neal and said, “You see what I have to deal with?”
He threw his hands up in the air in exaggeration, as Neal nodded in sympathy.
“Hey, if you ever go somewhere in my radius, call me,” Neal said. “I promise to be better company than Peter.”
She had laughed, and forgotten about it soon after, and Neal probably had, too. But Peter hadn’t.
So the next time Elizabeth started murmuring, “I’m thinking we’ll need some new seasonal tops...” Peter promptly starting leaving around print-outs and flyers from every fancy-sounding store in Neal’s radius.
He’d married a smart woman, one who caught on fast, and that weekend he sighed in contentment as he relaxed on the couch and watched his game with a beer in one hand and the remote in the other, while Elizabeth was out having fun with Neal.
That evening they came back to his place, one of the only out-of-radius places approved for Neal’s off-duty probation time, loaded down with bags and laughing, still chatting about clothes as they both wandered upstairs to...do whatever it is people do with clothes after shopping sprees.
“Why can’t I be like you?” he asked Satchmo. “You never have to change your clothes.”
Satch snored on, oblivious to Peter’s plight.
Half an hour later, Peter opened the door to his room, only to find Neal and El both standing there in their underwear while deciding that next to try out in a new combination.
Who else opens his bedroom door, finds his wife and another man standing there undressed, and feels relieved that it’s not him in there?
“Let me guess, it’s not what it looks like?” Peter asked as he picked up his laptop from the beside table.
“I’d say it’s exactly what it looks like,” Neal said cheerfully, not even bothering to hide the fact that all he was wearing was a pair of socks and briefs.
“On that note,” El said, reaching across the bag for the only bag unpacked. “I have this tie-”
“You two have fun,” Peter said quickly, running out the door and closing it behind him to their laughter.
His wife was standing in his bedroom undressing with another man, and he told them to have fun. Shaking his head, he went back downstairs.
The next Monday, he described all this to Diana, who dressed well but treated it as just another part of her work, and she laughed, too.
But it was a good system. Every few weeks, Elizabeth would get a hankering for some new clothes and find a store within two miles of June’s apartment and call up Neal, and Peter would wave his wife out the door before claiming the living room for himself. Hours and hours of the TV to himself on the weekends, his wife taken care of, and the only interruption being Neal and El tumbling into the house if they didn’t go back to June’s, usually to disappear upstairs to test out their purchases with El’s existing wardrobe, leaving Peter to his own devices yet again.
He should’ve known it was too good to last.
He also should’ve known they were up to something when Neal spent a whole day flattering him, helping him, only barely back-talking, and even offering to get files, and when they went home and El already had all his favorites waiting for him on the table. Instead, he sat down, and his two fashionistas sat opposite to him, he led himself be blindly led into contentment and complacency before they sprung it on him: a shopping trip.
To a store outside Neal’s radius.
“It’s abusing FBI resources,” Peter said.
“You have the perfect excuse,” El said.
“We work with knock-offs, and that means keeping up with the fashion industry,” Neal began.
“So think of this as purely business,” El said. “You and Neal are studying the details of the field you work in, while I’m just...helping along.”
“Uh-huh,” Peter said, crossing his arms defiantly.
But of course, these were the only two people in the world capable of manipulating him with a pout, so the two of them ganging up on him meant that weekend, Peter was calling in the marshals on the way to the store, Neal and El chatting excitedly about it the entire way there.
Once there, of course, he did need to be productive, and have something to show for his efforts in case anyone questioned him later on. So once El and Neal disappeared into the racks, he stayed safely up front chatting with the owner and various clerks about updates in the fashion industry and things to look out for. He kept a wary eye out the entire time, afraid one or both of them might come to drag him off make him try something on.
Instead, Neal came by to measure Peter’s head, saying only, “Your wife wants to get you a new hat,” before taking off again, and Peter turned back to see the store owner smiling at him, the nearby clerks all giggling into their hands.
What was it about clothes everybody kept finding so funny?
