Marking Time (White Collar/Doctor Who) PG
TINE LORDS. MASTERS OF FLATWARE. SONIC SPOONS
I have been writing this story since August 2010 and it's made me a little nuts. Enjoy.
Marking Time
A White Collar/Doctor Who crossover
by mhalachaiswords
At AO3| Dreamwidth
Summary: These are the things Peter Burke knows about Neal Caffrey's beginnings. None of these things are true.
Rating: PG for slight swearing
Setting: Around current times for White Collar (post 3.10); earlyish in season 5 for Doctor Who. References both old-school Who and Daleks in Manhattan from Ten's day.
Characters: Gen. Neal Caffrey, Peter Burke, the rest of the White Collar team. References to Doctor Who characters, Old and New. A cameo appearance by the Eleventh Doctor.
Words: 7,450
Notes: All characters are canon (no, really). Situations and speculation is mine alone. More notes at the end.
To the best of Peter Burke's knowledge, the man known as Neal Caffrey was born on Oct. 21, 1978, in Chicago. His mother died when Neal was a child, and the boy bounced around from house to house until he was old enough to start picking pockets down at the track. His father... well, there's a story about a dirty cop that Peter pretends he believes.
These are the things Peter Burke knows about Neal Caffrey's beginnings.
(None of these things are true.)
Neal hates estate fraud; hates watching families grieving and finding themselves ripped off; hates listening to the justification of thwarted greed and familial abandonment.
Most of all, he hates being asked what would you do if it was your mother/father/grandfather? because if he told the truth not a single one of these people could understand.
But it isn't mortgage fraud so at least the day isn't a total loss.
Diana's interviewing the grieving (defrauded) couple. Peter's holed up in his office and Neal takes the momentary lull in the storm to flip through his notes from an old case, wondering if humans know how often they keep repeating (will repeat) the same prophesied steps before they can finally break free of a million years of evolution.
Probably another million more. Neal hopes he won't be there to see it.
The family is leaving and Peter stands framed in the door of his office, and Neal puts old thoughts back on the shelf. Time to go play cops and robbers.
(Everything White Collar touches is soaked in greed and someday he wonders how a man like Peter can spend his life surrounded by such avarice.)
Estate fraud turns into mortgage fraud turns into jewelry theft and Neal slips through the middle of it all, touching all the surfaces but never standing still.
He drifts around Peter (solid and unmoving in his certainty), until the week is over and Peter goes home to Elizabeth and Neal goes home to silence.
His room is cold, set apart from the time swirling the streets and alleys like dust. Sometimes Neal can live a year in one night in this room, and no one seems to notice.
There are many things he can do, many possibilities open to him paint drink stare wait wait always wait so he does nothing, stands in the middle of the room and closes his eyes and waits for dawn.
(He hasn't seen Mozzie in months and wonders why he can never let his people go).
On the day a case takes them to the Empire State Building, Neal falls apart.
Put another way, Neal falls apart because a case takes them to the Empire State Building.
Rather, the Empire State Building pulls Neal apart.
(None of these things are true.)
Someone is robbing tenants of the building and the FBI worries that the banks will be next. And when rich people in New York worry about their money, Peter Burke rides to the rescue with his pet felon at his heel.
"What's the matter with you?" Peter asks as they ride the elevator to the basement, the most likely place in the building that crooks could hide.
"There's nothing wrong with me," Neal lies. He feels quite calm lying to Peter about this, because it's not about the case and it's not about the crime and it's not even really about Neal. It just is.
And it's not like Peter will believe him anyway.
"You're acting twitchy."
Neal takes his eyes off the elevator door to look at Peter. The man is solid and still, time eddying around him. "I do not twitch."
He waits for Peter to pick up the thread, run down a list of Neal's tells. Only Peter doesn't do that.
"Is this about... you know?"
Neal exhales slowly, his left heart speeding up at Peter's words. He hates it when his hearts beat at different speeds, it makes him light-headed. "This isn't about anyone," he says, then hurries on before Peter can start his all-American cowboy-up pitch. "I'm just having an off day."
"An off day," Peter repeats, and the echo chamber in Neal's head picks up off day in Peter's voice and flings it back at him, run away run away run away! in his mother's voice as she dragged him out of his life, out of his world, out of all time and flung him back alone into the distant past.
Instead of telling Peter more things he will not believe, Neal presses his hand to his forehead and waits for the elevator doors to open, giving Neal the only escape he can take.
Only Peter Burke isn't having any of it.
Two steps down the hall, and Peter's hand is on Neal's arm and the physical contact is a shock, spinning Neal around and ready for a fight. "I need you on your game today," Peter says.
It's not a question and so Neal doesn't have to lie. "I'm always on my game," he tosses back with a con man's grin, all flash and no substance. "We don't want to keep New York's finest waiting, do we?"
He turns on his heel, spinning in a brush of air colder than normal for a New York basement. The corridor feels... off, but Neal can chalk that up to the waves of Peter's confusion.
After a moment, Peter follows him.
They find the police officers and the security guards near an old access tunnel, bricks and mortar dripping with hundred-year-old dust. The cops and Peter do the back-and-forth of law enforcement chest pounding, and all Neal wants is some air not saturated with dust and decay.
When the pissing contest ceases, Peter claims top-dog status and reels Neal in, hands him a flashlight and sends him first into the tunnel.
"Why are you sending me in as bait?" Neal protests, his stomach churning in unanticipated apprehension. Something isn't right, something he should know. Something he's seen felt before. "Is this about your parking space?"
"There's no one in here, security already ran a check," Peter tells him, shining his flashlight over the walls. "And this is not about my parking spot. I'm over that."
"Really?" Neal presses, pushing Peter in the wrong mental direction. "That's mighty big of you."
"It's called being a grown-up," Peter says. "You might want to try it sometime, Christopher Robin."
Neal is about to respond, about to drag the centuries-old children's characters out of his memory, but he steps into an open space in the basement and the part of him that will always be the child of a Time Lady explodes with panic and pain and the echoes of destruction.
Of extermination.
He can't see it, of course, the danger and destruction nearly a hundred years in the past. But the walls and the floor and the high ceiling are soaked with the blood of the innocent, with the desperation of a dying race.
Ghosts in the chamber herald the righteousness of the Daleks, just as the screams of annihilation did (will do) a hundred years from now, to echo across the Earth's bloodied sky.
Sharp hands grip Neal's arms, and for a moment Neal blinks and sees his father. But no, David Campbell is long dead and won't be born for another hundred years, and it's Peter Burke who give Neal a hard shake. "Neal, what's going on?"
The marble is cold at Neal's back and when he tries to pull away, he slams his head into the wall. The pain is instantaneous and even better than the pain is the sudden clarity.
There are no Daleks in New York. Only ghosts.
"Neal!"
Neal blinks and focuses on Peter's face. Peter is here. Peter is real. Sometimes, Neal thinks Peter is the only real thing in his universe. "What?"
"What's going on?" Peter repeats, letting go of Neal's arms. Neal blinks again and expands his range of focus to the entire corridor. The cops and security guards alike look at him with a range of confusion and boredom. Nothing new, move it along.
Neal pulls his attention back to Peter. Probably the only thing worse than lying to Peter right now would be telling Peter the truth. So Neal takes the only route available to him. "Claustrophobia. From the tunnel."
Peter mouths the word back at him, but by that point Neal pushes off the wall and squares himself, more for the benefit of the watching cops than for Peter.
"Sorry about that, guys," Neal says with a shaky grin, wrapping himself in the skin of Neal Caffrey, reformed con man and FBI confidential informant extraordinaire.
The cop nearest Neal shrugs, brushing away the incident. "You want to actually get back to work?"
"Nah, I was thinking of flailing around some more," Neal shoots back, turning his grin into flirting, and while the cop sorts his way through that one, Neal steps directly into the ghosts of history.
It's nearly imperceptible, but Neal can see the threads of Dalek design in the walls, curling up and through the building and he'll never be able to look at the Empire State Building the same way again.
When he will be a child in twenty-second century London, he will see remains of Dalek technology in the buildings and the mines, and his mother will tell him stories of the Dalek Invasion of Earth, and he will fall asleep dreaming of Daleks and Slythers and the end of the universe.
And because he will spend his childhood climbing in the abandoned Dalek laboratories, he knows the strengths and weaknesses of Dalek design and how humans can convert such architecture to their benefit.
"Here."
"What here?" Peter asks, shining his flashlight up at the ceiling.
"Prime point of entry and egress." Neal touches the crumbling tiles, feeling the bile rise in his throat. Is this how his mother felt (will feel) every time she walked (will walk) through the ruins of London? He takes a shallow breath and keeps going. "You'd have to be motivated to get through an access shaft that small, but considering that we're in the corner of the building right under the Bank of America vault, I'd say motivation won't be the limiting factor."
The cop swears under his breath, somehow making a puff of air sound impressed. Peter's already on the phone to Jones, and Neal takes that as permission to back his way out of the room and through the tunnel and sits down by the elevator door and waits for Peter to be done with this whole mess.
