White Collar Fic: Heaven Restores You In Life, Part 1
Title: Heaven Restores You in Life, Part 1
Rating: NC-17
Characters/Pairings: Neal/Peter/El, Moz, Diana, OCs
Spoilers: Some basic facts from S3.
Content Notice: Character death, none of it permanent
Word Count: 18,000
Summary: Neal is immortal. This leads to a lot of complications.
A/N: This is meant to take place sometime in S4, when I assume Neal is back in New York, Kramer has been dealt with and our favorite characters are all together again.
This is my entry for Whump-a-Palooza , now going on over at whitecollarhc, as well as a fill for the gaining/losing immortality square on my dark bingo card. Additional notes at the end.
Part 1 | Part 2
----
The first time Neal Caffrey died was in 1918, and it nearly ended him…
His beloved wife Josie succumbed in the first wave of Spanish flu to hit Boston. She was always such a strong person - his rock, his center. She’d survived the harrowing birth of their daughter Cora the year before, so to think of something as trifling as a cold taking her away from him - well, it was the very definition of the word unthinkable, and that was the truth of it. But the speed with which the disease claimed her was frightening - she was dead within three days. And Cora, poor, always-frail Cora, had not survived the death of her mother for long.
Neal wasn’t sure if it was the grief or the flu that claimed him, but when he revived, he found himself in a pine box in a church, in preparation for a mass funeral for members of their parish. He was alone, thankfully - it was nearly 5:00 am - but he couldn’t take the time to give thanks to God, wouldn’t talk to God for decades, actually, not until after Kate’s death, because he was too busy cursing Him for the fate that left him alone and bereft.
The second time Neal died, he was serving on board the USS Oklahoma at Pearl Harbor in 1941. He had a position as a gunner - had joined the navy the year before in a misguided effort to try to do something with his life - and had been awakened from a deep sleep in his bunk by the sound of explosions and screams. He was running desperately to his post, trying to defend his ship, when he found himself nearly cut in half by the tracers from the smaller aircraft strafing the decks of the battleship. He remembers the ship going down, and he remembers reviving sometime later, floating in the water. The men who pulled him out just thought he’d been a survivor. They called it a miracle. Neal knew better.
The third time Neal died, it was in the arms of his closest friend, the man he would call “beloved” if he’d allow himself such luxuries, and it was in many ways the most painful.
“Peter, no, don’t,” he said. Tried to say - the bullet lodged in his chest made it hard to breathe, to speak.
“Neal, what did you do that for?” Peter said urgently, pressing desperately against the wound.
Pain made his vision go white and he may have screamed. He felt Peter stiffen, so he tried to calm himself. “Mayer would have… he would have…” shot you.
“I have a vest, Neal, a vest.”
“Oh.” Oh yeah, that was stupid.
“Medics’ll be here soon.”
“It’s OK, it’ll be OK.” Neal tried to shush Peter, make him understand that he shouldn’t worry for him. But his arms had gone numb and he couldn’t really feel anything anymore. That was never good.
“Neal, please, stay with me. Stay.”
“Peter…” Don’t grieve for me.
“Please Neal, don’t leave me, I love you, don’t go.”
“I’m sorry,” Neal thought he said before it all went black.
----
Neal revived to find himself naked and shivering, lying on a tray in a locker at the morgue. He supposed it beat a coffin buried underground, but not by much. At least there was light - shining through from the room outside. The space was tight, but he managed to lift his arms along his sides and over his head. He worked his fingertips through the space above his head - the cracks along the edges of the drawer they had him stored in - and pushed ever so slightly. Luckily, the hinges of the thing were well-oiled and maintained, and there was not a lock on the drawer. He pushed it open enough for his eyes to peep out and was relieved to see he was alone.
He pushed the drawer all the way open and sat up. He winced in pain as he did it - his chest felt like he’d been hit by a car. He looked down and realized why - the Y-incision from his autopsy had left a fading mark on his chest and abdomen. He imagined they’d had to crack his ribs to retrieve the bullet, to determine cause of death. He took a deep breath and immediately regretted it - his broken ribs must have still been knitting.
He knew he must go and be quick about it. He noticed the toe tag on his right foot and removed it, jumped down from the drawer and took stock of the occupants of the other drawers arrayed to his right and left. He found a John Doe of his approximate size that had been there for weeks and switched the tags followed by the labels on the outside of the drawers. He resolved to make sure his next will specified a closed coffin, and immediately regretted the alarm the disappearance of his “remains” would cause his loved ones when the switch was discovered.
He turned to leave, and his bare foot slapping down on the tile floor made him realize he had another problem - he was completely, 100%, bare-assed naked. “Crap,” he said and looked around. There was a lab coat strewn across a chair against the wall that he picked up gratefully. Down the hall he found a staff locker room, and it was the work of a moment to pick the locks on some of them with a paperclip he found on the employee bulletin board. He found sneakers that fit in the second locker, and scrubs that fit him in the fourth. Ten minutes later, he was outside, skirting the edges of the building and trying to get his bearings for where in the city he was. He used the five dollars he found in the pocket of the lab coat to buy a one-trip pass on the subway, and headed uptown toward his former residence.
----
Neal thanked whatever twist of fate made him revive in the middle of the night, and then the other one that put June out of town this week. He broke into the mansion easily enough, his goal to pack a few essentials that no one would miss and then to get the hell out of there. He mounted the stairs quickly, let himself into his apartment and nearly dropped dead again from a heart attack when he spotted Moz sitting slouched at his table, legs stretched in front of him, blinking morosely at the two empty bottles of red wine in front of him.
Moz screamed.
“Mozzie, Jesus!”
“What the fuck!” Mozzie surged to his feet, the chair toppling over behind him.
“Let me explain!”
Moz took a step back as Neal advanced on him, hands spread out in front of him. “You’re dead, I saw you myself.”
“I know, and I’m sorry.”
“Dead, Neal!” Moz had his hands on his head, then dropped them. Neal was struck by how lost he suddenly looked and he wished there was something he could do about it. “You died,” Moz whispered, removing his glasses. “You left me.” There were tears on his cheeks and he looked like he was going to pass out. He probably felt like he was going to pass out, because he plopped himself down onto the floor with a moan.
Neal rushed over to him and crouched down beside him, a hand between his shoulder blades. “I’m sorry, Moz,” he repeated, and Moz promptly puked on Neal's shoes.
----
The thing is, he can’t be seen now. He can’t be caught - no one can know about him and his situation. It happened once before and it was… bad.
Neal tried to explain it to Moz, tried to convey his need for urgency, but Moz’s brain might have gone offline a little. “You’re not dead,” he kept repeating, and Neal knew it was because he was completely shit-faced, not to mention in shock, but it was still annoying.
“Yes, Moz. I don’t die, I can’t die. I explained.”
“You’re not dead.” Moz muttered and keeled over on the couch.
Neal settled a blanket around his friend and went to pack. He grabbed an old canvas duffel he’d never used - it still had the logo of some now-defunct bank on the side, and he knew no one would notice if it was gone - and stuffed it with his second-best things. Underwear, shirts, jeans, socks. Toiletries he left - there were Walgreens everywhere, weren’t there? - but he did take the brush he liked with the soft bristles that didn’t make his hair all fly-away. He was fondly fingering one of Byron’s old tie clips when he spotted a picture on the dresser of him with Peter and Elizabeth.
“I think I’ll miss you most of all, Scarecrow,” he whispered and picked it up. It was a picture of the three of them taken right after Peter and El had renewed their wedding vows. Interestingly, he was standing right in the middle, with the Burkes bracketing him like a pair of bookends. Happy smiles, full of hope for the future. Jesus.
He ran a fingertip over Peter’s face, the crinkles his eyes made when he smiled, and nearly lost it. Deciding it couldn’t hurt, he threw the picture, frame and all, into the duffel and turned to contemplate shoe options.
When he emerged from his closet, Moz was sitting up and blinking at him. The imprint of the couch’s fabric was pressed into the side of this face, all red and moist from sweat or tears or both, and the look in his eyes was more than an accusation - it was a condemnation. “You’re leaving.”
“I’m supposed to be dead, Moz, I can’t just find a new apartment and pretend it never happened.”
“Were you going to tell me where you were going?”
“Truthfully, no.”
“That’s cold, man.”
Neal just stared at him. Of course it was, this whole thing was, but what the fuck?
“Need me to arrange a funeral?” Moz offered, and Neal really didn’t deserve him as a friend.
“Thanks. There’s a guy who looks nothing like me with my name on him. Cremation might be a good option.”
“You have papers?”
“Yeah.” Neal invented identity farming. This time around, he’ll be Jonathan Craig.
“Take care of yourself, then.”
Well, shit.
----
This is what got him found out the first time he died - the sticking around.
On his way to the airport, Neal made the cabbie stop on DeKalb Avenue - it was totally on the way to JFK, right? They sat at the corner and he watched the Burke house for fifteen minutes, until some lady on the curb started banging on the hood of the car and yelling at him for hogging the cab. He got to the front of the line at the British Airways counter to buy a ticket and then bailed.
Later, at the Airport Marriott over a club sandwich and all the alcohol from the minibar, he sat with the picture of himself, Peter and El, his mind emptied of thought, and just stared.
When he went to his own funeral, he told himself it was just morbid curiosity, that he was being careful, that no one would see him and it would be OK. No big deal.
Never let it be said that Moz didn’t have an appreciation for the ceremonial. Neal's funeral service was a full-on mass, complete with the sacrament, water, wine, altar boys. It went on for over an hour, but was surprisingly well-attended. Neal sat in a luncheonette across the street from the church and watched the comings and goings - even Ruiz showed up, with a surprisingly hot wife in tow.
Peter and Elizabeth were the first to arrive and the last to leave; he escorted her to the car with a hand at her elbow, settled her inside and then closed the door gently. Then Peter stood there, both hands on the roof of the Taurus and just paused. He tilted his face to the sky and blinked up at the sun, and the look on his face - well, Neal felt like an intruder, really, to witness such stark, unadulterated grief.
He’d never wanted to talk to Peter Burke more. Sit across his desk from him and those steady brown eyes and just explain.
He couldn’t, of course. Couldn’t tell the man he’d long considered his closest friend - the person he’d confessed more to than any other - his ultimate secret. Because what was the point? Neal stepped into a new identity and a new city roughly every twenty years, by necessity. It was a good plan - twenty years was about the point at which the fact that he did not age started to cause him trouble when people noticed.
He thought he’d have more time, dammit. He thought he’d have another eight years before he had to deal with all of this. Eight years’ time with people he’d grown close to, doing work he’d come to value.
More time with Peter, with Elizabeth. Peter, who’d challenged his mind like no other person in his long life, not Kate, not even Josie, as desperately and as deeply as he’d loved her. And Elizabeth, who had always been kind to him, had always supported him, even when Peter couldn’t.
