Fic: Plate 413 (Senseless, 3/5)
Title: Plate 413
Author: QWERTYfaced
Fandom: White Collar
Wordcount: ~1000
Rating: PG
Characters: Neal Caffrey
Genre: Angst
Notes: Part 3 of 5 of the "Senseless" exercise: touch. [Depression and Neal!whump.]
Summary: Neal Caffrey always thought he lived by his wits, but then something deprives him of one of his senses. One premise, five short standalone scenarios, each progressively whumpier. (It's a new word.)
Disclaimer: This is a work of fanfiction. All characters and settings belong to their respective copyright holders, not me. Which is why I don't have a hovercraft yet.
( 2: Would Smell as Sweet )
In the end, he always came back to the book.
It was a formidable work of art-page after page of darkly beautiful engravings, with their delicately muted tinting, finely limned shading, and careful lettering. Generations of physicians had learned from it. So had artists.
And it held a fatal fascination for Neal Caffrey, months after what people generally referred to, cautiously and euphemistically, as "the incident."
It was an infuriatingly benign term.
The incident could send him back to the helplessness of childhood in the middle of the night. In some ways, it was worse than childhood. He knew that there was no comforting figure to call, no one to soothe him with gentle words, reassure him that the terrors in his mind were all just a dream.
Because it wasn't just a dream. It was memory.
In the darkness, the clinging sheets fitted themselves into a groove invisibly tattooed against his throat, and the mattress's warm pressure against his back echoed the bulk of a body. He remembered the scratch of linen suiting on a forearm locked around his neck, and the strange, uncomfortable intimacy of being a human shield. He remembered the knife that had been held against his side.
Most of all, he remembered the moment it all came apart.
The wordless signal from Peter. The abrupt wrench away from his captor. The jerk of the knife.
Peculiarly, he couldn't remember what the cut itself felt like, the bright steel slicing through yielding tissue. What he recalled was a sudden rush of sensations, as if every cell in his body was surprised, all at once. A deathly chill, then autoclave heat; vision darkening and then exploding into effervescent light; a sudden drop into numb, acoustic-tiled silence.
When it cleared away, the man with the knife was on the ground and moaning from gunshots Neal hadn't heard. And a white-faced Peter had his hands clenched around Neal's upper arm. In the breathless, endless microsecond before the pain hit, he looked down and saw blood dripping through the elbow of his jacket.
Days were lost to anesthesia, and the fog of pain and opiates. His first clear moment stood out in contrast, every shape and color laser-cut and pitilessly bright. He had stared past the bandages at his right hand, limp and curled in on itself, and realized with a slow, creeping horror that he could not feel palm or fingers at all.
The afternoon he went home, his head was full of clamoring phrases. Snippets of anatomy floated past, chased by statements about physical therapy, muscle and nerve damage, and the cruel optimism that someday he might regain "some" function.
After a strained dinner with his friends, Neal sat on the couch for the rest of the evening and stared at the wall, while the rough music of medicalese played endlessly in his brain.
By the time he went back to the office, he'd taught himself to print his name left-handed. The letters were large, ungainly, and cost him more labor than an entire sketch once would have. He could hardly bear to look at them.
He endured the welcome back, even smiling as the Harvard Crew presented him with a pinstriped sling to replace the ugly hospital version. Someone made a too-hearty comment about how glad they were he was back, and how after all, he didn't need to be able to paint forgeries to detect them. Neal was careful not to show how the words burned-but later on, he found paperwork on his desk that sported his old, dashing signature.
He buried himself in case files and didn't speak a word for the rest of the afternoon.
That night, he had the first dream. In the sweating, trembling aftermath, he was walking to the kitchen for a glass of water, when the battered old copy of Gray's Anatomy caught his eye.
He took it to the couch and turned the pages slowly until he found what he was looking for, then stared at it for over an hour.
That was the first time, but over the months, he went back to it again and again. Somehow, he would find his feet carrying him to the bookshelf; would find the book open on his lap, while his arm lay quiescent beside it.
Again and again: after torturous physical therapy sessions; after work took him into the presence of art; after yet another operation to remove the agonizing clumps of nerve tissue that were healing wrong. And always, always after the nightmares-when he woke so rigid with memory, with trying to contain the waves of despair and anger and grief, that it often took half an hour before he could find the strength to move.
It became a ritual.
Stripped of his shirt, his eyes and his left hand would slowly trace the contours of a limb that no longer seemed to belong to him. The inert muscle cratered with scar tissue. The hand always slightly curled. The place on the third finger now missing the old callus from pencil, brush, carving tool.
He would try, futilely, to rub out the phantom aches, in hopes that it would ease the hollow, burning stretch lodged deep within his chest.
Then he would open the book to plate 413...the cross-section of an upper arm.
Sometimes the book ended up flung across the room, and sometimes he'd just stare until the image became white noise, loud enough to drown out the cacophony in his head.
And sometimes his eyes would trace the fragile cross-hatching and precise outlines with assiduous care, though the image was already indelibly etched into his memory.
Plate 413: an illustration of what he could no longer do...and why.