More cops and feds pour into the bowels of the building, funneling past Neal, and none of them give Neal much of a look. Diana wanders past in her FBI jacket and raises her eyebrows, but Neal just sits in the dust of history and stares up at her. She touches his hair and walks away, and Neal isn't sure who's more surprised by the gesture.
Neal's mother will touch his hair like that, one day, when he is a child.
Neal tries to push away memories of Daleks and childhood and failure, instead focusing on planning a bank robbery of his own. If he had that secret (Dalek-built) access shaft, if he had the time and the quiet of the (Dalek-built) basement, could he do it?
Of course he could, there isn't anything in the world that Neal Caffrey can't steal.
But he wouldn't. Neal hates robbing banks. Too much security, too much that can go wrong, you always need a team you can never fully trust. Neal prefers to work on his own or in a pair. He'd done it with Kate and with Mozzie and now he does it with Peter, and that's enough of a mind-twist to bring Neal up short.
The idea of Peter Burke as criminal mastermind keeps Neal occupied for the rest of the afternoon, until Peter stomps his way out of the tunnel and hauls Neal to his feet. "Come on," Peter says, pushing and pulling at Neal until they are both in the elevator and heading back towards the surface. "It's quitting time."
"I thought the FBI never quits," Neal retorts. Now that they are moving away from the ghosts of the Daleks in the basement, he's finally able to breathe in and not taste death.
"Which is why Diana's staying. We found evidence in the basement that indicates that service tunnel was previously used to access the bank vault."
Neal swings around to look at Peter. "Really?"
Peter stands tall, hands in his pockets. "You look surprised."
"You were never this relaxed when you were chasing me."
The elevator disgorges them into the lobby, and Peter saunters out onto the marble, Neal in his wake. "And if I'd been alive when this robbery happened, I might have higher hopes at catching the perpetrator before he struck again."
"You discovered a bank robbery from the forties?" Neal asks, aware he should be more interested.
"I'm not that old," Peter protests, and they're in the car and pulling out into rush hour.
"Really? Because that tie says otherwise."
Neal normally doesn't push Peter about ages, because one day Peter is going to realize that Neal's back-story doesn't make any sense for a man born in 1978, but this mean he doesn't have to talk about Daleks in New York and that's enough.
"There's nothing wrong with this tie," Peter says. "I like it."
"Did you lose a bet?"
Peter grinds his teeth and doesn't take his eyes off the cars ahead of him. "It was my father's tie."
At which Neal closes his mouth and turns to look out the passenger window. He doesn't have anything of David Campbell except memories. Even when he looks in the mirror, all he sees are reflections of his mother.
The silence hangs, oppressive, until Peter says, "If we're going strictly by wardrobe, I should be asking if you robbed that bank."
"I'll check my daytimer," Neal responds automatically.
The car stops at a light and Neal watches New York swirl past them. How was it possible that Daleks had been in New York, and yet the city is so alive? When Daleks had (would) bring the Earth to its knees and leave near complete destruction in their wake?
As he stares out the window, the threads of the conversation (time, time, it's always about time) smooth out in Neal's mind and he frowns. "Wait, how do you know when the robbery was?"
"That's what Jones was working on all day. There was a robbery in that bank in 1963. Over a million dollars in non-sequential bills just vanished from the vault. No one had any idea how the money could have walked away like that."
"Until today," Neal finishes for Peter. "I have to say, I'm impressed."
"I thought you might be." Peter gives Neal a sideways glance. "I was a little surprised you weren't right there with us, taking notes."
He's goading Neal, but Neal's head is full of ghosts and he doesn't care. "I was on elevator duty. Someone had to make sure people knew where to go."
"Just like you knew where the tunnel entrance was?"
Peter's shot in the dark slams home. Neal runs his tongue over his lower lip and thinks about all the ways he can lie his way out of this one. "It was the only logical spot for a tunnel into one of the banks," he says, a truth offering of sorts.
Peter doesn't say a word, just breathes through his nose and turns the car towards June's house. It's the kind of silence that puts Neal's back up, the silence that falls between them when Peter thinks Neal's hiding something.
As usual, Peter is right.
"Okay, fine, you got me," Neal says at last. "I robbed the bank twenty years before I was born. Then I cleverly joined in the investigation in order to divert suspicion from myself. Brilliant, really."
It isn't until after the words are out of his mouth that he realizes how close to the edge things still are, months later, and the sudden cold silence from the other side of the car tells Neal that Peter still isn't over Keller.
Elizabeth is fine, Neal tells himself through the familiar ache of remembered terror. She's fine and Peter's fine and everything is fine.
Peter stops the car outside June's house and Neal gets out, mind torn between memories of Dalek tunnels and Keller's face as he held a gun to Elizabeth's head. He doesn't know how to pull back on his words and in the end he doesn't even try, just closes the car door and turns around and walks up the steps to his own opulent prison.
Peter waits until Neal is halfway to the door before peeling out into the New York twilight. With him goes the last lingering stabilizing point of the day, and all Neal can think about is Daleks in New York.
"Hey Neal!" calls a young voice. June's granddaughter Samantha runs down the hallway in a blaze of color, her sweater all the shades of the rainbow, pulling Neal along in her wake. "I made a painting, want to see?"
"Of course I do," Neal tells her. He drifts into the living room, where June and Samantha's mother Theresa are looking over some books. Sam ignores them both as she picks up a large piece of paper and carries it proudly over to Neal.
The paper is thick with paint, layer on layer of color pushing out at Neal through the dim light. It's deep and harsh and real, and for a moment Neal can't breath through the sensory overload.
"Do you like it?" Sam asks anxiously.
Neal closes his eyes for a moment, forces away the mental chaos, of Daleks and Keller and his long-lost mother. "It's amazing," he says, sitting on the loveseat and laying the picture down on the table. "Tell me about it."
"It's complementary colors," Sam says, all bright smiles and toothy innocence. "Cindy had a book about color and stuff and I got to play with her paints yesterday and so I made an abstract." She bites off the end of the final 't'.
Neal traces the hidden pencil outline, coated red by a child's paintbrush. "You did a great job." All his eyes can see are the spirals under the paint, curling up and away into the darkness at the top of the page.
Mollified, Sam lets her mother bundle her up and herd her towards the door, only to return with hugs for grandma and because she forgot her painting and finally for a secret artist's high-five from Neal.
He hands Sam a purple origami orchid that he will fold once he goes upstairs, and finally the child runs out into the night, into a city free of the Dalek's mindless hate.
In the silence, June looks at Neal until Neal drifts up the stairs to his apartment, hat in hand and the day closing hard upon him like prison bars.
His apartment is cold and silent, a room apart from the rest of New York. Tonight he can find no respite, for now he knows this is a city contaminated by the Daleks, like the London of his very own distant future.
The room stays dark as Neal strips off his jacket, his vest, his shirt. Clad only in undershirt and trousers, he moves one bookcase away from the wall before picking up his charcoals.
Tonight, he cannot stop himself.
Tonight, he draws the harsh lines of an abandoned Dalek laboratory onto the wall, sharp instruments and screaming psychic echoes dark on the blank white surface. He draws until the walls are covered, until he is surrounded by the nightmares from a future Neal isn't sure will happen.
Only then does he lay down and close his eyes.
When at last he sleeps, he dreams of Slythers.
Stories other children's parents tell them to keep them from the forests, but Neal's mother doesn't lie to him and she too puts stories of Slythers into his head, creeping black darkness, grasping tentacles and muffled screams and approaching death. Neal is in the forest by the old mine shafts and he's running, running, because he knows his mother is there.
The Slythers know too.
He sees her, hidden by darkness in the trees and he reaches for her but he trips over blackness and it has him, pulling him into the flooded mines, into drowning, and all he can hear is his mother's screaming.
When he wakes, the world is stark in shades of early-morning grey as the sun returns to shine on New York.
The office is full of FBI agents working on the decades-old bank robbery, with consultants flown in from Quantico and San Diego and in spite of Peter's protestations, Neal is barred from working on the case. Any other day, Neal would care, would poke and prod and pester until he sat in his rightful place at the White Collar task force, but this just isn't any day.
This is the day after Neal learned that Daleks once spread their annihilation in New York. This was not a normal day at all.
He sits at his desk, drawing thin ink spirals on page after page, black ink on white paper. Eventually the days will end, and White Collar will move on from the bank vault heist and go back to their normal fare of fraud and tedium.
Neal lays down his pen and puts his hand over his face. His mother's screams have been echoing in his head since he woke in the early hours, and he's tired.
But it's not like he has anywhere else to be, so eventually he drags himself to his feet and goes for the coffee machine.
Only to stutter to a stop when Elizabeth Burke steps directly into his path.
(She's out of the cast and the scars are fading and she's the only spot of color in the room and seeing her makes Neal's chest burn like drowning.)
He wants to run away, but she's right in front of him and when she reaches out to touch his arm, he steps back into a chair. He barely moves, but the light in Elizabeth's eyes falters, and her hand drops away.
