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White Collar fanfic: Monday's Child
Title: Monday's Child
Fandom: White Collar
Pairing: Neal/Elizabeth, a little one-sided Peter/Elizabeth
Word Count: 5600
Rating: PG-13
Summary: AU- the one in which Neal meets Elizabeth first.
Cross-posted: http://archiveofourown.org/works/548624
Note: This story is a little sad if you're invested in the canon versions of the character relationships. Not everyone gets a happy ending. But some of them do.
ETA: There is now a (much less depressing!) sequel, Thursday's Child.
It just figures. The one time that something really exciting, really out of the ordinary happens at the DeArmitt Gallery, Elizabeth is on vacation. She's gone for a week in France with her sister, and she comes back to discover that the gallery has been robbed in her absence. To rub salt in the wounds, it's all anyone can talk about for weeks.
"It was terrifying," says Megan, their staff advertising artist. "I don't know how I can ever feel safe again."
"But you didn't actually see them," Elizabeth points out. "No one saw them. They broke in at night and then they left. It's not that scary."
"You should talk," Megan retorts. "You weren't here."
And that's the problem: she wasn't. She just gets to hear secondhand about the FBI interviewing all the gallery employees and crawling all over the place taking fingerprints and working with nifty pieces of high-tech equipment that Elizabeth wishes she'd seen. Adding insult to injury, one of the FBI agents comes back to do a follow-up interview ... while Elizabeth is at lunch, so he talks to Megan instead. She would have loved to meet an actual FBI agent.
But that's a general rule of her life. Nothing exciting ever happens to Elizabeth Mitchell.
She grew up in a small town in the Midwest, dreaming of a career as a private investigator or a high-flying travel agent or a foreign correspondent for a major news network. Something that would involve excitement and travel.
And somehow, she isn't quite sure how, she ended up with a business degree, working at a small gallery in New York City. It's certainly not a bad life. The big city is full of places to see, and she tries to take at least one vacation to somewhere interesting every year. But her family doesn't like her to travel alone, and she has to admit that she kind of agrees, so she usually ends up coordinating her vacations with her sister, and that's getting difficult now that Peggy is married. She doesn't hate her life, but sometimes she looks around at her tastefully decorated little apartment and thinks Is this all there is?
***
Five years later, she's still asking herself that question, only somewhat more pointedly now that she's about to turn thirty and she's still working at the DeArmitt Gallery. She remembers a time when this job challenged and excited her, but now it's just become routine, and she's starting to think about maybe putting her resume around to a few places. Or even starting her own business; she's learned a lot and made a lot of contacts that she could parley into a pretty decent starting customer base. Maybe she could do event planning, or interior decorating. She really likes both ideas.
But in the end, she doesn't do either one, because the gallery gets robbed again, and this time Elizabeth Mitchell is smack in the middle of it.
***
On this particular night, Elizabeth gets home only to realize that she left a very important folder of documents pertaining to their upcoming Rembrandt exhibit at work. She'd been planning to go over the gallery display space tonight over a glass of wine. She thinks about letting it go, then sighs and calls a cab.
Later, she thinks sometimes how easy it would have been to just stay in. Forget about it. Read about the excitement happening to someone else the next day.
She punches in the security code and finds her way through the gallery without bothering to turn on the lights. After all these years, she knows it like the back of her hand.
Which is why it's so completely unexpected when she turns the corner and runs headlong into someone. They both go down amid a whispery pattering, like someone's spilling a bag of grain all around them.
"Oh, wow, okay, unexpected," the other person says, and she doesn't know the voice at all. In the darkness of the corridor, all she can see is the faint white blur of his face. Elizabeth scrambles backwards and so does he. For a moment they stare at each other, not that they can see much.
Elizabeth has been trying to figure out that odd pattering sound, and she's finally connected it to the exhibition of seed pearl jewelry that's in a display case in the east wing. Or perhaps, that used to be in the east wing. Reaching out a hand, she touches something hard and cold and round. "Are you robbing us?" she asks in disbelief.
"Strangely enough, I'm having a great deal of trouble coming up with a cover story you'd believe." The stranger tips his head to the side; she sees the flash of his teeth when he smiles. "Yes, I'm robbing you. Please don't scream."
"I'm not going to scream." Curiosity compels her to ask, "How did you get in?"
He answers readily, "Through a security gap on your roof."
Elizabeth heaves a sigh. "That's what the other thief used. I thought the gallery had fixed that."
"Apparently not." The thief laughs, a quick, bright sound, and then asks, "Could you help me pick these up, please?"
"You want me to help you rob our gallery?"
"Well, you'd have to pick them up anyway in order to return them to their display case," the thief points out sensibly. "It'll be half the work with two people. We can discuss what to do with them afterwards."
"Am I a hostage?" Elizabeth asks curiously.
"What?" Now it's his turn to be shocked, and then quickly defensive. "No, no, not at all. I never take hostages. I don't like violence."
"You're a gentleman thief," El says in delight.
He laughs, and once again she's caught up in the infectious joy of it. "Mozzie might disagree with that."
"Who's Mozzie?"
"Someone who would hate it that I just name-dropped him."
They gather the pearls, and then El invites him to her office for a glass of wine and a chat. She's never met a real live cat burglar before and is not about to pass up the opportunity. They take the pearls along with them, because they still haven't decided which of the two of them will get their way in that matter, or how to decide. The cat burglar (who gives his name first as Nick, and later as Neal) suggests a coin toss and then a card game. El turns down both suggestions and then offers a game of solitaire on the computer.
"Seriously?"
"You can't cheat the computer."
"What makes you think I'd cheat you?" His smile glimmers at her. She's got the lights in her office turned low, and Neal is a study in shadow and light. He's dressed all in black, right down to his gloves.
"Because you're a thief," she points out.
She eventually convinces him to leave the pearls because if he takes them, the police will be crawling all over the gallery for days and it would set her back terribly on preparing for the Rembrandt exhibit. Neal agrees that he doesn't want to cause her any extra work, so he helps her put the pearls back in the case and reset its alarm, which he had quietly disabled without doing any visible damage.
"I have to say that you are nothing like what I expected a thief to be like," El says.
"How many thieves have you met?"
She has to concede that he has a point.
Just before dawn, Neal slips out the back, but not before she gives him her number.
