![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
White Collar fic: Survivor (2/2)
Part 1
The wind picked up as they climbed. Her feet felt like blocks of wood, and El tried desperately not to think about the damage she must be doing to them. You'll be the original Iron Woman if you tell your friends in Manhattan that you lost a toe to frostbite, she counseled herself, which turned out to be very little help.
It was getting harder to keep her spirits up. In fact, it was getting harder to keep herself going at all. She was unable to stop shivering, her damp, muddy, bloodstained sweater doing little more to protect her from the wind than a wet T-shirt. Peter was hardly shivering at all; she wasn't sure whether that was good or bad.
"Hot cocoa," she muttered under her breath as she climbed. "Hot coffee. Hot tea. Hot baths with raspberry-scented bubble bath. That soft fuzzy sweater that Aunt Rose gave me. Warm little Satchmo on my feet, my perfectly warm, unhurt feet ..."
A snowflake whirled past her nose.
El stopped walking, jolted out of her weary reverie by a new surge of fear and indignation. "Oh, you have got to be kidding me," she said, tilting her face to the sky. Another snowflake landed on her eyelashes before melting into a drop of cold water. "We couldn't get a break just this once?"
Maybe the snow would cover their trail. She had read something like that in a Louis L'Amour western once. But it will also cover us, she thought, and her flagging willpower began to crumble. She eased Peter to the ground; he went down limp as a sack of laundry, and she wondered if she was ever going to be able to get him up again. At the moment, she didn't really care. She sank down after him and pulled his head and shoulders into her lap, for all the comfort that she was able to offer.
Satchmo whined and tried to crawl into her lap after his master. "Lay down, Satch. Keep Peter warm," El urged, until she got the dog curled up against Peter's side and her own. He was, indeed, warm. Actually, she thought, of the three of them, Satch was the one most likely to survive. He wouldn't be able to live by himself in the wilderness, but the rescue workers would find him. Maybe Neal would take care of him.
I should call Neal, she thought, but it was hard to work up the urge to move any part of her sore, exhausted, shivering body.
The phone vibrated against her leg. El smiled despite herself, and carefully worked it out of her pocket. "Yes," she said.
"Elizabeth, thank God." Wherever Neal was, it was noisy, with voices in the background and the rumble of a loud engine. "How are you two doing?"
"I can't wake Peter. I don't know, Neal. It's starting to snow."
"You're kidding me; snow? On top of everything?"
El managed a miserable little laugh. "That's pretty much what I said."
"Look, Elizabeth, I'm about to get into a search and rescue helicopter. Talk about getting out of my radius, right? But I won't be able to call you while we're in the air. Jones is our contact on the ground. Stay in touch with him, okay?"
"Okay," El said. She thought she probably ought to have had a stronger reaction to the idea of losing her link to Neal, but all the emotion had drained out of her. She felt like an empty shell of a woman.
"We're going to find you, Elizabeth. Hang on. Both of you."
"We're hanging," El said, trying to smile. "Oh, Neal, wait. Someone should call my sister Barb and tell her that we're not going to be there tonight, so they don't worry."
There was a brief pause on Neal's end. "So they don't worry?" he repeated, sounding incredulous.
"They'll probably get worried when we don't show up on time."
"Yes, but Elizabeth, I don't think knowing the particulars of your current situation would worry them any less."
"Maybe not. I'm ... I guess I'm not thinking really clearly right now, Neal."
"I don't think anyone blames you for that," Neal said. "Hang on, Diana wants to talk to you."
She heard the rustling of the phone being passed to someone else, then, "Elizabeth?"
"Hi, Diana."
"Hi. Listen, I wanted you to know that Peter could be right, Organized Crime says Lacey's been out of prison for about two months and dropped right off their radar. Do you have any weapons?"
"We left Peter's gun back at the car," El said. "I mean, I did. I should have kept hold of it, but I only have one hand --"
"Don't worry about it. What I want you to do, if you can, is get on top of that hill you were talking about, to a clearing if possible, where the helicopters can find you. We have your cell located and you're right on the edge of the Catskills. If you get too deep into the wilderness, it's going to be much harder to get you out, and we'll probably lose cell contact completely."
"No wilderness. Okay."
"You're going to be all right, Elizabeth," Diana said firmly. "Could you pass the phone to Peter for a minute, please?"
"No," El said, looking down at Peter's face. He was a dead weight in her lap. She was afraid even to check if he was still breathing; the uncertainty was better than knowing the worst. "He's not -- no, I can't."
