White Collar fic: catch me (if you can)
For kanarek13's Get Well Fest!
Title: catch me (if you can)
Fandom: White Collar
Word Count: 3600
Pairing: Peter/Neal (with background Peter/Elizabeth)
Rating: PG
Summary: Post-anklet. Peter decides it's Neal's turn to chase him for a change. Season five spoilers, but the fic itself is pure fluff.
Cross-posted: http://archiveofourown.org/works/1284562
It was just past 6:30 a.m. when Neal let himself into the Burke townhouse. It was a Monday, and Peter should have been getting ready for the office -- stepping out of the shower, maybe, or puttering around in the kitchen with his tie askew and the sports section of the paper in one hand.
Instead the house was silent and felt, for lack of a better term, empty.
"Peter?" Neal called. A surge of completely irrational worry swept over him -- what if he had a heart attack, he's lying helpless upstairs -- and he mounted the stairs three at a time, even while telling himself it was ridiculous, Peter was perfectly healthy. And, indeed, the bedroom was as empty as the rest of the house, the bed neatly made.
Neal wandered the rest of the house until it was very clear that it was entirely empty of Peter or anyone else. El kept a condo in DC and came up on weekends, leaving on Sunday night to start her work week. Weekends were her Peter time, and Neal had him during the week. When Neal was in town, they'd frequently do something all together on Saturday afternoon, and this Saturday had been no exception. They'd gone to a gallery opening -- mostly it was El and Neal wandering around the exhibits while Peter relaxed in the lobby with a crossword -- and then had dinner, and Peter hadn't even mentioned anything about being out of town this week, whether going back to DC with El or going somewhere else.
Neal had gotten in the habit of coming over on Monday mornings because Peter tended to be morose on Mondays, after El went back to DC. Neal might have felt a little jealous except El had told him that, on Saturdays when they didn't see him, Peter basically talked of nothing but what he'd been doing with Neal all week.
So where was he, exactly? The worrisome thought of a kidnapping crossed Neal's mind. Frustrated and concerned, he finally broke down and called El.
"Neal!" she said, sounding happy to hear from him as always -- and not concerned in the slightest. From the background noise he guessed she was already at work. Peter, workaholic though he could be, wasn't even a patch on El.
"Hey, El. Uh, is Peter --" And here he stalled out, unable to figure out quite how to phrase the question so that it didn't sound suspicious. Two years after the anklet had come off and his strange, convoluted relationship with Peter had gotten even more strange and convoluted, there was still some amount of uncertainty. They had a comfortable arrangement that worked for all of them, but he didn't ever want Elizabeth to think that he was trying to come between her and Peter, or begrudged them spending time together.
Elizabeth, being Elizabeth, merely laughed. "Are you in the house?"
"Yes," he said, because of course she knew that he came over every Monday morning to make sure Peter didn't feel alone.
"And you're probably wondering where Peter is."
"I was, kinda," he said, rapidly becoming suspicious.
"Good luck finding him," El said with undaunted cheer. "Oh, Amy, just put it over there, that's great!"
"Wait, what?"
"You're supposed to find him, that's the whole point," El said. "Oh dear, I'm not sure if I was supposed to tell you that ... Well, you'd have figured it out on your own anyway."
"This is ... adult hide and seek?" Neal said in disbelief.
"I'm told there's a suitable prize waiting for you if you do manage to find him."
Neal forcibly wrenched his brain back on track. "Peter just ... ran away? Are you serious?"
"You do," El pointed out. "Sometimes. When you need to."
"Yes, but that's -- that's me, I thought everyone was okay with that!" It was one of the reasons why this relationship worked; he could vanish off to Florence for a month if New York started feeling too small, and no one batted an eye at it.
"Oh, Neal," El sighed, sounding a little sad. "It's not that, dear, it's really not. He is fine with it -- that's you, and we don't want you to be any other way -- but he thought it was your turn to be the one to do the looking for a change. That's all."
"It's supposed to be some kind of object lesson?"
"I think it's more like a game. Look," El said, "if you don't want to play, I'm sure you can just leave him alone and he'll come back in a few days."
"A few days? What did he do, take the week off work?"
"Yes," El said simply.
"He didn't tell me!"
"Well, no; it was a surprise."
"Peter took the week off work," Neal said, trying to wrap his mind around it, "so that he could disappear somewhere and make me try to find him, when we could have just spent his entire week off lounging around the house together ... is that about right?"