"Peter's in a meeting," Neal says quickly, before she can ask him anything. "But he should be out soon."
The way Elizabeth looks at him, like she knows what he's thinking, makes Neal's head ache. "I'm a few minutes early, we're going for lunch," she tells him.
"Good," Neal responds automatically, all the while wanting to run away from Elizabeth. Because that's what Neal Caffrey does: run away. "I'll leave you to it, then."
"Neal," Elizabeth says, and this time she steps into his personal space and puts her hand on his arm and he can't pull away. "Come to lunch with us."
Part of him wants to take Elizabeth up on her offer, but the side of Neal Caffrey that spent all night tangled in Dalek dreams can't stand to be in her presence any longer. Carefully, Neal extracts his arm from Elizabeth's grasp and backs away. "I can't."
"Neal..."
"I can't," he says again, so quiet this time that she can't hear him, and stumbles back and out of the office.
The elevator ride to the lobby echoes loud in his head; lights buzzing and cables twanging. When the doors finally open and disgorge him into the lobby of the Federal Building, Neal fights down the urge to run, and instead makes his way slowly and carefully to the exit door, across the plaza, coming to a stop outside the cafe across the street. This is as far as his electronic tether goes when he's not with Peter. He will not run, he tells himself sternly as he threads his way around a gaggle of agents from Counterterrorism. There's no need to run. They got Elizabeth back and she's fine and Peter's fine and everything is fine.
He orders an oversized iced coffee, flirting reflexively with the counter staff as he waits. There's a couple of feds from Organized Crime waiting behind Neil, and he can feel the weight of their stares on the back of his neck.
Normally, Neal could do end-runs around the Organized Crime boys, but today he just doesn't care. Let them stare. It's not like they could possibly have anything on him.
Sometimes, it worries him how practical his approach to law enforcement officers has become.
He takes his iced coffee and wanders out onto the sidewalk, idly aware that he's killing time before heading back up to the office (not that he has anything to do there today - he's not allowed to work the bank robbery and everything else is dull and grey, now that he knows there were Daleks in New York). So he drops down onto a bench outside the cafe and sips his iced coffee and lets city life pass him by.
That's when he sees his great-grandfather's TARDIS.
The world rips itself apart and sews itself back together as Neal stares at the big blue police box, time speeding up and slowing down as the TARDIS takes up space on a New York sidewalk. It's nearly the same as the last time Neal saw (will see) it, over two hundred years from now in London, when his mother's grandfather stumbled into their lives before the skies opened up and stole his mother out of all existence. Back when Neal was Alexander Campbell, son of Susan Foreman and David Campbell, and life was so terribly uncomplicated.
Before Neal can draw breath, two people run up to the TARDIS -- a beautiful red-headed woman, then a brunette man. Neither of them are Neal's great-grandfather, but his mother told him that sometimes the Time Lord known as the Doctor would travel about with people in his TARDIS. She'd told him that once, long before Neal had even been born, she had been the one to travel about with the Doctor through time and space.
Then a third man runs up to the TARDIS, crashing against the wood as he tries to open the door. The man flails around, all wild brown hair and suspenders and bow tie, and even though Neil has never seen that face before, he knows him.
This man is the Doctor.
The Doctor is a Time Lord.
The Doctor is the only Time Lord.
Numbly, Neal raises his hand, to call out or start screaming or something, when the last of the Time Lords lifts his head, scans the crowd, and ends up looking directly at Neal.
Then he turns away into the TARDIS and closes the door behind him.
The man does not know Neal. He doesn't know Neal because there are no more Time Lords and Neal won't be born for another hundred years, if he's even born at all. He's an impossible thing in a universe of impossibilities, and because of this, Neal is left sitting on the bench, alone.
He lowers his hand.
There are no more Time Lords. He knows this in a way he never has before, has finally identified the giant gaping hole in the universe where Time Lords should have been. The Time Lords are gone.
His mother is gone.
Another heartbeat, and Neal bolts to his feet and runs at the TARDIS, caught in the ebb and flow of time currents around the blue box. He reaches out and touches the blue-painted wood on the door, just as the TARDIS starts to dematerialize. He tries the door, slaps against the unresponsive surface, but a blast of wind pushes Neal back and the TARDIS vanishes.
Neal stumbles back. He nearly had it, was so close to his great-grandfather, to knowing what had happened to his mother. But his great-grandfather is gone, just like his mother, just like everything Neal has ever known.
All of a sudden, Neal just feels so old. He wonders if he'll see the last Time Lord again, how the man can be alive when everyone else is gone, and Neal is all alone.
Hours later, Peter finds Neal in the park on the far side of the Federal Plaza, staring at the fading autumnal leaves clinging to the trees. "What the hell have you been doing?" Peter begins, but then he sees Neal's face and all the bluster fades into concern. "What's wrong?"
Neal goes back to looking at the trees. He wonders how they can survive in the city, surrounded by all the noise and light and pollution. "My mother's dead," he says, and as he hears the words out loud, it's like it finally becomes real.
Peter sits beside him on the stone wall. "Your mother has been dead for a long time," he reminds Neal.
Neal shrugs. Right now, he can't remember what lies he's told Peter, so he lays the truth out before him. "That doesn't make it any easier, some days."
Peter looks at Neal like he understands, which he doesn't, because Peter's mother is alive and well and safely ensconced in Syracuse. Peter doesn't know what it's like to realize that your mother is never coming home and that means you're all alone.
Neal drops his head into his hands and tries to breathe around the isolation crushing down on him. Alone in the universe. Just him and his not-dead great-grandfather of a Time Lord.
After a few minutes, Peter clears his throat. "You okay to go back upstairs?" he asks awkwardly.
"Yeah," Neal mutters.
"Good." Peter stands expectantly.
Neal takes another breath, then levers himself into a standing position under his own power. He straightens his tie and suit jacket, trying to pull all the pieces of Neal Caffrey back together again.
"Elizabeth says she invited you for lunch," Peter blurts out suddenly. He's got his hands shoved into his trench coat pockets, looking directly at Neal's face. "She's worried about you."
Neal freezes, the utterly impossibly concept of Elizabeth Burke being worried about him catching him in the throat until he can't breathe. When the air finally does come rushing back, the shock of oxygen wraps around his hearts and what might have been a sob bursts out as a strangled laugh. "She's worried about me?"
It's too much. His mother is dead and Elizabeth is worried about him; there were Daleks in New York and his great-grandfather is alive.
He walks away from Peter before he can fall into tinier pieces.
But because this is Peter Fucking Burke, the man catches Neal in ten steps, takes his arm and hauls him bodily in the direction of the Fed building.
Peter tosses Neal into his office, closes the door and goes off to yell at various agents for a while. When he finally returns, Neal is sitting in Peter's chair, staring out the window at the city.
His mother is dead and Elizabeth is worried about him; there were Daleks in New York and his great-grandfather is gone.
"Out," Peter demands. Neal stands without a fight, going to lean against the window to watch the street below.
"Yelling at the team? That's an interesting motivational technique you have there, Agent Burke," Neal says. He's had enough time to pull himself back into the skin of Neal Caffrey, debonair con man and art thief (alleged) extraordinaire. This is how the game with him and Peter goes, nothing can change that.
Peter drops into his chair with a bit too much force. "If they don't want to get yelled at, then they shouldn't be moving my investigation backwards," he snaps.
In spite of the disaster that is his life, Neal can't hide his smile. "I could crack the case in under a day."
Peter swings around. "If we don't make any progress in the case by tomorrow, then you'll get to test that theory." He takes a sip from his mug and makes a face. "Why can't anyone from DC make a decent cup of coffee?"
"The FBI isn't renowned for its barista training program," Neal reminds Peter.
"Maybe I'll start looking for that in the interns." Peter puts his coffee cup onto the desk, a deliberate gesture that fills Neal with dread. "We need to talk about Elizabeth."
Neal turns back to the window. "She's fine."
Peter makes an exasperated noise in the back of his throat. "She's fine, but you're sure as hell not."
"I'm perfectly..." Neal searches for another word, because he's so sick of the word fine that he wants to punch it in the face. "Acceptable."
"It's been two months and you still won't talk about it."
"There's nothing to talk about."
A long silence fills the office. Neal uses the respite to breathe on the glass and trace an intricate 'AC' before the moisture dissipates. Then Peter draws breath, and Neal girds for battle. "You shot Keller."
"Someone had to. He was going to kill Elizabeth."
Only it hadn't been that easy. The memory crashes over Neal, takes his breath away and pushes him into the past, with Elizabeth bleeding and broken on the ground and Keller with no other way out, Keller lifting a gun to finish what he'd started. What Mozzie started. What Vincent Adler started, so very long ago.
Neal takes a deep breath, the memory of that night so vivid that he half-expects his lungs to fill with icy water. But it's day time, and he's in the FBI building, and Matthew Keller is dead.
"You shot Keller after he tried to drown you."
Keller's hands on Neal's back, forcing him off the dock beside the riverfront warehouse where he kept Elizabeth. Keller's hands on Neal's shoulders, pushing him underwater until Neal stopped struggling.
