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White Collar fic: The Right Way to Fall (1/2)
... this should probably be total crack, and yet it came out strangely uncracklike. I can't explain it either.
Title: The Right Way to Fall
Fandom: White Collar
Pairing: Gen with Peter/El on the side
Raiting: PG
Word Count: ~21,000
Summary: AU in which Neal has survived his reckless art-thief career mostly because he has a literal guardian angel. (Guess who.)
Crossposted: On AO3 | On DW (one page)
Neal was hanging head-down from the top of the Metropolitan Museum of Art when his safety line snapped.
"Oh shit," he said, in a seemingly endless moment in which he hung weightless, and then he was falling, the wind screaming past his ears.
Mozzie had told him not to do it. Mozzie would probably say "I told you so" at his funeral. The roof of the Met wasn't really that high -- if he was lucky, the fall might not kill him, it might just leave him in a coma, or maybe paralyzed --
Neal shut his eyes, which was why he didn't see exactly what happened, just that it happened very fast: he slammed into something that resisted, strong arms closed around him and then he was on his feet and stumbling, going to his knees with painful force as momentum carried him forward, catching himself with his hands. He opened his eyes. He was on his hands and knees on the sidewalk. His palms stung where he'd scuffed them on the concrete.
"Reckless idiot," said Peter's gruff voice, above his head.
Neal looked up quickly, but Peter was already gone.
******
Neal had first met Peter when he was three and a half. Left unattended for a few minutes in the backyard of the mobile home where they were currently living, he'd crawled under the fence, through a hole he'd already scoped out during other backyard excursions, and wandered down to the road. The traffic looked interesting. He watched it for a while and then, catching sight of even more interesting-looking stuff on the other side of the road, decided to dash through a gap in the flow of traffic. He wasn't stupid; he knew that fast-moving cars were dangerous. But he planned to be even faster.
Someone adult-sized scooped him up before he'd made it more than a few feet, lifting him off the ground into the air. Neal looked down, too startled to make a sound, as he was whisked back to the gravel shoulder of the road and deposited there.
"You okay, kid?" the stranger asked.
Neal looked up at him. His mother always said not to speak to strangers, but Neal had never understood why. Strangers were interesting. "Yep," Neal said. "Let's do it again!"
"Let's not," the stranger said. He knelt down so that he could look Neal in the face. There was something vaguely familiar about him, like Neal had known him all his life. He was wearing a long, rumpled overcoat that spread out around him in the gravel, like wings. He looked worried. "Do you realize you could have been killed?"
"I knew what I was doing," Neal said. The stranger blinked at him, as grown-ups usually did when Neal spoke to them in his precise, complete sentences. He was small for his age, but his mother always said that he had a precocious vocabulary.
"Uh-huh. Just don't do it again, okay?"
"Okay," Neal said. He wasn't going to do it exactly like that again, in any case. Neal never tried something the same way twice if it didn't work the first time. It made it too easy for the adults to anticipate him, for one thing. "I'm Neal," he added, because sometimes it helped head off a scolding if he could distract the adults before they got around to it. And he stuck out his small hand.
The stranger stared at it, then took his hand and shook it. Neal's little hand vanished into the stranger's big one. "I'm Peter," the stranger said, and just like that, he wasn't a stranger anymore.
As soon as the words left his mouth, Peter winced. "Except I'm not supposed to tell you that," he said, and straightened up but kept Neal's hand in his, kindly but somewhat awkwardly, like he wasn't used to kids. Or maybe not used to kids like Neal. "Let's go back to your yard and block up that hole under the fence, why don't we?"
"Okay," Neal said agreeably. He wasn't worried; he knew of a half-dozen other holes, or weak places that could be enlarged into holes. Also, he was pretty sure that if he grew a little bit more, he'd be big enough to climb over the fence, and that would be even more awesome.
"You're going to be a handful, aren't you?" Peter said.
******
Until he started school, Neal thought that everyone had a Peter. After that first time -- which he had a vague idea might not be the first time, but it was the first time he remembered -- he saw Peter about a half-dozen more times. One time he fell into a flooded culvert while trying to look into it. Another time he climbed up on the roof of their mobile home during a lightning storm and couldn't get down. Then there was the time he got chased by the neighbor's Doberman ...
A Peter was a very useful thing to have around.
His mother didn't like him to talk about Peter, but mothers were like that. Also, his mother was busy and distracted with her boyfriends and her different jobs. She left Neal with the neighbors a lot, which usually meant he got to play on his own, or with Peter.
"Jumping off the roof in the hopes that I'll catch you isn't a game," Peter snapped, after setting Neal on the ground.
"But you did catch me."
He didn't really like making Peter upset, though. He liked Peter and wanted Peter to like him. But it made Peter upset when Neal did dangerous things, and those were also the only times that he ever saw Peter, so Peter was upset at him a lot. Neal thought Peter probably liked him anyway, though, or Peter wouldn't keep catching him when he fell (or jumped) off things. Sort of like his mom.
Then he started school, and began to figure out that no one else had a Peter of their own, or at least, no one talked about it if they did. School was a miserable experience all the way around -- Neal was small and precociously smart, a deadly combination on the recess yard, and his mother still moved around a lot, so he was always the new kid.
Mostly he could avoid the worst of it because he was small and fast and, when all else failed, sneaky. And he had Peter to fall back on. Or he thought he did. When a bunch of bigger kids cornered him against the fence during recess, he thought Peter would rescue him.
Peter didn't.
Furious, and hurting from more than his bruises, Neal skipped school for the rest of the day -- he was six -- and deliberately walked in front of a cement truck. Next thing he knew he was thumping down behind a hedge next to the road, while the shriek of the truck's brakes squealed in his ears, and Peter shook him.
"What's wrong with you, kid? You could have killed not only yourself, but the driver of that truck, too. You're a smart kid, Neal. Stop and think for a change."
Neal pulled away and crossed his arms, meeting Peter's stormcloud glower with one of his own. Peter's eyes went to the bruises on his face, his mussed-up school clothes -- the only good clothes he had -- and the anger melted away as if it had never been. Peter went down on one knee and put a hand on Neal's arm. "Awww, Neal," he said.
Neal shook him off. "I thought you'd be there," Neal said furiously. "You're always there."
"Not for things like that." Peter looked uncomfortable. "You have to get through that stuff on your own."