If he had more time, he’d be able to prepare himself to disengage, get into the right headspace. Create some distance.
He needed to be sure they’d be OK.
Because the fact was that Peter loved him, and he couldn’t ignore it. And Peter’d actually confessed it to him. Hadn’t he said that as Neal lay dying? As he thought Neal was dying? He loved him. Neal knew that already, had known for a while. It was pretty obvious from all the breaks he’d given Neal, all the chances, the looks when he thought Neal hadn’t noticed. Neal appreciated it, he did, but he wouldn’t reciprocate, as much as he wanted to. As much as he had deep feelings for Peter Burke. And his wife too, if that could be believed.
He loved them. And he wanted them to be OK.
Which was what got him into trouble, because he had to stick around and see them, couldn’t leave, couldn’t bear to.
So it shouldn’t have been a surprise when Peter found him, not really. Except that it totally was.
----
The first time Neal died, he had been unprepared, had no idea what to do, so he haunted his life. This wasn’t hard - the influenza outbreak nearly emptied the city, and the people that remained behind kept to their houses. He holed up in his abandoned home, first purging it of anything reminding him of his wife and daughter, and tried not to suffocate on his grief.
That lasted about a week.
Wondering if perhaps there were others like him - maybe it was a side effect, maybe others had also survived - he spent his nights on the outskirts of cemeteries, waiting. No one emerged from the mass graves the city council had eventually been forced to resort to, at least no one that hadn’t gone in on his own steam. He next visited hospitals and the churches where the sick had been taken, their makeshift morgues not giving anything away to him.
He was a rational man, a Yale man, and after what he’d seen in the war, he no longer believed in resurrection, despite what the Bible and Father John had drilled into his brain when he was a boy. But still he had no answers and so he thought that if he could just pick up the thread of his life again, he might find one.
Until he ran into someone who knew him.
“Tris?”
He turned to see his younger brother Ethan standing behind him on the street corner, a look of utter shock on his face that Tristan - for that was his given name: Tristan Francis Hennessey - knew was mirrored on his own.
“N-no,” Tristan tried to deny, but he didn’t yet have the conman’s facility for lying instilled in him, not yet. He was an art history professor, for God’s sake.
“I can’t believe it,” Ethan stammered.
“You have me confused with someone else, excuse me,” Tristan said and pushed past him.
But Ethan wouldn’t be deterred, and he pursued him. “Why are you going? What are you doing?” he called after him, but Tristan slipped away, and he ducked inside a doorway until the younger man passed him. When he emerged, he’d already made the decision to leave the city - the risk of being exposed now clear - and it pained him to have to do it, but there was no other way.
As he was about to head toward home, he again caught sight of Ethan across the road - he must have doubled back. Again the chase was on, and Tristan turned to run.
“Tris!”
Tristan could hear his brother calling, even as he made his escape. But then, behind him he heard a great shrieking of metal and a crash, the sound so loud he skidded to a halt. He almost knew what it was before he turned, a sick dropping feeling in his gut - an automobile had come from around the corner and Ethan, not seeing it, had fallen under its wheels.
Tristan ran to the scene, along with what few people were on the street. Someone called for a doctor, and the driver stood beside his vehicle with his hands on his head, looking helpless. All of this Tristan would remember later; for now, he only had eyes for his fallen brother, lying broken in the middle of the road.
“Ethan!” he said urgently, a hand on his brother’s chest. He couldn’t help but flash back to their childhood then, when they shared a bed in the tiny, hot attic room at their grandmother’s house, and Ethan would always sleep too long and be late for school. “Ethan.”
Ethan opened his eyes, their blue color clouded by pain, but he responded to his brother’s voice. “It was you,” he said with difficulty.
“Shh, Ethan, please, be quiet now.”
“I thought I was going crazy,” Ethan said, then coughed, and a fine spray of blood marred his pale skin. “I saw you yesterday, and I thought I was crazy, so I came back here, looking for you.”
“No, Ethan, no.”
Ethan’s face contorted in agony then, and Tristan pulled him into his lap, held on to him. He’d seen many men in this condition in the trenches in France, he recognized a dying man when he saw it.
“Tris,” Ethan said, his fingertips brushing Tristan’s chin. “Tris.” And then we was gone.
Tristan stayed with him as the ambulance came, stayed with him at the morgue until they made him leave - they had no more room for grieving relatives, not during an epidemic. So he stayed outside until the mortician came, and he watched his brother’s funeral from the back of the church, and he sat at his graveside for two more days, but there was no sign that Ethan would revive as Tristan had, no sign that maybe this was some family curse that Tristan knew nothing about.
When he’d cried all he was going to for his brother, Tristan changed his name to George Donald Smith and moved to New York for the first time, and taught himself how to play the stock market.
----
This time when Neal haunted his life, it wasn’t because he couldn’t leave it, but because he was worried. Or so he told himself.
He spent three weeks following Peter Burke, tailing him like some sort of clichéd private detective. He couldn’t explain his morbid fascination, and so he didn’t try. He told himself he wanted to be sure Peter was OK, that the sight of him grieving was something to worry about. It was not an unconscious attempt to hang on to a life and people he’d grown to love too much. Not at all.
So this time, he used the many skills he’d honed over years in the Game, the ability to melt into a crowd, the light step he’d developed, the keen eyesight that persisted despite his advanced years. Except he apparently underestimated the ability of a trained FBI agent to spot a tail.
It was morning, the rush hour was in full swing, and he’d retired to the Starbucks on the corner across Federal Plaza near where Peter parked the Taurus. It was a good spot - if Peter headed out for a case, he’d see him get in the Taurus; when he left for lunch at the little Greek place where they used to meet Elizabeth, he’d be able to keep an eye on him. Right now, he thought he’d have a few hours before any of that was likely to happen, so he settled into a seat at the window with an iced coffee to watch the crowd of people walk by.
And then the bus that had stopped in front of the shop pulled away, and Peter was standing on the sidewalk across the street staring right at him.
Neal's mouth went dry. And then it began to water, because he thought he might vomit. And then he stood and ducked out the side entrance, sprinting down Worth Street. He made it all the way to Columbus Park before he thought to look back, and he saw that Peter had kept pace with him, despite the heavy foot traffic. Neal headed for the park’s entrance, but the screech of car tires behind him brought him up short and he flashed back to that horrible day nearly a hundred years ago. “Ethan, no,” he let slip and turned around. And there was Peter Burke, who had indeed run into the middle of the street, only instead of being in danger of getting run down, he’d pulled his badge and was forcing all of the traffic to make way for him.
Neal watched, frozen, as Peter strode towards him. His brows were furrowed, his face pale, shocked. Before Neal knew it, Peter was standing in front of him, staring into his eyes in disbelief. “Peter -“ he began.
“Son of a bitch!” Peter said before clocking him right across the jaw.
“Ow,” Neal told him.
“What did you do?”
“I -“
“I watched you die, I saw you autopsied, Neal. How - what did you do?”
“I died,” Neal said simply, flinching as Peter came at him again, only this time, Peter threw his arms around him and pulled him close, squeezing so tight, Neal almost couldn’t breathe.
“I thought I was going crazy. I thought I was dreaming. You’re real, right? You’re real?” He released Neal, but put his hands on his upper arms, squeezing lightly as if touching was the proof he needed.
“I’m real. And I’m here. And I’m sorry. Because I have to go now.”
----
He didn’t go, of course. He couldn’t. When faced with an emotionally charged Peter Burke, you don’t just walk away. So Neal found himself sitting across the Burkes’ dining room table from his former partner, staring at a point on the wall just over Peter’s head as he told him the truth. All of it.
“You’re immortal?” All of Peter’s statements were sounding like questions.
“I think so, maybe. Yeah.”
“You think so?”
“So far, I’ve been unable to stay dead.” He’d tried to figure it out, really, had traveled to Tibet and India and China in the 70’s to try to find answers, or more people like him, but mostly people just looked at him funny when he asked.
“So you do die? I mean, it’s not like you’re pretending?”
“I die, yes, and it’s scary and painful, and horrible. And then I, I don’t know, regenerate or something. I can’t explain it because I don’t know. I just wake up and I’m fine. It’s only happened three times.”
“How old are you?”
“Well, a lady hardly…” He caught Peter’s expression and became serious again. “One hundred and twenty-four.”
Peter flinched at the knowledge, but his face betrayed no other emotion, and he continued the interrogation. “Is Neal Caffrey your real name?”
“No. It’s my,” Neal did some mental calculations, “sixth. I think. The 60’s and 70’s were kind of a blur, actually. I change my identity every twenty years, move to a different city, start over.”
“How very efficient.”
“You do what you do. Look, is the interrogation over, because I really should be going. Now that people know my secret, it complicates a lot of things.”
“’People’? Who else knows?”
“I ran into Mozzie the day after I ‘died’.” Neal actually employed air quotes when he said that and wanted to kill himself - if only he could. He settled for a sigh.
“Mozzie knows?” Peter said, and the hurt in his voice made the knot in Neal’s gut twist even more.
“Not by design. I made my first mistake by going home to get a few things before leaving town. He was at my apartment.”
This seemed to mollify Peter, and he nodded. Neal stood. “Will I ever see you again?”
“No. It’s better this way, trust me.”
“Better for who?”
Neal ignored that. “I have to go. Thank you for everything, Peter, sincerely. You and El have been such great friends to me, and I’ll always remember it.”
Peter stood as well. “So you just skip town now? It’s that easy?”
“None of it’s easy, Peter. But I don’t have a choice. I’m supposed to be dead. I can’t just show up at the office Monday morning and pretend that I’m not.”
“But you can just leave me? Leave us? You once said we were all family.”
Neal closed his eyes. “Don’t make this harder.”
“I told you I loved you.”
He had to go and make it harder. Neal had no answer for that - what would telling Peter he felt the same way accomplish? - so he walked to the front door.
“Neal, wait!” Peter said, maneuvering himself around the table, trying to chase him, but Neal reached the door before he could catch up, and opened it.
Elizabeth stood there, key at the ready. When she saw Neal, her eyes widened. Then she screamed. Then she fainted.
“Fucking hell,” Neal muttered, catching her.
----
“Fucking hell,” Elizabeth muttered. “Did I just faint?” she asked her husband.
Peter adjusted the cool cloth on her forehead. “Yeah, hon.”
“I thought I saw Neal in our house.” Her eyes moved around the room then, and caught Neal where he stood near the fireplace with his hands in his pockets looking like a deer caught in headlights. He felt like a deer caught in headlights - what the hell was he supposed to do now?
Elizabeth recoiled against the couch and her eyes filled with tears. Peter followed her gaze to Neal and back and took one of her hands. “Hon, Neal is… he’s here.” She sat up and started to cry.