Elizabeth laughed. "Neal, he's playing with you. So go play back. Or, if you like, let him alone until he gets bored and comes home. But in that case you should probably think about what it means, that he'll play the game with you, but you drop out as soon as you're the one who has to do the work."
"Did you have anything to do with this?"
"Nope. This was all Peter. And now," El said, "I have a meeting to go to, and you'd better get on the hunt before the trail is cold."
"Did he leave me any clues?" Neal asked plaintively.
"Oh, I know for certain that I'm not supposed to tell you that," El chirped. And she hung up.
Neal stared at the phone. Just when he thought he had the Burkes figured out ...
But maybe, just maybe, that was why -- six years after the anklet deal, two years after getting the anklet off -- he wasn't even remotely bored. Being with Peter still felt like being poised at the beginning of an adventure, not at the end of one.
***
A detailed search of the house revealed nothing obvious: no printed hotel receipts, no suspicious Visa bills, no brochures for swanky upstate resorts.
Of course it wouldn't be that easy.
So think, Neal told himself. He had a pretty good feel by now for Peter's thought processes, particularly the chain of logic that Peter used when hunting for bad guys (or for Neal, since he did not include himself in that category). Of course, that could mean that Peter knew what Neal was going to try and had already figured out how to thwart him ...
He realized with a certain amount of amusement that he was, indeed, having fun. Actually, he wasn't sure if he'd been this intrigued by a new puzzle since ... well, since he got the anklet off and stopped working cases with Peter.
Okay, so think it through. Peter usually started by making a profile of the suspect and determining where they were likely to go. Most people had habits, including habits they weren't aware of. And Neal knew Peter very well. Even if Peter thought he'd anticipated Neal's possible lines of deduction, there might be something he'd overlooked.
Neal made himself a cup of coffee and took it out to the patio along with a pad of paper and a pencil.
Not having Satchmo underfoot was still a little disconcerting. With El being in DC most of the time and Peter chronically working late, the Burkes and Neal had decided it would be less disruptive for the dog to rehome him. They'd given him to a neighbor down the street with two kids who adored him, close enough to still visit his former owners occasionally, but able to live out his elderly dog years without being alone most of the time. From what Neal had seen of him, he was the world's happiest and most overpetted dog these days.
Focus, Neal told himself firmly, and began to make a quick list of places Peter might go.
Peter, for all the mental flexibility that had so delighted Neal when he'd discovered it, was still a creature of habits that he rarely deviated from. If he and El went out of town, they nearly always went to the Rusty Egret. That was clearly too easy ... and also too far away. Neal didn't think Peter would take the chase that far afield.
On the other hand, he had led Peter all over the world, so maybe Peter had run off to Beijing or Buenos Ares or somewhere else just to mess with him.
But probably not. The number of places Peter could be were effectively infinite ... which meant it had to be constrained somehow. And people very rarely did anything truly random. Wherever Peter had gone would be implied by his personality and his past actions.
Neal walked the pencil over his fingers while he mused. For Peter, this was a form of romance. And despite Peter's apparently sincere belief that he was bad at romance, he was actually one of the most deeply sentimental people Neal had ever met. Peter might get distracted and forget that an anniversary was coming up, but anniversaries mattered to him. Important dates. Important places. He was the sort of guy who always took his wife to the restaurant where they'd had their first date, and remembered the exact day he'd captured Neal even though he'd had no special reason to mark it at the time. (After Neal got the anklet off, Peter had started giving him a small gift on his "arrestiversary". It was adorable and just a tiny bit creepy. El, more tactfully, baked a cake each year on his "ankletiversary", the day the thing had finally come off.)
"Oh my God, he wouldn't," Neal murmured aloud. Except Peter most definitely would, so Neal made a list of places that might qualify as romantic according to Peter's heartfelt but weird ideas about romance. The warehouse where Peter had arrested him was the leading option, but he also noted Kate's old apartment, the hotel where Peter had taken him when he first got out of prison, and even the prison itself.
Time to do some legwork.
But first he swung by the White Collar office in the hope that Peter might have said something to someone, or inadvertently left a clue lying around.
***
"No, Caffrey," Diana said. "We are not helping you look for your boyfriend."