Hurt broke through the anger. Neal was, after all, only six, precocious or not. "I thought we were friends."
Peter stared at him helplessly. "Neal, I'm not even supposed to be talking to you right now. You aren't supposed to see me at all, or if you do, it'd be once in a lifetime -- enough to write off as the trauma of a near-death experience. You're a lot more accident-prone than most kids your age."
Neal had a finely honed adult-bullshit detector, enough to cut through everything Peter was saying to what he wasn't saying. "We're not friends," he said, hesitant, trying it out.
"I'm not allowed to be."
Neal turned his back. When he looked around again, Peter was gone. He tried to tell himself that it didn't hurt.
He started being more careful after that. Well, a little bit.
******
Later in life, Neal was (mostly) convinced that Peter had been a figment of his imagination. Most kids have imaginary friends, right? Maybe his had been a little more ... tangible than most, but it wasn't like he had a good sanity baseline to compare it to. His best friend was named after a childhood teddy bear, for pete's sake.
And, okay, yes, maybe he had a few more close calls and narrow escapes than most people, but he figured it was nothing more than the line of work he was in and the fact that, so far, he'd been a lucky guy. He miscalculated the timer on a smoke grenade, and it almost went off in his hand, but fortuitously stopped working. A security guard who was about to shoot him tripped over, of all the ironic things, a no-slip safety mat in the slippery museum foyer that had somehow gotten rucked up. And then there was that time he and Alex got away from a car full of furious mafia guys because the mobsters blew a tire ... He was just lucky, that's all.
Or so he believed, until he found himself on a sidewalk below the Met at three a.m., the knees of his expensive suit ripped and his palms full of gravel, staring up at the city's glow on the bellies of the clouds. There was no way to write that off to luck.
Not that he didn't try, over the next few days. Adrenaline, maybe? He'd had a really fortunate landing, and rolled, and his brain had conjured a random memory from his childhood ...
Mild head trauma, perhaps?
It had to be something like that, no matter how unlikely, because the alternative was that his childhood imaginary friend was real, and he had a real-life guardian angel, a tired-looking guy in a wrinkled overcoat who could fly.
******
Six months later, he and Alex were robbing a minor count's estate in northern Italy when it happened again.
In all fairness, parachuting into the estate hadn't been the best idea. But it was the only thing they could think of, because the defenses were good, and while Alex had a decent plan for getting out through the water main for the estate's self-contained hydroelectric power generator, it wouldn't work the other way without sucking them into the turbines. So, one bribable pilot later, here he was ...
... a thousand feet above the flanks of the Alps with a parachute that didn't work.
"Oh, you've got to be kidding me," he muttered, yanking the cord with increasing desperation. He caught sight of the glimmer of Alex's chute off to his left, though the wind was carrying her away from the estate, not towards it. Irony was having a field day with them this time. At least she and Moz wouldn't have to worry about breaking into the estate to remove his remains, because at this height and this speed, there wouldn't be enough left of him to bother.
Then he stopped falling with a jerk as someone's hands caught his own. At this speed, both their arms should have been dislocated, but all he felt was a sharp wrenching and then he staggered forward, grass under his feet, falling against --
"Peter," Neal said, and hung onto Peter's hands, not letting him vanish off to wherever it was that Peter went when he wasn't saving Neal's life.
Peter stepped backwards. Even by the light of the moon, he looked like Neal remembered: rumpled and tired and annoyed.
"You do remember me," Peter said. "You're not supposed to. Of course, no one is supposed to almost die as often as you do, either."
"If I let go, will you stay?" Neal asked. That came out a bit desperate, so he amended it quickly. "To talk a minute. I want to ask some questions."
"I'll just bet you do," Peter said with a sigh. He crossed his arms. "Since it looks like this is going to keep happening, we may as well. Ask away."
Neal grinned inwardly, but managed to keep it on the inside. He usually got his way sooner or later. "Let's go somewhere that we can sit down, at least." When Peter did nothing, Neal said, "Come on, a minute ago I was a thousand feet in the air and now I'm standing on the ground. I don't know if you want to call it teleportation or something else, but I know you can do it."
Peter heaved a sigh. "This," he said, "this is why we don't talk to you people, because you aren't supposed to know things like that," and he took Neal by the elbow, and suddenly they were standing in the middle of Neal's sumptuous hotel suite. "Better?"
Neal staggered, caught off guard by the sudden change of scenery, but hastily slapped the smiling, slightly bored mask back on his face. "Perfect." Alex was going to be furious, but she could take care of herself and he'd probably never get a better opportunity to ask the questions that had plagued him all his life. He crossed to the bar and poured himself a shot of Ketel One. "What are you drinking?"
"Beer, if you've got it."
Neal turned and looked at him. "Angels drink beer?"
"This one does."
It was expensive beer, at least. Neal opened one and handed it over. "So are you an angel?"
Peter sighed and sat on the arm of one of the spare, sleek-looking couches in the hotel suite's lounge. "More or less. Close enough to count, I suppose. I was human once, a long time ago."
"Really?" Neal said curiously.
Peter shrugged and sipped the beer. "They recruit from those of us who were lawmen in life. The guardian angel gig is a pretty big deal, actually." He turned the beer around to read the label. "Mmm. That's good beer."
"Lawmen, huh?" It just figured that he'd have a guardian angel that was a cop. This was precisely the kind of irony that life loved throwing at him. "What were you? Police? FBI?"
"It was a little before the FBI," Peter said with a slight grin.
"Seriously? How old are you?"
"Why don't we talk about you," Peter said, gesturing to him with the beer. "The point of having a guardian angel isn't so you can pull stupid stunts while fleecing other people of their money, you know. The vast majority of people don't have or need a guardian angel once they're past the age of, oh, twenty or so. The whole point to my department is to make sure that the human race survives the years when they haven't yet figured out that fire is hot, strange dogs bite, and following black-clad men into alleyways isn't a good idea. Then most people develop some common sense, and what happens after that is on their heads, and not the business of the guardian angel division."
Neal grinned brightly. "I'm special, am I?"
"You certainly are," Peter said gloomily. "Do you know how many times I've saved your life in the last year alone?"
"Really? How many?"
"Classified," Peter snapped. "Too many to count off the top of my head, anyway."