Diana's pause was very brief, but noticeable. "All right. Stay focused, Elizabeth. I have to go. Jones is going to call you in a minute, okay? -- Neal, what now?"
More rustling of the phone exchanging hands. "Elizabeth," Neal said. "I ..."
He trailed off, and El didn't know what to say, either. Yet somehow the silence was comfortable. Warm.
"Thank you," Neal said at last. "For, you know, everything. I have to -- I have to go now."
"I know," El whispered. "Neal -- thank you, too."
She sat in silence for a few minutes, stroking Peter's face, while the snowflakes grew thicker. El had never realized that falling snow made a sound, but it was so quiet out here that she could hear the tiny whispers of the flakes touching down on her shoulders and hair, on Peter, on Satchmo and the dead leaves around her.
If they hadn't gone off the road, they'd be at Barb's now, probably sitting with Barb and Mike, having a drink before bed. They'd be looking out the window at the falling snow, exclaiming in delight, looking forward to a crystalline white morning.
The phone vibrated on her thigh, and went skittering into the leaves. El retrieved it and checked the caller ID. "Hello, Jones."
"Hi, Mrs. Burke. I'm at our command center here. We have a lock on your phone's GPS signal -- I'm looking at it on my screen right now. There are helicopters in the air, and we're going to have you out of that place as soon as we can."
Elizabeth tipped her head back and watched the snowflakes swirl down out of the dark sky. "The weather's getting bad."
"Pfft," Jones said. "A little snow won't even slow those big birds down. You doing okay?"
"Yes," El said quietly, shifting her legs a little to make a more comfortable nest for Peter on her thighs. "I could use some hot coffee, maybe."
"Never seen a rescue chopper yet that didn't have a thermos of hot coffee somewhere on board."
"Well, that'll be okay, then." She wanted to give him a laugh, at least, but she was just too tired and too cold to pretend. In fact, the effort of keeping the conversation going was sapping energy she did not have to spare. "Clinton, I'm going to go look for a place where the helicopter can land to pick us up."
"They don't have to land, Mrs. Burke, if the terrain's too rough for it. They can lift you right out of there, just as easy as you want."
"I know," she said, though she hadn't. "But I need something to do."
"Hang in there," Jones said. "We'll stay in touch."
She was loathe to leave Peter, even for a minute, but Diana had said to get on top of the hill and find a clearing, and she needed to know how close they were. They'd been climbing for what felt like hours. Days. And she had a feeling that the longer she stayed here, the less likely she was to ever get up again.
"Stay with Peter, Satch." When the dog rose and tried to follow, El held out her hand, palm forward, the visual "stay" command that he'd learned in obedience school when he was a puppy. "Stay, Satchmo."
Satchmo whined and lay down again.
El kissed Peter's forehead, tucked the cell phone into his hand and curled his limp fingers around it. Then she began a slow, limping climb up what remained of the hill. To her gratified surprise, it turned out that they'd been almost to the summit when she'd stopped. The slowly rising land flattened off and then dropped away in a much more sudden decline than the gentle slope she'd just been climbing.
Beyond the hill, there was nothing but darkness -- a sea of darkness stretching to merge into the impenetrable blackness of the clouds. El stood on the brow of the hill in the wind's harsh teeth, and she knew that they would never have found help this way. If they hadn't had the cell phone, they'd have just kept going, never coming to a house or a town or a road.
Shivering with more than just the cold, she turned away. The snow was starting to collect in the open places between the trees around her. It lent a little extra brightness to the night, and made it easier to walk without stumbling. It should have been painfully cold, but it didn't feel that cold to her. El touched her fingers to her lips and found them swollen and painfully stiff.
Looking back the way she'd come, she discovered that the far-off road was visible from up here, marked by distant headlights like tiny sparks. Here and there, through the falling snow, she caught the glimmer of a house or two, and even one cluster of lights that might be a small town. She was amazed at how far she and Peter had come from the road, fueled by fear and adrenaline -- amazed and appalled, because there was no way they could walk back that way, even though it was the only direction in which help was to be found if the cavalry couldn't get to them in time.
She strained her ears for the sound of helicopters. She could hear distant engines, but had no idea how to tell if they were helicopters or not. Jets above the clouds, or cars on the highway -- it all sounded alike to her.
But they were coming. She had to believe in them. All she had to do was wait, and keep them both alive.