Neal fled to the kitchen and began pacing back and forth. He heard Peter and El’s muffled voices in the other room, but pointedly ignored them. He was wondering if it would be bad form if he slipped out the back door, when he turned around to find the Burkes standing in front of him with their arms around each other.
“I - I can’t believe it,” Elizabeth said, her voice throaty; tears were smeared across her cheeks, still falling.
“I know, I don’t know what to say,” Neal began, but as he did, she walked up to him, snaked her arms around his waist and just held him. “El,” he began again, but she just squeezed him tighter, rubbing at his back with her right hand, and the feel of her arms around him was so warm, and so welcoming, and so what he needed in that moment, that soon he found himself crying too. He dropped his arms around her shoulders and hung on for dear life, and wept like a freaking baby.
The next thing he knew, Peter had joined them, had taken them both in this strong arms, and Neal would have thought his added strength would have calmed him down, but unfortunately, all of the emotion and tension of the last weeks began to be released along with his tears, and he found he couldn’t stop. Before he knew it, Elizabeth had taken his face in her tiny hands, stood up on her tiptoes and kissed him. On the mouth.
Shit.
“What did you do th-that for?” he blubbered.
“You looked like you needed it, sweetie.”
And then Peter was pulling his head against his shoulder, and the two of them just stood there and held him, and damn it if he hadn’t felt so protected and safe in maybe a hundred years.
Eventually, after more time had passed than he’d ever admit to anyone, Neal calmed down and stopped crying. He sniffled and he snotted and he was sure his face was all red and blotchy, and it was undignified. He wanted to find a dark hole to crawl into. Except that Elizabeth led him by the hand over to the kitchen island and sat him down on a stool, and Peter handed him a handkerchief from his pocket (linen, freshly laundered), kept a comforting hand between Neal's shoulder blades. And El made them all some tea and served cookies (the kind with the dried-up jelly in the middle), and it was all so wonderful, he would have cried again if he’d had the emotional capacity for it.
They all sat down and drank their tea. And then El asked Neal to help her clean up, and then Peter asked him to come take Satch for a walk. They walked to a nearby park, and Neal kicked at the fallen leaves along the paths, and it was just so comfortable. And when they got back to the house, El handed them both glasses of red wine, and she was cooking her famous ravioli with roasted red pepper sauce, and she asked if Neal would make the salad.
Before Neal knew it, it was after 10:00 and they’d distracted him long enough and often enough, and he should not have been surprised to find himself sitting back against the couch with his shoes off, drunk on too much red wine and staring at the ceiling. Except he was surprised. And his eyes were moist again, but it was totally because of the dust in the house and not the fact he felt so…at home.
The light murmur of El and Peter talking as they cleaned up in the kitchen combined with the wine made him drowsy.
“Come on, it’s late. Time for bed,” El said, suddenly there and taking his hand and pulling him to his feet. He let her, let himself be led up the stairs, looked forward to sleeping in a comfortable bed in a home and not the stiff, starchy sheets at the hotel. When he looked up and saw that she’d led him to her bedroom and not the guest room, he blinked at her uncertainly in the low light from the bedside lamps. He jumped as Peter entered the room behind him, taking off his watch, opening and closing drawers.
“Wh..?” Neal said intelligently.
“Time for bed,” Peter said casually and pressed a pair of pajama bottoms against his chest.
“Bu…” Neal replied.
“It’s just sleeping, honey,” El said, standing there, suddenly, in an old Harvard t-shirt that was clearly Peter’s, the worn cotton hanging to mid-thigh. She sat on the bed and began to rub lotion on her knees and elbows. The water in the bathroom down the hall came on as Peter brushed his teeth. Neal took a step backward. “We’re not going to force you,” El said seriously, “but we have talked about this before, and if you think I haven’t noticed how you and Peter look at each other, and at me, well, a woman has eyes, Neal.”
“Hmm.” Apparently, both he and Peter failed completely at hiding their feelings.
“We want this,” she said plainly. “And having a second chance at it - at you - well, I don’t have to tell you what that means.”
At that moment, Peter entered the room, dressed in a t-shirt and shorts, and Neal blinked slowly.
“If you don’t, that’s fine,” she continued, “but the only thing stopping it would be you.”
“I’m drunk,” he muttered to himself, and walked to the bathroom.
“They’re drunk,” he said as he relieved himself and got changed and brushed his teeth. He looked at himself in the mirror. He looked as shell-shocked as he felt.
“We’re drunk,” he whispered as he stood in their doorway again. Peter sat on the right side of the bed, working a crossword puzzle, El curled up beside him with an iPad in her hands. He crossed the room and got into the bed, sitting stiffly with his back against the headboard, hands in his lap.
Eventually, El handed her iPad to Peter and he put the puzzle down. “Should we get to sleep?” El said. “It’s been an unexpectedly trying day.”
“OK,” Neal answered too quickly. He lay down on his side facing away from them, as close to the side of the bed as he could get without falling off. As much as he had fantasized about a moment such as this, experiencing it was freaking him out. He felt nervous, and awkward, and maybe the ravioli wasn’t sitting quite right on top of the entire bottle of red wine he may or may not have consumed.
He didn’t know what was going on behind him - intimate murmurs between man and wife, rooted in years of familiarity and intimacy. The bed was moving slightly as the couple settled down; Neal imagined them spooning. He suddenly felt very hot. He felt a hand on his hip then, light and reassuring. “’Night, Neal,” Peter said.
Neal threw the covers off and fled to the guest room.
----
Then the Burkes became like a pair of silk-lined handcuffs Neal didn’t have the will to pick.
He slept fitfully - thank the wine for that - and when he woke the next morning, the sun hadn’t yet risen. But the birds had.
Shirr-up! Shirr-up! Shirr-up! the robins outside his window sang cheerfully.
“Shut the fuck up,” he grumbled and got out of bed. He was hung over and cranky and sometimes when you get everything you ever wanted, the timing is just wrong.
He dressed quickly in the bathroom and walked down the steps quietly, totally not intending to escape undetected except for the fact that it was true.
“Morning!” Elizabeth called from the kitchen as he was bending to retrieve his shoes from beside the couch where he’d left them, and he reluctantly walked down the short hall to greet her. “I’m making pancakes.”
Of course she was - it was a Saturday, these things happened. She had all the ingredients laid out on the counter, and she was currently loading up the beans in the coffee grinder.
“Look at that, blueberries,” he said nearly enthusiastically.
She beamed at him.
“You’re an early riser,” he observed.
“I could say the same thing about you. Did I bust you trying to duck out on us?” How could she be so chipper? And, like, psychic?
“That would be -“
“The smart thing to do. You can’t be found out, I get that. But I was thinking that maybe we could make this work.”
“You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“I know that I want to try, and that you’re smart, and so is Peter, and we can figure it out.” She pushed the button on the grinder and grinned at him. “Pull up a seat - set a spell,” she said and chucked the ground coffee into the French press.
He sat and watched her, open-mouthed, as she bustled about, mixing up the batter, heating the pan, pouring the coffee. She still wore the t-shirt from the night before, and her nipples tented the soft cotton like they had no business doing. Neal swallowed. It had been so long since Sara, and there was no way he’d fooled himself into thinking that had been love. It had been a deep-seated like, for sure. But Elizabeth - she was the kind of woman men killed for.
“You want blueberries in yours?” she asked, melting a pat of butter in the pan. She made him a stack of pancakes and handed it to him on a warmed plate with maple syrup and a glass of fresh orange juice. She leaned heavily on the kitchen island, her feet kicking up into the air, and watched him eat, occasionally taking a bite from his plate with her fork.
“Aren’t you having any?”
“It’s funner from your plate.”
“’Funner’?”
“It’s a word - look it up.”
Peter came down five minutes later and sat on the stool next to Neal’s, and she repeated the performance, though she dropped a pancake on the floor and bent to pick it up before Satchmo could, and Jesus tap-dancing Christ, did Peter get this every Saturday?
“More coffee?” Peter offered, watching him watch Elizabeth and actually laughing.
Neal felt dizzy.
When breakfast was done, he found himself at a loss as to his next move. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, or say, here,” he admitted.
El came over and stood between Peter’s knees and he wrapped her in his arms, rested his chin on her shoulder and looked at Neal seriously. “Neither do we.”
“I know that I want to be with you,” Neal began, not really knowing he meant it until he said it. “But I can’t, I don’t…” He closed his eyes and sighed. “I’m going to say this all at once, so please just let me spit it out. I don’t form attachments, not really. Because I always know I’m going to have to leave someday, and I can’t… I know I’m going to have to hurt people, and so I don’t.” He opened his eyes. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“You don’t want to be hurt,” El observed, blue eyes large and serious.
“That’s not what I said-“
“You know you can’t die, and so you don’t want to watch it happen to anyone else, to someone you love. You’ll live forever, and so you think you’re doomed to face it alone. But Neal, sweetie, isn’t it lonely?”
He felt his throat clench. “Like you have no idea, Elizabeth.”
“Well, can’t we just forget about it, then?”
“I don’t understand.”
“A lot of people say you should live each day like it’s your last. What if you, Neal Caffrey, lived each day like it’s your first?”
With that, she reached out and took his hand, pulled him to her and kissed him. She reached up and rested her hand at the nape of his neck, her fingers playing with the short hairs there as she opened her mouth, her tongue a little invader against his lips, licking his teeth. Peter, still behind her, leaned forward and rested his hands on Neal's hips, pulling him in closer. Neal opened his eyes and Peter smiled at him, brown eyes crinkling with what Neal could only call mischief, and he regretted - oh, how he regretted the grief he’d been responsible for putting in those eyes. Breaking the kiss with Elizabeth, Neal leaned over her shoulder to catch Peter’s mouth with his own and the contact was at once electric and gentle and loving and everything he’d never thought kissing Peter Burke would be like.
El turned so that she was standing sideways between them, and placed a hand on each of their faces, encouraging the kiss, smiling up at them. Both men reached an arm around her back, entwined against the other, and they stood like that, kissing in turns, for several minutes. At last, El broke them up, looked at Peter and it was like a silent agreement was made. They each took one of Neal's hands and led him up the stairs to their bedroom.
Neal reeled.
Yeah, he’ll admit it, the possibility of making love with Peter and Elizabeth Burke made him actually fucking swoon. Peter noticed - because he always noticed everything - and laid a steadying hand on his arm. And then he kissed Neal again, and then he and Elizabeth got him undressed with surprising efficiency, and they were on their knees in front of Neal and, well.