When Peter and Neal had first started sleeping together -- which Neal considered much less of a milestone than the rest of the world apparently did; they'd been tangled up and weird and stupidly fond of each other before, and they were still tangled and weird and fond, except now with sex -- they'd initially tried to keep it a secret. That had lasted about three days before Diana and Jones figured it out, and not too long after that, everyone seemed to know. The office seemed to be divided into three basic camps: the ones who felt sorry for El because her husband was cheating on her, the ones who felt sorry for Peter because his wife had heartlessly left him for a job in DC, and the others (fortunately the majority) who either didn't care or were genuinely curious about how it all worked.
It was entirely possible that their relationship had torpedoed any possibility of Peter ever again being promoted beyond field agent. Neal still felt guilty about that, but when he'd brought it up, Peter had shaken his head.
"I don't want a desk job. I tried that, remember? This is the job I love, and I'd be happy to keep doing it as long as they'll let me. Besides ..." And here he'd looked away, not quite meeting Neal's eyes. "If the cost of a promotion is treating you like some kind of dirty secret, I don't want it."
Neal hadn't realized it was possible to love Peter more than he already did. As with so many things about Peter, he'd been wrong.
Right now, however, he was mostly just annoyed, because Peter was a sneaky jerk and everyone at the office was defending his location like a classified secret.
"Come on, give me a hint."
"We don't know anything," Jones said, on his way past with a stack of files. "But if you're that bored, I have some cold cases you could look at."
"I'm just going to examine his desk, then," Neal said quickly.
Peter's office yielded no new insights and nothing unusual, which meant Neal was going to have to do the legwork himself. He gave Diana and Jones a jaunty hat tip and strolled out the door. It was, after all, a lovely day, and he was a self-employed artist with nothing else in particular to do. A tour of his past with Peter wasn't necessarily a bad thing.
His phone bleeped to indicate an incoming text. Neal's Peter sense tingled, and indeed, there was a message from Peter reading: Excuse me, where's my pursuit? I'm starting to feel ignored.
Neal rolled his eyes and called him. Hopefully the background noise would give him a clue as to Peter's whereabouts, but it just went to voicemail -- apparently Peter had anticipated that trick.
"You know," he told Peter's voicemail, "some fugitives can manage to wait more than two hours before they start taunting their pursuers. Of course, I didn't have terribly high expectations, since you're an amateur at this and all."
His phone bleeped after no more than thirty seconds ... about the length of time it would take to check a voicemail message. Challenge accepted.
Neal texted back: This is no way for a 52-year-old man to behave. Just saying.
I'll keep that in mind, Peter replied. Coming from a model of self-control and decorum like yourself.
Decorum? Someone's been hitting the crossword puzzle dictionaries. An awful thought occurred to him. Are you with Mozzie? Is he in on this?
He had time to vividly picture the look on Peter's face before Peter texted, Like I need help.
Okay, this is on.
No response came to this, so Peter had either decided to let him have the last word or just got tired of teasing him. Neal called Mozzie.
"Moz, do you have equipment that can trace the location of a cell phone?"
There was a pause before Mozzie said, "Is that a trick question? Wait, does this involve that thing with you and the Suit that Elizabeth mentioned? Because if so, I want no part of it."
"Elizabeth told you?" Neal demanded in disbelief.
"It may have come up," Mozzie said evasively. "Sorry, mon frère, you're on your own for this one."
"Some friend you are."
"If you want to come over to Friday and have a nice glass of Chablis until the Suit gets bored of waiting for you, feel free to drop by," Mozzie said, and hung up.
"It's a conspiracy," Neal muttered, putting his phone away.
This left him with nothing except his original plan of retracing his and Peter's early movements to locate anywhere that might qualify for Peter's slightly downscale but undeniably nostalgic notion of romance. He went first to what he considered the most likely spot: the warehouse where Peter had arrested him.
... which, he found, had been converted to hipster apartments in the intervening decade. Neal stood across the street and stared at it in mingled amazement and dismay. Not that he had some sort of sentimental attachment to the place; he'd never even considered coming back here for any reason. It was just an ordinary warehouse, and one with not-so-great connotations on top of that. Still, it was a little disconcerting to see that it now had plants on windowsills and a bike rack out front.
It really had been awhile, hadn't it? And even longer since the first time he'd met Peter outside a Midtown bank -- which, okay, the bank was probably even a better prospect than the warehouse.