As she listened to the still night, El realized that she could hear more than just the distant hum of engines on the edge of the world, more than the soft patter of snowflakes touching down. She could also hear distant rustling and the sound of breaking twigs. Then, very distinctly, she heard a man's voice, with the cadence of someone cursing to themselves.
She swiveled in that direction -- down the hill and off to her right. And there it was: the firefly glimmer of a flashlight on the dark slope of the hill. She wasn't sure how to judge distances in all this featureless darkness, but it was definitely much closer than the headlights she'd seen earlier.
For a moment's blinding panic, she couldn't figure out how to get back to Peter. Down the hill -- but there was a whole lot of hill, and she wasn't sure if she'd gone straight up the hill when she'd left it, or climbed at an angle. And had she walked left or right when she reached the top? She couldn't remember, and horror washed over her: what if she never found him again, what if he had to lie on the cold ground until he froze to death?
The only thing she could think to do was to call out to Satchmo, try to get him to bark. But that would give away both her own position and Peter's.
Excellent woodcraft, Elizabeth Burke. Louis L'Amour would not approve.
But a moment after that, she realized that she must have left tracks in the snow. There was not a whole lot of snow yet, but that turned out to be even better, because looking behind her, she could clearly see a dark trail of scuffed leaves through the dimly reflective whiteness. Her slow, staggering gait, scuffling the leaves as she walked, had blazed a trail that was plain even to her city-girl, non-tracker self. The snow was covering it even as she stood there, though, so she hurried to backtrack herself as quickly as possible. By the time she made it back to Peter and Satch, the trail was all but gone.
El sank down beside Peter, and listened again, absently rubbing Satchmo's head and then burying her numb hand in the damp but warm fur of his belly. She heard a twig break, a loud carrying snap. Lacey, if it was Lacey, was not far away from them.
"Peter," she said, leaning over him and rubbing his shoulder. "Honey, we have to go. Honey?"
She refused to believe that he would never open his eyes again. His breathing was shallow and rapid, but he was still breathing, so she decided to go the Sleeping Beauty route. El closed her lips over his cold, slack ones, and kissed him long, hard and deep. For the first instant it was horribly like kissing a corpse, but then he began to respond, and they necked quietly on the leaves in the falling snow until El opened her eyes and found his soft brown eyes looking back into hers.
"Hey, hon," she whispered against his mouth.
"Hey, hon," he whispered back, and then, in a tone of mild confusion, "Are we at your sister's?"
Fear rose in the back of her throat. "No. We're still in the woods. We have to get moving again."
Peter made a valiant attempt to get on his feet with her help, but El could tell from the beginning that it wasn't going to work. They both went down in a heap. Satchmo barked once, and Elizabeth shushed him frantically. Peter was unconscious again. She managed to coax him back to some semblance of consciousness with petting and perhaps a little judicious slapping -- love taps, she would have informed anyone who was unwise enough to ask -- but he was dazed and confused, and didn't seem to understand anything that she said to him.
Finally she gave up the struggle and settled back into the leaves. Here they were and here, apparently, they were going to stay. Satchmo pressed against her side, blessedly warm. She put her arms around Peter -- the hurt and the unhurt arm; at this point she'd lost track of which was which anyway -- and cuddled him against her chest, burying her face in his hair.
"You take me to the nicest places, Peter Burke," she whispered, and kissed his neck.
Silence settled around them once again. She could hear the crashing of Lacey forcing his way through the forest very clearly now. And she could also hear something else, a low rhythmic drumming. She was so tired that it took her a little while to figure out what it was. Then she raised her head in startled gratitude.
"That," she said to Peter and the dog, "is a helicopter."
Satchmo thumped his tail against her leg, more in response to her tone than her words, she knew, but it still seemed as if the dog shared her excitement.
The thrumming of the helicopter vibrated behind her breastbone. It wasn't far away. They weren't going to lie out here until they froze to death. They were getting off this godforsaken hillside.
"Well, well," said a stranger's voice, and light turned the blackness behind her closed eyelids to red.
Elizabeth opened her eyes and squinted against the blinding brilliance of the flashlight pointed at her. I forgot him. How could I forget him? But she had. In her thrilled excitement at the sound of the helicopter, she'd completely forgotten that Lacey was on the same hillside with them.
Satchmo jumped to his feet, his tail whipping against El's arm. As far as he was concerned, their ticket home, back to his warm comfortable dog bed, had just arrived.