The sight of both Peter and Elizabeth mouthing at Neal's impossibly hard cock was a sight he won’t soon forget. It was a sensation that almost made him reel again, and so he moved back until his legs hit their bed and he could sit down. Things got a little bit easier for him in the staying-upright department, but then Peter had to go and blow his mind by literally swallowing his dick, and he didn’t mean to, he really didn’t want to be fucking Peter Burke’s mouth, and he was going to have to stop referring to him by his full name in his mind soon, and He couldn’t keep his hips still, and then he was coming, and Peter took it all, just swallowed it all and then he sat back on his heels, and kissed his wife with Neal's taste still in his mouth and if Neal hadn’t already spent himself, he’d be coming like a goddamn geiser.
Neal lay on their bed propped up on his elbows, watching them stand and kiss each other, and El lifted her leg and began to rub her foot against Peter’s knee. He lifted her then, easily, and she locked her ankles around his waist and he fumbled down between them to push the elastic waistband of his gym shorts down, push the thin wisp of fabric that was her panties aside so that she could slide herself down on his massive erection. She gasped, and then she levered herself up with her arms on his shoulders and came down again, and Peter made a sound like a moan that was strangely silent and cut off. Neal watched as El did it again and again, mesmerized, but eventually Peter must have tired, because he maneuvered her around toward the bed and laid her down gently on her back. She scooted away from him to undress and get a better position on the bed, and he pulled his own clothes off and watched her, a predatory expression in his eyes that Neal couldn’t wait to see trained on him.
El flipped on her side then, and kissed Neal lightly on the mouth. “Sit up against the headboard?” she prompted. He did as she asked and she sat between his thighs, her back against his chest and his dick cradled in the hollow where her back sloped into the curve of her ass. She held her arms out to her husband. Smiling, Peter got onto the bed, pressed her thighs open and began to lap at her pussy, pressing his tongue against her clit until she shivered. The motion made her tits quiver deliciously, and Neal reached his right hand around to tweak her nipple tentatively.
“Oh, fuck, that’s perfect,” she breathed, and turned her head so he could kiss her.
Peter shoved two fingers inside her then, and she gasped as he started a slow, steady rhythm, pressing against her G-spot as he worried his tongue against her clit, hard, until she was squirming. At last, she clenched her thighs shut around his head and held him against her, tight, smothering, and held her breath as her orgasm hit her with a force that made her shake all over.
The sight of it, and the sensation of a warm, vibrant, vibrating woman in his lap soon had Neal's cock’s interest piqued again. When El released him, Peter got up on his knees and kissed her mouth, her neck, down to her breasts. “Oh, God, my husband gives the best head!” she enthused, and Neal had to agree. She leaned forward into Peter then, reaching behind her back to grasp Neal's thickening dick in her hand, and she began to stroke him as Peter sucked at each of her nipples in turn.
“Daddy’s turn,” she cooed after a few minutes, sitting up and grabbing Peter’s face between her hands to kiss him.
Peter groaned. “I asked you never to call me that again, El,” he admonished and she giggled as she turned around. Neal found himself smiling at the shared joke, and marveling at the easy way they had with each, and wanting more of it for himself.
El turned herself over then, and got on her elbows and knees. Shimmying her hips a little, she invited Peter to fuck her from behind. The sight of her tits swaying, nipples nearly brushing against the coverlet, almost had Neal coming again. El turned her face toward him then and smiled at him, all white teeth and quirked lips, and then her mouth was on Neal's dick again and she was humming.
She stopped as Peter entered her, hands on her hips, his thick cock caused her to make an involuntary noise. He looked up at Peter, whose eyes were on what his wife was doing, but when he saw he had Neal's attention, he flicked his eyes over to Neal’s and just smiled, hair sweaty and sticking out in all directions, but he looked so youthful and happy that Neal just had to kiss him right then and there.
As he did, Neal knew that he could never leave them.
----
They literally spent the day in bed, fucking and touching and dozing in a mass of tangled limbs and sheets. At around 8:00, El made them all get out to change the bedding, and then Peter suggested a shower and then, well… they kind of messed up the new sheets too. And then Peter made them all omelets.
Neal fell asleep with the realization that Peter and El had once more distracted him into forgetting about the ramifications of his staying, and he found he couldn’t really care about it.
Sunday morning, Neal sat in bed with his arms around his legs, head resting on his knees. El was downstairs making breakfast, Peter was in the shower, and Neal was alone for the first time in a day and a half. When he woke earlier, he found himself alone, but he didn’t feel that way. The scent of his lovers on the sheets and on his body, the warmth in the bed, the safety in their home all combined to make him feel more secure than he had in decades. He could now say he knew what it meant for a heart to swell with love. He felt like his had expanded to fill his entire chest. He swallowed against the sudden lump in his throat as Peter padded into the room, barefoot with a towel around his waist.
“You still thinking about running?” Peter asked.
“Not even a little bit,” Neal replied, and was surprised to realize it was true. Leaving - the fact that he always would, that he’d need to be prepared for it no matter what - was a constant thought in his head every day of his life. But the last day had provided whole swaths of time when he could forget. “I feel like this is some sort of time warp, and the world has been reduced to just us three.”
Peter came to sit beside him on the bed, close enough that their bodies touched, shoulders, hips, thigh. “If you stay, it can be like this forever,” he pointed out.
“I never would have thought you capable of such flights of fancy,” Neal replied, not mentioning that they each had different definitions of the word “forever.”
“I’m a romantic guy,” Peter said, snaking his arm around Neal and pulling his head over to rest on his shoulder.
Neal melted against him - and there he was learning the meaning of yet another cliché. “I wish you were right.”
“Do we have to decide about it now?”
“I suppose not.”
On Monday morning, he woke with Elizabeth’s head on his chest and Peter’s leg flung across both of them and suddenly knew what a sex-induced stupor felt like. He lifted his head and looked around. “Peter,” he said, poking him with a toe, “it’s nearly 8:30 - shouldn’t you be getting ready for work?”
Peter lifted his head, glanced at the clock and then lay down again. “Nah. Sent Hughes an email last night - I’m under the weather.” He snuggled his face into the back of Elizabeth’s neck and she sighed.
“You know, keeping me cowed through sexual gratification will not work,” Neal pointed out.
“We can try.”
Neal put his head down and closed his eyes, thinking that delaying the inevitable would probably bite him in the ass, but not really caring.
It came back and bit him in the ass about five hours later.
“Agent Jones!” He heard the words ring through the house as Elizabeth opened the front door, but it was like he was watching himself, dull-witted, his reactions all out of sync with his brain, so he kept walking from the dining room to the kitchen, carrying the plates from lunch, in full view of Jones.
Stupid sex-induced stupor.
“Holy Mary, mother of God,” Jones yelled, and there was a clatter in the vestibule as he reacted to the sight of a very alive Neal Caffrey apparently about to do the dishes in his boss’s house; he threw his arms out to the sides, took a step back in shock.
“Fucking hell,” Neal and El said in unison.
“You’re supposed to be dead!”
“It didn’t take,” Neal replied, walking to the front of the house.
“I - I need to sit down,” Jones said, stricken.
“Sure thing, honey,” El said, taking his elbow and leading him to the couch.
Neal closed the door and joined them, because what else was he supposed to do? He sat down on the couch opposite Jones, who looked at him with eyes wide, breathing from his mouth. Suddenly, he closed the gap between them and threw his arms around Neal. “I can’t believe it!” he said, and Neal awkwardly patted his back. When Jones sat back again, he had tears in his eyes and a happy smile on his face - an uncharacteristically emotional response from the usually stalwart agent that made Neal feel like a shit.
“I - yeah.”
“Wh-what happened? I saw the blood, Neal. I - you don’t come away from something like that!”
“I… was…”
“Undercover!” El supplied.
“Right. Top secret assignment. Had to fake dying so that I could go deep, deep undercover.”
Jones gave them both his you-can’t-fool-me-I-went-to-Harvard-Law face and Neal tried again. “In fact, I’m still undercover. Peter’s been my handler.”
Peter, bless him, chose that very moment to come in after taking the dog for a walk. Satchmo trotted over and sat on Neal’s shoes, tongue lolling. “Jones. Hi. I see you’ve… seen Neal.”
“It’s incredible.”
“It has to stay a secret,” Peter said, face suddenly stern.
“Boss -“
“Clinton, I know I don’t have to tell you what kind of danger Neal will be in if word of this leaks to anyone. He’s been deep undercover for weeks, and we’re just so close to a break in the case.”
Clinton was loyal enough to give his boss the benefit of the doubt, but his mother didn’t raise any dummies, so he still looked unconvinced.
“All will be made clear when I come back,” Neal found himself promising, his best conman’s smile in place. Yep, he was a shit.
When Clint had gone, Neal flopped himself on the couch, boneless from the tension of that moment finally being over, and not letting himself think about the fact he’d just been outed. If only it had been Diana who’d come over to bring some files to Peter, they might have convinced her to leave it. But Clint - he was as by-the-book as Peter, probably more so, and they just couldn’t let this lie now.
“What are you doing?” Neal asked, noticing Peter had picked up his cell phone and was dialing.
“Calling Hughes. If ‘all will be made clear,’ we’d better get started on it clearing it up.”
Neal thought it might be worth dying again if he got to see the look on Reese Hughes’ face just one more time once he’d entered the Burke house that evening. Then he felt guilty - the guy was getting up there in years, maybe his ticker couldn’t handle it.
In the end, though, Hughes was surprisingly sanguine about aiding and abetting a cover story that featured Neal being loaned out to the Secret Service to bust a counterfeiting ring in Orlando. It would take a week to fake the paperwork, which Neal spent at the Burkes’, feeling like a kid home from school with the chicken pox or something, while Peter and Elizabeth went about their lives.
He took the opportunity to re-enter parts of his life, though, finding Moz again to explain that he was staying.
“I’m coming back,” he said to Moz as the older man entered the new Tuesday, a storage unit in Queens that was inexplicably filled with cases and cases of breakfast cereal.
“You never left,” Moz pointed out, and how the hell did he always know these things? “Been having fun playing house with the Suits?” he asked, and Neal knew how.
“Been spying on people again?”
“A man has to fill his days,” Moz sniffed.
After a few minutes and a promise to forge a Delacroix - he was so not looking forward to the specific coloring, the detailed brushwork; he could sense a lot of creative cursing coming on - the ice was broken, and Moz was advising him on the best way to break the news of his impending life to June.
In the end, it became surprisingly easy to slip back into his life, and he felt almost relieved the night before he was to return to the FBI, like a workaholic who’d been off on a particularly unsatisfying vacation and couldn’t wait to get back to the office.
He got a few looks as he made his way to the 21st floor, but when he entered the office, everyone stood and welcomed him with much hand-shaking and back-slapping, and he felt special and almost like a hero, except that he hadn’t done anything.
Falling back into the rhythms of the office took almost no effort, and Peter soon had him working on a mortgage fraud case that had him wondering why he came back, it was so boring. But he secretly loved it. And he not-so-secretly loved going home to Peter and El every night, because it was a magical slice of normal with a side of hot sex and he might even be happy.