Because it was still the first year of Neal’s probation, on Monday he did have to go to Hughes and explain away the visit, but Hughes just sighed after Peter’s minor presentation and said, “Who came up with that one, Elizabeth or Caffrey?”
“I have no idea,” he admitted.
“Well...just let them know if my niece is ever in town, I won’t ask too many questions about Caffrey’s tracking data.”
They shared a brief smile of solidarity, before they both went back to work.
El and Neal’s shopping trips became his rather roundabout way of watching over them. He tried not to look too closely at what they bought, beyond keeping tabs on Neal’s just-do-not-ask-too-many-questions credit cards. They gave each other lavish gift cards for various holidays, usually with the intent to go shopping together. In theory, Peter knew he should be worried about them having a close relationship which involves putting clothes on and off each other a significant portion of the time, but all he could think was that he was glad it wasn’t him. At most, if he needed new clothes, they’d take his measurements and flounce off together, a whirlwind of dark hair and bright eyes, and Peter didn’t really have too much of a problem with effectively letting them dress him, slowing expanding his own wardrobe as well as theirs.
The first thing El did when Neal got out of prison the second time was take him shopping.
“Shopping, El? His girlfriend died and he’s spent the last two months in prison and you want to take him shopping?”
“What else am I supposed to do?” she asked as she packed up her purse. “Neal is locking himself in and bottling up all his feelings...I don’t expect him to let them out, but I at least want to know what they are.”
“And you can do that by shopping?” Peter asked incredulously.
“Of course,” she said, as if the answer were obvious.
With the look on Neal’s face when they came home, Peter decided it was better to let El do her thing and not question her again.
When Mozzie got shot, and El and Neal tried to kidnap him soon after his hospital release, Peter found a strange ally in him as they both hid from their respective clothe-aholics that night.
“No, I never understood it, either,” Moz said. “It’s one thing to understand designer clothing for a con, I have a perfectly good grasp of contemporary fashion...but this thing about actually liking it outside of a con...? I don’t know. Even Kate used to make fun of him for it.”
“Seriously?” Peter asked as he let Moz rifle through his kitchen.
“Seriously,” Moz said, leaning into the fridge. “She’s like Lady Suit - dressing well is a job and nothing more.”
“And you?” Peter asked.
“I try to avoid jobs that need designer clothes,” Moz said simply, popping back out with his prize of cake in his hand.
After the entire Adler thing, and Peter was going through psych consults while investigating Neal off the books, he knew when El didn’t believe him about the treasure, the way she’d still regularly go out with Neal to poke around any fancy new boutique, though she didn’t ask Peter for as many out-of-radius trips as usual.
He also knew when she started to genuinely believe him, when they only occasionally went out, mostly if they were already both headed somewhere, and day-long trips and hours of trying on outfits at home boiled down to an hour or two in a store and Neal no longer coming home with her.
“Do you think he knows?” Peter asked, after she came home along from one such trip. “That I’m on to him?”
“Of course he knows, how can he not?” El asked sadly, heading up to their room.
Even Neal’s girlfriend noticed.
“I know what you think Neal did,” Sara said when yet another one of her recovery jobs intersected with his investigations.
“Do you think he did it?” Peter asked. “You broke up with him recently.”
“I’m not commenting on that,” Sara said glibly as they both waited for the museum curator. “Though to be honest the fact that Neal’s relationship with you and Elizabeth was going downhill has been pretty obvious for quite a while.”
“What...?”
“The shopping trips?” she asked, raising her eyebrow.
“Did you go with them?” Peter asked.
Sara shook her head. “I...well, I like to look nice. I don’t care much about the process of looking nice.”
Peter raised an eyebrow, and she laughed, saying, “That wasn’t about the shopping, it was playing conwoman to draw out a thief.”
“So shopping does nothing for you, but playing sharkbait does? Or is it just your tastes suddenly being awakened when you had more than a hundred and twenty million dollars to back it up?”