Neal thought back on it. "I only saw you the once."
"That's because I'm good at my job. We're not supposed to be seen at all. Sometimes there's not enough advance warning to come up with an unobtrusive way of saving your life, though." He set down the empty bottle, crossed to the bar and opened another one.
"Hey, slow down or they'll confiscate your wings for drunken flying." Peter scowled at him; Neal grinned, unrepentant. "Does alcohol even affect you?" he asked, curious.
"Sure. When I'm here, that is, physically present as I am at the moment, I'm just as solid and real as you are. I can get drunk. I can eat. If I'm careless enough, I can even die. Well," Peter added, "I wouldn't die, technically. I'd most likely be reassigned. Getting killed in the line of duty is a definite screw-up for a guardian angel; they don't tend to give us second chances."
"Taking a bullet for me isn't in your job description?"
"No," Peter said flatly. "My job as your guardian angel is to make sure that I never have to. If it does come down to a situation where there really is no other choice -- either you die, or I die saving you -- then the rule is that I let you go." His eyes were distant, and Neal wondered if he was thinking back to a time that he'd done exactly that, on some previous assignment.
"That's a bit harsh, especially if you're talking about a five-year-old."
"Life is harsh," Peter pointed out. "Kids die. We try to make sure they don't, but there's only so much we can do. In fact, I wasn't supposed to expose myself to you --" He paused, blinked, as Neal snorted quiet laughter. "-- reveal myself in the first place."
"That's not any better."
"No comments from the peanut gallery." But Peter was clearly struggling to suppress his own amusement. Neal got the impression that his guardian angel was really feeling that beer-and-a-half; presumably they didn't drink much in the heavenly cafeteria or wherever he hung out when he wasn't saving Neal from plummeting to his death. "My supervisor wrote me up for that, you know. According to procedure, I should've let the car hit you, or diverted it some other way. And you saw why -- I'm sure you remember how you reacted when you believed that you couldn't die. Can you imagine a world in which every five-year-old child knew that he or she could be as reckless as humanly possible, with no ill effects?"
Neal thought back to his childhood spree of roof-jumping. "I'm not getting why that's bad, though, except it'd keep you guys busy. Better than one of those five-year-olds being flattened by a bus, certainly."
"It's bad because you have to grow up and become a responsible human being. Pain and an understanding of consequences is part of that process." Peter frowned, went for another gulp of the beer only to discover that this one, too, was empty. "I wonder if you're the way you are now because you never really got that understanding hammered into you as a kid."
"I'd say it was hammered pretty hard," Neal said, remembering the bullies in the schoolyard, all those years ago. The sense of betrayal was attenuated by time and maturity, though, into something softer and more like regret.
"Not like it would have been if you hadn't known I was there. Maybe there's some kind of critical period for figuring these things out. Maybe you were already past it when I finally did the right thing and stopped interacting with you. Maybe everything you've stolen in the last fifteen years is on my head ..." Peter reached for another beer, then sighed and stopped himself. "Look, I'm almost certainly going to get yet another demerit when I write up this conversation in my daily report, so I think this is about as far as we ought to go. If I'm not even supposed to show myself to you -- shut up, Neal -- then having long conversations with you is definitely out."
Neal had a vision of a heavenly bureaucracy, angels with little fluttery wings carrying stacks of files, clipboards, Blackberrys ... "So don't report it, then."
Peter stared at him. "You realize I'm an angel, right? And you want me to lie to my superiors?"
"It's what I would do."
Peter stared at him a moment longer, then shook his head. "Yeah. You probably would." And he vanished without another word.
Neal gazed at the empty air. "You still there?" he asked, but the air, of course, did not reply. He collected the beer bottles and dropped them in the trash. At least there was some tangible evidence that he hadn't imagined the whole thing.
Alex turned up on his doorstep ten hours later, covered with mud and grass stains, and furious. Neal told her he'd missed the landing zone, too. He didn't mention the rest of it.
******
Neal wished he'd taken better advantage of his one opportunity to talk to Peter, because in the following weeks, he kept thinking of questions he really should have asked. Like, was Peter watching him all the time? He didn't want to get too paranoid -- he already had Mozzie as an excellent cautionary tale -- but he had to resist the temptation to shower without turning the bathroom lights on. This also had the potential to put a major crimp in his sex life, not that there was much of that at the moment, since Kate was still incommunicado.
He and Alex went their separate ways in the wake of the botched heist, and Neal moved back to New York for a while. The attraction of Europe was wearing off again, and he missed the city he called home, inasmuch as he called anyplace home. He missed Mozzie. And he'd like to see if he could find Kate.
"You know, you could make your angel self useful and help me find her," Neal said to the empty air in his new apartment. It was a nice place, and dirt cheap for the location. He'd run into the nice older lady who owned the house by pure chance, and it turned out she was open to the idea of having a tenant around the place, so here he was and he paid next to nothing for it. Neal had started out thinking that he was conning her, and was left wondering if he'd actually been taken for a ride instead, or perhaps they'd met in the middle. He had not mentioned what he did for a living, but some of his oblique conversations with June gave him the impression that she knew a whole lot more about him than she let on.
But Peter didn't make himself useful, and Kate had gone underground so thoroughly that even Moz's contacts didn't know where she was, so Neal turned his attention to playing the tourist for a while. He didn't want for money, and New York was relatively safe for him at the moment, with Interpol still combing Europe. So he was temporarily content to spend his days wandering the city's many attractions and art galleries, planning fantasy heists that he never intended to pull off. Peter probably appreciated the time off, Neal thought.
He found his next job at the DeArmitt Gallery. By New York standards, it wasn't a particularly large or famous gallery, but it tended to attract an extremely high quality of work, including some quite expensive pieces. Neal enjoyed most of their shows, and on one of his trips there, he picked up a postcard from a stack at the front desk advertising their upcoming Kleinfeld exhibit.
"Most of Kleinfeld's work was destroyed during the second world war and the years leading up to it," he told Moz over a glass of wine in June's loft. "There are only a handful of pieces in the world, and most of them are going to be in New York in a couple of weeks."
"It's not worth that much," Mozzie objected. "Not even compared to most midlist 20th-century painters. Also, every Kleinfeld I've ever seen was so ugly it hurt the eyes, and these eyes have seen a lot, man."