And then he died again.
On to Part 2
Rating: NC-17
Characters/Pairings: Neal/Peter/El, Moz, Diana, OCs
Spoilers: Some basic facts from S3.
Content Notice: Character death, none of it permanent
Word Count: 18,000
Summary: Neal is immortal. This leads to a lot of complications.
A/N: This is meant to take place sometime in S4, when I assume Neal is back in New York, Kramer has been dealt with and our favorite characters are all together again.
This is my entry for Whump-a-Palooza , now going on over at whitecollarhc, as well as a fill for the gaining/losing immortality square on my dark bingo card. Additional notes at the end.
Part 1 | Part 2
----
The first time Neal Caffrey died was in 1918, and it nearly ended him…
His beloved wife Josie succumbed in the first wave of Spanish flu to hit Boston. She was always such a strong person - his rock, his center. She’d survived the harrowing birth of their daughter Cora the year before, so to think of something as trifling as a cold taking her away from him - well, it was the very definition of the word unthinkable, and that was the truth of it. But the speed with which the disease claimed her was frightening - she was dead within three days. And Cora, poor, always-frail Cora, had not survived the death of her mother for long.
Neal wasn’t sure if it was the grief or the flu that claimed him, but when he revived, he found himself in a pine box in a church, in preparation for a mass funeral for members of their parish. He was alone, thankfully - it was nearly 5:00 am - but he couldn’t take the time to give thanks to God, wouldn’t talk to God for decades, actually, not until after Kate’s death, because he was too busy cursing Him for the fate that left him alone and bereft.
The second time Neal died, he was serving on board the USS Oklahoma at Pearl Harbor in 1941. He had a position as a gunner - had joined the navy the year before in a misguided effort to try to do something with his life - and had been awakened from a deep sleep in his bunk by the sound of explosions and screams. He was running desperately to his post, trying to defend his ship, when he found himself nearly cut in half by the tracers from the smaller aircraft strafing the decks of the battleship. He remembers the ship going down, and he remembers reviving sometime later, floating in the water. The men who pulled him out just thought he’d been a survivor. They called it a miracle. Neal knew better.
The third time Neal died, it was in the arms of his closest friend, the man he would call “beloved” if he’d allow himself such luxuries, and it was in many ways the most painful.
“Peter, no, don’t,” he said. Tried to say - the bullet lodged in his chest made it hard to breathe, to speak.
“Neal, what did you do that for?” Peter said urgently, pressing desperately against the wound.
Pain made his vision go white and he may have screamed. He felt Peter stiffen, so he tried to calm himself. “Mayer would have… he would have…” shot you.
“I have a vest, Neal, a vest.”
“Oh.” Oh yeah, that was stupid.
“Medics’ll be here soon.”
“It’s OK, it’ll be OK.” Neal tried to shush Peter, make him understand that he shouldn’t worry for him. But his arms had gone numb and he couldn’t really feel anything anymore. That was never good.
“Neal, please, stay with me. Stay.”
“Peter…” Don’t grieve for me.
“Please Neal, don’t leave me, I love you, don’t go.”
“I’m sorry,” Neal thought he said before it all went black.
----
Neal revived to find himself naked and shivering, lying on a tray in a locker at the morgue. He supposed it beat a coffin buried underground, but not by much. At least there was light - shining through from the room outside. The space was tight, but he managed to lift his arms along his sides and over his head. He worked his fingertips through the space above his head - the cracks along the edges of the drawer they had him stored in - and pushed ever so slightly. Luckily, the hinges of the thing were well-oiled and maintained, and there was not a lock on the drawer. He pushed it open enough for his eyes to peep out and was relieved to see he was alone.
He pushed the drawer all the way open and sat up. He winced in pain as he did it - his chest felt like he’d been hit by a car. He looked down and realized why - the Y-incision from his autopsy had left a fading mark on his chest and abdomen. He imagined they’d had to crack his ribs to retrieve the bullet, to determine cause of death. He took a deep breath and immediately regretted it - his broken ribs must have still been knitting.
He knew he must go and be quick about it. He noticed the toe tag on his right foot and removed it, jumped down from the drawer and took stock of the occupants of the other drawers arrayed to his right and left. He found a John Doe of his approximate size that had been there for weeks and switched the tags followed by the labels on the outside of the drawers. He resolved to make sure his next will specified a closed coffin, and immediately regretted the alarm the disappearance of his “remains” would cause his loved ones when the switch was discovered.
He turned to leave, and his bare foot slapping down on the tile floor made him realize he had another problem - he was completely, 100%, bare-assed naked. “Crap,” he said and looked around. There was a lab coat strewn across a chair against the wall that he picked up gratefully. Down the hall he found a staff locker room, and it was the work of a moment to pick the locks on some of them with a paperclip he found on the employee bulletin board. He found sneakers that fit in the second locker, and scrubs that fit him in the fourth. Ten minutes later, he was outside, skirting the edges of the building and trying to get his bearings for where in the city he was. He used the five dollars he found in the pocket of the lab coat to buy a one-trip pass on the subway, and headed uptown toward his former residence.
----
Neal thanked whatever twist of fate made him revive in the middle of the night, and then the other one that put June out of town this week. He broke into the mansion easily enough, his goal to pack a few essentials that no one would miss and then to get the hell out of there. He mounted the stairs quickly, let himself into his apartment and nearly dropped dead again from a heart attack when he spotted Moz sitting slouched at his table, legs stretched in front of him, blinking morosely at the two empty bottles of red wine in front of him.
Moz screamed.
“Mozzie, Jesus!”
“What the fuck!” Mozzie surged to his feet, the chair toppling over behind him.
“Let me explain!”
Moz took a step back as Neal advanced on him, hands spread out in front of him. “You’re dead, I saw you myself.”
“I know, and I’m sorry.”
“Dead, Neal!” Moz had his hands on his head, then dropped them. Neal was struck by how lost he suddenly looked and he wished there was something he could do about it. “You died,” Moz whispered, removing his glasses. “You left me.” There were tears on his cheeks and he looked like he was going to pass out. He probably felt like he was going to pass out, because he plopped himself down onto the floor with a moan.
Neal rushed over to him and crouched down beside him, a hand between his shoulder blades. “I’m sorry, Moz,” he repeated, and Moz promptly puked on Neal's shoes.
----
The thing is, he can’t be seen now. He can’t be caught - no one can know about him and his situation. It happened once before and it was… bad.
Neal tried to explain it to Moz, tried to convey his need for urgency, but Moz’s brain might have gone offline a little. “You’re not dead,” he kept repeating, and Neal knew it was because he was completely shit-faced, not to mention in shock, but it was still annoying.
“Yes, Moz. I don’t die, I can’t die. I explained.”
“You’re not dead.” Moz muttered and keeled over on the couch.
Neal settled a blanket around his friend and went to pack. He grabbed an old canvas duffel he’d never used - it still had the logo of some now-defunct bank on the side, and he knew no one would notice if it was gone - and stuffed it with his second-best things. Underwear, shirts, jeans, socks. Toiletries he left - there were Walgreens everywhere, weren’t there? - but he did take the brush he liked with the soft bristles that didn’t make his hair all fly-away. He was fondly fingering one of Byron’s old tie clips when he spotted a picture on the dresser of him with Peter and Elizabeth.
“I think I’ll miss you most of all, Scarecrow,” he whispered and picked it up. It was a picture of the three of them taken right after Peter and El had renewed their wedding vows. Interestingly, he was standing right in the middle, with the Burkes bracketing him like a pair of bookends. Happy smiles, full of hope for the future. Jesus.
He ran a fingertip over Peter’s face, the crinkles his eyes made when he smiled, and nearly lost it. Deciding it couldn’t hurt, he threw the picture, frame and all, into the duffel and turned to contemplate shoe options.
When he emerged from his closet, Moz was sitting up and blinking at him. The imprint of the couch’s fabric was pressed into the side of this face, all red and moist from sweat or tears or both, and the look in his eyes was more than an accusation - it was a condemnation. “You’re leaving.”
“I’m supposed to be dead, Moz, I can’t just find a new apartment and pretend it never happened.”
“Were you going to tell me where you were going?”
“Truthfully, no.”
“That’s cold, man.”
Neal just stared at him. Of course it was, this whole thing was, but what the fuck?
“Need me to arrange a funeral?” Moz offered, and Neal really didn’t deserve him as a friend.
“Thanks. There’s a guy who looks nothing like me with my name on him. Cremation might be a good option.”
“You have papers?”
“Yeah.” Neal invented identity farming. This time around, he’ll be Jonathan Craig.
“Take care of yourself, then.”
Well, shit.
----
This is what got him found out the first time he died - the sticking around.
On his way to the airport, Neal made the cabbie stop on DeKalb Avenue - it was totally on the way to JFK, right? They sat at the corner and he watched the Burke house for fifteen minutes, until some lady on the curb started banging on the hood of the car and yelling at him for hogging the cab. He got to the front of the line at the British Airways counter to buy a ticket and then bailed.
Later, at the Airport Marriott over a club sandwich and all the alcohol from the minibar, he sat with the picture of himself, Peter and El, his mind emptied of thought, and just stared.
When he went to his own funeral, he told himself it was just morbid curiosity, that he was being careful, that no one would see him and it would be OK. No big deal.
Never let it be said that Moz didn’t have an appreciation for the ceremonial. Neal's funeral service was a full-on mass, complete with the sacrament, water, wine, altar boys. It went on for over an hour, but was surprisingly well-attended. Neal sat in a luncheonette across the street from the church and watched the comings and goings - even Ruiz showed up, with a surprisingly hot wife in tow.
Peter and Elizabeth were the first to arrive and the last to leave; he escorted her to the car with a hand at her elbow, settled her inside and then closed the door gently. Then Peter stood there, both hands on the roof of the Taurus and just paused. He tilted his face to the sky and blinked up at the sun, and the look on his face - well, Neal felt like an intruder, really, to witness such stark, unadulterated grief.
He’d never wanted to talk to Peter Burke more. Sit across his desk from him and those steady brown eyes and just explain.
He couldn’t, of course. Couldn’t tell the man he’d long considered his closest friend - the person he’d confessed more to than any other - his ultimate secret. Because what was the point? Neal stepped into a new identity and a new city roughly every twenty years, by necessity. It was a good plan - twenty years was about the point at which the fact that he did not age started to cause him trouble when people noticed.
He thought he’d have more time, dammit. He thought he’d have another eight years before he had to deal with all of this. Eight years’ time with people he’d grown close to, doing work he’d come to value.
More time with Peter, with Elizabeth. Peter, who’d challenged his mind like no other person in his long life, not Kate, not even Josie, as desperately and as deeply as he’d loved her. And Elizabeth, who had always been kind to him, had always supported him, even when Peter couldn’t.