***
What follows is a strange, magical, whirlwind love affair. Neal often comes to her apartment after dark, climbing the fire escape to slip in the window like a fairy lover from a storybook. He sends her cryptic, romantic little notes directing her to a series of secret rendezvous. She knows that the police and the FBI are hunting him, because he tells her so. And yet she doesn't care. He makes her laugh and makes her gasp and fills the corners of her everyday life with wonder. He sneaks her into museums after hours, and they wander around looking at the great shadows that the dinosaur skeletons cast on the walls. He treats her at restaurants so fancy that she could never afford them. Once, he takes her down to an abandoned subway station with murals on the walls, the colors lighting up like cave paintings in the light of a hissing Coleman lantern.
She learns that he's currently on the rebound from a failed scam and an equally failed love affair. (That other young woman moved to Chicago with her boyfriend; Elizabeth never does learn her name.) She talks about her childhood and her daydreams. And she feels something inside her, something that had been carefully folded and tucked away in a deep private place, begin to open like a spring flower in the sun.
Her work at the gallery becomes haphazard, careless. She, who has always been a model employee and has never even been late, starts making stupid mistakes and forgetting appointments. It all seems so boring, so pointless. She lives to get through the workdays and back to what she's coming to think of as her real life.
Two weeks after meeting Neal, she quits -- doesn't turn in notice, just cleans out her desk and emails her resignation to her boss. She feels terrible about leaving them in the lurch like this, but she just can't keep making it through these interminable days. This life, once so fulfilling, is killing her, because now she knows what she's been missing.
When Neal comes to see her that evening, she's sitting on the couch with a small bag next to her: underwear and a toothbrush and a locket that her grandmother left her. Everything else in her apartment just seems like stuff to her now -- meaningless and easily replaceable.
"Take me with you," she says, and he lights up in that incandescent way he has, and holds out a hand. And she thinks that maybe she's been waiting her whole life for this.
***
So Neal teaches her how to do what he does. How to survive, he says.
El starts out with huge qualms -- she hates to see people upset and hurt. But Neal takes her into it in small steps. They start with little things; she learns sleight of hand and pickpocketing and how to do card tricks. It's fun and exciting, a kind of game. Under Neal's tutelage, she steps up to running little card scams in the park and lifting wallets from passersby, though she often returns them if they don't contain much cash.
They try not to take anything from people who don't have much to give. Corporations and the wealthy are their primary targets. No mail fraud scams targeting seniors; no playing upon parents' fears to sell them fraudulent life insurance for sick children.
"When we're at our best," Neal tells her, "we leave people feeling a little better than they did before. We flatter them and give them a boost. We give them a chance to share in a little of the excitement that we get every day."
"And then we take all their money." She's still having some trouble with that part.
Neal flashes her one of his sparkling grins. "Property is theft anyway, isn't it?"
"Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. You've been spending too much time around Mozzie."
But it gets easier. Every time she does it, it's easier and she doesn't feel as guilty about it. In a year, she graduates from three-card monte to helping Neal and Mozzie with some of their bigger cons, and turns out to be a natural front man because of (she's told) her charming girl-next-door demeanor. No one expects Elizabeth Mitchell to fleece them ... which of course makes her very, very good at it.
It's like being swept up into a real-life fairy tale. She and Neal drink hundred-dollar glasses of champagne on the balconies of thousand-dollar hotel rooms, and clear out before the bill comes. They pretend to be movie stars and talk salesmen into letting them test-drive Lamborghinis and Aston-Martins. She's never been a person who was into either dresses or jewelry, but there's something very heady about wearing dresses and jewelry that cost more than Elizabeth Mitchell, gallery employee, used to make in a year.
And yet, it's not about the stuff. Neal sometimes reminds her of that, but he doesn't have to. It's about the challenge. It's about the dream. It's about stepping out of society and playing by their own rules.
Elizabeth grew up in the Midwest, to middle-class parents of modest means and equally modest ambitions. Leaving home and going to the big city was her idea of reaching for the stars. Now she is learning that the stars are so much higher and so much brighter than she ever dreamed.
After all, why shouldn't she have these nice things? Most people with money don't work half as hard to earn it as she and Neal do. It's passed down to them, or won in a few lucky breaks in the stock market. For every softhearted billionaire philanthropist, there are a dozen vicious Wall Street sharks or slack-jawed trust-fund kids. If these people aren't clever enough and wise enough to hang onto their money, then why shouldn't she and Neal spend it on extravagant hotels and flights in private jets? It's not as if it would be going to anything better. Perhaps being conned will make the marks a little sharper, a little less likely to fall for such obvious tricks in the future. The next con artist to come along might not be as principled as she and Neal are.
People, in general, seem so foolish to her now. So trusting and easily tricked. She feels as if she spent most of her life in a daze and has only just now awakened. Neal has helped her peel back the veneer of her comfortable middle-class life and showed her the real world under it, a seething world of sharks and predators. It baffles her that she ever considered herself safe and secure, and placed her trust in the police and the courts to keep her that way. She realizes, now, that the world is made up of victims and predators, and she plans to spend the rest of her life in the latter category.
The downside is never being able to trust anyone again, not completely. She's not even sure she trusts Neal. She's never entirely sure how much of what he says to her is true. But in fairness, he can't know that about her, either.
She remembers with a sort of half-bemused wonder how close she used to be to her family. She talked to her sister on the phone every night. Now she can only snatch small fragments of conversation here and there, from burner phones on street corners, and rather than talking about the kids, Peggy just begs her to come home. The last time she called her parents, her father hung up on her. She misses them, in a vague, abstracted kind of way, but she doesn't have anything in common with them anymore.
And so she swims through her new life, just another small silver shark in the pool, until inevitably joining Neal on the FBI's radar.
***
The FBI agent who's after them is named Burke. Neal seems to enjoy tweaking his chain, and El comes to find it entertaining, too.
They have near misses all over the place, always managing to keep one step ahead (but barely). Neal's even managed to have a couple of brief conversations with Burke -- once outside a bank, once on the phone -- and that's what turns it into a competition between herself and Neal, as well as between the two of them and the FBI. They've always liked to play these little games of one-upsmanship -- who can steal the bigger painting before the museum's alarm goes off, who can come up with the most daring escape route? And this isn't any different. It's a game of who can get closer and dance away before getting caught.
It's playing with fire and they both know it. Darting close to the flames and slipping away before they can be burned. But if they didn't love that feeling, they wouldn't do what they do.
At the point when they're forced to flee the country (Temporarily. Again.) the score stands at three (Neal) and two (Elizabeth). El can see why Neal seems to like Burke so much. He's a worthy adversary, smart and twisty, and he doesn't get angry at their games; he just seems to be intrigued. Very intrigued. During their latest foray into Europe (Italy, this time, since France is too hot for them ever since the Marseilles job) she ponders the whole situation and comes to a conclusion that she, too, finds intriguing.