Sara rolled her eyes. “I’m not the shopping kind, at least not like Elizabeth and Neal are...Neal misses you. And he misses El.”
“Does he miss you?” Peter challenged.
“I...” Sara took a deep breath. “I was the scarf - fun, potentially something deep, but in the end, the weather wasn’t cold enough to need one. You and El are the hat - he may put you away sometimes, but he’ll always pull you back out.”
“Great,” Peter muttered, as their curator and witness approached. “Just what I needed. Nonsensical accessory metaphors.”
Peter mentioned all this to El, and she just sighed and said, “This was always something fun for us, Peter, I can’t do that if I’m worrying the entire time.”
At first he’d no idea what she meant, but in a few months he got a pretty good idea.
After Keller took El, and then took Neal in El’s place, and even later than that, when El’s nightmares started to settle down a little and Neal lay in a hospital bed, pale and bruised but alive, Peter went to go get coffee, and came back to see El talking to Neal earnestly.
“...with me?” he heard her say as he stood just outside the door.
“Elizabeth,” Neal said, voice raspy from screaming. “I - do you really?”
“We haven’t been in ages,” Elizabeth said. “And you’ve lost a lot of weight since my kidnapping, you’ll need some new clothes to hold you over until you can go back to Byron’s suits again.”
“You really want me to?” Neal asked, sounding like an amazed child on Christmas morning.
“Yes,” El said. “I can’t - Peter doesn’t forgive easily. And sometimes, I feel angry, and it’s at you and Keller and Mozzie and Peter and the FBI and me and...I can’t let my anger take over my relationships.”
“But you’ll let clothes do it?” Neal asked softly.
“Of course...we’ll go that boutique three streets over from June’s place. They love you, and they’ll be happy to help us around the store if we’re still a little bruised up by then. And we can go for coffee across the street after.”
“And after the coffee?” Neal asked.
“...I think we’ll save the outfit trials for the next trip,” El said. “It’s...it won’t be easy.”
“Nothing worth it ever is,” Neal said.
They did eventually get back into their rhythm. For the first few trips, El still came home alone. But their little shopping sprees did get longer and longer, and eventually, Neal started coming home, and half a year after El’s abduction, Peter was yet again hiding in the living room with a game on TV and a beer in his hand, Satchmo curled up at his feet, the faintest hints of El and Neal’s conversation drifting down from the second floor.
During a commercial break, when Peter figured now was a good time to go fetch some magazines to catch up on, he headed up the stairs and spent a few moments leaning against the doorway of his room, watching El and Neal.
Neal was wearing a pair of slacks that clung sharply to his thighs but flowed a little more softly from his knees, dark black with the faintest hint of pinstripes but not quite. He appeared to be trying on a bunch of belts, all three a deep brown, the current one some earth-like thing with fanciful embroidery along the edges and embossed holes down the end, testing its effect based on which hole he cinched it to.
El was wearing one of those shirts that was also a dress - or was it a dress that was also a shirt? - something blue with a purple-red floral design across her upper back and shoulders, vines trailing down her back and arms and ending in sequins. She wasn’t wearing a skirt at that moment, her bare legs shining in the lamplight, but she was examining a blue one that would fall to just below her knees with purple-red Celtic-y embroidery along the hem, and she was wearing a white sandal on one foot, the other sandal on the other side of the room.
“They’re clothes,” Peter said. “How can you care so much about stupid pieces of fabric?”
“Peter!” Neal said with a mock horrified gasp. “Stupid pieces of a fabric? How could you!”
El opened her mouth, but before she could speak he grumbled, “I am not going to apologize to the clothes. Apologizing to Satchmo is bad enough.”
“You made him apologize to Satchmo?” Neal asked of El in awe. She nodded proudly, before turning what Peter could swear was a sadistic grin on her husband.
“We brought some new socks for you,” she started out easily.
Peter darted in, collecting his magazines from the corner of the bed before running out the door. El took a few steps after him but she eventually ran into Neal, and the two fell onto the bed together, laughing as Peter shook his head fondly at them before continuing back to his chair in the living room.