El squinted against the light. All she could make out was a big dark blur -- and the gleaming barrel of a shotgun pointed at her and Peter.
"You two have been a real pain in my ass today," Lacey said. Satchmo's wagging tail hesitated and began to droop.
"Please," Elizabeth said. She tightened her arms around Peter, trying to cover as much of him as possible. "We never meant you any harm. Just go away, please."
"Never meant me any harm?" Lacey let out a sharp laugh. "Your husband ruined my life, Mrs. Burke." He walked forward a few steps. Satchmo wasn't wagging at all now. "Is he dead? That would make my life a bit simpler. Of course, there's still you to deal with."
"Yes," El said. "He's dead. Thanks to you." Gently, she lowered Peter and let him rest on the snow-free ground where she had been sitting. The snow was falling heavily now, fat heavy flakes covering the ground to a depth of an inch in places and muffling the helicopter's thumping until she could barely hear it. This snowfall wouldn't even last the next day, not this early in the year, but right now the world seemed to be swallowed in a winter that would never end. "It's just you and me."
"Yeah, like I'm going to take your word for that. Step back." Lacey gestured with the barrel of the shotgun.
Satchmo pressed close to El as she crouched beside Peter. El looked at the dog and then up at the man with the gun. There was a game that Peter and Neal sometimes played with Satch, holding a stick or a toy and making the dog jump to get it, to the command "rocket dog". She kept trying to make them stop, because having Satchmo unexpectedly jump and knock things out of her hands was much more of a hazard than a pleasant diversion.
But giving him the command now would mean sending her sweet little friend into a danger that he couldn't understand, and she wasn't sure how much time it could buy them anyway.
The sound of the helicopter seemed to fade, changing pitch and growing softer. No, she thought, please don't go away! Maybe it was nothing to do with them. But she had to believe that help was only minutes away. All they had to do was hang on that long.
And she could only think of one thing to do.
"Satchmo," she murmured, and the dog pricked up his ears. "Rocket dog."
Satchmo's ears and tail went up happily. Finally, in this entire strange, confusing situation, one of his humans had given him something fun to do. He was off like a shot, leaping towards the hand holding the flashlight, which must have looked like a more appealing target to him than the shotgun.
Lacey yelled, spun to confront the onrushing dog and fired reflexively. The shotgun's blast was deafening at this close range. The slugs kicked up a fountain of snow and leaves a few feet from Peter's leg, completely missing Satchmo.
The dog, though, gave a wild yelp of dismay and reversed direction so suddenly that he left skid marks in the snow. He had no way to know that the gun was dangerous; all he knew was that it was loud and unpleasant and scary, and he didn't like it any better this time than the last time. Too panicked to think of anything but escape, he dashed off into the woods.
As soon as Satchmo lunged for Lacey's hand, El scrambled to interpose herself between Lacey and Peter. A steely determination formed in the pit of her stomach: if this man wanted her husband, he would have to go through her first. She scraped up a loose snowball and flung it while he was distracted. She and her sister were veterans of many a childhood snowball war, and the snowball struck right on target, splattering across his face. She followed it up with more, as fast as she could pack them, not even sure what she was trying to accomplish, just that the most important thing in the world was buying time, second by second, until the helicopter could reach them.
"Bitch, you're dead," Lacey yelled, dashing snow from his eyes.
And then the helicopter was upon them without warning -- either it had come over the ridge or she'd been too distracted with Lacey to notice the noise escalating. It skimmed over at treetop level through the falling snow, the thump of the rotors rattling her teeth. A searchlight swept across the trees and for a second their shadows stood out stark and black against the snow. Then the light was gone and they were plunged back into darkness again, and just as El had time to think, Oh no, they didn't see us --, the timber of the rotors changed and the helicopter circled to spear them with the floodlight again.
"This is the FBI." Diana's amplified voice echoed off the hill; it seemed to fill the night around them. "There are rifles on you right now. Drop your gun or we will shoot."
El shielded her eyes and squinted up at the belly of the helicopter hovering above them. She could make out small figures leaning out of it, and the long slender barrel of a sniper rifle. The wind of the rotors whipped her hair wildly and raised a cloud of snow-devils swirling up through the trees.
Lacey stared up at the helicopter, then at Elizabeth, his snow-crusted face twisted with rage. She thought he was about to shoot her anyway, out of spite, but then Diana bellowed, "Hands in the air, weapon on the ground, or we open fire!" and he threw the shotgun into the snow and raised his hands.