"That's not the point." Neal was starting to get excited, the more he thought about it. "The point is that this guy was a collage artist, one of the Berlin Dadaists. His art would be next to impossible to forge, not only because of the modern-day scarcity of the materials he used, but also --"
"-- because no one wants to?"
"Because he's obscure enough that it's not easy to find copies or slides of his work at a high enough resolution to work from." Neal grinned and rubbed his hands together. He could feel himself coming alive. "Collage isn't my preferred medium, but that's what makes it a challenge."
"What's security at the gallery like?" Mozzie asked.
"Let's find out."
"Excellent. I'll break out my extensive collection of disguises."
Neal shook his head. "I have a better idea. We'll just ask."
******
One advantage to the DeArmitt Gallery being rather small was that it wasn't hard to get a lunch appointment with the gallery's assistant manager, whose name was Elizabeth Hart. She sounded nice on the phone, and turned out to be even nicer in person, which almost made Neal feel guilty that they were about to rob her blind.
Almost.
He assumed a cover identity that he and Moz had concocted for a previous job and then never used: artist and sculptor Nick Winters. They still had the old website and all the fake newspaper clippings that they'd thrown together, and the time gap just made it more plausible, since his cover story was that he'd been out of the public eye for a couple of years working on a new collection of paintings. He wasn't quite ready to put on a show yet, but he was looking for a gallery to display them. On his way to the meeting with Elizabeth, he stopped by the storage unit where he kept most of his own art, and used his phone to snap a few pictures of his favorite pieces for demonstration purposes.
"Yes, I've seen you at our openings a few times," Elizabeth said. He had to mask a look of surprise. This woman paid a whole lot more attention to the gallery's daily goings-on than he'd expected.
In fact, she turned out to be a very hands-on manager. The gallery couldn't afford a large staff, and she often ended up doing everything from hanging paintings to making flyers when their in-house artist was on vacation. She was willing to answer Neal's paranoid-artist questions about security, mostly to his satisfaction, and he only had to drop a couple of hints before she invited him to come by the following day and tour their facilities. "And bring a portfolio with you," she added. "Obviously I can't make promises until my boss and I review your work, but I believe one of the functions of an art gallery is to showcase the work of upcoming local artists from the community as well as the internationally known. We like to show a mix of different artists and styles, so we'll also be considering how your work fits into our show calendar as a whole. In the upcoming month, for example, we have a Kleinfeld exhibit and a show of Tang Dynasty sculpture opening together."
"The postmodern and the traditional, juxtaposed," Neal said. "Very smart." He'd been drawn to the forgery challenge of the Kleinfelds, but he wondered if it would be possible to walk off with a bit of Tang sculpture while he was at it. Just a small sculpture ...
He took his leave from her after making an appointment to tour the gallery tomorrow afternoon, and went back to June's loft to prepare a portfolio of some sort. He'd been as vague as possible about "Nick's" show, which would give him leeway to look through his existing original work and come up with a suitably commercial-sounding theme that fit a subset of it. He still had time to create a few new pieces if he needed to, and it wasn't like any of it was going to hang in the gallery anyway; once the robbery occurred, or on some other pretext if necessary, "Nick" would get cold feet and pull out --
"Do you realize what you'll be doing to Elizabeth Hart's career?" said Peter's voice behind him, and Neal jumped a foot in the air.
"Sneak up on a person, why don't you," he said when his heart rate calmed down.
"I wasn't sneaking, I was already here," Peter said, and while Neal tried to figure out how to point out that this was not actually any better, he went on: "She's responsible for the security of the exhibit. She'll probably be fired at the very least, and she may even end up being charged as an accessory if you go through with this."
Neal firmly tamped down guilt. "I'm an art thief, Peter; it's what I do. Elizabeth Hart will be just fine. She may never even realize that a theft took place at all, if Moz and I do a thorough job." He frowned, as the realization crept upon him that this was the first time he'd seen Peter when his life wasn't at risk. That he knew about ... "Is something lethal about to happen to me?"
"What? Not that I'm aware of. The future isn't in my jurisdiction," Peter said. "No, I came to talk you out of this idiocy."
"This idiocy is my life's work," Neal said. He retrieved a wine glass from the cabinet above the sink and held it out. "Wine? No beer, sorry."
"I don't want a drink, I want to convince you not to steal the painting," Peter said.
"You've never tried to stop me before."
"I never realized that your entire criminal career might be my fault before," Peter said with a very un-angelic air of gloom, then drew himself together. "So, if I did break you somehow, it's my responsibility to get you back on the path that you should have been on in the first place, if I hadn't messed up all those years ago by revealing myself when I rescued you."
"And what path would that be?" Neal asked, amused.
"I'm not sure. But clearly it isn't this. Neal, you're smart, you're talented, and you are, even if you like to deny it, a decent person. You're better than this."
"That's your setting-my-life-straight pep talk?" Neal said, and laughed. "Come on, Peter. Regardless of why things turned out this way, and personally I think you're giving yourself way too much credit -- I like my life. There's nothing I'd want to change about it."
"You make your living by destroying other people's lives."
"That's a bit of a stretch, don't you think? I take things from faceless corporations or from people who have so much money they don't know what to do with it. I'm hardly Robin Hood, I must admit, but I'm not a --" He floundered for some kind of suitable insult. "I'm not a common street thief, and I never take anything from people who can't afford to lose it."
"Fine. I hoped I wouldn't have to do this, but ..." Peter held out a hand, which was now holding a stack of neat, color-coded file folders that Neal was pretty sure had been nowhere on his person a minute ago.
"What's that?" Neal asked, eyeing them with trepidation.
"With you behaving like a sane adult for the last few weeks, I've been able to afford the time to do a little research." Peter flipped open the top file folder. "Do you remember Frank Kozlowski?"
Neal ran the name around his brain. "Can't say it rings a bell, no."
"He was one of the security guards at the bank that you and your little buddy robbed in 2003. Remember that? Cleaned out the safe deposit boxes."
"Yes, I do remember that, and I also remember that not a single person was hurt. Mozzie and I didn't lay a finger on anybody; we didn't even see anybody. We were in and out, and no one was the wiser until the next morning."