His wife just fell into bed with another man. Literally.
Scratching Satchmo’s head, Peter flopped back into his chair with a relaxed sigh, turned his game back on, and opened up his magazine with relief.
~*~
A/N: This is my first published fic in White Collar fandom, so please tell me what you think! I'm always eager to improve my writing, so concrit is much appreciated. ^_^ Part 2 will hopefully be up by around this weekend. :)
Rating: PG (this part, NC-17 overall)
Summary: Peter doesn't really know how people can spend so much energy on clothes, but it keeps El and Neal happy so he's not going to rock the boat any time soon.
Word Count: 3000
Characters/Pairings: Peter, Elizabeth, Neal (this part, will be P/E/N next part)
Warnings/Content: this part is very gen; next part will contain an explicit threesome
Beta: None :(
Notes: A very late gift for arithilim. And my first foray into White Collar fandom, yikes!
~*~
Peter never liked shopping - he comes from a family of pragmatists, and if it was comfortable and presentable, they were good to go. Sometimes he put in more effort, but usually for the sake of impressing someone else.
Then El walked into his life, and shopping went from something he didn’t care about into a nightmare.
It wasn’t the bill that wasn’t a big problem - after all, El earned more than he did and they were both fine with that arrangement. No, the problem was that when he got married, he had never signed up to being a giant dress-up doll.
“I’m not a mannequin,” he said often when they went.
“You’re my husband,” she said, cinching his belt and patting his rump. “That’s close enough.”
And then he’d sigh, and let her stuff him into whatever shirt or pair of pants or stupid accessory he’d never wear anyway that she’s stumbled across.
While he did like the way she ate him up with her eyes while wearing some of her choices, it wasn’t worth the grief.
It got even worse when one day, he’d been staring forlornly at clippings and cut-outs of pictures of various designer clothes in a case file spread out across the dining table, and Elizabeth had stopped by and said, “Honey I thought you hated shopping?”
“James Bonds doesn’t,” he said.
She laughed, bending down and shifting through them. “Well he does have impeccable taste.”
“They make him look like a cartoon character,” he complained.
“Baby, they’re classics,” she said, leaning over to kiss his forehead. “And you can’t beat the classics.”
He sighed, shaking his head as he compared El, in her formfitting and flowing clothes, to James Bonds’ tailored three-piece suits, usually dark and almost...nostalgic in nature. There was probably a fashion word for it but Peter never needed that sort of thing for his job, so he didn’t bother knowing it.
“You’d get along fine with El,” Peter grumbled at the file as he continued shifting through his forger’s purchases.
So of course, about half a decade later, when Neal was comfortable enough with the Burkes to break into their house without knocking first and his only response to Peter’s simmering anger was, “Don’t worry, I didn’t ruin my suit,” Elizabeth laughed.
“Oh, you should’ve seen his face when he was trying to go through your clothing purchases the first time he was chasing you around,” she said.
“What about it?”
“He works with designer clothing all the time, and he hates them,” she said, still laughing. “Oh, he kept complaining about how he had enough clothes to deal with from shopping with me and working the occasional knock-off case, he hated that you gave him more clothes to work with from your shopping sprees. He hates shopping.”
“What’s wrong with shopping?” Neal asked in confusion. Genuine confusion.
“What isn’t wrong with shopping?” he asked incredulously.
There was a moment of silence, before Elizabeth turned to Neal and said, “You see what I have to deal with?”
He threw his hands up in the air in exaggeration, as Neal nodded in sympathy.
“Hey, if you ever go somewhere in my radius, call me,” Neal said. “I promise to be better company than Peter.”
She had laughed, and forgotten about it soon after, and Neal probably had, too. But Peter hadn’t.
So the next time Elizabeth started murmuring, “I’m thinking we’ll need some new seasonal tops...” Peter promptly starting leaving around print-outs and flyers from every fancy-sounding store in Neal’s radius.