But Peter was not at the bank. Nor was he at the crappy hotel where Neal had once refused to stay (still in business, for some inexplicable reason), the apartment where Neal had been arrested the second time, the warehouse where they'd arrested Hagen, or any of the museums and jewelry stores where Neal had been unjustly accused of stealing things. Neal also checked Battery Park, where they'd had a silly little ceremony when he got the anklet off -- he seemed to recall that it had been mostly Elizabeth's idea. Peter had unlocked the anklet at sunset and then they'd all toasted each other with sparkling grape juice so as not to violate the city's public drinking laws. But Peter wasn't there today. Neal was starting to feel like a character in a terrible children's show. "Where is Peter, kids? Is he behind the lamppost? No, Peter is not behind the lamppost ..."
Neal didn't actually think Peter would be at the prison; still, considering the general weirdness of their relationship, it was possible, so he drove out anyway. There was, indeed, no Peter, but Neal sat in his car for a moment, staring at the gates out of which he'd walked six years ago. Things had been so different then. He'd had nothing but the clothes on his back (well, and a couple million dollars' worth of assets in various storage units, but all of it had been out of his immediate reach). He hadn't yet met June, Diana, Jones, or Sara, and he hadn't seen Moz in four years. Peter was still the federal agent who'd arrested him and testified against him at his trial, even if he'd already had a fondness for him, that he couldn't quite articulate in words ...
He could still remember vividly walking through those gates, the anklet's weight unfamiliar and uncomfortable. (Now, there were times when he looked down at his feet and was startled not to see it there.) He'd walked into the sharp autumn wind and the cold sunlight, trying to put on a brave face and not look as unsure and lonely and afraid as he'd really been.
And Peter had been there, waiting for him.
Neal realized that he was grinning helplessly, remembering it. Not an auspicious beginning, no. But it had led to things he could never have dreamed of on that autumn day all those years ago. Some had been terrible and tragic, and some had been wonderful beyond his imagination.
And he was happy, he realized, gazing at the forbidding prison walls. He was happy, even if this thing with Peter was still just as strange and incomprehensible as it had ever been. He had a space of his own, and friends, and a slowly building career that he enjoyed. He had long sunny afternoons to spent painting in June's loft -- he'd tried renting a studio space, but found he liked the loft better. He had weekday evenings with Peter in the townhouse, playfully sniping and cuddling while they watched movies, and he had Saturdays with Elizabeth, talking about art and wine. He had hope and a future and a home.
He loved, and was loved.
On a pleasant wave of euphoria, he drove back to the city. He thought about texting Peter to throw in the towel on the chase -- he didn't really feel the need to "win" anymore, and mostly just wanted to see him. But maybe he shouldn't give up yet; maybe he'd stop in at June's, settle his thoughts by painting a bit, and think some more ...
The door to his apartment was slightly ajar. And, as Neal pushed it the rest of the way, he thought, There was one place I didn't look.
"Took you long enough," Peter said, turning back from the view over the city. Although it was only mid-afternoon, he had a beer in one hand. He was casually dressed in jeans and one of the open-necked polo shirts that he'd long ago figured out drove Neal wild.
"Excuse me?" Neal said, and made an elaborate show of checking the watch he wasn't wearing. "It took you how long to catch me the first time? Oh, right -- three years." He got a wine glass and a bottle from the rack by sheer habit, but mostly he was looking at Peter. Peter's skin was tinted gold in the light of the slanting sun, and he wore a soft, playful smile. "I can't help thinking," Neal said as he poured a glass of wine, "that you're not very good at this fugitive thing. At least I had the sense not to turn up at your house."
"True," Peter conceded. He moved closer, so close that he was right in Neal's space, though not quite touching him. "I guess I'd better stick to what I'm good at." He leaned even closer, and his breath brushed across Neal's cheek. "Which is catching you, by the way."
"You didn't actually have to explain it." Neal set down his wine glass so that he didn't spill it, and then, when Peter tried to snug an arm around his waist, he gracefully slipped out of it.
"Hey," Peter said. He was still smiling, but it had gone a bit fixed and there was a shadow of hurt in his eyes.
"If you're going to brag about catching me," Neal said, "I expect you to prove it."
"Oh. Oh." Peter set down his beer. Neal tensed.
The chase that ensued was very brief and ended with Peter flattening Neal to the bed, lightly caging Neal's wrists with one hand. Neal could have broken his grasp without even trying, but he didn't try.
"Got you," Peter murmured against Neal's lips.
"Yeah," Neal whispered back, and between kisses managed to say, "You do."