"I bet we could get some good dirt on Burke."
"I don't think Burke has dirt," Neal says. He's sprawled on the bed of their Venice hotel room, sketching a piece of statuary. "The guy's straight as an arrow."
"I mean we make some," El says, and Neal twists around and sits up, looking at her. "I think he's got a crush on me. We can use that."
Neal looks ... something. A little turned on and a little disturbed. "Why do we need dirt on Burke, again?"
It's so obvious that she's surprised it needs to be explained. "As a hole card, in case we ever need it. Neal, he is trying to put us in jail. Don't tell me you want to go to jail."
"No, of course not, but it still seems like cheating, somehow."
Elizabeth loves Neal, and she loves the way that he's awakened the spontaneous, joyous part of her, but there are times when she feels like he just doesn't understand the gravity of their situation. "He's got the entire U.S. government and Interpol on his side. It's definitely Advantage FBI. I think we're entirely within our rights to cheat a bit in order to even the odds."
It still takes some convincing, but these days, Elizabeth is nothing if not good at convincing people to do things.
***
Two weeks later, Elizabeth is sitting on the hood of Burke's car when he leaves the FBI building, her legs crossed and her short skirt hiked up to show her long thighs. He slows, stops. She sees him reach under his jacket.
"Do you really think I don't have an escape plan?" she asks him. "If you call your FBI buddies down here and try to arrest me, you'll never know what I wanted."
He hesitates, and then lowers his hand. A slight smile quirks the corner of his mouth, and just then, for the briefest instant, he reminds her of Neal. "And what do you want?" he asks her. Challenging. Inviting.
"Well," she says, "I like Italian food."
***
She has Burke take her to a tiny, hole-in-the-wall restaurant that she and Neal like ... or liked, rather, since this is going to thoroughly burn it. (She thinks about getting him to spring for the most expensive restaurant in Manhattan, but figures that she shouldn't push her luck, especially since he's probably a lot less likely to go for it if there's too much chance of being seen by anyone he knows.)
There is a hovering sense of tension and danger in the air between them that brings all her senses alive. It reminds her of her earliest days with Neal, when she was still half afraid of him. She has no idea what Burke is going to do, and even though she has half a dozen escape routes scoped out, there is still the chance that he could be too quick and sharp for her, and come up with something she hasn't anticipated.
She loves it.
"Is this a date?" he asks her after the waiter brings their wine. El notes that he picks his drink up quickly, and puts it down out of her reach. She appreciates paranoia in a man. "And if so, what does your boyfriend think?"
Neal is, in fact, across the street with a telephoto lens. "Husband," she corrects him.
Burke's eyebrows go up. "There's no record of a marriage between the two of you."
"Not a government marriage," she scoffs. She and Neal had exchanged vows they'd written themselves on a beach in the Caribbean, barefoot in the sand. There was no officiant, and the only witnesses were seagulls. Her parents would have been scandalized, but El can't imagine that any white-dress wedding in a church could have been more pure and true.
"And what about you?" she asks, leaning forward and cupping her chin in her hands. "Is there a Mrs. Burke?"
She and Neal know full well that there's not. They've kept a close enough eye on Peter Burke to know that he goes home at night to a small apartment in Queens, where he eats takeout standing up at the kitchen counter, an FBI file spread next to it.
"I think," Peter says, with a gleam in his eye, "that I'd like to hear more about you."
By the time their main course arrives, their careful riposte and parry -- each trying to feel the other out for information without giving anything away -- has drifted onto lighter topics: childhood pets, disastrous first dates. Peter is sweet and funny, all the more so when he's not trying to be, and she has to remind herself that he's the enemy, the other side, the yang to her and Neal's yin.
After the meal, while he's fumbling for his wallet, she leans across the table and kisses him, sudden and deep and hard.
"Okay," he says when he comes up for air, looking ruffled and startled. "I know Caffrey wouldn't approve of that."
"Neal and I have an understanding." Not quite the understanding that Peter probably thinks, but she lets it hang in the air between them. "I also," she adds, "have a reservation tonight at a very nice hotel, under an alias you've never heard of. There's a bottle of champagne and two glasses, and a very large bed."
Peter pushes her away gently, two fingertips on her breastbone. He looks sad. "I know what you're trying to do. Sorry. No."
"It's not like that."
"Isn't it?" He still looks wistful, but determined. "I'm an FBI agent; you're the criminal I'm trying to apprehend. Your motives are pretty obvious, Elizabeth. I've already let this go a lot farther than I should have."
"Maybe it started out that way," she tells him, and leans closer, so that her hair brushes his shoulder. "But not now. I'm not trying to get anything from you anymore. Honestly, Peter, tonight you made me feel ..." She hesitates; her voice catches. "You made me feel like I used to be, before all of this. I thought that person was gone forever, but tonight, it was like a little glimmering of a part of me that's been buried for a long time.
"I meant to take you back to that hotel room and seduce you, you're right. But now I just want to hold onto that feeling for a little longer. We don't even have to do anything. We can sip champagne and talk. That's all."
She can see him weighing this possibility, versus another night in his small apartment with its thin walls and thinner curtains. When it comes to hooks for reeling in a mark, loneliness is one of the most effective.
"Just talking," he says at last, firmly, and she feels a tiny bit guilty.
***
The hotel room is nice, and the company is nice. They talk over champagne, and it's easy and pleasant. For a few fanciful moments, she wonders what it would have been like if she'd met Peter before she met Neal. But the image that comes to mind of life as Peter Burke's wife is so stultifying that she balks in horror: a sickeningly cute little house in the suburbs, an SUV, a flower garden, maybe a dog ...
How awful. She would have died of boredom. Peter is a nice guy, but he's not her type at all.
Flushed from two glasses of champagne, Peter loosens his tie. El leans over and helps him with it, allowing her blouse to slip off her shoulder.
It's not hard for one thing to casually lead to another. He's not putting up much resistance now ...
There's not going to be any actual sex. That's the line that she and Neal have always agreed they won't cross. Flirting with marks, using sex appeal to draw down their defenses ... sometimes it has to be done. But having actual sex for a con is a bridge too far, for both of them.
But she takes it farther than she ever has with a mark before. They need some good shots, after all -- she trusts that Neal and his camera are on the job. She's stripped to the waist and not all of her flush and fast breathing is faked by the time that she decides it's time to stop. She dips a hand under the mattress for the handcuffs that are already stashed there; it's going to have to be fast, because Peter is no dummy and she knows he could overpower her if he tried.