He’d married a smart woman, one who caught on fast, and that weekend he sighed in contentment as he relaxed on the couch and watched his game with a beer in one hand and the remote in the other, while Elizabeth was out having fun with Neal.
That evening they came back to his place, one of the only out-of-radius places approved for Neal’s off-duty probation time, loaded down with bags and laughing, still chatting about clothes as they both wandered upstairs to...do whatever it is people do with clothes after shopping sprees.
“Why can’t I be like you?” he asked Satchmo. “You never have to change your clothes.”
Satch snored on, oblivious to Peter’s plight.
Half an hour later, Peter opened the door to his room, only to find Neal and El both standing there in their underwear while deciding that next to try out in a new combination.
Who else opens his bedroom door, finds his wife and another man standing there undressed, and feels relieved that it’s not him in there?
“Let me guess, it’s not what it looks like?” Peter asked as he picked up his laptop from the beside table.
“I’d say it’s exactly what it looks like,” Neal said cheerfully, not even bothering to hide the fact that all he was wearing was a pair of socks and briefs.
“On that note,” El said, reaching across the bag for the only bag unpacked. “I have this tie-”
“You two have fun,” Peter said quickly, running out the door and closing it behind him to their laughter.
His wife was standing in his bedroom undressing with another man, and he told them to have fun. Shaking his head, he went back downstairs.
The next Monday, he described all this to Diana, who dressed well but treated it as just another part of her work, and she laughed, too.
But it was a good system. Every few weeks, Elizabeth would get a hankering for some new clothes and find a store within two miles of June’s apartment and call up Neal, and Peter would wave his wife out the door before claiming the living room for himself. Hours and hours of the TV to himself on the weekends, his wife taken care of, and the only interruption being Neal and El tumbling into the house if they didn’t go back to June’s, usually to disappear upstairs to test out their purchases with El’s existing wardrobe, leaving Peter to his own devices yet again.
He should’ve known it was too good to last.
He also should’ve known they were up to something when Neal spent a whole day flattering him, helping him, only barely back-talking, and even offering to get files, and when they went home and El already had all his favorites waiting for him on the table. Instead, he sat down, and his two fashionistas sat opposite to him, he led himself be blindly led into contentment and complacency before they sprung it on him: a shopping trip.
To a store outside Neal’s radius.
“It’s abusing FBI resources,” Peter said.
“You have the perfect excuse,” El said.
“We work with knock-offs, and that means keeping up with the fashion industry,” Neal began.
“So think of this as purely business,” El said. “You and Neal are studying the details of the field you work in, while I’m just...helping along.”
“Uh-huh,” Peter said, crossing his arms defiantly.
But of course, these were the only two people in the world capable of manipulating him with a pout, so the two of them ganging up on him meant that weekend, Peter was calling in the marshals on the way to the store, Neal and El chatting excitedly about it the entire way there.
Once there, of course, he did need to be productive, and have something to show for his efforts in case anyone questioned him later on. So once El and Neal disappeared into the racks, he stayed safely up front chatting with the owner and various clerks about updates in the fashion industry and things to look out for. He kept a wary eye out the entire time, afraid one or both of them might come to drag him off make him try something on.
Instead, Neal came by to measure Peter’s head, saying only, “Your wife wants to get you a new hat,” before taking off again, and Peter turned back to see the store owner smiling at him, the nearby clerks all giggling into their hands.
What was it about clothes everybody kept finding so funny?
Because it was still the first year of Neal’s probation, on Monday he did have to go to Hughes and explain away the visit, but Hughes just sighed after Peter’s minor presentation and said, “Who came up with that one, Elizabeth or Caffrey?”
“I have no idea,” he admitted.
“Well...just let them know if my niece is ever in town, I won’t ask too many questions about Caffrey’s tracking data.”
They shared a brief smile of solidarity, before they both went back to work.