"There wasn't any other option, Peter."
Barely pulling himself out of the river, choking up water out of his oh-so-human lungs, stumbling up the ramp and into the building in time to see Elizabeth bleeding and broken on the ground and Keller with no other way out, Keller lifting a gun to finish what he'd started.
Neal had done the only thing left to do. He'd tackled Keller to the ground, taken the man's gun, and shot him.
The shot had been the loudest thing in the universe.
"I know that, Neal." Peter stands and joins Neal by the window. "You did what you had to do."
The shot had been the loudest thing in the universe, and then Elizabeth was sitting up and Neal could see the broken bones in her arm poking through the skin, and he'd very nearly shot Keller's body again.
Neal hadn't been around when Elizabeth gave her statement to the cops, but whatever she said hadn't landed him back in jail on a murder charge, so that had been enough for one day.
"What's she worried about?"
Peter edges into Neal's line of sight. "She's worried because you haven't spoken to her since the ambulance ride."
They rode in the ambulance together, Neal holding Elizabeth's uninjured hand while the paramedics tried to stabilize her blood pressure. She was fading in and out of consciousness and didn't hear Neal whispering wake up, please wake up, over and over until they got to the hospital. Then Peter was there and that was that.
Neil twitches his shoulders back, keeping his hands in his pockets. He's ruining the lines of his suit and he really can't bring himself to care. "What exactly am I supposed to say to her, Peter? I'm sorry you got kidnapped and almost killed?"
"That would be a start," Peter snaps, anger starting to show through his concern. "When are you going to realize that you can't just flit around like Peter Pan, doing things without any repercussions?"
Neal looks at Peter out of the corner of his eye, sees the frustration and worry, and wonders exactly when it was that Neal Caffrey started caring about what Peter Burke thought. "Does that make you Captain Hook?"
"Neal..." Peter says warningly, but Neal steps away and around the desk, putting as much space between them as possible.
"Are we done here?"
Peter's face crumples in that special way it does when he's thinking of throwing Neal back in prison. "Be back here, tomorrow morning, seven o'clock."
It's an hour earlier than normal, but Neal can't bring himself to care. He crosses the office floor, grabbing his hat on the way out and ducking into an elevator before Peter can change his mind.
Elizabeth is worried about him. There were Daleks in New York. His mother is dead. His great-grandfather is gone.
Apologies can't change a damn thing.
June is out when he gets home. Neal makes a mental note to ask her about the bank robbery. Byron wasn't much for that sort of crime, but he may have heard things back in the day, and if anyone can help Neal solve the case in modern-day Manhattan, it's probably June.
The stairs seem miles long, as Neal trudges up to his apartment. The walls are still covered in angry black lines, the books lay scattered on the floor. At some point in the night, the ornate sand-glass fell to the ground, the sands of time spilling out onto the floor.
Neal hangs his hat on the edge of the easel, not bothering to turn on any of the lights in the room. He know where everything is, all the pieces of his fragmented life. Memories flit around the room, of the people who've walked out of his life.
Neal hasn't seen Mozzie in months, not since Keller died. He doesn't know what he'd say to Mozzie if he sees him again, either. Things have changed between then. As Mozzie said, Neal made his choice to stay in New York. He's not going to regret that decision now, even if he's traded in one prison for another.
A memory of his mother tugs at Neal's mind, stirring up like dust along the floorboards, about choices, about running away, impossible prisons and the tricks of good wizards.
Some day, Neal will find his great-grandfather, the last Time Lord known as the Doctor, and ask him what happened to the Time Lady known as Susan Campbell. This time, when the Time Lord will ask Neal to go away with him in his time machine, Neal will say yes.
Some day.
But on this day, Neal unrolls a sheet of parchment out onto the only bare space on the table. He reaches for a bottle of ink, and lets the memories of his mother's fairy tales flow out onto the page.
The sun is still far below the horizon on this foggy New York morning, but the Burke household is up and about. Neal stands on the sidewalk, watching indistinct shadows move behind the drawn curtains. He doesn't want to be here, but he can't think of where else he should be.
Tipping his hat over one eye and holding tight to the roll of parchment in his hand, Neal quickly climbs the stairs and rings the bell before he loses what little nerve he has left.
A change in the movement behind closed doors, and Neal is willing to bet Peter's about to answer the door with his sidearm. The door swings open, and true to form, Peter's braced for anything.
When he sees Neal, Peter's shoulders relax. "Neal, it's six-thirty in the morning," he scolds.
"You're up," Neal retorts.
"Why are you here?" Peter demands. He looks over Neal's shoulder at the street, as if the emptiness may hold some answers.
This is it, Neal tells himself. "Can I come in?"
Peter blinks. "Why?"
"Because..." Only Neal doesn't have a good answer to that. So he gives the only reason he can. "I need to say something to Elizabeth."
Peter keeps looking at him. "And you need to say this at six-thirty in the morning?"
"Let him in, Peter," comes Elizabeth's voice from the living room.
There's no getting out of this one. Neal squares his shoulders and slips past Peter. Elizabeth sits on the couch with a cup of coffee, Satchmo curled up at her feet. It's the very picture of domesticity, marred only by the long surgical scar on Elizabeth's forearm.
Neal's carefully planned speech deserts him. He stands there, uncertain, until Peter bumps his shoulder on the way past. "Start talking, Caffrey," Peter says darkly.
Glancing down at the parchment in his hands, Neal draws a deep breath. "Elizabeth, I... I'm sorry. About what happened, with Keller and Mozzie and... all of it."
She's staring at Neal, her eyes dark and wide, and Neal can't tell what she's thinking.
He tries again. "I know that's not a reason or an excuse, but it's the truth. And I wanted to you know that."
Silence falls in the room for a long moment. Then Elizabeth holds out her hand.
"Come over here," she says. She pats the sofa cushion beside her. "Sit down."
Peter stirs, but doesn't speak as Neal sits on the edge of the couch.
Elizabeth touches the back of Neal's hand, an echo of the way he held her hand in the ambulance ride all those months before. "I'm glad you came by," she says, smiling just a little.
Things weren't better, or fixed, but it's a start.
"What's this?" she asks, indicating the parchment in Neal's hands.
Neal traces the edge of the roll with his thumb. "This is for you."
Elizabeth raises her eyebrows, taking the parchment from Neal and unrolling it. When she sees the ink sketched on the page, she lets out her breath in a sigh. "Neal, this is..."
Peter helps her unroll the sheet on the coffee table, revealing the dark ink blocked out in rotating spirals. If one were to watch closely, one can almost see the inner spirals of the locking device moving.
"Neal, it's gorgeous," Elizabeth says, tracing over the intricate lines. "What is it?"
An apology, Neal thinks. A story. An impossibility.
Instead of saying these things, Neal leans forward and touches the centre of the circles with one finger. "This... is a fairy tale," he begins, voice soft as he gives voice to his mother's words after all these years. "Once upon a time, there was a warrior who would drop down out of the sky and tear worlds apart. Until one day, a good wizard caught the warrior, tricked him, and locked him up for all eternity in a prison called the Pandorica."
Neal traces along the curves of the locks, remembering his mother's face when she told him the story of the Pandorica, filling his mind with images of the impossible prison, of the trickster wizard, of battles long past.
"What happens next?" Elizabeth asks, her voice soft to match Neal's. "Did the warrior ever escape the prison?"
Neal stares at the drawing for a while. "Maybe. Maybe the warrior redeemed himself one day."
"Every story can stand a bit of redemption," Elizabeth says, taking his hand in hers again. "Even this one."
Neal's eyes blur, for just a moment, and he has to blink hard to force down unexpected tears. He squeezes Elizabeth's hand as a thank you he's not sure he really understands.
Let me tell you a story, his mother used to say into his mind, her thoughts becoming his thoughts, long before he knew what proper words were. He remembers her fingers smoothing back his hair, smiling down at him in his cradle. We're all only stories, in the end.
Across the room, Peter stands. "Come on, Neal. We gotta go."
Reluctantly, Neal lets go of Elizabeth's hand and stands as well. He gives the drawing of the Pandorica one last glance, sees the outer circle twisting just a fraction of an inch on the parchment, and sees a wave of yet-to-be slip through his mind.
Neal Caffrey and Peter Burke will go out into the day, into a New York that holds the ghosts of Daleks and of the last Time Lord. Alone and surrounded by millions of people, each with their own story, not knowing what will happen next.
Stories like that... well, they never really end.
(This much is true.)
-fin
Author's Notes: See, the thing about this story is that it would have been so much easier to write before the whole stolen Nazi treasure thing because really - how can that possibly be sorted out? So I sort of improvised; let me know what you think.
In any event: All of these characters and places are canon. Susan Foreman is the First Doctor's granddaughter, and she traveled with him in Season 1. She met David Campbell in 22nd Century London (and the Doctor subsequently locked her out of the TARDIS). Even Alexander Campbell, great-grandson of the Doctor, is canon (if one includes Big Finnish Audio, which I am for the purposes of this exercise.) When I figured that out, I couldn't resist.