"Until next morning, that's right," Peter said, flipping through the file. "By which time you two were long gone. But you didn't think the bank manager was simply going to roll over and accept the loss of several million dollars in deposit-box contents, and the resulting loss of business from some of their wealthiest clients, did you? They had to pin the blame on someone. Both Kozlowski and his partner were fired, and it took him eight months to find another job. He and his wife lost their house."
"Listen, it's not like we planned --"
"Or this," Peter said, opening the file underneath. "What about Lydia Drummond? Does that one ring a bell?"
Neal sighed and sat down at the table, resigned to the fact that this guilt trip was probably going to continue for a while. "I'm not going to like this, am I?"
"Lydia Drummond was one of the bank customers whose jewelry you stole. Diamond necklace, matching earrings and bracelet?"
"I think I remember the jewelry," Neal said cautiously. "But that doesn't mean -- Look, everyone we stole from had more money than they knew what to do with. I don't remember Lydia Drummond specifically, you're right, but there wasn't a single person we stole from in that heist who couldn't have afforded to replace the things we took a dozen times over."
"Some things can't be replaced," Peter said. "That diamond necklace had been a gift from her first husband when he was courting her. He died ten years later, but she never stopped loving him. She only took it out on the anniversary of his death. Until you stole and fenced it, of course."
"Tell me she didn't kill herself or anything like that."
"Does it matter to you?" Peter asked gently.
"Of course it matters! Come on, Peter, you know me; you've been watching me since I was a kid. You know I don't get my rocks off by hurting people."
Peter sighed. He closed the folder. "I know you don't intend to. But I've just listed two people who were directly hurt by your actions, two people whose names you didn't even bother to learn. One was rich, one wasn't, but they're both human beings, just like you." He set the stack of files on the edge of the table. "Here are more. I'm going to leave this here for you to read."
"Wait --" Neal began, but Peter vanished as soon as his fingertips left the stack of files.
Neal groaned. Morbidly curious, he slid a random file out of the stack, then put it back without opening it.
"You're my guardian angel, not my conscience," he said aloud to the empty room. "My conscience works just fine, thanks. I don't need you looking over my shoulder, let alone trying to run my life."
There was no response, and the emptiness felt very ... empty. Neal dialed Moz's number; he could use some help going through and collating his art for "Nick Winters'" portfolio.
******
He was right on time for his tour of the gallery, and Elizabeth came down to meet him at the front desk. He'd expected to be pawned off on an underling, but he wasn't unhappy to see her again.
"Most of our smaller temporary exhibits end up in either the Sato Room or the Whitney Room," she said, leading him across the gallery's spotless white floor with brisk taps of her high heels. "The Sato is bigger, with more floor space, but the Whitney has better light."
The Whitney Room, Neal recalled, was where the Kleinfeld exhibit was going to be. He tried not to show undue interest in it, instead guiding Elizabeth into a discussion of the possibility for setting up refreshment tables offering wine and hors d'ouevres in the larger room.
There was a stepladder half-hidden in an alcove in the Sato Room; he probably wouldn't have noticed it except that he was checking all the corners, entrances, exits, locations of cameras and so forth. Peeking around the corner, he saw that a panel was stripped off the wall. "Renovations?"
"Of a sort," Elizabeth said, coolly herding him away. "We're actually upgrading our security cameras in this room for the Tang exhibit. It was overdue anyway."
He couldn't really fish too much more on that topic without looking suspicious, but before he left he got a look at the "This premises protected by ..." security sticker on one of the cameras, and made a mental note of the company name, Diamond Security. Slipping Mozzie onto the team upgrading the cameras would give them a perfect opportunity to plant a little hardware of their own ...
Feeling cheerful and confident, he opened the door to June's loft and stopped dead at the sight of Peter sitting at his table with a brand-new stack of file folders.
"Oh, come on, now what?"
"Some more reading material for you," Peter said, holding them up. "You said you don't like hurting people. Excellent. Prove it. These are dossiers on everyone who works at the DeArmitt Gallery, starting with Elizabeth Hart. Reading about them years after the theft, when there's nothing you can do to change it, is one thing. Can you go through with it if they all have names, faces, lives? If they're not just an abstract idea to you, but fellow human beings?"
"You're really becoming a pain, you know that?" Neal uncorked a bottle of wine, trying to ignore his unwelcome houseguest.
Peter flipped open the top folder. "Let's start with Elizabeth, why don't we, since you've been seeing so much of her lately. Elizabeth Frances Hart, born January 23, 1974 in Syracuse, New York. One sister, three years younger --"
"Let me make myself clear. This isn't funny anymore, Peter. I want you to leave. Now."
"It was never meant to be funny," Peter said quietly, and he disappeared, leaving the stack of files behind. The top one was still open.
Neal crossed to the table, reluctantly, and reached to close the file, then hesitated, arrested by Elizabeth's smiling photo pinned neatly to the edge. Where had that photo come from? It looked recent; she was still wearing her hair the same way, at least. He had an amusing but vaguely creepy mental image of his guardian angel sneaking around invisibly taking photographs. Skimming the first page of the dossier, he started reading a paragraph at random: Hobbies: cooking, reading novels (prefers literary fiction, with a weakness for military adventure fiction: Tom Clancy, etc). Captain of roller derby team in college, still plays occasionally --
He snapped it shut. If Peter wanted to play angel stalker with the staff of the DeArmitt Gallery, that was his business. Neal didn't have to join in. In two weeks he'd never see any of these people again, anyway.
******
Over the next week, things fell into place, one piece at a time. Mozzie was able to get a close look at the security cameras and plant some of their own hardware under the guise of a Diamond Security consultant, though he wasn't forthcoming with the exact details -- "Better you don't know," was all he'd had to say. Neal threw himself into forging a picture-perfect Kleinfeld, and tuned out the world, cheerfully immersed in his favorite pastime. Well, one of his favorite pastimes, anyway.
Four days after Neal's meeting with Elizabeth at the gallery, Peter popped into existence in June's apartment, causing Neal to fling his handful of carefully prepared bits of 1920s German newspapers all over the floor. At least he didn't drop the glue pot, which would have been a worse disaster. "You enjoy doing that, don't you?"
"It does give me some pleasure, yes." Peter frowned at the partly completed collage on the easel. "I see you're still determined to persist in this insanity."
"This insanity is my job, my calling, my reason for getting up in the morning -- so yes. I do." He straightened up with a handful of newspaper scraps, and reached for his glue pot.