~
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Title: catch me (if you can)
Fandom: White Collar
Word Count: 3600
Pairing: Peter/Neal (with background Peter/Elizabeth)
Rating: PG
Summary: Post-anklet. Peter decides it's Neal's turn to chase him for a change. Season five spoilers, but the fic itself is pure fluff.
Cross-posted: http://archiveofourown.org/works/1284562
It was just past 6:30 a.m. when Neal let himself into the Burke townhouse. It was a Monday, and Peter should have been getting ready for the office -- stepping out of the shower, maybe, or puttering around in the kitchen with his tie askew and the sports section of the paper in one hand.
Instead the house was silent and felt, for lack of a better term, empty.
"Peter?" Neal called. A surge of completely irrational worry swept over him -- what if he had a heart attack, he's lying helpless upstairs -- and he mounted the stairs three at a time, even while telling himself it was ridiculous, Peter was perfectly healthy. And, indeed, the bedroom was as empty as the rest of the house, the bed neatly made.
Neal wandered the rest of the house until it was very clear that it was entirely empty of Peter or anyone else. El kept a condo in DC and came up on weekends, leaving on Sunday night to start her work week. Weekends were her Peter time, and Neal had him during the week. When Neal was in town, they'd frequently do something all together on Saturday afternoon, and this Saturday had been no exception. They'd gone to a gallery opening -- mostly it was El and Neal wandering around the exhibits while Peter relaxed in the lobby with a crossword -- and then had dinner, and Peter hadn't even mentioned anything about being out of town this week, whether going back to DC with El or going somewhere else.
Neal had gotten in the habit of coming over on Monday mornings because Peter tended to be morose on Mondays, after El went back to DC. Neal might have felt a little jealous except El had told him that, on Saturdays when they didn't see him, Peter basically talked of nothing but what he'd been doing with Neal all week.
So where was he, exactly? The worrisome thought of a kidnapping crossed Neal's mind. Frustrated and concerned, he finally broke down and called El.
"Neal!" she said, sounding happy to hear from him as always -- and not concerned in the slightest. From the background noise he guessed she was already at work. Peter, workaholic though he could be, wasn't even a patch on El.
"Hey, El. Uh, is Peter --" And here he stalled out, unable to figure out quite how to phrase the question so that it didn't sound suspicious. Two years after the anklet had come off and his strange, convoluted relationship with Peter had gotten even more strange and convoluted, there was still some amount of uncertainty. They had a comfortable arrangement that worked for all of them, but he didn't ever want Elizabeth to think that he was trying to come between her and Peter, or begrudged them spending time together.
Elizabeth, being Elizabeth, merely laughed. "Are you in the house?"
"Yes," he said, because of course she knew that he came over every Monday morning to make sure Peter didn't feel alone.
"And you're probably wondering where Peter is."
"I was, kinda," he said, rapidly becoming suspicious.
"Good luck finding him," El said with undaunted cheer. "Oh, Amy, just put it over there, that's great!"
"Wait, what?"
"You're supposed to find him, that's the whole point," El said. "Oh dear, I'm not sure if I was supposed to tell you that ... Well, you'd have figured it out on your own anyway."
"This is ... adult hide and seek?" Neal said in disbelief.
"I'm told there's a suitable prize waiting for you if you do manage to find him."
Neal forcibly wrenched his brain back on track. "Peter just ... ran away? Are you serious?"
"You do," El pointed out. "Sometimes. When you need to."
"Yes, but that's -- that's me, I thought everyone was okay with that!" It was one of the reasons why this relationship worked; he could vanish off to Florence for a month if New York started feeling too small, and no one batted an eye at it.
"Oh, Neal," El sighed, sounding a little sad. "It's not that, dear, it's really not. He is fine with it -- that's you, and we don't want you to be any other way -- but he thought it was your turn to be the one to do the looking for a change. That's all."
"It's supposed to be some kind of object lesson?"
"I think it's more like a game. Look," El said, "if you don't want to play, I'm sure you can just leave him alone and he'll come back in a few days."
"A few days? What did he do, take the week off work?"
"Yes," El said simply.
"He didn't tell me!"
"Well, no; it was a surprise."
"Peter took the week off work," Neal said, trying to wrap his mind around it, "so that he could disappear somewhere and make me try to find him, when we could have just spent his entire week off lounging around the house together ... is that about right?"