El and Neal’s shopping trips became his rather roundabout way of watching over them. He tried not to look too closely at what they bought, beyond keeping tabs on Neal’s just-do-not-ask-too-many-questions credit cards. They gave each other lavish gift cards for various holidays, usually with the intent to go shopping together. In theory, Peter knew he should be worried about them having a close relationship which involves putting clothes on and off each other a significant portion of the time, but all he could think was that he was glad it wasn’t him. At most, if he needed new clothes, they’d take his measurements and flounce off together, a whirlwind of dark hair and bright eyes, and Peter didn’t really have too much of a problem with effectively letting them dress him, slowing expanding his own wardrobe as well as theirs.
The first thing El did when Neal got out of prison the second time was take him shopping.
“Shopping, El? His girlfriend died and he’s spent the last two months in prison and you want to take him shopping?”
“What else am I supposed to do?” she asked as she packed up her purse. “Neal is locking himself in and bottling up all his feelings...I don’t expect him to let them out, but I at least want to know what they are.”
“And you can do that by shopping?” Peter asked incredulously.
“Of course,” she said, as if the answer were obvious.
With the look on Neal’s face when they came home, Peter decided it was better to let El do her thing and not question her again.
When Mozzie got shot, and El and Neal tried to kidnap him soon after his hospital release, Peter found a strange ally in him as they both hid from their respective clothe-aholics that night.
“No, I never understood it, either,” Moz said. “It’s one thing to understand designer clothing for a con, I have a perfectly good grasp of contemporary fashion...but this thing about actually liking it outside of a con...? I don’t know. Even Kate used to make fun of him for it.”
“Seriously?” Peter asked as he let Moz rifle through his kitchen.
“Seriously,” Moz said, leaning into the fridge. “She’s like Lady Suit - dressing well is a job and nothing more.”
“And you?” Peter asked.
“I try to avoid jobs that need designer clothes,” Moz said simply, popping back out with his prize of cake in his hand.
After the entire Adler thing, and Peter was going through psych consults while investigating Neal off the books, he knew when El didn’t believe him about the treasure, the way she’d still regularly go out with Neal to poke around any fancy new boutique, though she didn’t ask Peter for as many out-of-radius trips as usual.
He also knew when she started to genuinely believe him, when they only occasionally went out, mostly if they were already both headed somewhere, and day-long trips and hours of trying on outfits at home boiled down to an hour or two in a store and Neal no longer coming home with her.
“Do you think he knows?” Peter asked, after she came home along from one such trip. “That I’m on to him?”
“Of course he knows, how can he not?” El asked sadly, heading up to their room.
Even Neal’s girlfriend noticed.
“I know what you think Neal did,” Sara said when yet another one of her recovery jobs intersected with his investigations.
“Do you think he did it?” Peter asked. “You broke up with him recently.”
“I’m not commenting on that,” Sara said glibly as they both waited for the museum curator. “Though to be honest the fact that Neal’s relationship with you and Elizabeth was going downhill has been pretty obvious for quite a while.”
“What...?”
“The shopping trips?” she asked, raising her eyebrow.
“Did you go with them?” Peter asked.
Sara shook her head. “I...well, I like to look nice. I don’t care much about the process of looking nice.”
Peter raised an eyebrow, and she laughed, saying, “That wasn’t about the shopping, it was playing conwoman to draw out a thief.”
“So shopping does nothing for you, but playing sharkbait does? Or is it just your tastes suddenly being awakened when you had more than a hundred and twenty million dollars to back it up?”
Sara rolled her eyes. “I’m not the shopping kind, at least not like Elizabeth and Neal are...Neal misses you. And he misses El.”
“Does he miss you?” Peter challenged.
“I...” Sara took a deep breath. “I was the scarf - fun, potentially something deep, but in the end, the weather wasn’t cold enough to need one. You and El are the hat - he may put you away sometimes, but he’ll always pull you back out.”
“Great,” Peter muttered, as their curator and witness approached. “Just what I needed. Nonsensical accessory metaphors.”