I have been writing this story since August 2010 and it's made me a little nuts. Enjoy.
Marking Time
A White Collar/Doctor Who crossover
by mhalachaiswords
At AO3| Dreamwidth
Summary: These are the things Peter Burke knows about Neal Caffrey's beginnings. None of these things are true.
Rating: PG for slight swearing
Setting: Around current times for White Collar (post 3.10); earlyish in season 5 for Doctor Who. References both old-school Who and Daleks in Manhattan from Ten's day.
Characters: Gen. Neal Caffrey, Peter Burke, the rest of the White Collar team. References to Doctor Who characters, Old and New. A cameo appearance by the Eleventh Doctor.
Words: 7,450
Notes: All characters are canon (no, really). Situations and speculation is mine alone. More notes at the end.
To the best of Peter Burke's knowledge, the man known as Neal Caffrey was born on Oct. 21, 1978, in Chicago. His mother died when Neal was a child, and the boy bounced around from house to house until he was old enough to start picking pockets down at the track. His father... well, there's a story about a dirty cop that Peter pretends he believes.
These are the things Peter Burke knows about Neal Caffrey's beginnings.
(None of these things are true.)
Neal hates estate fraud; hates watching families grieving and finding themselves ripped off; hates listening to the justification of thwarted greed and familial abandonment.
Most of all, he hates being asked what would you do if it was your mother/father/grandfather? because if he told the truth not a single one of these people could understand.
But it isn't mortgage fraud so at least the day isn't a total loss.
Diana's interviewing the grieving (defrauded) couple. Peter's holed up in his office and Neal takes the momentary lull in the storm to flip through his notes from an old case, wondering if humans know how often they keep repeating (will repeat) the same prophesied steps before they can finally break free of a million years of evolution.
Probably another million more. Neal hopes he won't be there to see it.
The family is leaving and Peter stands framed in the door of his office, and Neal puts old thoughts back on the shelf. Time to go play cops and robbers.
(Everything White Collar touches is soaked in greed and someday he wonders how a man like Peter can spend his life surrounded by such avarice.)
Estate fraud turns into mortgage fraud turns into jewelry theft and Neal slips through the middle of it all, touching all the surfaces but never standing still.
He drifts around Peter (solid and unmoving in his certainty), until the week is over and Peter goes home to Elizabeth and Neal goes home to silence.
His room is cold, set apart from the time swirling the streets and alleys like dust. Sometimes Neal can live a year in one night in this room, and no one seems to notice.
There are many things he can do, many possibilities open to him paint drink stare wait wait always wait so he does nothing, stands in the middle of the room and closes his eyes and waits for dawn.
(He hasn't seen Mozzie in months and wonders why he can never let his people go).
On the day a case takes them to the Empire State Building, Neal falls apart.
Put another way, Neal falls apart because a case takes them to the Empire State Building.
Rather, the Empire State Building pulls Neal apart.
(None of these things are true.)
Someone is robbing tenants of the building and the FBI worries that the banks will be next. And when rich people in New York worry about their money, Peter Burke rides to the rescue with his pet felon at his heel.
"What's the matter with you?" Peter asks as they ride the elevator to the basement, the most likely place in the building that crooks could hide.
"There's nothing wrong with me," Neal lies. He feels quite calm lying to Peter about this, because it's not about the case and it's not about the crime and it's not even really about Neal. It just is.
And it's not like Peter will believe him anyway.
"You're acting twitchy."
Neal takes his eyes off the elevator door to look at Peter. The man is solid and still, time eddying around him. "I do not twitch."
He waits for Peter to pick up the thread, run down a list of Neal's tells. Only Peter doesn't do that.
"Is this about... you know?"
Neal exhales slowly, his left heart speeding up at Peter's words. He hates it when his hearts beat at different speeds, it makes him light-headed. "This isn't about anyone," he says, then hurries on before Peter can start his all-American cowboy-up pitch. "I'm just having an off day."
"An off day," Peter repeats, and the echo chamber in Neal's head picks up off day in Peter's voice and flings it back at him, run away run away run away! in his mother's voice as she dragged him out of his life, out of his world, out of all time and flung him back alone into the distant past.
Instead of telling Peter more things he will not believe, Neal presses his hand to his forehead and waits for the elevator doors to open, giving Neal the only escape he can take.
Only Peter Burke isn't having any of it.
Two steps down the hall, and Peter's hand is on Neal's arm and the physical contact is a shock, spinning Neal around and ready for a fight. "I need you on your game today," Peter says.
It's not a question and so Neal doesn't have to lie. "I'm always on my game," he tosses back with a con man's grin, all flash and no substance. "We don't want to keep New York's finest waiting, do we?"
He turns on his heel, spinning in a brush of air colder than normal for a New York basement. The corridor feels... off, but Neal can chalk that up to the waves of Peter's confusion.
After a moment, Peter follows him.
They find the police officers and the security guards near an old access tunnel, bricks and mortar dripping with hundred-year-old dust. The cops and Peter do the back-and-forth of law enforcement chest pounding, and all Neal wants is some air not saturated with dust and decay.
When the pissing contest ceases, Peter claims top-dog status and reels Neal in, hands him a flashlight and sends him first into the tunnel.
"Why are you sending me in as bait?" Neal protests, his stomach churning in unanticipated apprehension. Something isn't right, something he should know. Something he's seen felt before. "Is this about your parking space?"
"There's no one in here, security already ran a check," Peter tells him, shining his flashlight over the walls. "And this is not about my parking spot. I'm over that."
"Really?" Neal presses, pushing Peter in the wrong mental direction. "That's mighty big of you."
"It's called being a grown-up," Peter says. "You might want to try it sometime, Christopher Robin."
Neal is about to respond, about to drag the centuries-old children's characters out of his memory, but he steps into an open space in the basement and the part of him that will always be the child of a Time Lady explodes with panic and pain and the echoes of destruction.
Of extermination.
He can't see it, of course, the danger and destruction nearly a hundred years in the past. But the walls and the floor and the high ceiling are soaked with the blood of the innocent, with the desperation of a dying race.
Ghosts in the chamber herald the righteousness of the Daleks, just as the screams of annihilation did (will do) a hundred years from now, to echo across the Earth's bloodied sky.
Sharp hands grip Neal's arms, and for a moment Neal blinks and sees his father. But no, David Campbell is long dead and won't be born for another hundred years, and it's Peter Burke who give Neal a hard shake. "Neal, what's going on?"
The marble is cold at Neal's back and when he tries to pull away, he slams his head into the wall. The pain is instantaneous and even better than the pain is the sudden clarity.
There are no Daleks in New York. Only ghosts.
"Neal!"
Neal blinks and focuses on Peter's face. Peter is here. Peter is real. Sometimes, Neal thinks Peter is the only real thing in his universe. "What?"
"What's going on?" Peter repeats, letting go of Neal's arms. Neal blinks again and expands his range of focus to the entire corridor. The cops and security guards alike look at him with a range of confusion and boredom. Nothing new, move it along.
Neal pulls his attention back to Peter. Probably the only thing worse than lying to Peter right now would be telling Peter the truth. So Neal takes the only route available to him. "Claustrophobia. From the tunnel."
Peter mouths the word back at him, but by that point Neal pushes off the wall and squares himself, more for the benefit of the watching cops than for Peter.
"Sorry about that, guys," Neal says with a shaky grin, wrapping himself in the skin of Neal Caffrey, reformed con man and FBI confidential informant extraordinaire.
The cop nearest Neal shrugs, brushing away the incident. "You want to actually get back to work?"
"Nah, I was thinking of flailing around some more," Neal shoots back, turning his grin into flirting, and while the cop sorts his way through that one, Neal steps directly into the ghosts of history.
It's nearly imperceptible, but Neal can see the threads of Dalek design in the walls, curling up and through the building and he'll never be able to look at the Empire State Building the same way again.
When he will be a child in twenty-second century London, he will see remains of Dalek technology in the buildings and the mines, and his mother will tell him stories of the Dalek Invasion of Earth, and he will fall asleep dreaming of Daleks and Slythers and the end of the universe.
And because he will spend his childhood climbing in the abandoned Dalek laboratories, he knows the strengths and weaknesses of Dalek design and how humans can convert such architecture to their benefit.
"Here."
"What here?" Peter asks, shining his flashlight up at the ceiling.
"Prime point of entry and egress." Neal touches the crumbling tiles, feeling the bile rise in his throat. Is this how his mother felt (will feel) every time she walked (will walk) through the ruins of London? He takes a shallow breath and keeps going. "You'd have to be motivated to get through an access shaft that small, but considering that we're in the corner of the building right under the Bank of America vault, I'd say motivation won't be the limiting factor."
The cop swears under his breath, somehow making a puff of air sound impressed. Peter's already on the phone to Jones, and Neal takes that as permission to back his way out of the room and through the tunnel and sits down by the elevator door and waits for Peter to be done with this whole mess.