"If appealing to your better nature isn't having any effect," Peter said, "perhaps your sense of self-preservation might work, assuming you have one. You and Mozzie aren't the only people casing the gallery."
Neal laid the glue pot back down, intrigued. "Really? Someone else wants the Kleinfelds? I'm going to love telling Moz that."
"I don't think they're after the Kleinfelds," Peter said. "Based on their surveillance, my guess would be it's the Tang Dynasty art they want."
He might have known he'd have some competition if he wanted to go after those. "Who are they? Do you know?"
"I'm not sure," Peter said, sounding frustrated. "At a guess, I'd say the Russian mafia, because I'm fairly sure that's the language they've been speaking when I've managed to eavesdrop on them. And Russian, at least modern Russian, happens to be one of the languages I don't understand."
"Let me get this straight," Neal said. "You've spent the last four days lurking around the gallery?"
"Not the entire four days, and I don't think lurking is the most accurate --"
"How in the world do you justify all of this in your reports, if you aren't even supposed to talk to me? I'd think steering me onto a new career path is blowing your non-interference policy all to hell, so to speak."
Peter's evasive expression was answer enough. Neal laughed in sheer delight. "You're falsifying reports, aren't you?"
"I wouldn't say falsifying," Peter said stiffly. "I may have left a few things out."
"Like everything you've done in the last week?"
Peter disappeared without another word. Once he stopped laughing, Neal did feel a little guilty. Just a little. Maybe the corruption was going both ways and Peter was successfully managing to infect Neal with his angelic guilt complex.
A little guilt, Neal thought, was probably a good thing: it would keep him on his toes. He needed to stop listening to Peter, though, before it got worse. And he'd have to ask Moz if there was any word on the street about an upcoming heist at the DeArmitt. He was pretty sure that Peter wasn't far enough gone yet to lie just to keep him away from the gallery, which meant there really was a rival group casing it, and that could be trouble.
******
Between forging the Kleinfeld and planning the actual art swap, Neal was so engrossed that it came as a total surprise when Elizabeth called him to set up another meeting to talk about the scheduling of his imaginary art show. He'd completely forgotten about it -- so completely, in fact, that he almost answered the phone as "Neal" rather than "Nick" even when her name came up on the caller ID. Sloppy.
They arranged to meet in Central Park. It was a gorgeous day -- brilliantly sunny, but with the slight undercurrent of coolness that heralded the approach of fall. They bought lunch from a sidewalk vendor and strolled in the dappled sun and shade while they ate.
"I'm afraid we don't have any openings on our show calendar until next summer," Elizabeth said, balling up her napkin and tossing it into a nearby trash bin. "We're definitely interested in showing your work, though, Nick. The manager and I both thought your Chicago show was excellent, although your recent work is in a very different style."
She'd been looking at the website, then. The fake images from the Chicago show were actually a number of charcoal nude studies Neal had done while sitting in on a couple of art classes, photoshopped into some pictures he'd taken on an entirely unrelated visit to the Art Institute of Chicago.
"I've been experimenting with new techniques," Neal said. "I don't want to get stale, get stuck in a --" He had to force himself not to stop with his mouth hanging open, but just keep moving, keep talking. "-- rut. Creatively and personally. You know how it is."
His mouth rambled on, but his eyes kept roaming, because he'd just seen Peter, fully corporeal and visible, sitting on one of the park benches watching them. A bench they were about to pass shortly. Still babbling about creative technique, Neal steered Elizabeth back into the shade of the trees and down a different path.
He'd figured it wouldn't help, and he was right. They ran into Peter another hundred yards or so along the path: they rounded a turn and there he was, stepping forward. "Hi, Neal," he said with sardonic cheer.
Neal froze on the verge of answering, as he realized that it wouldn't help his cover to make Elizabeth think that Nick Winters had conversations with himself. He glanced sideways at her, saw her uncertain but friendly smile in Peter's direction, and the question was answered: he wasn't the only person who could see Peter. Unfortunately the delay meant that Elizabeth had an opportunity to speak first. "I'm afraid you've mistaken us for someone else," she said.
"Nope," Peter said. "Regardless of what he's told you, his name is Neal Caffrey." Neal was making frantic throat-cutting gestures out of Elizabeth's line of sight, which his meddlesome guardian angel ignored. "He's a con artist and art thief. He's planning to rob your gallery. I'm sorry," he added softly, as Elizabeth stared at him with wide, baffled blue eyes.
"Excuse me, we need to have a talk right now." Neal grabbed Peter by the arm -- he was still dressed just the same as every other time Neal had seen him, in the long camel-colored overcoat. "Old frat buddy, thinks he's a lot funnier than he is," he said over his shoulder, and towed Peter a few yards away so that they could speak without being overheard. "What are you doing?" he demanded through a pasted-on smile for Elizabeth's benefit.
"Saving you from yourself," Peter retorted.
"Destroying everything Mozzie and I have worked for, you mean."
"Keeping you from being shot by Russian mobsters is more like it."
"Peter," Neal said between his teeth. "I'm an adult, remember? I've been an adult for years. What happened to letting me make my own mistakes so that I can learn from them? Or do your rules only apply when they're convenient for you?"
Neal shut up, as Elizabeth was approaching them. "I really feel like I've missed a few key pieces of this conversation," she said, looking back and forth between the two of them. Her tone was polite bafflement with steel underneath, and Neal suddenly, for the first time, got the impression that underneath all of her sweet smiles, Elizabeth Hart might be a force to be reckoned with.
Peter opened his mouth, looked at Neal, and shut it again. He was clearly in the throes of a major moral dilemma. "Like I said," Neal said, "it's a running joke between us that got a little out of hand this time. Elizabeth, this is Peter, a very old friend. Peter, meet Elizabeth, the manager of the gallery where I plan to show my work next year, which I believe we've already talked about."
He said all of this as fast as possible, in the hopes that Peter wouldn't be able to squeeze a word in until he'd already gotten his version of the story into Elizabeth's ears. Peter glared at him, and then shifted gears, giving Elizabeth a flustered smile. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to get you involved in this," he said, which was certainly ambiguous enough to apply to either Neal's version of events or his own.
Elizabeth looked politely confused, but held out her hand, which Peter, looking even more flustered, accepted. "I'm happy to meet a friend of Nick's," she said. "We were going to get ice cream -- would you like to join us?"