But it goes off without a hitch; he's entirely clueless until, with a single fast movement, she has him handcuffed to the bedframe and ducks back out of reach. The look that he gives her is almost comically hurt.
"Oh, come now," she says, clasping herself back into her bra. "Tell me you didn't see that coming." She'd always thought Burke was one of the smart ones, but in the end, deep down, he's really just one of the sheep.
He tests the cuffs and then settles back, watching her assessingly as she buttons her blouse and fixes her hair, putting the armor back on. "Was any of it real?" he asks softly. "All that about the person you used to be ..."
"No," she half-lies. "But I had a good time tonight. Thank you for dinner." She places the handcuff key on the table, then nabs his wallet from his crumpled heap of trousers, while he glowers at her. "We'll have someone come up to the room in an hour or so, in case you haven't managed to free yourself by then."
The temptation to stick around somewhere nearby and see if he does free himself is strong, and she has to talk Neal out of doing exactly that. But there's no sense in tempting fate.
She and Neal mail back the wallet a few days later, with every last cent intact, after giving Burke enough time to have a nice little freakout about it and cancel all his credit cards.
And the photos come out quite nice, in El's opinion.
There was a time in her life when the idea of blackmailing anyone would have been abhorrent to her. But of course, being on the run from the law would have been equally abhorrent. And when the other predators are out to get you, it only makes sense to use the tools at your disposal to survive.
***
It's almost a year later when they finally deploy the photos, and once again, El has to talk Neal into it. He doesn't really want to. He's enjoying the cat-and-mouse that they have going with Burke. El stopped enjoying it awhile back, because Burke is just too good. Sooner or later he's going to catch them. The only way this can end is with the two of them in prison -- "Separate prisons, Neal," she reminds him. "I don't think they have prisons for husband-and-wife felons."
It's amazing to her that she is, in some ways, the more ruthless of the two of them. Or perhaps it's simply that she's the more practical one. Neal doesn't think ahead. Left to his own devices, she suspects he'd be in jail already, and she has no intention of seeing him there -- or herself. They have to take care of each other, and sometimes this means taking out their enemies, even if they don't want to.
And it's getting to the point where she's watched Neal in one too many life-threatening situations. She's been in a few too many herself. They're no longer as young as they once were, and she's starting to think they've stretched their luck as far as it will go -- all their stupid risks are going to catch up with them sooner or later. It's time to start thinking about a quiet semi-retirement, somewhere warm and sunny and isolated. Neal is fully on board with the idea; he enjoys the challenge and adventure of the lifestyle, but he has dreams of settling down, too.
But first they need to get the bloodhound off their trail. Because they can never settle down while Burke is after them, and they both know it. Over the years, while he's been collecting information on them, they've been collecting insurance of their own. And it's time to use it.
Stealing Burke's wallet was more than just a prank -- it gave them valuable identity-theft information. By now, Burke has certainly changed or cancelled anything in his (temporarily) stolen wallet, but they have his social security number, address, old credit card numbers, and other information.
And from there it's just playing the game like they've always played it.
They open an account in a random bank in Burke's name, and deposit $1.5 million in multiple deposits over a month -- it would be more convincing if they played it out longer, but they don't want to take too much risk of having him catch onto their game and collapse their house of cards. Then they buy him a ticket to Tahiti, and use their acquired information to gain access to his real bank account and clean out everything in it, wire-transfering it to the fake one.
"They'll never fall for it," Neal remarks. "No one is this stupid."
"No one like us. You have to think like the marks do." It's all too easy to remember how she used to be, only a few short years ago. Now the people around her seem naive and stupid, so cozy and complacent in their deliberately narrowed lives. The papers are full of stupid people committing stupid crimes, being caught for doing ridiculously avoidable things: hiding out with their parents, using their own car as a getaway vehicle. People who haven't committed crimes before don't know how to hide their tracks. They overlook the obvious; they can't think in devious ways. Burke would probably be a lot more devious than this, if he were to go on the take in reality, but it doesn't matter; all they have to do is make the FBI believe it. Or at least introduce enough doubt about Burke's integrity that they'll never trust him near a position of responsibility again.
El breaks into Burke's apartment and plants the ticket. Then the photos of El and Burke (the FBI agent and the wanted suspect, in flagrante delicto) are dropped in the FBI morning mail, in a plain manilla envelope with Reese Hughes's name on it. Just to be sure and cover as many bases as possible, they drop similar envelopes in the mail to a couple of the more tabloid-style news outlets.
For all their hopes, it may not be enough to end Burke's career. He's smart and slippery and good at talking his way out of things, and his superiors like him. But even if he claws his way back, he won't be running the White Collar unit for a while (if ever again), and he'll certainly have lot more to worry about than a husband-and-wife team of con artists who plan to exit quietly, stage left.
Epilogue
There's a young couple in a small Greek beach town. The husband goes by Nick; the wife's name is Ellen. Everyone likes Nick and Ellen. They don't think themselves above everyone else, like so many Americans do. They are very nice people and they tip well. They are both becoming fluent in Greek and learning to speak without an accent. Sometimes they vanish for short periods of time. But they are never gone very long. The elderly couple next door, who also do their housekeeping, are paid well to take care of their house in their absence.
The husband is a painter, and spends long hours attempting to capture the particular quality of the brilliant Mediterranean light on the ocean. The wife is some sort of heiress; no one is entirely sure. They take long walks on the beach in the evening. They are clearly and obviously in love.
And they are happy.
~
Fandom: White Collar
Pairing: Neal/Elizabeth, a little one-sided Peter/Elizabeth
Word Count: 5600
Rating: PG-13
Summary: AU- the one in which Neal meets Elizabeth first.
Cross-posted: http://archiveofourown.org/works/548624
Note: This story is a little sad if you're invested in the canon versions of the character relationships. Not everyone gets a happy ending. But some of them do.
ETA: There is now a (much less depressing!) sequel, Thursday's Child.
It just figures. The one time that something really exciting, really out of the ordinary happens at the DeArmitt Gallery, Elizabeth is on vacation. She's gone for a week in France with her sister, and she comes back to discover that the gallery has been robbed in her absence. To rub salt in the wounds, it's all anyone can talk about for weeks.
"It was terrifying," says Megan, their staff advertising artist. "I don't know how I can ever feel safe again."
"But you didn't actually see them," Elizabeth points out. "No one saw them. They broke in at night and then they left. It's not that scary."