Elizabeth laughed. "Neal, he's playing with you. So go play back. Or, if you like, let him alone until he gets bored and comes home. But in that case you should probably think about what it means, that he'll play the game with you, but you drop out as soon as you're the one who has to do the work."
"Did you have anything to do with this?"
"Nope. This was all Peter. And now," El said, "I have a meeting to go to, and you'd better get on the hunt before the trail is cold."
"Did he leave me any clues?" Neal asked plaintively.
"Oh, I know for certain that I'm not supposed to tell you that," El chirped. And she hung up.
Neal stared at the phone. Just when he thought he had the Burkes figured out ...
But maybe, just maybe, that was why -- six years after the anklet deal, two years after getting the anklet off -- he wasn't even remotely bored. Being with Peter still felt like being poised at the beginning of an adventure, not at the end of one.
***
A detailed search of the house revealed nothing obvious: no printed hotel receipts, no suspicious Visa bills, no brochures for swanky upstate resorts.
Of course it wouldn't be that easy.
So think, Neal told himself. He had a pretty good feel by now for Peter's thought processes, particularly the chain of logic that Peter used when hunting for bad guys (or for Neal, since he did not include himself in that category). Of course, that could mean that Peter knew what Neal was going to try and had already figured out how to thwart him ...
He realized with a certain amount of amusement that he was, indeed, having fun. Actually, he wasn't sure if he'd been this intrigued by a new puzzle since ... well, since he got the anklet off and stopped working cases with Peter.
Okay, so think it through. Peter usually started by making a profile of the suspect and determining where they were likely to go. Most people had habits, including habits they weren't aware of. And Neal knew Peter very well. Even if Peter thought he'd anticipated Neal's possible lines of deduction, there might be something he'd overlooked.
Neal made himself a cup of coffee and took it out to the patio along with a pad of paper and a pencil.
Not having Satchmo underfoot was still a little disconcerting. With El being in DC most of the time and Peter chronically working late, the Burkes and Neal had decided it would be less disruptive for the dog to rehome him. They'd given him to a neighbor down the street with two kids who adored him, close enough to still visit his former owners occasionally, but able to live out his elderly dog years without being alone most of the time. From what Neal had seen of him, he was the world's happiest and most overpetted dog these days.
Focus, Neal told himself firmly, and began to make a quick list of places Peter might go.
Peter, for all the mental flexibility that had so delighted Neal when he'd discovered it, was still a creature of habits that he rarely deviated from. If he and El went out of town, they nearly always went to the Rusty Egret. That was clearly too easy ... and also too far away. Neal didn't think Peter would take the chase that far afield.
On the other hand, he had led Peter all over the world, so maybe Peter had run off to Beijing or Buenos Ares or somewhere else just to mess with him.
But probably not. The number of places Peter could be were effectively infinite ... which meant it had to be constrained somehow. And people very rarely did anything truly random. Wherever Peter had gone would be implied by his personality and his past actions.
Neal walked the pencil over his fingers while he mused. For Peter, this was a form of romance. And despite Peter's apparently sincere belief that he was bad at romance, he was actually one of the most deeply sentimental people Neal had ever met. Peter might get distracted and forget that an anniversary was coming up, but anniversaries mattered to him. Important dates. Important places. He was the sort of guy who always took his wife to the restaurant where they'd had their first date, and remembered the exact day he'd captured Neal even though he'd had no special reason to mark it at the time. (After Neal got the anklet off, Peter had started giving him a small gift on his "arrestiversary". It was adorable and just a tiny bit creepy. El, more tactfully, baked a cake each year on his "ankletiversary", the day the thing had finally come off.)
"Oh my God, he wouldn't," Neal murmured aloud. Except Peter most definitely would, so Neal made a list of places that might qualify as romantic according to Peter's heartfelt but weird ideas about romance. The warehouse where Peter had arrested him was the leading option, but he also noted Kate's old apartment, the hotel where Peter had taken him when he first got out of prison, and even the prison itself.
Time to do some legwork.
But first he swung by the White Collar office in the hope that Peter might have said something to someone, or inadvertently left a clue lying around.
***
"No, Caffrey," Diana said. "We are not helping you look for your boyfriend."