( 4: Fool's Gold )
Author: QWERTYfaced
Fandom: White Collar
Wordcount: ~1000
Rating: PG
Characters: Neal Caffrey
Genre: Angst
Notes: Part 3 of 5 of the "Senseless" exercise: touch. [Depression and Neal!whump.]
Summary: Neal Caffrey always thought he lived by his wits, but then something deprives him of one of his senses. One premise, five short standalone scenarios, each progressively whumpier. (It's a new word.)
Disclaimer: This is a work of fanfiction. All characters and settings belong to their respective copyright holders, not me. Which is why I don't have a hovercraft yet.
( 2: Would Smell as Sweet )
In the end, he always came back to the book.
It was a formidable work of art-page after page of darkly beautiful engravings, with their delicately muted tinting, finely limned shading, and careful lettering. Generations of physicians had learned from it. So had artists.
And it held a fatal fascination for Neal Caffrey, months after what people generally referred to, cautiously and euphemistically, as "the incident."
It was an infuriatingly benign term.
The incident could send him back to the helplessness of childhood in the middle of the night. In some ways, it was worse than childhood. He knew that there was no comforting figure to call, no one to soothe him with gentle words, reassure him that the terrors in his mind were all just a dream.
Because it wasn't just a dream. It was memory.
In the darkness, the clinging sheets fitted themselves into a groove invisibly tattooed against his throat, and the mattress's warm pressure against his back echoed the bulk of a body. He remembered the scratch of linen suiting on a forearm locked around his neck, and the strange, uncomfortable intimacy of being a human shield. He remembered the knife that had been held against his side.
Most of all, he remembered the moment it all came apart.
The wordless signal from Peter. The abrupt wrench away from his captor. The jerk of the knife.
Peculiarly, he couldn't remember what the cut itself felt like, the bright steel slicing through yielding tissue. What he recalled was a sudden rush of sensations, as if every cell in his body was surprised, all at once. A deathly chill, then autoclave heat; vision darkening and then exploding into effervescent light; a sudden drop into numb, acoustic-tiled silence.
When it cleared away, the man with the knife was on the ground and moaning from gunshots Neal hadn't heard. And a white-faced Peter had his hands clenched around Neal's upper arm. In the breathless, endless microsecond before the pain hit, he looked down and saw blood dripping through the elbow of his jacket.
Days were lost to anesthesia, and the fog of pain and opiates. His first clear moment stood out in contrast, every shape and color laser-cut and pitilessly bright. He had stared past the bandages at his right hand, limp and curled in on itself, and realized with a slow, creeping horror that he could not feel palm or fingers at all.
The afternoon he went home, his head was full of clamoring phrases. Snippets of anatomy floated past, chased by statements about physical therapy, muscle and nerve damage, and the cruel optimism that someday he might regain "some" function.
After a strained dinner with his friends, Neal sat on the couch for the rest of the evening and stared at the wall, while the rough music of medicalese played endlessly in his brain.
By the time he went back to the office, he'd taught himself to print his name left-handed. The letters were large, ungainly, and cost him more labor than an entire sketch once would have. He could hardly bear to look at them.
He endured the welcome back, even smiling as the Harvard Crew presented him with a pinstriped sling to replace the ugly hospital version. Someone made a too-hearty comment about how glad they were he was back, and how after all, he didn't need to be able to paint forgeries to detect them. Neal was careful not to show how the words burned-but later on, he found paperwork on his desk that sported his old, dashing signature.
He buried himself in case files and didn't speak a word for the rest of the afternoon.
That night, he had the first dream. In the sweating, trembling aftermath, he was walking to the kitchen for a glass of water, when the battered old copy of Gray's Anatomy caught his eye.
He took it to the couch and turned the pages slowly until he found what he was looking for, then stared at it for over an hour.
That was the first time, but over the months, he went back to it again and again. Somehow, he would find his feet carrying him to the bookshelf; would find the book open on his lap, while his arm lay quiescent beside it.
Again and again: after torturous physical therapy sessions; after work took him into the presence of art; after yet another operation to remove the agonizing clumps of nerve tissue that were healing wrong. And always, always after the nightmares-when he woke so rigid with memory, with trying to contain the waves of despair and anger and grief, that it often took half an hour before he could find the strength to move.
It became a ritual.
Stripped of his shirt, his eyes and his left hand would slowly trace the contours of a limb that no longer seemed to belong to him. The inert muscle cratered with scar tissue. The hand always slightly curled. The place on the third finger now missing the old callus from pencil, brush, carving tool.
He would try, futilely, to rub out the phantom aches, in hopes that it would ease the hollow, burning stretch lodged deep within his chest.
Then he would open the book to plate 413...the cross-section of an upper arm.
Sometimes the book ended up flung across the room, and sometimes he'd just stare until the image became white noise, loud enough to drown out the cacophony in his head.
And sometimes his eyes would trace the fragile cross-hatching and precise outlines with assiduous care, though the image was already indelibly etched into his memory.
Plate 413: an illustration of what he could no longer do...and why.
( 4: Fool's Gold )