"You should talk," Megan retorts. "You weren't here."
And that's the problem: she wasn't. She just gets to hear secondhand about the FBI interviewing all the gallery employees and crawling all over the place taking fingerprints and working with nifty pieces of high-tech equipment that Elizabeth wishes she'd seen. Adding insult to injury, one of the FBI agents comes back to do a follow-up interview ... while Elizabeth is at lunch, so he talks to Megan instead. She would have loved to meet an actual FBI agent.
But that's a general rule of her life. Nothing exciting ever happens to Elizabeth Mitchell.
She grew up in a small town in the Midwest, dreaming of a career as a private investigator or a high-flying travel agent or a foreign correspondent for a major news network. Something that would involve excitement and travel.
And somehow, she isn't quite sure how, she ended up with a business degree, working at a small gallery in New York City. It's certainly not a bad life. The big city is full of places to see, and she tries to take at least one vacation to somewhere interesting every year. But her family doesn't like her to travel alone, and she has to admit that she kind of agrees, so she usually ends up coordinating her vacations with her sister, and that's getting difficult now that Peggy is married. She doesn't hate her life, but sometimes she looks around at her tastefully decorated little apartment and thinks Is this all there is?
***
Five years later, she's still asking herself that question, only somewhat more pointedly now that she's about to turn thirty and she's still working at the DeArmitt Gallery. She remembers a time when this job challenged and excited her, but now it's just become routine, and she's starting to think about maybe putting her resume around to a few places. Or even starting her own business; she's learned a lot and made a lot of contacts that she could parley into a pretty decent starting customer base. Maybe she could do event planning, or interior decorating. She really likes both ideas.
But in the end, she doesn't do either one, because the gallery gets robbed again, and this time Elizabeth Mitchell is smack in the middle of it.
***
On this particular night, Elizabeth gets home only to realize that she left a very important folder of documents pertaining to their upcoming Rembrandt exhibit at work. She'd been planning to go over the gallery display space tonight over a glass of wine. She thinks about letting it go, then sighs and calls a cab.
Later, she thinks sometimes how easy it would have been to just stay in. Forget about it. Read about the excitement happening to someone else the next day.
She punches in the security code and finds her way through the gallery without bothering to turn on the lights. After all these years, she knows it like the back of her hand.
Which is why it's so completely unexpected when she turns the corner and runs headlong into someone. They both go down amid a whispery pattering, like someone's spilling a bag of grain all around them.
"Oh, wow, okay, unexpected," the other person says, and she doesn't know the voice at all. In the darkness of the corridor, all she can see is the faint white blur of his face. Elizabeth scrambles backwards and so does he. For a moment they stare at each other, not that they can see much.
Elizabeth has been trying to figure out that odd pattering sound, and she's finally connected it to the exhibition of seed pearl jewelry that's in a display case in the east wing. Or perhaps, that used to be in the east wing. Reaching out a hand, she touches something hard and cold and round. "Are you robbing us?" she asks in disbelief.
"Strangely enough, I'm having a great deal of trouble coming up with a cover story you'd believe." The stranger tips his head to the side; she sees the flash of his teeth when he smiles. "Yes, I'm robbing you. Please don't scream."
"I'm not going to scream." Curiosity compels her to ask, "How did you get in?"
He answers readily, "Through a security gap on your roof."
Elizabeth heaves a sigh. "That's what the other thief used. I thought the gallery had fixed that."
"Apparently not." The thief laughs, a quick, bright sound, and then asks, "Could you help me pick these up, please?"
"You want me to help you rob our gallery?"
"Well, you'd have to pick them up anyway in order to return them to their display case," the thief points out sensibly. "It'll be half the work with two people. We can discuss what to do with them afterwards."
"Am I a hostage?" Elizabeth asks curiously.
"What?" Now it's his turn to be shocked, and then quickly defensive. "No, no, not at all. I never take hostages. I don't like violence."
"You're a gentleman thief," El says in delight.
He laughs, and once again she's caught up in the infectious joy of it. "Mozzie might disagree with that."
"Who's Mozzie?"
"Someone who would hate it that I just name-dropped him."
They gather the pearls, and then El invites him to her office for a glass of wine and a chat. She's never met a real live cat burglar before and is not about to pass up the opportunity. They take the pearls along with them, because they still haven't decided which of the two of them will get their way in that matter, or how to decide. The cat burglar (who gives his name first as Nick, and later as Neal) suggests a coin toss and then a card game. El turns down both suggestions and then offers a game of solitaire on the computer.
"Seriously?"
"You can't cheat the computer."
"What makes you think I'd cheat you?" His smile glimmers at her. She's got the lights in her office turned low, and Neal is a study in shadow and light. He's dressed all in black, right down to his gloves.
"Because you're a thief," she points out.
She eventually convinces him to leave the pearls because if he takes them, the police will be crawling all over the gallery for days and it would set her back terribly on preparing for the Rembrandt exhibit. Neal agrees that he doesn't want to cause her any extra work, so he helps her put the pearls back in the case and reset its alarm, which he had quietly disabled without doing any visible damage.
"I have to say that you are nothing like what I expected a thief to be like," El says.
"How many thieves have you met?"
She has to concede that he has a point.
Just before dawn, Neal slips out the back, but not before she gives him her number.
***
What follows is a strange, magical, whirlwind love affair. Neal often comes to her apartment after dark, climbing the fire escape to slip in the window like a fairy lover from a storybook. He sends her cryptic, romantic little notes directing her to a series of secret rendezvous. She knows that the police and the FBI are hunting him, because he tells her so. And yet she doesn't care. He makes her laugh and makes her gasp and fills the corners of her everyday life with wonder. He sneaks her into museums after hours, and they wander around looking at the great shadows that the dinosaur skeletons cast on the walls. He treats her at restaurants so fancy that she could never afford them. Once, he takes her down to an abandoned subway station with murals on the walls, the colors lighting up like cave paintings in the light of a hissing Coleman lantern.
She learns that he's currently on the rebound from a failed scam and an equally failed love affair. (That other young woman moved to Chicago with her boyfriend; Elizabeth never does learn her name.) She talks about her childhood and her daydreams. And she feels something inside her, something that had been carefully folded and tucked away in a deep private place, begin to open like a spring flower in the sun.
Her work at the gallery becomes haphazard, careless. She, who has always been a model employee and has never even been late, starts making stupid mistakes and forgetting appointments. It all seems so boring, so pointless. She lives to get through the workdays and back to what she's coming to think of as her real life.