Peter mentioned all this to El, and she just sighed and said, “This was always something fun for us, Peter, I can’t do that if I’m worrying the entire time.”
At first he’d no idea what she meant, but in a few months he got a pretty good idea.
After Keller took El, and then took Neal in El’s place, and even later than that, when El’s nightmares started to settle down a little and Neal lay in a hospital bed, pale and bruised but alive, Peter went to go get coffee, and came back to see El talking to Neal earnestly.
“...with me?” he heard her say as he stood just outside the door.
“Elizabeth,” Neal said, voice raspy from screaming. “I - do you really?”
“We haven’t been in ages,” Elizabeth said. “And you’ve lost a lot of weight since my kidnapping, you’ll need some new clothes to hold you over until you can go back to Byron’s suits again.”
“You really want me to?” Neal asked, sounding like an amazed child on Christmas morning.
“Yes,” El said. “I can’t - Peter doesn’t forgive easily. And sometimes, I feel angry, and it’s at you and Keller and Mozzie and Peter and the FBI and me and...I can’t let my anger take over my relationships.”
“But you’ll let clothes do it?” Neal asked softly.
“Of course...we’ll go that boutique three streets over from June’s place. They love you, and they’ll be happy to help us around the store if we’re still a little bruised up by then. And we can go for coffee across the street after.”
“And after the coffee?” Neal asked.
“...I think we’ll save the outfit trials for the next trip,” El said. “It’s...it won’t be easy.”
“Nothing worth it ever is,” Neal said.
They did eventually get back into their rhythm. For the first few trips, El still came home alone. But their little shopping sprees did get longer and longer, and eventually, Neal started coming home, and half a year after El’s abduction, Peter was yet again hiding in the living room with a game on TV and a beer in his hand, Satchmo curled up at his feet, the faintest hints of El and Neal’s conversation drifting down from the second floor.
During a commercial break, when Peter figured now was a good time to go fetch some magazines to catch up on, he headed up the stairs and spent a few moments leaning against the doorway of his room, watching El and Neal.
Neal was wearing a pair of slacks that clung sharply to his thighs but flowed a little more softly from his knees, dark black with the faintest hint of pinstripes but not quite. He appeared to be trying on a bunch of belts, all three a deep brown, the current one some earth-like thing with fanciful embroidery along the edges and embossed holes down the end, testing its effect based on which hole he cinched it to.
El was wearing one of those shirts that was also a dress - or was it a dress that was also a shirt? - something blue with a purple-red floral design across her upper back and shoulders, vines trailing down her back and arms and ending in sequins. She wasn’t wearing a skirt at that moment, her bare legs shining in the lamplight, but she was examining a blue one that would fall to just below her knees with purple-red Celtic-y embroidery along the hem, and she was wearing a white sandal on one foot, the other sandal on the other side of the room.
“They’re clothes,” Peter said. “How can you care so much about stupid pieces of fabric?”
“Peter!” Neal said with a mock horrified gasp. “Stupid pieces of a fabric? How could you!”
El opened her mouth, but before she could speak he grumbled, “I am not going to apologize to the clothes. Apologizing to Satchmo is bad enough.”
“You made him apologize to Satchmo?” Neal asked of El in awe. She nodded proudly, before turning what Peter could swear was a sadistic grin on her husband.
“We brought some new socks for you,” she started out easily.
Peter darted in, collecting his magazines from the corner of the bed before running out the door. El took a few steps after him but she eventually ran into Neal, and the two fell onto the bed together, laughing as Peter shook his head fondly at them before continuing back to his chair in the living room.
His wife just fell into bed with another man. Literally.
Scratching Satchmo’s head, Peter flopped back into his chair with a relaxed sigh, turned his game back on, and opened up his magazine with relief.
~*~
A/N: This is my first published fic in White Collar fandom, so please tell me what you think! I'm always eager to improve my writing, so concrit is much appreciated. ^_^ Part 2 will hopefully be up by around this weekend. :)