More cops and feds pour into the bowels of the building, funneling past Neal, and none of them give Neal much of a look. Diana wanders past in her FBI jacket and raises her eyebrows, but Neal just sits in the dust of history and stares up at her. She touches his hair and walks away, and Neal isn't sure who's more surprised by the gesture.
Neal's mother will touch his hair like that, one day, when he is a child.
Neal tries to push away memories of Daleks and childhood and failure, instead focusing on planning a bank robbery of his own. If he had that secret (Dalek-built) access shaft, if he had the time and the quiet of the (Dalek-built) basement, could he do it?
Of course he could, there isn't anything in the world that Neal Caffrey can't steal.
But he wouldn't. Neal hates robbing banks. Too much security, too much that can go wrong, you always need a team you can never fully trust. Neal prefers to work on his own or in a pair. He'd done it with Kate and with Mozzie and now he does it with Peter, and that's enough of a mind-twist to bring Neal up short.
The idea of Peter Burke as criminal mastermind keeps Neal occupied for the rest of the afternoon, until Peter stomps his way out of the tunnel and hauls Neal to his feet. "Come on," Peter says, pushing and pulling at Neal until they are both in the elevator and heading back towards the surface. "It's quitting time."
"I thought the FBI never quits," Neal retorts. Now that they are moving away from the ghosts of the Daleks in the basement, he's finally able to breathe in and not taste death.
"Which is why Diana's staying. We found evidence in the basement that indicates that service tunnel was previously used to access the bank vault."
Neal swings around to look at Peter. "Really?"
Peter stands tall, hands in his pockets. "You look surprised."
"You were never this relaxed when you were chasing me."
The elevator disgorges them into the lobby, and Peter saunters out onto the marble, Neal in his wake. "And if I'd been alive when this robbery happened, I might have higher hopes at catching the perpetrator before he struck again."
"You discovered a bank robbery from the forties?" Neal asks, aware he should be more interested.
"I'm not that old," Peter protests, and they're in the car and pulling out into rush hour.
"Really? Because that tie says otherwise."
Neal normally doesn't push Peter about ages, because one day Peter is going to realize that Neal's back-story doesn't make any sense for a man born in 1978, but this mean he doesn't have to talk about Daleks in New York and that's enough.
"There's nothing wrong with this tie," Peter says. "I like it."
"Did you lose a bet?"
Peter grinds his teeth and doesn't take his eyes off the cars ahead of him. "It was my father's tie."
At which Neal closes his mouth and turns to look out the passenger window. He doesn't have anything of David Campbell except memories. Even when he looks in the mirror, all he sees are reflections of his mother.
The silence hangs, oppressive, until Peter says, "If we're going strictly by wardrobe, I should be asking if you robbed that bank."
"I'll check my daytimer," Neal responds automatically.
The car stops at a light and Neal watches New York swirl past them. How was it possible that Daleks had been in New York, and yet the city is so alive? When Daleks had (would) bring the Earth to its knees and leave near complete destruction in their wake?
As he stares out the window, the threads of the conversation (time, time, it's always about time) smooth out in Neal's mind and he frowns. "Wait, how do you know when the robbery was?"
"That's what Jones was working on all day. There was a robbery in that bank in 1963. Over a million dollars in non-sequential bills just vanished from the vault. No one had any idea how the money could have walked away like that."
"Until today," Neal finishes for Peter. "I have to say, I'm impressed."
"I thought you might be." Peter gives Neal a sideways glance. "I was a little surprised you weren't right there with us, taking notes."
He's goading Neal, but Neal's head is full of ghosts and he doesn't care. "I was on elevator duty. Someone had to make sure people knew where to go."
"Just like you knew where the tunnel entrance was?"
Peter's shot in the dark slams home. Neal runs his tongue over his lower lip and thinks about all the ways he can lie his way out of this one. "It was the only logical spot for a tunnel into one of the banks," he says, a truth offering of sorts.
Peter doesn't say a word, just breathes through his nose and turns the car towards June's house. It's the kind of silence that puts Neal's back up, the silence that falls between them when Peter thinks Neal's hiding something.
As usual, Peter is right.
"Okay, fine, you got me," Neal says at last. "I robbed the bank twenty years before I was born. Then I cleverly joined in the investigation in order to divert suspicion from myself. Brilliant, really."
It isn't until after the words are out of his mouth that he realizes how close to the edge things still are, months later, and the sudden cold silence from the other side of the car tells Neal that Peter still isn't over Keller.
Elizabeth is fine, Neal tells himself through the familiar ache of remembered terror. She's fine and Peter's fine and everything is fine.
Peter stops the car outside June's house and Neal gets out, mind torn between memories of Dalek tunnels and Keller's face as he held a gun to Elizabeth's head. He doesn't know how to pull back on his words and in the end he doesn't even try, just closes the car door and turns around and walks up the steps to his own opulent prison.
Peter waits until Neal is halfway to the door before peeling out into the New York twilight. With him goes the last lingering stabilizing point of the day, and all Neal can think about is Daleks in New York.
"Hey Neal!" calls a young voice. June's granddaughter Samantha runs down the hallway in a blaze of color, her sweater all the shades of the rainbow, pulling Neal along in her wake. "I made a painting, want to see?"
"Of course I do," Neal tells her. He drifts into the living room, where June and Samantha's mother Theresa are looking over some books. Sam ignores them both as she picks up a large piece of paper and carries it proudly over to Neal.
The paper is thick with paint, layer on layer of color pushing out at Neal through the dim light. It's deep and harsh and real, and for a moment Neal can't breath through the sensory overload.
"Do you like it?" Sam asks anxiously.
Neal closes his eyes for a moment, forces away the mental chaos, of Daleks and Keller and his long-lost mother. "It's amazing," he says, sitting on the loveseat and laying the picture down on the table. "Tell me about it."
"It's complementary colors," Sam says, all bright smiles and toothy innocence. "Cindy had a book about color and stuff and I got to play with her paints yesterday and so I made an abstract." She bites off the end of the final 't'.
Neal traces the hidden pencil outline, coated red by a child's paintbrush. "You did a great job." All his eyes can see are the spirals under the paint, curling up and away into the darkness at the top of the page.
Mollified, Sam lets her mother bundle her up and herd her towards the door, only to return with hugs for grandma and because she forgot her painting and finally for a secret artist's high-five from Neal.
He hands Sam a purple origami orchid that he will fold once he goes upstairs, and finally the child runs out into the night, into a city free of the Dalek's mindless hate.
In the silence, June looks at Neal until Neal drifts up the stairs to his apartment, hat in hand and the day closing hard upon him like prison bars.
His apartment is cold and silent, a room apart from the rest of New York. Tonight he can find no respite, for now he knows this is a city contaminated by the Daleks, like the London of his very own distant future.
The room stays dark as Neal strips off his jacket, his vest, his shirt. Clad only in undershirt and trousers, he moves one bookcase away from the wall before picking up his charcoals.
Tonight, he cannot stop himself.
Tonight, he draws the harsh lines of an abandoned Dalek laboratory onto the wall, sharp instruments and screaming psychic echoes dark on the blank white surface. He draws until the walls are covered, until he is surrounded by the nightmares from a future Neal isn't sure will happen.
Only then does he lay down and close his eyes.
When at last he sleeps, he dreams of Slythers.
Stories other children's parents tell them to keep them from the forests, but Neal's mother doesn't lie to him and she too puts stories of Slythers into his head, creeping black darkness, grasping tentacles and muffled screams and approaching death. Neal is in the forest by the old mine shafts and he's running, running, because he knows his mother is there.
The Slythers know too.
He sees her, hidden by darkness in the trees and he reaches for her but he trips over blackness and it has him, pulling him into the flooded mines, into drowning, and all he can hear is his mother's screaming.
When he wakes, the world is stark in shades of early-morning grey as the sun returns to shine on New York.
The office is full of FBI agents working on the decades-old bank robbery, with consultants flown in from Quantico and San Diego and in spite of Peter's protestations, Neal is barred from working on the case. Any other day, Neal would care, would poke and prod and pester until he sat in his rightful place at the White Collar task force, but this just isn't any day.
This is the day after Neal learned that Daleks once spread their annihilation in New York. This was not a normal day at all.
He sits at his desk, drawing thin ink spirals on page after page, black ink on white paper. Eventually the days will end, and White Collar will move on from the bank vault heist and go back to their normal fare of fraud and tedium.
Neal lays down his pen and puts his hand over his face. His mother's screams have been echoing in his head since he woke in the early hours, and he's tired.
But it's not like he has anywhere else to be, so eventually he drags himself to his feet and goes for the coffee machine.
Only to stutter to a stop when Elizabeth Burke steps directly into his path.
(She's out of the cast and the scars are fading and she's the only spot of color in the room and seeing her makes Neal's chest burn like drowning.)
He wants to run away, but she's right in front of him and when she reaches out to touch his arm, he steps back into a chair. He barely moves, but the light in Elizabeth's eyes falters, and her hand drops away.
"Peter's in a meeting," Neal says quickly, before she can ask him anything. "But he should be out soon."