Peter's look of frozen terror was, Neal thought, probably matched or exceeded by his own. Unfortunately Peter caught Neal's expression, firmed up and managed to say, "Okay," in a somewhat faint voice.
******
Neal expected the whole experience to be excruciating, but actually it was ... fun: himself and the guardian angel he'd known all his life and a pretty, intelligent lady who liked to talk about art, all strolling in the park in the sunshine eating ice cream. Peter's attempts to sabotage Neal's heist had gone underground, in the form of small barbs or verbal feints that Neal was able to head off before they veered into dangerous territory. Peter didn't talk much at all, though, because he couldn't exactly talk about himself, so Elizabeth talked about herself -- mostly information that had been in the dossier, though it wasn't like Neal could bring that up -- or she and Neal talked about art.
"Oh, goodness," Elizabeth said, checking her watch. "I was supposed to be back to the gallery half an hour ago. It was very nice meeting you, Peter."
Peter blushed to the roots of his hair, and Neal thought Oh crap as the penny suddenly dropped. He hadn't seen this particular complication coming, though he realized in retrospect that he should have.
Elizabeth hesitated a moment longer, as if she wanted to say something but couldn't quite get the words out. Asking for a phone number? Good luck with that one, Neal thought. Then she said a hasty goodbye to both of them and hurried off.
Neal said, "So all that lurking around the gallery wasn't just to keep an eye on the Russians, huh?"
"I have no idea what you're talking about," Peter snapped.
"Yeah, you do."
He expected Peter to just vanish, his usual way of avoiding awkward conversations, but instead Peter took him by the arm and hauled him behind the nearest tree. An instant later they were in Neal's apartment.
Neal staggered and caught the edge of the table. "I wish you'd warn me before you do that."
Peter ignored him, sank down at the table and buried his face in his hands. "I'm in so much trouble," he said, muffled.
"You really do fail at the whole non-interference thing," Neal pointed out. "Beer?" After the last time the angel had showed up unannounced in his apartment, he'd decided that it was just going to keep happening. He might as well resign himself to it and lay in appropriate supplies.
Peter took it and downed a third of the bottle in one long swallow. "It's never gonna go anywhere, you know," he said. "It couldn't. I'm an angel. She's a human. It wouldn't work."
"I don't see what the problem is," Neal said, pouring himself a glass of wine. "You were human once, right?"
"Yeah, two thousand years ago. The dating scene has changed a bit since then."
"Really? That long?" Neal tried to imagine Peter as a Roman centurion. The image of Peter in a toga was disturbing enough that he shook his head to get rid of it. "Look, the details might change, but people have been figuring out this dating thing for a lot longer than two thousand years. If you want it and she wants it, and I can tell you, she certainly didn't look unwilling -- what's the problem?"
"The problem is it's against the rules. Fraternizing with a human? They'd do a whole lot more than take my wings for that."
"You do have wings! I knew it." Neal glanced at the air above Peter's shoulders. "Why can't I see them?"
"Because you're human," Peter said snappishly. "You don't have eyes that can see. But anyway, even leaving aside the fact that it's highly illegal for an angel to even think about doing anything like that with a human, there's also the fact that whenever you become capable of surviving on your own -- not that you appear to be in any danger of that yet --"
"Hey."
"-- I'll be reassigned Heaven only knows where ... and I mean that literally. My next assignment could be in Nairobi, in rural Mongolia, in a tiny sheepherding town in the Pyrenees. What would I do, ask Elizabeth to move there? Write letters to her?" He tilted the bottle and found it empty.
Neal set the whole six-pack on the table in front of him. Lending a sympathetic ear to an angel having a romantic crisis wasn't exactly how he'd planned to spend his evening, but, well, they were ahead of schedule on the heist, so he had time. And he'd always wondered what would happen if he got Peter drunk.
The answer, come to find out, was that Peter drunk was very much the same as Peter sober, except a little more talkative and relaxed. They veered off the topic of Elizabeth and somehow started talking about Kate -- not that there was much about the Kate situation that Peter didn't know, since he'd been there for all of it, but it was oddly nice to be able to talk about Kate to someone who would just listen. Mozzie had very definite opinions on the Kate situation, and Alex ... well, talking to Alex about any part of his romantic life got too awkward.
Once Peter got a few beers in him, Neal managed to get him to talk about the world he'd grown up in, just a little bit. He was still vague about where it had been -- Neal thought maybe Britain around the time of the Roman occupation, if he were going to guess. Wherever it had been, Peter had several hilarious and risque stories about the other guys he'd served with in the army or clan peacekeeping force or whatever branch of service he'd been in. A lawman, Neal thought. He was a cop in 200 A.D. and he's still a cop now, he's just an invisible cop with wings.
But he was also good company, which was something Neal had never suspected, or at least hadn't consciously realized. And there was another thing he'd never realized, but he found himself thinking about it, as he poured himself another glass of wine and looked at the tired, rumpled, now slightly drunken man across the table from him. He really liked Peter. When the inevitable reassignment came, as Peter kept assuring him that it would, Neal was going to miss him. And not just because he'd have to be a little more careful about checking his safety harness before climbing tall buildings.
Although, well, that too. But it wasn't the most important reason. Not at all. It wasn't Peter the angel that he'd miss; it was Peter the human being.
******
Elizabeth called him the next day. "Nick, I'm sorry to bother you. I really feel very silly for asking you this."
"Hey, you're the lady who's offering me a gallery show; you can ask me anything." He was almost done with the forged Kleinfeld, and feeling on top of the world; making a pretty woman smile would be the icing on the cake.
"It's not a big thing," she said, and hesitated. "Your friend Peter. I don't even know his last name, so I can't look him up, and I was just wondering if you might have his number."
Crud. The thought occurred to him that it would serve Peter right for all his guardian-angel meddling if Neal went and did the same thing back to him. He entertained the amusing fantasy of matchmaking Peter and Elizabeth for a few seconds before realizing that it wouldn't be fair to Elizabeth, who seemed like a nice person, to jerk her around like that. "Just a minute," he said, and covered the phone with his hand. "Peter?" he said to the empty air in the apartment. No answer. Peter was probably over at the gallery stalking her in person, anyway. "Sorry, I can't find it. Why don't I look around and text it to you later?"