If he had more time, he’d be able to prepare himself to disengage, get into the right headspace. Create some distance.
He needed to be sure they’d be OK.
Because the fact was that Peter loved him, and he couldn’t ignore it. And Peter’d actually confessed it to him. Hadn’t he said that as Neal lay dying? As he thought Neal was dying? He loved him. Neal knew that already, had known for a while. It was pretty obvious from all the breaks he’d given Neal, all the chances, the looks when he thought Neal hadn’t noticed. Neal appreciated it, he did, but he wouldn’t reciprocate, as much as he wanted to. As much as he had deep feelings for Peter Burke. And his wife too, if that could be believed.
He loved them. And he wanted them to be OK.
Which was what got him into trouble, because he had to stick around and see them, couldn’t leave, couldn’t bear to.
So it shouldn’t have been a surprise when Peter found him, not really. Except that it totally was.
----
The first time Neal died, he had been unprepared, had no idea what to do, so he haunted his life. This wasn’t hard - the influenza outbreak nearly emptied the city, and the people that remained behind kept to their houses. He holed up in his abandoned home, first purging it of anything reminding him of his wife and daughter, and tried not to suffocate on his grief.
That lasted about a week.
Wondering if perhaps there were others like him - maybe it was a side effect, maybe others had also survived - he spent his nights on the outskirts of cemeteries, waiting. No one emerged from the mass graves the city council had eventually been forced to resort to, at least no one that hadn’t gone in on his own steam. He next visited hospitals and the churches where the sick had been taken, their makeshift morgues not giving anything away to him.
He was a rational man, a Yale man, and after what he’d seen in the war, he no longer believed in resurrection, despite what the Bible and Father John had drilled into his brain when he was a boy. But still he had no answers and so he thought that if he could just pick up the thread of his life again, he might find one.
Until he ran into someone who knew him.
“Tris?”
He turned to see his younger brother Ethan standing behind him on the street corner, a look of utter shock on his face that Tristan - for that was his given name: Tristan Francis Hennessey - knew was mirrored on his own.
“N-no,” Tristan tried to deny, but he didn’t yet have the conman’s facility for lying instilled in him, not yet. He was an art history professor, for God’s sake.
“I can’t believe it,” Ethan stammered.
“You have me confused with someone else, excuse me,” Tristan said and pushed past him.
But Ethan wouldn’t be deterred, and he pursued him. “Why are you going? What are you doing?” he called after him, but Tristan slipped away, and he ducked inside a doorway until the younger man passed him. When he emerged, he’d already made the decision to leave the city - the risk of being exposed now clear - and it pained him to have to do it, but there was no other way.
As he was about to head toward home, he again caught sight of Ethan across the road - he must have doubled back. Again the chase was on, and Tristan turned to run.
“Tris!”
Tristan could hear his brother calling, even as he made his escape. But then, behind him he heard a great shrieking of metal and a crash, the sound so loud he skidded to a halt. He almost knew what it was before he turned, a sick dropping feeling in his gut - an automobile had come from around the corner and Ethan, not seeing it, had fallen under its wheels.
Tristan ran to the scene, along with what few people were on the street. Someone called for a doctor, and the driver stood beside his vehicle with his hands on his head, looking helpless. All of this Tristan would remember later; for now, he only had eyes for his fallen brother, lying broken in the middle of the road.
“Ethan!” he said urgently, a hand on his brother’s chest. He couldn’t help but flash back to their childhood then, when they shared a bed in the tiny, hot attic room at their grandmother’s house, and Ethan would always sleep too long and be late for school. “Ethan.”
Ethan opened his eyes, their blue color clouded by pain, but he responded to his brother’s voice. “It was you,” he said with difficulty.
“Shh, Ethan, please, be quiet now.”
“I thought I was going crazy,” Ethan said, then coughed, and a fine spray of blood marred his pale skin. “I saw you yesterday, and I thought I was crazy, so I came back here, looking for you.”
“No, Ethan, no.”
Ethan’s face contorted in agony then, and Tristan pulled him into his lap, held on to him. He’d seen many men in this condition in the trenches in France, he recognized a dying man when he saw it.
“Tris,” Ethan said, his fingertips brushing Tristan’s chin. “Tris.” And then we was gone.
Tristan stayed with him as the ambulance came, stayed with him at the morgue until they made him leave - they had no more room for grieving relatives, not during an epidemic. So he stayed outside until the mortician came, and he watched his brother’s funeral from the back of the church, and he sat at his graveside for two more days, but there was no sign that Ethan would revive as Tristan had, no sign that maybe this was some family curse that Tristan knew nothing about.
When he’d cried all he was going to for his brother, Tristan changed his name to George Donald Smith and moved to New York for the first time, and taught himself how to play the stock market.
----
This time when Neal haunted his life, it wasn’t because he couldn’t leave it, but because he was worried. Or so he told himself.
He spent three weeks following Peter Burke, tailing him like some sort of clichéd private detective. He couldn’t explain his morbid fascination, and so he didn’t try. He told himself he wanted to be sure Peter was OK, that the sight of him grieving was something to worry about. It was not an unconscious attempt to hang on to a life and people he’d grown to love too much. Not at all.
So this time, he used the many skills he’d honed over years in the Game, the ability to melt into a crowd, the light step he’d developed, the keen eyesight that persisted despite his advanced years. Except he apparently underestimated the ability of a trained FBI agent to spot a tail.
It was morning, the rush hour was in full swing, and he’d retired to the Starbucks on the corner across Federal Plaza near where Peter parked the Taurus. It was a good spot - if Peter headed out for a case, he’d see him get in the Taurus; when he left for lunch at the little Greek place where they used to meet Elizabeth, he’d be able to keep an eye on him. Right now, he thought he’d have a few hours before any of that was likely to happen, so he settled into a seat at the window with an iced coffee to watch the crowd of people walk by.
And then the bus that had stopped in front of the shop pulled away, and Peter was standing on the sidewalk across the street staring right at him.
Neal's mouth went dry. And then it began to water, because he thought he might vomit. And then he stood and ducked out the side entrance, sprinting down Worth Street. He made it all the way to Columbus Park before he thought to look back, and he saw that Peter had kept pace with him, despite the heavy foot traffic. Neal headed for the park’s entrance, but the screech of car tires behind him brought him up short and he flashed back to that horrible day nearly a hundred years ago. “Ethan, no,” he let slip and turned around. And there was Peter Burke, who had indeed run into the middle of the street, only instead of being in danger of getting run down, he’d pulled his badge and was forcing all of the traffic to make way for him.
Neal watched, frozen, as Peter strode towards him. His brows were furrowed, his face pale, shocked. Before Neal knew it, Peter was standing in front of him, staring into his eyes in disbelief. “Peter -“ he began.
“Son of a bitch!” Peter said before clocking him right across the jaw.
“Ow,” Neal told him.
“What did you do?”
“I -“
“I watched you die, I saw you autopsied, Neal. How - what did you do?”
“I died,” Neal said simply, flinching as Peter came at him again, only this time, Peter threw his arms around him and pulled him close, squeezing so tight, Neal almost couldn’t breathe.
“I thought I was going crazy. I thought I was dreaming. You’re real, right? You’re real?” He released Neal, but put his hands on his upper arms, squeezing lightly as if touching was the proof he needed.
“I’m real. And I’m here. And I’m sorry. Because I have to go now.”
----
He didn’t go, of course. He couldn’t. When faced with an emotionally charged Peter Burke, you don’t just walk away. So Neal found himself sitting across the Burkes’ dining room table from his former partner, staring at a point on the wall just over Peter’s head as he told him the truth. All of it.
“You’re immortal?” All of Peter’s statements were sounding like questions.
“I think so, maybe. Yeah.”
“You think so?”
“So far, I’ve been unable to stay dead.” He’d tried to figure it out, really, had traveled to Tibet and India and China in the 70’s to try to find answers, or more people like him, but mostly people just looked at him funny when he asked.
“So you do die? I mean, it’s not like you’re pretending?”
“I die, yes, and it’s scary and painful, and horrible. And then I, I don’t know, regenerate or something. I can’t explain it because I don’t know. I just wake up and I’m fine. It’s only happened three times.”
“How old are you?”
“Well, a lady hardly…” He caught Peter’s expression and became serious again. “One hundred and twenty-four.”
Peter flinched at the knowledge, but his face betrayed no other emotion, and he continued the interrogation. “Is Neal Caffrey your real name?”
“No. It’s my,” Neal did some mental calculations, “sixth. I think. The 60’s and 70’s were kind of a blur, actually. I change my identity every twenty years, move to a different city, start over.”
“How very efficient.”
“You do what you do. Look, is the interrogation over, because I really should be going. Now that people know my secret, it complicates a lot of things.”
“’People’? Who else knows?”
“I ran into Mozzie the day after I ‘died’.” Neal actually employed air quotes when he said that and wanted to kill himself - if only he could. He settled for a sigh.
“Mozzie knows?” Peter said, and the hurt in his voice made the knot in Neal’s gut twist even more.
“Not by design. I made my first mistake by going home to get a few things before leaving town. He was at my apartment.”
This seemed to mollify Peter, and he nodded. Neal stood. “Will I ever see you again?”
“No. It’s better this way, trust me.”
“Better for who?”
Neal ignored that. “I have to go. Thank you for everything, Peter, sincerely. You and El have been such great friends to me, and I’ll always remember it.”
Peter stood as well. “So you just skip town now? It’s that easy?”
“None of it’s easy, Peter. But I don’t have a choice. I’m supposed to be dead. I can’t just show up at the office Monday morning and pretend that I’m not.”
“But you can just leave me? Leave us? You once said we were all family.”
Neal closed his eyes. “Don’t make this harder.”
“I told you I loved you.”
He had to go and make it harder. Neal had no answer for that - what would telling Peter he felt the same way accomplish? - so he walked to the front door.
“Neal, wait!” Peter said, maneuvering himself around the table, trying to chase him, but Neal reached the door before he could catch up, and opened it.
Elizabeth stood there, key at the ready. When she saw Neal, her eyes widened. Then she screamed. Then she fainted.
“Fucking hell,” Neal muttered, catching her.
----
“Fucking hell,” Elizabeth muttered. “Did I just faint?” she asked her husband.
Peter adjusted the cool cloth on her forehead. “Yeah, hon.”
“I thought I saw Neal in our house.” Her eyes moved around the room then, and caught Neal where he stood near the fireplace with his hands in his pockets looking like a deer caught in headlights. He felt like a deer caught in headlights - what the hell was he supposed to do now?
Elizabeth recoiled against the couch and her eyes filled with tears. Peter followed her gaze to Neal and back and took one of her hands. “Hon, Neal is… he’s here.” She sat up and started to cry.