El's legs turned to water and she crumpled to the snow beside Peter. "Oh honey," she gasped, wrapping her hand around his. "Oh honey."
Someone dropped a line from the helicopter, and the first person to touch down was Diana, in body armor with a gun in her hands. As soon as she unclipped herself, two paramedic-type people came down next, followed by Neal. He was, as usual, impeccably dressed in a suit and vest, with a garish orange windbreaker slung around his shoulders that one of the paramedics must have given him.
He crossed the snow to her in a couple of bounds, went to his knees and put an arm around her. El sagged into him, after making a single feeble attempt to push him away. "Your suit -- I'm a mess, Neal, I'm ruining it --"
Neal laughed and pulled her in tighter against him. He was warm, so warm. "June has a whole closet full of them. And I wouldn't care if it was the last Devore on Earth, anyway."
"Yes, you would," El said, trying to laugh and swiping at her eyes with her cold, muddy hand.
"Okay, maybe I would, but I'd at least have the decency to get out of your earshot before complaining."
El laughed helplessly and let him hold her, accepting the comfort and the warmth. Someone handed Neal a military-green coat and he wrapped it around her. El huddled into it with a tiny whimper of gratitude.
"Ma'am, you're going to have to let go," one of the paramedics said, and El looked down to discover that her fingers were still twined tightly with Peter's -- the fingers on her injured side, actually, and when she let go, the jolt of pain that shot up her wrist made her cry out. The lower part of her arm was so swollen that it looked like a softball shoved under the sleeve of her sweater. She hadn't even noticed that before.
"Elizabeth, let them take care of you," Neal said. His eyes kept going to Peter, who was very still as the paramedics strapped him onto a stretcher with clips on the sides to fasten to the lines from the helicopter. The harsh glare of the helicopter's floodlight made him a study in black and white: dead-white skin, black blood forming inkblot patterns on his face and throat.
El tore her eyes away from him. "Satchmo," she said, gripping Neal's arm. "Neal, he ran away into the woods when that man shot at him. I don't know where he's gone. And the helicopter will be scaring him even more --"
"I'll get him," Neal said. From the eagerness in his voice, he'd hated being sidelined and wanted something to do anyway. "Which way did he go?"
El pointed. Neal gave her a final one-armed hug and jogged off into the woods, slithering on the snow in his impractical shoes.
"Where the hell is Caffrey going?" Diana demanded as she and someone else in an FBI jacket secured Lacey to one of the lines from the helicopter.
"To get Satchmo." Without Neal to prop her up, El felt herself on the verge of collapse. Diana caught her by the elbow.
"That's all we need -- hunting for Neal in the woods, too. Blake, get Caffrey," Diana ordered over her shoulder, and began snapping a harness around Elizabeth. "Was there anyone else with Lacey, or was he working alone?"
"I -- don't know, alone, I guess? We can't leave without Satchmo. Or Neal." El huddled in the coat, shaking.
"We're not leaving without anybody," Diana reassured her. "Okay, we're going up together now. I'll hold onto you. Don't look down."
Under any other circumstances, El thought she would probably have found the ascent into the helicopter one of the most terrifying, dizzying experiences of her life. Right now, though, her capacity to absorb new trauma was so thoroughly overloaded that she felt nothing as Diana deposited her on the floor of the hovering helicopter.
With the side door open and the rotors whipping, it was as cold inside the helicopter as outside. It was bigger than El expected, but crowded. She glimpsed Lacey in a corner, handcuffed and under heavy guard. Most of her attention, though, was reserved for Peter, on the floor with an oxygen mask and IV, and paramedics wrapping blankets around him.
"Mrs. Burke?" One of the paramedics knelt in front of her. "I'm going to put a temporary sling on your arm to keep it immobile, all right? It looks like you've got some fractures, but we won't know for sure until we get it X-rayed."
El nodded. Someone else settled a blanket around her shoulders. She looked up again when Neal arrived along with a squirming, wild-eyed Satchmo. Catching sight or scent of El, the dog gave a great heave of his body and twisted out of Neal's arms, bolting to wriggle against her.
"Does he bite?" the paramedic asked nervously.
"Not under normal circumstances," Neal said. He eased through the crowded interior of the helicopter to settle next to Elizabeth and Peter. When his shoulder pressed against hers, El could feel him shivering. "It's miserable out there. I don't know how the two of you --" He shut his mouth, fast, cutting off anything else he was going to say.