The way Elizabeth looks at him, like she knows what he's thinking, makes Neal's head ache. "I'm a few minutes early, we're going for lunch," she tells him.
"Good," Neal responds automatically, all the while wanting to run away from Elizabeth. Because that's what Neal Caffrey does: run away. "I'll leave you to it, then."
"Neal," Elizabeth says, and this time she steps into his personal space and puts her hand on his arm and he can't pull away. "Come to lunch with us."
Part of him wants to take Elizabeth up on her offer, but the side of Neal Caffrey that spent all night tangled in Dalek dreams can't stand to be in her presence any longer. Carefully, Neal extracts his arm from Elizabeth's grasp and backs away. "I can't."
"Neal..."
"I can't," he says again, so quiet this time that she can't hear him, and stumbles back and out of the office.
The elevator ride to the lobby echoes loud in his head; lights buzzing and cables twanging. When the doors finally open and disgorge him into the lobby of the Federal Building, Neal fights down the urge to run, and instead makes his way slowly and carefully to the exit door, across the plaza, coming to a stop outside the cafe across the street. This is as far as his electronic tether goes when he's not with Peter. He will not run, he tells himself sternly as he threads his way around a gaggle of agents from Counterterrorism. There's no need to run. They got Elizabeth back and she's fine and Peter's fine and everything is fine.
He orders an oversized iced coffee, flirting reflexively with the counter staff as he waits. There's a couple of feds from Organized Crime waiting behind Neil, and he can feel the weight of their stares on the back of his neck.
Normally, Neal could do end-runs around the Organized Crime boys, but today he just doesn't care. Let them stare. It's not like they could possibly have anything on him.
Sometimes, it worries him how practical his approach to law enforcement officers has become.
He takes his iced coffee and wanders out onto the sidewalk, idly aware that he's killing time before heading back up to the office (not that he has anything to do there today - he's not allowed to work the bank robbery and everything else is dull and grey, now that he knows there were Daleks in New York). So he drops down onto a bench outside the cafe and sips his iced coffee and lets city life pass him by.
That's when he sees his great-grandfather's TARDIS.
The world rips itself apart and sews itself back together as Neal stares at the big blue police box, time speeding up and slowing down as the TARDIS takes up space on a New York sidewalk. It's nearly the same as the last time Neal saw (will see) it, over two hundred years from now in London, when his mother's grandfather stumbled into their lives before the skies opened up and stole his mother out of all existence. Back when Neal was Alexander Campbell, son of Susan Foreman and David Campbell, and life was so terribly uncomplicated.
Before Neal can draw breath, two people run up to the TARDIS -- a beautiful red-headed woman, then a brunette man. Neither of them are Neal's great-grandfather, but his mother told him that sometimes the Time Lord known as the Doctor would travel about with people in his TARDIS. She'd told him that once, long before Neal had even been born, she had been the one to travel about with the Doctor through time and space.
Then a third man runs up to the TARDIS, crashing against the wood as he tries to open the door. The man flails around, all wild brown hair and suspenders and bow tie, and even though Neil has never seen that face before, he knows him.
This man is the Doctor.
The Doctor is a Time Lord.
The Doctor is the only Time Lord.
Numbly, Neal raises his hand, to call out or start screaming or something, when the last of the Time Lords lifts his head, scans the crowd, and ends up looking directly at Neal.
Then he turns away into the TARDIS and closes the door behind him.
The man does not know Neal. He doesn't know Neal because there are no more Time Lords and Neal won't be born for another hundred years, if he's even born at all. He's an impossible thing in a universe of impossibilities, and because of this, Neal is left sitting on the bench, alone.
He lowers his hand.
There are no more Time Lords. He knows this in a way he never has before, has finally identified the giant gaping hole in the universe where Time Lords should have been. The Time Lords are gone.
His mother is gone.
Another heartbeat, and Neal bolts to his feet and runs at the TARDIS, caught in the ebb and flow of time currents around the blue box. He reaches out and touches the blue-painted wood on the door, just as the TARDIS starts to dematerialize. He tries the door, slaps against the unresponsive surface, but a blast of wind pushes Neal back and the TARDIS vanishes.
Neal stumbles back. He nearly had it, was so close to his great-grandfather, to knowing what had happened to his mother. But his great-grandfather is gone, just like his mother, just like everything Neal has ever known.
All of a sudden, Neal just feels so old. He wonders if he'll see the last Time Lord again, how the man can be alive when everyone else is gone, and Neal is all alone.
Hours later, Peter finds Neal in the park on the far side of the Federal Plaza, staring at the fading autumnal leaves clinging to the trees. "What the hell have you been doing?" Peter begins, but then he sees Neal's face and all the bluster fades into concern. "What's wrong?"
Neal goes back to looking at the trees. He wonders how they can survive in the city, surrounded by all the noise and light and pollution. "My mother's dead," he says, and as he hears the words out loud, it's like it finally becomes real.
Peter sits beside him on the stone wall. "Your mother has been dead for a long time," he reminds Neal.
Neal shrugs. Right now, he can't remember what lies he's told Peter, so he lays the truth out before him. "That doesn't make it any easier, some days."
Peter looks at Neal like he understands, which he doesn't, because Peter's mother is alive and well and safely ensconced in Syracuse. Peter doesn't know what it's like to realize that your mother is never coming home and that means you're all alone.
Neal drops his head into his hands and tries to breathe around the isolation crushing down on him. Alone in the universe. Just him and his not-dead great-grandfather of a Time Lord.
After a few minutes, Peter clears his throat. "You okay to go back upstairs?" he asks awkwardly.
"Yeah," Neal mutters.
"Good." Peter stands expectantly.
Neal takes another breath, then levers himself into a standing position under his own power. He straightens his tie and suit jacket, trying to pull all the pieces of Neal Caffrey back together again.
"Elizabeth says she invited you for lunch," Peter blurts out suddenly. He's got his hands shoved into his trench coat pockets, looking directly at Neal's face. "She's worried about you."
Neal freezes, the utterly impossibly concept of Elizabeth Burke being worried about him catching him in the throat until he can't breathe. When the air finally does come rushing back, the shock of oxygen wraps around his hearts and what might have been a sob bursts out as a strangled laugh. "She's worried about me?"
It's too much. His mother is dead and Elizabeth is worried about him; there were Daleks in New York and his great-grandfather is alive.
He walks away from Peter before he can fall into tinier pieces.
But because this is Peter Fucking Burke, the man catches Neal in ten steps, takes his arm and hauls him bodily in the direction of the Fed building.
Peter tosses Neal into his office, closes the door and goes off to yell at various agents for a while. When he finally returns, Neal is sitting in Peter's chair, staring out the window at the city.
His mother is dead and Elizabeth is worried about him; there were Daleks in New York and his great-grandfather is gone.
"Out," Peter demands. Neal stands without a fight, going to lean against the window to watch the street below.
"Yelling at the team? That's an interesting motivational technique you have there, Agent Burke," Neal says. He's had enough time to pull himself back into the skin of Neal Caffrey, debonair con man and art thief (alleged) extraordinaire. This is how the game with him and Peter goes, nothing can change that.
Peter drops into his chair with a bit too much force. "If they don't want to get yelled at, then they shouldn't be moving my investigation backwards," he snaps.
In spite of the disaster that is his life, Neal can't hide his smile. "I could crack the case in under a day."
Peter swings around. "If we don't make any progress in the case by tomorrow, then you'll get to test that theory." He takes a sip from his mug and makes a face. "Why can't anyone from DC make a decent cup of coffee?"
"The FBI isn't renowned for its barista training program," Neal reminds Peter.
"Maybe I'll start looking for that in the interns." Peter puts his coffee cup onto the desk, a deliberate gesture that fills Neal with dread. "We need to talk about Elizabeth."
Neal turns back to the window. "She's fine."
Peter makes an exasperated noise in the back of his throat. "She's fine, but you're sure as hell not."
"I'm perfectly..." Neal searches for another word, because he's so sick of the word fine that he wants to punch it in the face. "Acceptable."
"It's been two months and you still won't talk about it."
"There's nothing to talk about."
A long silence fills the office. Neal uses the respite to breathe on the glass and trace an intricate 'AC' before the moisture dissipates. Then Peter draws breath, and Neal girds for battle. "You shot Keller."
"Someone had to. He was going to kill Elizabeth."
Only it hadn't been that easy. The memory crashes over Neal, takes his breath away and pushes him into the past, with Elizabeth bleeding and broken on the ground and Keller with no other way out, Keller lifting a gun to finish what he'd started. What Mozzie started. What Vincent Adler started, so very long ago.
Neal takes a deep breath, the memory of that night so vivid that he half-expects his lungs to fill with icy water. But it's day time, and he's in the FBI building, and Matthew Keller is dead.
"You shot Keller after he tried to drown you."
Keller's hands on Neal's back, forcing him off the dock beside the riverfront warehouse where he kept Elizabeth. Keller's hands on Neal's shoulders, pushing him underwater until Neal stopped struggling.