Neal fled to the kitchen and began pacing back and forth. He heard Peter and El’s muffled voices in the other room, but pointedly ignored them. He was wondering if it would be bad form if he slipped out the back door, when he turned around to find the Burkes standing in front of him with their arms around each other.
“I - I can’t believe it,” Elizabeth said, her voice throaty; tears were smeared across her cheeks, still falling.
“I know, I don’t know what to say,” Neal began, but as he did, she walked up to him, snaked her arms around his waist and just held him. “El,” he began again, but she just squeezed him tighter, rubbing at his back with her right hand, and the feel of her arms around him was so warm, and so welcoming, and so what he needed in that moment, that soon he found himself crying too. He dropped his arms around her shoulders and hung on for dear life, and wept like a freaking baby.
The next thing he knew, Peter had joined them, had taken them both in this strong arms, and Neal would have thought his added strength would have calmed him down, but unfortunately, all of the emotion and tension of the last weeks began to be released along with his tears, and he found he couldn’t stop. Before he knew it, Elizabeth had taken his face in her tiny hands, stood up on her tiptoes and kissed him. On the mouth.
Shit.
“What did you do th-that for?” he blubbered.
“You looked like you needed it, sweetie.”
And then Peter was pulling his head against his shoulder, and the two of them just stood there and held him, and damn it if he hadn’t felt so protected and safe in maybe a hundred years.
Eventually, after more time had passed than he’d ever admit to anyone, Neal calmed down and stopped crying. He sniffled and he snotted and he was sure his face was all red and blotchy, and it was undignified. He wanted to find a dark hole to crawl into. Except that Elizabeth led him by the hand over to the kitchen island and sat him down on a stool, and Peter handed him a handkerchief from his pocket (linen, freshly laundered), kept a comforting hand between Neal's shoulder blades. And El made them all some tea and served cookies (the kind with the dried-up jelly in the middle), and it was all so wonderful, he would have cried again if he’d had the emotional capacity for it.
They all sat down and drank their tea. And then El asked Neal to help her clean up, and then Peter asked him to come take Satch for a walk. They walked to a nearby park, and Neal kicked at the fallen leaves along the paths, and it was just so comfortable. And when they got back to the house, El handed them both glasses of red wine, and she was cooking her famous ravioli with roasted red pepper sauce, and she asked if Neal would make the salad.
Before Neal knew it, it was after 10:00 and they’d distracted him long enough and often enough, and he should not have been surprised to find himself sitting back against the couch with his shoes off, drunk on too much red wine and staring at the ceiling. Except he was surprised. And his eyes were moist again, but it was totally because of the dust in the house and not the fact he felt so…at home.
The light murmur of El and Peter talking as they cleaned up in the kitchen combined with the wine made him drowsy.
“Come on, it’s late. Time for bed,” El said, suddenly there and taking his hand and pulling him to his feet. He let her, let himself be led up the stairs, looked forward to sleeping in a comfortable bed in a home and not the stiff, starchy sheets at the hotel. When he looked up and saw that she’d led him to her bedroom and not the guest room, he blinked at her uncertainly in the low light from the bedside lamps. He jumped as Peter entered the room behind him, taking off his watch, opening and closing drawers.
“Wh..?” Neal said intelligently.
“Time for bed,” Peter said casually and pressed a pair of pajama bottoms against his chest.
“Bu…” Neal replied.
“It’s just sleeping, honey,” El said, standing there, suddenly, in an old Harvard t-shirt that was clearly Peter’s, the worn cotton hanging to mid-thigh. She sat on the bed and began to rub lotion on her knees and elbows. The water in the bathroom down the hall came on as Peter brushed his teeth. Neal took a step backward. “We’re not going to force you,” El said seriously, “but we have talked about this before, and if you think I haven’t noticed how you and Peter look at each other, and at me, well, a woman has eyes, Neal.”
“Hmm.” Apparently, both he and Peter failed completely at hiding their feelings.
“We want this,” she said plainly. “And having a second chance at it - at you - well, I don’t have to tell you what that means.”
At that moment, Peter entered the room, dressed in a t-shirt and shorts, and Neal blinked slowly.
“If you don’t, that’s fine,” she continued, “but the only thing stopping it would be you.”
“I’m drunk,” he muttered to himself, and walked to the bathroom.
“They’re drunk,” he said as he relieved himself and got changed and brushed his teeth. He looked at himself in the mirror. He looked as shell-shocked as he felt.
“We’re drunk,” he whispered as he stood in their doorway again. Peter sat on the right side of the bed, working a crossword puzzle, El curled up beside him with an iPad in her hands. He crossed the room and got into the bed, sitting stiffly with his back against the headboard, hands in his lap.
Eventually, El handed her iPad to Peter and he put the puzzle down. “Should we get to sleep?” El said. “It’s been an unexpectedly trying day.”
“OK,” Neal answered too quickly. He lay down on his side facing away from them, as close to the side of the bed as he could get without falling off. As much as he had fantasized about a moment such as this, experiencing it was freaking him out. He felt nervous, and awkward, and maybe the ravioli wasn’t sitting quite right on top of the entire bottle of red wine he may or may not have consumed.
He didn’t know what was going on behind him - intimate murmurs between man and wife, rooted in years of familiarity and intimacy. The bed was moving slightly as the couple settled down; Neal imagined them spooning. He suddenly felt very hot. He felt a hand on his hip then, light and reassuring. “’Night, Neal,” Peter said.
Neal threw the covers off and fled to the guest room.
----
Then the Burkes became like a pair of silk-lined handcuffs Neal didn’t have the will to pick.
He slept fitfully - thank the wine for that - and when he woke the next morning, the sun hadn’t yet risen. But the birds had.
Shirr-up! Shirr-up! Shirr-up! the robins outside his window sang cheerfully.
“Shut the fuck up,” he grumbled and got out of bed. He was hung over and cranky and sometimes when you get everything you ever wanted, the timing is just wrong.
He dressed quickly in the bathroom and walked down the steps quietly, totally not intending to escape undetected except for the fact that it was true.
“Morning!” Elizabeth called from the kitchen as he was bending to retrieve his shoes from beside the couch where he’d left them, and he reluctantly walked down the short hall to greet her. “I’m making pancakes.”
Of course she was - it was a Saturday, these things happened. She had all the ingredients laid out on the counter, and she was currently loading up the beans in the coffee grinder.
“Look at that, blueberries,” he said nearly enthusiastically.
She beamed at him.
“You’re an early riser,” he observed.
“I could say the same thing about you. Did I bust you trying to duck out on us?” How could she be so chipper? And, like, psychic?
“That would be -“
“The smart thing to do. You can’t be found out, I get that. But I was thinking that maybe we could make this work.”
“You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“I know that I want to try, and that you’re smart, and so is Peter, and we can figure it out.” She pushed the button on the grinder and grinned at him. “Pull up a seat - set a spell,” she said and chucked the ground coffee into the French press.
He sat and watched her, open-mouthed, as she bustled about, mixing up the batter, heating the pan, pouring the coffee. She still wore the t-shirt from the night before, and her nipples tented the soft cotton like they had no business doing. Neal swallowed. It had been so long since Sara, and there was no way he’d fooled himself into thinking that had been love. It had been a deep-seated like, for sure. But Elizabeth - she was the kind of woman men killed for.
“You want blueberries in yours?” she asked, melting a pat of butter in the pan. She made him a stack of pancakes and handed it to him on a warmed plate with maple syrup and a glass of fresh orange juice. She leaned heavily on the kitchen island, her feet kicking up into the air, and watched him eat, occasionally taking a bite from his plate with her fork.
“Aren’t you having any?”
“It’s funner from your plate.”
“’Funner’?”
“It’s a word - look it up.”
Peter came down five minutes later and sat on the stool next to Neal’s, and she repeated the performance, though she dropped a pancake on the floor and bent to pick it up before Satchmo could, and Jesus tap-dancing Christ, did Peter get this every Saturday?
“More coffee?” Peter offered, watching him watch Elizabeth and actually laughing.
Neal felt dizzy.
When breakfast was done, he found himself at a loss as to his next move. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, or say, here,” he admitted.
El came over and stood between Peter’s knees and he wrapped her in his arms, rested his chin on her shoulder and looked at Neal seriously. “Neither do we.”
“I know that I want to be with you,” Neal began, not really knowing he meant it until he said it. “But I can’t, I don’t…” He closed his eyes and sighed. “I’m going to say this all at once, so please just let me spit it out. I don’t form attachments, not really. Because I always know I’m going to have to leave someday, and I can’t… I know I’m going to have to hurt people, and so I don’t.” He opened his eyes. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“You don’t want to be hurt,” El observed, blue eyes large and serious.
“That’s not what I said-“
“You know you can’t die, and so you don’t want to watch it happen to anyone else, to someone you love. You’ll live forever, and so you think you’re doomed to face it alone. But Neal, sweetie, isn’t it lonely?”
He felt his throat clench. “Like you have no idea, Elizabeth.”
“Well, can’t we just forget about it, then?”
“I don’t understand.”
“A lot of people say you should live each day like it’s your last. What if you, Neal Caffrey, lived each day like it’s your first?”
With that, she reached out and took his hand, pulled him to her and kissed him. She reached up and rested her hand at the nape of his neck, her fingers playing with the short hairs there as she opened her mouth, her tongue a little invader against his lips, licking his teeth. Peter, still behind her, leaned forward and rested his hands on Neal's hips, pulling him in closer. Neal opened his eyes and Peter smiled at him, brown eyes crinkling with what Neal could only call mischief, and he regretted - oh, how he regretted the grief he’d been responsible for putting in those eyes. Breaking the kiss with Elizabeth, Neal leaned over her shoulder to catch Peter’s mouth with his own and the contact was at once electric and gentle and loving and everything he’d never thought kissing Peter Burke would be like.
El turned so that she was standing sideways between them, and placed a hand on each of their faces, encouraging the kiss, smiling up at them. Both men reached an arm around her back, entwined against the other, and they stood like that, kissing in turns, for several minutes. At last, El broke them up, looked at Peter and it was like a silent agreement was made. They each took one of Neal's hands and led him up the stairs to their bedroom.
Neal reeled.
Yeah, he’ll admit it, the possibility of making love with Peter and Elizabeth Burke made him actually fucking swoon. Peter noticed - because he always noticed everything - and laid a steadying hand on his arm. And then he kissed Neal again, and then he and Elizabeth got him undressed with surprising efficiency, and they were on their knees in front of Neal and, well.
The sight of both Peter and Elizabeth mouthing at Neal's impossibly hard cock was a sight he won’t soon forget. It was a sensation that almost made him reel again, and so he moved back until his legs hit their bed and he could sit down. Things got a little bit easier for him in the staying-upright department, but then Peter had to go and blow his mind by literally swallowing his dick, and he didn’t mean to, he really didn’t want to be fucking Peter Burke’s mouth, and he was going to have to stop referring to him by his full name in his mind soon, and He couldn’t keep his hips still, and then he was coming, and Peter took it all, just swallowed it all and then he sat back on his heels, and kissed his wife with Neal's taste still in his mouth and if Neal hadn’t already spent himself, he’d be coming like a goddamn geiser.