"All in, right?" Diana yelled. She hauled on the side door and it slammed, cutting the wind and some of the noise. El felt the helicopter rotate, swinging into motion. Her feet, tucked beneath the blanket, were beginning to burn and sting, and her arm throbbed miserably where it rested against her chest. She was so tired. She worked her good hand under the blankets wrapped around Peter until she could take hold of his limp hand, which made her feel a little better. She leaned her head against Neal's shoulder.
Diana said something to Neal, who broke into a wide grin and nudged El. "Is it true you fought that guy off with snowballs?"
"I didn't have anything else," El said, embarrassed. "I wouldn't have been able to do even that much if you two hadn't taught Satchmo to play 'rocket dog.' I'll never complain about that game again." She looked down at Satchmo's head resting in her lap.
"Never tangle with a Burke," Diana said to Neal. She was smiling, too. One of her hands rested on Peter's leg.
"Words to live by," Neal agreed, nodding.
El chafed the back of Peter's hand gently with her thumb. "Peter was worried you'd get up to something while he was gone."
Neal grinned again. "Well, look at me now. So far out of my radius you can't even see it from here. Happy Thanksgiving, by the way."
"This is not how I'd planned to spend it," El said weakly, leaning into him.
The limp hand twitched in hers, and Peter's fingers curled around her own. Elizabeth lifted her head off Neal's shoulder. "Honey?" she said, bending over him.
Peter's eyelids fluttered and then his body jackknifed. El recoiled, thinking he was having a seizure, but his eyes had opened wide and he seemed to be having a panic attack. He was saying something under the mask, but El couldn't make it out. Neal obviously could, though. He leaned past her and shook Peter's shoulder. "Peter, for God's sake, she's right here. She's holding your hand, actually."
Peter blinked at him, and then at her. Then he smiled, and his eyes closed. His cold fingers remained tight around hers.
"Control freak," Neal said fondly. He left his hand on Peter's shoulder.
Diana touched her radio headset. "Pilot says we're almost to the trauma center. Wants to know if everyone is doing okay back here."
"We're doing great," El said, and she leaned into Neal's shoulder again, and stayed there, gripping Peter's hand with all the strength remaining in her, until they touched down.
no subject
What has happened to ON DEMAND WC??
I wanted to see some of the shows and they are not there. PERIOD
Is it because it is now finished for the season?
I don't get it as it should be just starting
I also looked for another show which is not there either.
I know little about it but wanted to see a few episodes to get acquainted
no subject
no subject
where you can watch episodes, full, of shows without all the ads
which I find tedious
With the interest in WC I thought I might like to take a look
and could not believe that USA has none
That series and forget the other one on USA that I was interested in.
It is broken down e.g. USA, TNT, FX etc.
The tv series are free. There is also ON DEMAND first run which I do
not care about as it means paying $$$ to watch a film
I don't need to do that as I have access from library......
no subject
It is the same for all the shows on OnDemand. They only keep them on there for so long and only for so long after the seasons end.
no subject
I cannot figure it out sometimes.........e.g.
I looked for American Horror Show yesterday and nothing on ON DEMAND
I wanted to see the pilot, but nothing there but HD, which I do not get,
which was even then just trailer.............
It is a toss up when it comes to shows on ON DEMAND.
no subject
Yeah it is hard to figure out sometimes.
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
I felt so bad and worried for her, even though I knew you wouldn't permanently harm any of our people! I think it was easier to be Peter in this: stoic, and unconscious most of the time!
Diana rocks too, and of course Neal.
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
No, it's not. This was superb. But now I'm desperate to see Peter and El's recovery. I want to know who makes a worse patient. ;-)
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
And it's totally not enough stranded/survival or just any (wilderness) adventure stories in this fandom! I get this is because of the nature of canon, but still, I'm a sucker for such fics. Hope to see more from you!
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
So awesome!
The Elisabeth POV is great! I adore that she trusts Neal so much that she thinks that he can get them out of there and that he is her lifeline.
Go Satchmo, go! =)
Fending of the bad guy with snow balls? Fantastic!
Thank you very much for this fic! :)
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
Note to self: we're watching Supernatural right now. We will NOT drop everything and start watching White Collar, no matter how many wonderful fics Sholio writes.
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
Elizabeth is a compelling character on the show. You made she even more fascinating and awesome with this fic! Loved it so very much. I followed it from a rec from
no subject