When Peter and Neal had first started sleeping together -- which Neal considered much less of a milestone than the rest of the world apparently did; they'd been tangled up and weird and stupidly fond of each other before, and they were still tangled and weird and fond, except now with sex -- they'd initially tried to keep it a secret. That had lasted about three days before Diana and Jones figured it out, and not too long after that, everyone seemed to know. The office seemed to be divided into three basic camps: the ones who felt sorry for El because her husband was cheating on her, the ones who felt sorry for Peter because his wife had heartlessly left him for a job in DC, and the others (fortunately the majority) who either didn't care or were genuinely curious about how it all worked.
It was entirely possible that their relationship had torpedoed any possibility of Peter ever again being promoted beyond field agent. Neal still felt guilty about that, but when he'd brought it up, Peter had shaken his head.
"I don't want a desk job. I tried that, remember? This is the job I love, and I'd be happy to keep doing it as long as they'll let me. Besides ..." And here he'd looked away, not quite meeting Neal's eyes. "If the cost of a promotion is treating you like some kind of dirty secret, I don't want it."
Neal hadn't realized it was possible to love Peter more than he already did. As with so many things about Peter, he'd been wrong.
Right now, however, he was mostly just annoyed, because Peter was a sneaky jerk and everyone at the office was defending his location like a classified secret.
"Come on, give me a hint."
"We don't know anything," Jones said, on his way past with a stack of files. "But if you're that bored, I have some cold cases you could look at."
"I'm just going to examine his desk, then," Neal said quickly.
Peter's office yielded no new insights and nothing unusual, which meant Neal was going to have to do the legwork himself. He gave Diana and Jones a jaunty hat tip and strolled out the door. It was, after all, a lovely day, and he was a self-employed artist with nothing else in particular to do. A tour of his past with Peter wasn't necessarily a bad thing.
His phone bleeped to indicate an incoming text. Neal's Peter sense tingled, and indeed, there was a message from Peter reading: Excuse me, where's my pursuit? I'm starting to feel ignored.
Neal rolled his eyes and called him. Hopefully the background noise would give him a clue as to Peter's whereabouts, but it just went to voicemail -- apparently Peter had anticipated that trick.
"You know," he told Peter's voicemail, "some fugitives can manage to wait more than two hours before they start taunting their pursuers. Of course, I didn't have terribly high expectations, since you're an amateur at this and all."
His phone bleeped after no more than thirty seconds ... about the length of time it would take to check a voicemail message. Challenge accepted.
Neal texted back: This is no way for a 52-year-old man to behave. Just saying.
I'll keep that in mind, Peter replied. Coming from a model of self-control and decorum like yourself.
Decorum? Someone's been hitting the crossword puzzle dictionaries. An awful thought occurred to him. Are you with Mozzie? Is he in on this?
He had time to vividly picture the look on Peter's face before Peter texted, Like I need help.
Okay, this is on.
No response came to this, so Peter had either decided to let him have the last word or just got tired of teasing him. Neal called Mozzie.
"Moz, do you have equipment that can trace the location of a cell phone?"
There was a pause before Mozzie said, "Is that a trick question? Wait, does this involve that thing with you and the Suit that Elizabeth mentioned? Because if so, I want no part of it."
"Elizabeth told you?" Neal demanded in disbelief.
"It may have come up," Mozzie said evasively. "Sorry, mon frère, you're on your own for this one."
"Some friend you are."
"If you want to come over to Friday and have a nice glass of Chablis until the Suit gets bored of waiting for you, feel free to drop by," Mozzie said, and hung up.
"It's a conspiracy," Neal muttered, putting his phone away.
This left him with nothing except his original plan of retracing his and Peter's early movements to locate anywhere that might qualify for Peter's slightly downscale but undeniably nostalgic notion of romance. He went first to what he considered the most likely spot: the warehouse where Peter had arrested him.
... which, he found, had been converted to hipster apartments in the intervening decade. Neal stood across the street and stared at it in mingled amazement and dismay. Not that he had some sort of sentimental attachment to the place; he'd never even considered coming back here for any reason. It was just an ordinary warehouse, and one with not-so-great connotations on top of that. Still, it was a little disconcerting to see that it now had plants on windowsills and a bike rack out front.
It really had been awhile, hadn't it? And even longer since the first time he'd met Peter outside a Midtown bank -- which, okay, the bank was probably even a better prospect than the warehouse.