Two weeks after meeting Neal, she quits -- doesn't turn in notice, just cleans out her desk and emails her resignation to her boss. She feels terrible about leaving them in the lurch like this, but she just can't keep making it through these interminable days. This life, once so fulfilling, is killing her, because now she knows what she's been missing.
When Neal comes to see her that evening, she's sitting on the couch with a small bag next to her: underwear and a toothbrush and a locket that her grandmother left her. Everything else in her apartment just seems like stuff to her now -- meaningless and easily replaceable.
"Take me with you," she says, and he lights up in that incandescent way he has, and holds out a hand. And she thinks that maybe she's been waiting her whole life for this.
***
So Neal teaches her how to do what he does. How to survive, he says.
El starts out with huge qualms -- she hates to see people upset and hurt. But Neal takes her into it in small steps. They start with little things; she learns sleight of hand and pickpocketing and how to do card tricks. It's fun and exciting, a kind of game. Under Neal's tutelage, she steps up to running little card scams in the park and lifting wallets from passersby, though she often returns them if they don't contain much cash.
They try not to take anything from people who don't have much to give. Corporations and the wealthy are their primary targets. No mail fraud scams targeting seniors; no playing upon parents' fears to sell them fraudulent life insurance for sick children.
"When we're at our best," Neal tells her, "we leave people feeling a little better than they did before. We flatter them and give them a boost. We give them a chance to share in a little of the excitement that we get every day."
"And then we take all their money." She's still having some trouble with that part.
Neal flashes her one of his sparkling grins. "Property is theft anyway, isn't it?"
"Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. You've been spending too much time around Mozzie."
But it gets easier. Every time she does it, it's easier and she doesn't feel as guilty about it. In a year, she graduates from three-card monte to helping Neal and Mozzie with some of their bigger cons, and turns out to be a natural front man because of (she's told) her charming girl-next-door demeanor. No one expects Elizabeth Mitchell to fleece them ... which of course makes her very, very good at it.
It's like being swept up into a real-life fairy tale. She and Neal drink hundred-dollar glasses of champagne on the balconies of thousand-dollar hotel rooms, and clear out before the bill comes. They pretend to be movie stars and talk salesmen into letting them test-drive Lamborghinis and Aston-Martins. She's never been a person who was into either dresses or jewelry, but there's something very heady about wearing dresses and jewelry that cost more than Elizabeth Mitchell, gallery employee, used to make in a year.
And yet, it's not about the stuff. Neal sometimes reminds her of that, but he doesn't have to. It's about the challenge. It's about the dream. It's about stepping out of society and playing by their own rules.
Elizabeth grew up in the Midwest, to middle-class parents of modest means and equally modest ambitions. Leaving home and going to the big city was her idea of reaching for the stars. Now she is learning that the stars are so much higher and so much brighter than she ever dreamed.
After all, why shouldn't she have these nice things? Most people with money don't work half as hard to earn it as she and Neal do. It's passed down to them, or won in a few lucky breaks in the stock market. For every softhearted billionaire philanthropist, there are a dozen vicious Wall Street sharks or slack-jawed trust-fund kids. If these people aren't clever enough and wise enough to hang onto their money, then why shouldn't she and Neal spend it on extravagant hotels and flights in private jets? It's not as if it would be going to anything better. Perhaps being conned will make the marks a little sharper, a little less likely to fall for such obvious tricks in the future. The next con artist to come along might not be as principled as she and Neal are.
People, in general, seem so foolish to her now. So trusting and easily tricked. She feels as if she spent most of her life in a daze and has only just now awakened. Neal has helped her peel back the veneer of her comfortable middle-class life and showed her the real world under it, a seething world of sharks and predators. It baffles her that she ever considered herself safe and secure, and placed her trust in the police and the courts to keep her that way. She realizes, now, that the world is made up of victims and predators, and she plans to spend the rest of her life in the latter category.
The downside is never being able to trust anyone again, not completely. She's not even sure she trusts Neal. She's never entirely sure how much of what he says to her is true. But in fairness, he can't know that about her, either.
She remembers with a sort of half-bemused wonder how close she used to be to her family. She talked to her sister on the phone every night. Now she can only snatch small fragments of conversation here and there, from burner phones on street corners, and rather than talking about the kids, Peggy just begs her to come home. The last time she called her parents, her father hung up on her. She misses them, in a vague, abstracted kind of way, but she doesn't have anything in common with them anymore.
And so she swims through her new life, just another small silver shark in the pool, until inevitably joining Neal on the FBI's radar.
***
The FBI agent who's after them is named Burke. Neal seems to enjoy tweaking his chain, and El comes to find it entertaining, too.
They have near misses all over the place, always managing to keep one step ahead (but barely). Neal's even managed to have a couple of brief conversations with Burke -- once outside a bank, once on the phone -- and that's what turns it into a competition between herself and Neal, as well as between the two of them and the FBI. They've always liked to play these little games of one-upsmanship -- who can steal the bigger painting before the museum's alarm goes off, who can come up with the most daring escape route? And this isn't any different. It's a game of who can get closer and dance away before getting caught.
It's playing with fire and they both know it. Darting close to the flames and slipping away before they can be burned. But if they didn't love that feeling, they wouldn't do what they do.
At the point when they're forced to flee the country (Temporarily. Again.) the score stands at three (Neal) and two (Elizabeth). El can see why Neal seems to like Burke so much. He's a worthy adversary, smart and twisty, and he doesn't get angry at their games; he just seems to be intrigued. Very intrigued. During their latest foray into Europe (Italy, this time, since France is too hot for them ever since the Marseilles job) she ponders the whole situation and comes to a conclusion that she, too, finds intriguing.
"I bet we could get some good dirt on Burke."
"I don't think Burke has dirt," Neal says. He's sprawled on the bed of their Venice hotel room, sketching a piece of statuary. "The guy's straight as an arrow."
"I mean we make some," El says, and Neal twists around and sits up, looking at her. "I think he's got a crush on me. We can use that."
Neal looks ... something. A little turned on and a little disturbed. "Why do we need dirt on Burke, again?"
It's so obvious that she's surprised it needs to be explained. "As a hole card, in case we ever need it. Neal, he is trying to put us in jail. Don't tell me you want to go to jail."
"No, of course not, but it still seems like cheating, somehow."
Elizabeth loves Neal, and she loves the way that he's awakened the spontaneous, joyous part of her, but there are times when she feels like he just doesn't understand the gravity of their situation. "He's got the entire U.S. government and Interpol on his side. It's definitely Advantage FBI. I think we're entirely within our rights to cheat a bit in order to even the odds."