Neal lay on their bed propped up on his elbows, watching them stand and kiss each other, and El lifted her leg and began to rub her foot against Peter’s knee. He lifted her then, easily, and she locked her ankles around his waist and he fumbled down between them to push the elastic waistband of his gym shorts down, push the thin wisp of fabric that was her panties aside so that she could slide herself down on his massive erection. She gasped, and then she levered herself up with her arms on his shoulders and came down again, and Peter made a sound like a moan that was strangely silent and cut off. Neal watched as El did it again and again, mesmerized, but eventually Peter must have tired, because he maneuvered her around toward the bed and laid her down gently on her back. She scooted away from him to undress and get a better position on the bed, and he pulled his own clothes off and watched her, a predatory expression in his eyes that Neal couldn’t wait to see trained on him.
El flipped on her side then, and kissed Neal lightly on the mouth. “Sit up against the headboard?” she prompted. He did as she asked and she sat between his thighs, her back against his chest and his dick cradled in the hollow where her back sloped into the curve of her ass. She held her arms out to her husband. Smiling, Peter got onto the bed, pressed her thighs open and began to lap at her pussy, pressing his tongue against her clit until she shivered. The motion made her tits quiver deliciously, and Neal reached his right hand around to tweak her nipple tentatively.
“Oh, fuck, that’s perfect,” she breathed, and turned her head so he could kiss her.
Peter shoved two fingers inside her then, and she gasped as he started a slow, steady rhythm, pressing against her G-spot as he worried his tongue against her clit, hard, until she was squirming. At last, she clenched her thighs shut around his head and held him against her, tight, smothering, and held her breath as her orgasm hit her with a force that made her shake all over.
The sight of it, and the sensation of a warm, vibrant, vibrating woman in his lap soon had Neal's cock’s interest piqued again. When El released him, Peter got up on his knees and kissed her mouth, her neck, down to her breasts. “Oh, God, my husband gives the best head!” she enthused, and Neal had to agree. She leaned forward into Peter then, reaching behind her back to grasp Neal's thickening dick in her hand, and she began to stroke him as Peter sucked at each of her nipples in turn.
“Daddy’s turn,” she cooed after a few minutes, sitting up and grabbing Peter’s face between her hands to kiss him.
Peter groaned. “I asked you never to call me that again, El,” he admonished and she giggled as she turned around. Neal found himself smiling at the shared joke, and marveling at the easy way they had with each, and wanting more of it for himself.
El turned herself over then, and got on her elbows and knees. Shimmying her hips a little, she invited Peter to fuck her from behind. The sight of her tits swaying, nipples nearly brushing against the coverlet, almost had Neal coming again. El turned her face toward him then and smiled at him, all white teeth and quirked lips, and then her mouth was on Neal's dick again and she was humming.
She stopped as Peter entered her, hands on her hips, his thick cock caused her to make an involuntary noise. He looked up at Peter, whose eyes were on what his wife was doing, but when he saw he had Neal's attention, he flicked his eyes over to Neal’s and just smiled, hair sweaty and sticking out in all directions, but he looked so youthful and happy that Neal just had to kiss him right then and there.
As he did, Neal knew that he could never leave them.
----
They literally spent the day in bed, fucking and touching and dozing in a mass of tangled limbs and sheets. At around 8:00, El made them all get out to change the bedding, and then Peter suggested a shower and then, well… they kind of messed up the new sheets too. And then Peter made them all omelets.
Neal fell asleep with the realization that Peter and El had once more distracted him into forgetting about the ramifications of his staying, and he found he couldn’t really care about it.
Sunday morning, Neal sat in bed with his arms around his legs, head resting on his knees. El was downstairs making breakfast, Peter was in the shower, and Neal was alone for the first time in a day and a half. When he woke earlier, he found himself alone, but he didn’t feel that way. The scent of his lovers on the sheets and on his body, the warmth in the bed, the safety in their home all combined to make him feel more secure than he had in decades. He could now say he knew what it meant for a heart to swell with love. He felt like his had expanded to fill his entire chest. He swallowed against the sudden lump in his throat as Peter padded into the room, barefoot with a towel around his waist.
“You still thinking about running?” Peter asked.
“Not even a little bit,” Neal replied, and was surprised to realize it was true. Leaving - the fact that he always would, that he’d need to be prepared for it no matter what - was a constant thought in his head every day of his life. But the last day had provided whole swaths of time when he could forget. “I feel like this is some sort of time warp, and the world has been reduced to just us three.”
Peter came to sit beside him on the bed, close enough that their bodies touched, shoulders, hips, thigh. “If you stay, it can be like this forever,” he pointed out.
“I never would have thought you capable of such flights of fancy,” Neal replied, not mentioning that they each had different definitions of the word “forever.”
“I’m a romantic guy,” Peter said, snaking his arm around Neal and pulling his head over to rest on his shoulder.
Neal melted against him - and there he was learning the meaning of yet another cliché. “I wish you were right.”
“Do we have to decide about it now?”
“I suppose not.”
On Monday morning, he woke with Elizabeth’s head on his chest and Peter’s leg flung across both of them and suddenly knew what a sex-induced stupor felt like. He lifted his head and looked around. “Peter,” he said, poking him with a toe, “it’s nearly 8:30 - shouldn’t you be getting ready for work?”
Peter lifted his head, glanced at the clock and then lay down again. “Nah. Sent Hughes an email last night - I’m under the weather.” He snuggled his face into the back of Elizabeth’s neck and she sighed.
“You know, keeping me cowed through sexual gratification will not work,” Neal pointed out.
“We can try.”
Neal put his head down and closed his eyes, thinking that delaying the inevitable would probably bite him in the ass, but not really caring.
It came back and bit him in the ass about five hours later.
“Agent Jones!” He heard the words ring through the house as Elizabeth opened the front door, but it was like he was watching himself, dull-witted, his reactions all out of sync with his brain, so he kept walking from the dining room to the kitchen, carrying the plates from lunch, in full view of Jones.
Stupid sex-induced stupor.
“Holy Mary, mother of God,” Jones yelled, and there was a clatter in the vestibule as he reacted to the sight of a very alive Neal Caffrey apparently about to do the dishes in his boss’s house; he threw his arms out to the sides, took a step back in shock.
“Fucking hell,” Neal and El said in unison.
“You’re supposed to be dead!”
“It didn’t take,” Neal replied, walking to the front of the house.
“I - I need to sit down,” Jones said, stricken.
“Sure thing, honey,” El said, taking his elbow and leading him to the couch.
Neal closed the door and joined them, because what else was he supposed to do? He sat down on the couch opposite Jones, who looked at him with eyes wide, breathing from his mouth. Suddenly, he closed the gap between them and threw his arms around Neal. “I can’t believe it!” he said, and Neal awkwardly patted his back. When Jones sat back again, he had tears in his eyes and a happy smile on his face - an uncharacteristically emotional response from the usually stalwart agent that made Neal feel like a shit.
“I - yeah.”
“Wh-what happened? I saw the blood, Neal. I - you don’t come away from something like that!”
“I… was…”
“Undercover!” El supplied.
“Right. Top secret assignment. Had to fake dying so that I could go deep, deep undercover.”
Jones gave them both his you-can’t-fool-me-I-went-to-Harvard-Law face and Neal tried again. “In fact, I’m still undercover. Peter’s been my handler.”
Peter, bless him, chose that very moment to come in after taking the dog for a walk. Satchmo trotted over and sat on Neal’s shoes, tongue lolling. “Jones. Hi. I see you’ve… seen Neal.”
“It’s incredible.”
“It has to stay a secret,” Peter said, face suddenly stern.
“Boss -“
“Clinton, I know I don’t have to tell you what kind of danger Neal will be in if word of this leaks to anyone. He’s been deep undercover for weeks, and we’re just so close to a break in the case.”
Clinton was loyal enough to give his boss the benefit of the doubt, but his mother didn’t raise any dummies, so he still looked unconvinced.
“All will be made clear when I come back,” Neal found himself promising, his best conman’s smile in place. Yep, he was a shit.
When Clint had gone, Neal flopped himself on the couch, boneless from the tension of that moment finally being over, and not letting himself think about the fact he’d just been outed. If only it had been Diana who’d come over to bring some files to Peter, they might have convinced her to leave it. But Clint - he was as by-the-book as Peter, probably more so, and they just couldn’t let this lie now.
“What are you doing?” Neal asked, noticing Peter had picked up his cell phone and was dialing.
“Calling Hughes. If ‘all will be made clear,’ we’d better get started on it clearing it up.”
Neal thought it might be worth dying again if he got to see the look on Reese Hughes’ face just one more time once he’d entered the Burke house that evening. Then he felt guilty - the guy was getting up there in years, maybe his ticker couldn’t handle it.
In the end, though, Hughes was surprisingly sanguine about aiding and abetting a cover story that featured Neal being loaned out to the Secret Service to bust a counterfeiting ring in Orlando. It would take a week to fake the paperwork, which Neal spent at the Burkes’, feeling like a kid home from school with the chicken pox or something, while Peter and Elizabeth went about their lives.
He took the opportunity to re-enter parts of his life, though, finding Moz again to explain that he was staying.
“I’m coming back,” he said to Moz as the older man entered the new Tuesday, a storage unit in Queens that was inexplicably filled with cases and cases of breakfast cereal.
“You never left,” Moz pointed out, and how the hell did he always know these things? “Been having fun playing house with the Suits?” he asked, and Neal knew how.
“Been spying on people again?”
“A man has to fill his days,” Moz sniffed.
After a few minutes and a promise to forge a Delacroix - he was so not looking forward to the specific coloring, the detailed brushwork; he could sense a lot of creative cursing coming on - the ice was broken, and Moz was advising him on the best way to break the news of his impending life to June.
In the end, it became surprisingly easy to slip back into his life, and he felt almost relieved the night before he was to return to the FBI, like a workaholic who’d been off on a particularly unsatisfying vacation and couldn’t wait to get back to the office.
He got a few looks as he made his way to the 21st floor, but when he entered the office, everyone stood and welcomed him with much hand-shaking and back-slapping, and he felt special and almost like a hero, except that he hadn’t done anything.
Falling back into the rhythms of the office took almost no effort, and Peter soon had him working on a mortgage fraud case that had him wondering why he came back, it was so boring. But he secretly loved it. And he not-so-secretly loved going home to Peter and El every night, because it was a magical slice of normal with a side of hot sex and he might even be happy.
And then he died again.
On to Part 2