"There wasn't any other option, Peter."
Barely pulling himself out of the river, choking up water out of his oh-so-human lungs, stumbling up the ramp and into the building in time to see Elizabeth bleeding and broken on the ground and Keller with no other way out, Keller lifting a gun to finish what he'd started.
Neal had done the only thing left to do. He'd tackled Keller to the ground, taken the man's gun, and shot him.
The shot had been the loudest thing in the universe.
"I know that, Neal." Peter stands and joins Neal by the window. "You did what you had to do."
The shot had been the loudest thing in the universe, and then Elizabeth was sitting up and Neal could see the broken bones in her arm poking through the skin, and he'd very nearly shot Keller's body again.
Neal hadn't been around when Elizabeth gave her statement to the cops, but whatever she said hadn't landed him back in jail on a murder charge, so that had been enough for one day.
"What's she worried about?"
Peter edges into Neal's line of sight. "She's worried because you haven't spoken to her since the ambulance ride."
They rode in the ambulance together, Neal holding Elizabeth's uninjured hand while the paramedics tried to stabilize her blood pressure. She was fading in and out of consciousness and didn't hear Neal whispering wake up, please wake up, over and over until they got to the hospital. Then Peter was there and that was that.
Neil twitches his shoulders back, keeping his hands in his pockets. He's ruining the lines of his suit and he really can't bring himself to care. "What exactly am I supposed to say to her, Peter? I'm sorry you got kidnapped and almost killed?"
"That would be a start," Peter snaps, anger starting to show through his concern. "When are you going to realize that you can't just flit around like Peter Pan, doing things without any repercussions?"
Neal looks at Peter out of the corner of his eye, sees the frustration and worry, and wonders exactly when it was that Neal Caffrey started caring about what Peter Burke thought. "Does that make you Captain Hook?"
"Neal..." Peter says warningly, but Neal steps away and around the desk, putting as much space between them as possible.
"Are we done here?"
Peter's face crumples in that special way it does when he's thinking of throwing Neal back in prison. "Be back here, tomorrow morning, seven o'clock."
It's an hour earlier than normal, but Neal can't bring himself to care. He crosses the office floor, grabbing his hat on the way out and ducking into an elevator before Peter can change his mind.
Elizabeth is worried about him. There were Daleks in New York. His mother is dead. His great-grandfather is gone.
Apologies can't change a damn thing.
June is out when he gets home. Neal makes a mental note to ask her about the bank robbery. Byron wasn't much for that sort of crime, but he may have heard things back in the day, and if anyone can help Neal solve the case in modern-day Manhattan, it's probably June.
The stairs seem miles long, as Neal trudges up to his apartment. The walls are still covered in angry black lines, the books lay scattered on the floor. At some point in the night, the ornate sand-glass fell to the ground, the sands of time spilling out onto the floor.
Neal hangs his hat on the edge of the easel, not bothering to turn on any of the lights in the room. He know where everything is, all the pieces of his fragmented life. Memories flit around the room, of the people who've walked out of his life.
Neal hasn't seen Mozzie in months, not since Keller died. He doesn't know what he'd say to Mozzie if he sees him again, either. Things have changed between then. As Mozzie said, Neal made his choice to stay in New York. He's not going to regret that decision now, even if he's traded in one prison for another.
A memory of his mother tugs at Neal's mind, stirring up like dust along the floorboards, about choices, about running away, impossible prisons and the tricks of good wizards.
Some day, Neal will find his great-grandfather, the last Time Lord known as the Doctor, and ask him what happened to the Time Lady known as Susan Campbell. This time, when the Time Lord will ask Neal to go away with him in his time machine, Neal will say yes.
Some day.
But on this day, Neal unrolls a sheet of parchment out onto the only bare space on the table. He reaches for a bottle of ink, and lets the memories of his mother's fairy tales flow out onto the page.
The sun is still far below the horizon on this foggy New York morning, but the Burke household is up and about. Neal stands on the sidewalk, watching indistinct shadows move behind the drawn curtains. He doesn't want to be here, but he can't think of where else he should be.
Tipping his hat over one eye and holding tight to the roll of parchment in his hand, Neal quickly climbs the stairs and rings the bell before he loses what little nerve he has left.
A change in the movement behind closed doors, and Neal is willing to bet Peter's about to answer the door with his sidearm. The door swings open, and true to form, Peter's braced for anything.
When he sees Neal, Peter's shoulders relax. "Neal, it's six-thirty in the morning," he scolds.
"You're up," Neal retorts.
"Why are you here?" Peter demands. He looks over Neal's shoulder at the street, as if the emptiness may hold some answers.
This is it, Neal tells himself. "Can I come in?"
Peter blinks. "Why?"
"Because..." Only Neal doesn't have a good answer to that. So he gives the only reason he can. "I need to say something to Elizabeth."
Peter keeps looking at him. "And you need to say this at six-thirty in the morning?"
"Let him in, Peter," comes Elizabeth's voice from the living room.
There's no getting out of this one. Neal squares his shoulders and slips past Peter. Elizabeth sits on the couch with a cup of coffee, Satchmo curled up at her feet. It's the very picture of domesticity, marred only by the long surgical scar on Elizabeth's forearm.
Neal's carefully planned speech deserts him. He stands there, uncertain, until Peter bumps his shoulder on the way past. "Start talking, Caffrey," Peter says darkly.
Glancing down at the parchment in his hands, Neal draws a deep breath. "Elizabeth, I... I'm sorry. About what happened, with Keller and Mozzie and... all of it."
She's staring at Neal, her eyes dark and wide, and Neal can't tell what she's thinking.
He tries again. "I know that's not a reason or an excuse, but it's the truth. And I wanted to you know that."
Silence falls in the room for a long moment. Then Elizabeth holds out her hand.
"Come over here," she says. She pats the sofa cushion beside her. "Sit down."
Peter stirs, but doesn't speak as Neal sits on the edge of the couch.
Elizabeth touches the back of Neal's hand, an echo of the way he held her hand in the ambulance ride all those months before. "I'm glad you came by," she says, smiling just a little.
Things weren't better, or fixed, but it's a start.
"What's this?" she asks, indicating the parchment in Neal's hands.
Neal traces the edge of the roll with his thumb. "This is for you."
Elizabeth raises her eyebrows, taking the parchment from Neal and unrolling it. When she sees the ink sketched on the page, she lets out her breath in a sigh. "Neal, this is..."
Peter helps her unroll the sheet on the coffee table, revealing the dark ink blocked out in rotating spirals. If one were to watch closely, one can almost see the inner spirals of the locking device moving.
"Neal, it's gorgeous," Elizabeth says, tracing over the intricate lines. "What is it?"
An apology, Neal thinks. A story. An impossibility.
Instead of saying these things, Neal leans forward and touches the centre of the circles with one finger. "This... is a fairy tale," he begins, voice soft as he gives voice to his mother's words after all these years. "Once upon a time, there was a warrior who would drop down out of the sky and tear worlds apart. Until one day, a good wizard caught the warrior, tricked him, and locked him up for all eternity in a prison called the Pandorica."
Neal traces along the curves of the locks, remembering his mother's face when she told him the story of the Pandorica, filling his mind with images of the impossible prison, of the trickster wizard, of battles long past.
"What happens next?" Elizabeth asks, her voice soft to match Neal's. "Did the warrior ever escape the prison?"
Neal stares at the drawing for a while. "Maybe. Maybe the warrior redeemed himself one day."
"Every story can stand a bit of redemption," Elizabeth says, taking his hand in hers again. "Even this one."
Neal's eyes blur, for just a moment, and he has to blink hard to force down unexpected tears. He squeezes Elizabeth's hand as a thank you he's not sure he really understands.
Let me tell you a story, his mother used to say into his mind, her thoughts becoming his thoughts, long before he knew what proper words were. He remembers her fingers smoothing back his hair, smiling down at him in his cradle. We're all only stories, in the end.
Across the room, Peter stands. "Come on, Neal. We gotta go."
Reluctantly, Neal lets go of Elizabeth's hand and stands as well. He gives the drawing of the Pandorica one last glance, sees the outer circle twisting just a fraction of an inch on the parchment, and sees a wave of yet-to-be slip through his mind.
Neal Caffrey and Peter Burke will go out into the day, into a New York that holds the ghosts of Daleks and of the last Time Lord. Alone and surrounded by millions of people, each with their own story, not knowing what will happen next.
Stories like that... well, they never really end.
(This much is true.)
-fin
Author's Notes: See, the thing about this story is that it would have been so much easier to write before the whole stolen Nazi treasure thing because really - how can that possibly be sorted out? So I sort of improvised; let me know what you think.
In any event: All of these characters and places are canon. Susan Foreman is the First Doctor's granddaughter, and she traveled with him in Season 1. She met David Campbell in 22nd Century London (and the Doctor subsequently locked her out of the TARDIS). Even Alexander Campbell, great-grandson of the Doctor, is canon (if one includes Big Finnish Audio, which I am for the purposes of this exercise.) When I figured that out, I couldn't resist.