It still takes some convincing, but these days, Elizabeth is nothing if not good at convincing people to do things.
***
Two weeks later, Elizabeth is sitting on the hood of Burke's car when he leaves the FBI building, her legs crossed and her short skirt hiked up to show her long thighs. He slows, stops. She sees him reach under his jacket.
"Do you really think I don't have an escape plan?" she asks him. "If you call your FBI buddies down here and try to arrest me, you'll never know what I wanted."
He hesitates, and then lowers his hand. A slight smile quirks the corner of his mouth, and just then, for the briefest instant, he reminds her of Neal. "And what do you want?" he asks her. Challenging. Inviting.
"Well," she says, "I like Italian food."
***
She has Burke take her to a tiny, hole-in-the-wall restaurant that she and Neal like ... or liked, rather, since this is going to thoroughly burn it. (She thinks about getting him to spring for the most expensive restaurant in Manhattan, but figures that she shouldn't push her luck, especially since he's probably a lot less likely to go for it if there's too much chance of being seen by anyone he knows.)
There is a hovering sense of tension and danger in the air between them that brings all her senses alive. It reminds her of her earliest days with Neal, when she was still half afraid of him. She has no idea what Burke is going to do, and even though she has half a dozen escape routes scoped out, there is still the chance that he could be too quick and sharp for her, and come up with something she hasn't anticipated.
She loves it.
"Is this a date?" he asks her after the waiter brings their wine. El notes that he picks his drink up quickly, and puts it down out of her reach. She appreciates paranoia in a man. "And if so, what does your boyfriend think?"
Neal is, in fact, across the street with a telephoto lens. "Husband," she corrects him.
Burke's eyebrows go up. "There's no record of a marriage between the two of you."
"Not a government marriage," she scoffs. She and Neal had exchanged vows they'd written themselves on a beach in the Caribbean, barefoot in the sand. There was no officiant, and the only witnesses were seagulls. Her parents would have been scandalized, but El can't imagine that any white-dress wedding in a church could have been more pure and true.
"And what about you?" she asks, leaning forward and cupping her chin in her hands. "Is there a Mrs. Burke?"
She and Neal know full well that there's not. They've kept a close enough eye on Peter Burke to know that he goes home at night to a small apartment in Queens, where he eats takeout standing up at the kitchen counter, an FBI file spread next to it.
"I think," Peter says, with a gleam in his eye, "that I'd like to hear more about you."
By the time their main course arrives, their careful riposte and parry -- each trying to feel the other out for information without giving anything away -- has drifted onto lighter topics: childhood pets, disastrous first dates. Peter is sweet and funny, all the more so when he's not trying to be, and she has to remind herself that he's the enemy, the other side, the yang to her and Neal's yin.
After the meal, while he's fumbling for his wallet, she leans across the table and kisses him, sudden and deep and hard.
"Okay," he says when he comes up for air, looking ruffled and startled. "I know Caffrey wouldn't approve of that."
"Neal and I have an understanding." Not quite the understanding that Peter probably thinks, but she lets it hang in the air between them. "I also," she adds, "have a reservation tonight at a very nice hotel, under an alias you've never heard of. There's a bottle of champagne and two glasses, and a very large bed."
Peter pushes her away gently, two fingertips on her breastbone. He looks sad. "I know what you're trying to do. Sorry. No."
"It's not like that."
"Isn't it?" He still looks wistful, but determined. "I'm an FBI agent; you're the criminal I'm trying to apprehend. Your motives are pretty obvious, Elizabeth. I've already let this go a lot farther than I should have."
"Maybe it started out that way," she tells him, and leans closer, so that her hair brushes his shoulder. "But not now. I'm not trying to get anything from you anymore. Honestly, Peter, tonight you made me feel ..." She hesitates; her voice catches. "You made me feel like I used to be, before all of this. I thought that person was gone forever, but tonight, it was like a little glimmering of a part of me that's been buried for a long time.
"I meant to take you back to that hotel room and seduce you, you're right. But now I just want to hold onto that feeling for a little longer. We don't even have to do anything. We can sip champagne and talk. That's all."
She can see him weighing this possibility, versus another night in his small apartment with its thin walls and thinner curtains. When it comes to hooks for reeling in a mark, loneliness is one of the most effective.
"Just talking," he says at last, firmly, and she feels a tiny bit guilty.
***
The hotel room is nice, and the company is nice. They talk over champagne, and it's easy and pleasant. For a few fanciful moments, she wonders what it would have been like if she'd met Peter before she met Neal. But the image that comes to mind of life as Peter Burke's wife is so stultifying that she balks in horror: a sickeningly cute little house in the suburbs, an SUV, a flower garden, maybe a dog ...
How awful. She would have died of boredom. Peter is a nice guy, but he's not her type at all.
Flushed from two glasses of champagne, Peter loosens his tie. El leans over and helps him with it, allowing her blouse to slip off her shoulder.
It's not hard for one thing to casually lead to another. He's not putting up much resistance now ...
There's not going to be any actual sex. That's the line that she and Neal have always agreed they won't cross. Flirting with marks, using sex appeal to draw down their defenses ... sometimes it has to be done. But having actual sex for a con is a bridge too far, for both of them.
But she takes it farther than she ever has with a mark before. They need some good shots, after all -- she trusts that Neal and his camera are on the job. She's stripped to the waist and not all of her flush and fast breathing is faked by the time that she decides it's time to stop. She dips a hand under the mattress for the handcuffs that are already stashed there; it's going to have to be fast, because Peter is no dummy and she knows he could overpower her if he tried.
But it goes off without a hitch; he's entirely clueless until, with a single fast movement, she has him handcuffed to the bedframe and ducks back out of reach. The look that he gives her is almost comically hurt.
"Oh, come now," she says, clasping herself back into her bra. "Tell me you didn't see that coming." She'd always thought Burke was one of the smart ones, but in the end, deep down, he's really just one of the sheep.
He tests the cuffs and then settles back, watching her assessingly as she buttons her blouse and fixes her hair, putting the armor back on. "Was any of it real?" he asks softly. "All that about the person you used to be ..."
"No," she half-lies. "But I had a good time tonight. Thank you for dinner." She places the handcuff key on the table, then nabs his wallet from his crumpled heap of trousers, while he glowers at her. "We'll have someone come up to the room in an hour or so, in case you haven't managed to free yourself by then."