But Peter was not at the bank. Nor was he at the crappy hotel where Neal had once refused to stay (still in business, for some inexplicable reason), the apartment where Neal had been arrested the second time, the warehouse where they'd arrested Hagen, or any of the museums and jewelry stores where Neal had been unjustly accused of stealing things. Neal also checked Battery Park, where they'd had a silly little ceremony when he got the anklet off -- he seemed to recall that it had been mostly Elizabeth's idea. Peter had unlocked the anklet at sunset and then they'd all toasted each other with sparkling grape juice so as not to violate the city's public drinking laws. But Peter wasn't there today. Neal was starting to feel like a character in a terrible children's show. "Where is Peter, kids? Is he behind the lamppost? No, Peter is not behind the lamppost ..."
Neal didn't actually think Peter would be at the prison; still, considering the general weirdness of their relationship, it was possible, so he drove out anyway. There was, indeed, no Peter, but Neal sat in his car for a moment, staring at the gates out of which he'd walked six years ago. Things had been so different then. He'd had nothing but the clothes on his back (well, and a couple million dollars' worth of assets in various storage units, but all of it had been out of his immediate reach). He hadn't yet met June, Diana, Jones, or Sara, and he hadn't seen Moz in four years. Peter was still the federal agent who'd arrested him and testified against him at his trial, even if he'd already had a fondness for him, that he couldn't quite articulate in words ...
He could still remember vividly walking through those gates, the anklet's weight unfamiliar and uncomfortable. (Now, there were times when he looked down at his feet and was startled not to see it there.) He'd walked into the sharp autumn wind and the cold sunlight, trying to put on a brave face and not look as unsure and lonely and afraid as he'd really been.
And Peter had been there, waiting for him.
Neal realized that he was grinning helplessly, remembering it. Not an auspicious beginning, no. But it had led to things he could never have dreamed of on that autumn day all those years ago. Some had been terrible and tragic, and some had been wonderful beyond his imagination.
And he was happy, he realized, gazing at the forbidding prison walls. He was happy, even if this thing with Peter was still just as strange and incomprehensible as it had ever been. He had a space of his own, and friends, and a slowly building career that he enjoyed. He had long sunny afternoons to spent painting in June's loft -- he'd tried renting a studio space, but found he liked the loft better. He had weekday evenings with Peter in the townhouse, playfully sniping and cuddling while they watched movies, and he had Saturdays with Elizabeth, talking about art and wine. He had hope and a future and a home.
He loved, and was loved.
On a pleasant wave of euphoria, he drove back to the city. He thought about texting Peter to throw in the towel on the chase -- he didn't really feel the need to "win" anymore, and mostly just wanted to see him. But maybe he shouldn't give up yet; maybe he'd stop in at June's, settle his thoughts by painting a bit, and think some more ...
The door to his apartment was slightly ajar. And, as Neal pushed it the rest of the way, he thought, There was one place I didn't look.
"Took you long enough," Peter said, turning back from the view over the city. Although it was only mid-afternoon, he had a beer in one hand. He was casually dressed in jeans and one of the open-necked polo shirts that he'd long ago figured out drove Neal wild.
"Excuse me?" Neal said, and made an elaborate show of checking the watch he wasn't wearing. "It took you how long to catch me the first time? Oh, right -- three years." He got a wine glass and a bottle from the rack by sheer habit, but mostly he was looking at Peter. Peter's skin was tinted gold in the light of the slanting sun, and he wore a soft, playful smile. "I can't help thinking," Neal said as he poured a glass of wine, "that you're not very good at this fugitive thing. At least I had the sense not to turn up at your house."
"True," Peter conceded. He moved closer, so close that he was right in Neal's space, though not quite touching him. "I guess I'd better stick to what I'm good at." He leaned even closer, and his breath brushed across Neal's cheek. "Which is catching you, by the way."
"You didn't actually have to explain it." Neal set down his wine glass so that he didn't spill it, and then, when Peter tried to snug an arm around his waist, he gracefully slipped out of it.
"Hey," Peter said. He was still smiling, but it had gone a bit fixed and there was a shadow of hurt in his eyes.
"If you're going to brag about catching me," Neal said, "I expect you to prove it."
"Oh. Oh." Peter set down his beer. Neal tensed.
The chase that ensued was very brief and ended with Peter flattening Neal to the bed, lightly caging Neal's wrists with one hand. Neal could have broken his grasp without even trying, but he didn't try.
"Got you," Peter murmured against Neal's lips.
"Yeah," Neal whispered back, and between kisses managed to say, "You do."
~
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