The temptation to stick around somewhere nearby and see if he does free himself is strong, and she has to talk Neal out of doing exactly that. But there's no sense in tempting fate.
She and Neal mail back the wallet a few days later, with every last cent intact, after giving Burke enough time to have a nice little freakout about it and cancel all his credit cards.
And the photos come out quite nice, in El's opinion.
There was a time in her life when the idea of blackmailing anyone would have been abhorrent to her. But of course, being on the run from the law would have been equally abhorrent. And when the other predators are out to get you, it only makes sense to use the tools at your disposal to survive.
***
It's almost a year later when they finally deploy the photos, and once again, El has to talk Neal into it. He doesn't really want to. He's enjoying the cat-and-mouse that they have going with Burke. El stopped enjoying it awhile back, because Burke is just too good. Sooner or later he's going to catch them. The only way this can end is with the two of them in prison -- "Separate prisons, Neal," she reminds him. "I don't think they have prisons for husband-and-wife felons."
It's amazing to her that she is, in some ways, the more ruthless of the two of them. Or perhaps it's simply that she's the more practical one. Neal doesn't think ahead. Left to his own devices, she suspects he'd be in jail already, and she has no intention of seeing him there -- or herself. They have to take care of each other, and sometimes this means taking out their enemies, even if they don't want to.
And it's getting to the point where she's watched Neal in one too many life-threatening situations. She's been in a few too many herself. They're no longer as young as they once were, and she's starting to think they've stretched their luck as far as it will go -- all their stupid risks are going to catch up with them sooner or later. It's time to start thinking about a quiet semi-retirement, somewhere warm and sunny and isolated. Neal is fully on board with the idea; he enjoys the challenge and adventure of the lifestyle, but he has dreams of settling down, too.
But first they need to get the bloodhound off their trail. Because they can never settle down while Burke is after them, and they both know it. Over the years, while he's been collecting information on them, they've been collecting insurance of their own. And it's time to use it.
Stealing Burke's wallet was more than just a prank -- it gave them valuable identity-theft information. By now, Burke has certainly changed or cancelled anything in his (temporarily) stolen wallet, but they have his social security number, address, old credit card numbers, and other information.
And from there it's just playing the game like they've always played it.
They open an account in a random bank in Burke's name, and deposit $1.5 million in multiple deposits over a month -- it would be more convincing if they played it out longer, but they don't want to take too much risk of having him catch onto their game and collapse their house of cards. Then they buy him a ticket to Tahiti, and use their acquired information to gain access to his real bank account and clean out everything in it, wire-transfering it to the fake one.
"They'll never fall for it," Neal remarks. "No one is this stupid."
"No one like us. You have to think like the marks do." It's all too easy to remember how she used to be, only a few short years ago. Now the people around her seem naive and stupid, so cozy and complacent in their deliberately narrowed lives. The papers are full of stupid people committing stupid crimes, being caught for doing ridiculously avoidable things: hiding out with their parents, using their own car as a getaway vehicle. People who haven't committed crimes before don't know how to hide their tracks. They overlook the obvious; they can't think in devious ways. Burke would probably be a lot more devious than this, if he were to go on the take in reality, but it doesn't matter; all they have to do is make the FBI believe it. Or at least introduce enough doubt about Burke's integrity that they'll never trust him near a position of responsibility again.
El breaks into Burke's apartment and plants the ticket. Then the photos of El and Burke (the FBI agent and the wanted suspect, in flagrante delicto) are dropped in the FBI morning mail, in a plain manilla envelope with Reese Hughes's name on it. Just to be sure and cover as many bases as possible, they drop similar envelopes in the mail to a couple of the more tabloid-style news outlets.
For all their hopes, it may not be enough to end Burke's career. He's smart and slippery and good at talking his way out of things, and his superiors like him. But even if he claws his way back, he won't be running the White Collar unit for a while (if ever again), and he'll certainly have lot more to worry about than a husband-and-wife team of con artists who plan to exit quietly, stage left.
Epilogue
There's a young couple in a small Greek beach town. The husband goes by Nick; the wife's name is Ellen. Everyone likes Nick and Ellen. They don't think themselves above everyone else, like so many Americans do. They are very nice people and they tip well. They are both becoming fluent in Greek and learning to speak without an accent. Sometimes they vanish for short periods of time. But they are never gone very long. The elderly couple next door, who also do their housekeeping, are paid well to take care of their house in their absence.
The husband is a painter, and spends long hours attempting to capture the particular quality of the brilliant Mediterranean light on the ocean. The wife is some sort of heiress; no one is entirely sure. They take long walks on the beach in the evening. They are clearly and obviously in love.
And they are happy.
~
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I really like Neal/El (though I normally ship it as part of P/E/N), and this captures a lot of what draws me to their interactions.
I'm really impressed with the balance you achieve in showing El's new life. I can see why she loves it, and--the glamor, the excitement, the freedom--but you also show how destructive it is, to live like that, and El doesn't even notice it. It's sad to see her lose her trust in people and to see her dismiss the life she could have had with Peter, especially since the audience knows that that life actually would have made her happy. There's something that hurts deeply about an Elizabeth who could intentionally hurt Peter.
But, on the other hand, should I really feel sad for her? She doesn't. She and Neal are happy. I certainly feel sorry for Peter, but I can imagine that he gets his career back on track (and maybe even improves it, without taking dangerous risks for Neal all the time), and maybe he even meets someone who makes him happy.
It's really compelling the way that El is more ruthless than Neal. Once again, I absolutely believe it. Neal's hardly a wimp (he walked out of four years in prison without a scratch on him--that takes more than luck), but he does have a strange moral code that those around him tend not to share. In fact, both Neal and Peter have this sense of fair play about them that goes beyond (for Peter) laws and regulations. Both guys tend to be surprised when someone on their side doesn't play fair.
"When we're at our best," Neal tells her, "we leave people feeling a little better than they did before. We flatter them and give them a boost. We give them a chance to share in a little of the excitement that we get every day."
Yes, this is pretty much exactly my conception of Neal's idea of what he does. He makes people feel good! He provides a service, and he charges a fee for that service. It's an exorbitant fee, but that's fair, because he's really good at what he does. And if he doesn't tell people in advance that he going to be collecting, well...
I love AUs that tell us things about canon we may not have seen or understood before, and this does just that.
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Also, I like your comment about Peter and Neal both having a sense of fair play. I'd never really thought about it, but yes, I agree -- that is totally something that they have in common, and one reason why they work well together, and seem to end up on the same page more often than not, even when their methods differ!
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(I love it, in case that wasn't clear)
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