"Thank you; I appreciate that." She laughed. "Before I go, can I ask you a personal question, Nick?"
"Um, sure?" Of course, the answer to most personal questions for "Nick" wouldn't be the same as for Neal; he mentally prepared himself to come up with a lie on the spot.
"I know this is terribly silly, and I never believed in anything of the sort before, but when I met your friend Peter yesterday -- I don't know, Nick, I've heard of love at first sight and always thought it was a myth, but I really did feel something. Do you believe that you can look at a person and know they're the one, even before you speak to them?"
He thought instantly of Kate -- looking across a crowded room, seeing her face, her eyes, and just knowing. "Yes," he said quietly. "I do believe that. I don't know if Peter is the one for you" -- for both your sakes, I really hope not -- "but I do believe it can happen."
"Thank you, Nick," she said, and something inside him twinged. He didn't figure out what was bothering him until he'd said goodbye and disconnected the call; then it came to him, as he stood gazing at the forgery on his easel. He liked Elizabeth, and there was a part of him -- a tiny, perverse, stubborn part -- that wanted to blurt it all out to her: his real name, his real identity, his real reason for contacting the gallery. As Peter had done yesterday, he thought, and though he'd never admit it to Peter, there was a tiny little corner of himself that had actually been relieved. Let Elizabeth see him as he really was ...
... a thief, a liar, and a man whose only purpose in talking to her was to rob her gallery, he thought, seeing himself for an uncomfortable instant through her eyes, as she surely must see him if she ever learned the truth.
His phone buzzed: Mozzie. Saved by the bell, he thought.
"I don't know where you got your tip from, but your mystery informant was right," Mozzie said. "The Russian mob's been sniffing around the DeArmitt Gallery. Well, actually not the mob as a whole; the mobster in question is a very minor player in their power games named Vladimir Dimikov. He's known on the street as Vlad the Impaler."
"Do I want to know how he got the nickname?"
"Not really, no."
"Think they're here for the Tang sculptures?"
"I would make an educated guess that they're not after the Kleinfelds," Mozzie said. "We could pull the plug on this one, man. Dimikov's not a guy you want to mess with."
Neal thought about it, then said, "No. This could work to our advantage, actually." His mind began to spin the possibilities, and he felt the rising excitement of a successful heist in the making. "Another robbery at the same time, especially if it's a more high-profile one, will keep the cops busy and confuse everyone. We might even be able to openly throw suspicion on Dimikov's bunch, give the police someone to chase after, while we sip wine back at June's."
And for that matter, he thought as he hung up, Elizabeth and Peter's mutual attraction couldn't have come at a better time. Elizabeth probably would have followed up on Peter's suspicious comments about Neal the previous day -- hell, suspicious nothing; he'd blown the whole charade -- if she hadn't been too distracted by Peter himself, and Peter was too busy mooning after Elizabeth to keep a close eye on Neal.
As long as he's still paying enough attention to do his job when the time comes.
Close on the heels of this thought came another one, even more unwelcome: Would I have been quite so willing to take on Dimikov's goons if I didn't know there was a guardian angel hovering over my shoulder, ready to snatch me away if anything does go wrong?
But Mozzie had no such guarantee. Neither, for that matter, did Elizabeth, or anyone else who worked at the gallery.
Maybe Peter's right; maybe it does make me behave more recklessly, knowing he's there. And other people get caught in the crossfire.
He'd just have to be careful, he thought, and more than usually prepared to back out if things started going wrong.
Part Two
Title: The Right Way to Fall
Fandom: White Collar
Pairing: Gen with Peter/El on the side
Raiting: PG
Word Count: ~21,000
Summary: AU in which Neal has survived his reckless art-thief career mostly because he has a literal guardian angel. (Guess who.)
Crossposted: On AO3 | On DW (one page)
Neal was hanging head-down from the top of the Metropolitan Museum of Art when his safety line snapped.
"Oh shit," he said, in a seemingly endless moment in which he hung weightless, and then he was falling, the wind screaming past his ears.
Mozzie had told him not to do it. Mozzie would probably say "I told you so" at his funeral. The roof of the Met wasn't really that high -- if he was lucky, the fall might not kill him, it might just leave him in a coma, or maybe paralyzed --
Neal shut his eyes, which was why he didn't see exactly what happened, just that it happened very fast: he slammed into something that resisted, strong arms closed around him and then he was on his feet and stumbling, going to his knees with painful force as momentum carried him forward, catching himself with his hands. He opened his eyes. He was on his hands and knees on the sidewalk. His palms stung where he'd scuffed them on the concrete.
"Reckless idiot," said Peter's gruff voice, above his head.
Neal looked up quickly, but Peter was already gone.
Neal had first met Peter when he was three and a half. Left unattended for a few minutes in the backyard of the mobile home where they were currently living, he'd crawled under the fence, through a hole he'd already scoped out during other backyard excursions, and wandered down to the road. The traffic looked interesting. He watched it for a while and then, catching sight of even more interesting-looking stuff on the other side of the road, decided to dash through a gap in the flow of traffic. He wasn't stupid; he knew that fast-moving cars were dangerous. But he planned to be even faster.
Someone adult-sized scooped him up before he'd made it more than a few feet, lifting him off the ground into the air. Neal looked down, too startled to make a sound, as he was whisked back to the gravel shoulder of the road and deposited there.
"You okay, kid?" the stranger asked.
Neal looked up at him. His mother always said not to speak to strangers, but Neal had never understood why. Strangers were interesting. "Yep," Neal said. "Let's do it again!"
"Let's not," the stranger said. He knelt down so that he could look Neal in the face. There was something vaguely familiar about him, like Neal had known him all his life. He was wearing a long, rumpled overcoat that spread out around him in the gravel, like wings. He looked worried. "Do you realize you could have been killed?"
"I knew what I was doing," Neal said. The stranger blinked at him, as grown-ups usually did when Neal spoke to them in his precise, complete sentences. He was small for his age, but his mother always said that he had a precocious vocabulary.
"Uh-huh. Just don't do it again, okay?"
"Okay," Neal said. He wasn't going to do it exactly like that again, in any case. Neal never tried something the same way twice if it didn't work the first time. It made it too easy for the adults to anticipate him, for one thing. "I'm Neal," he added, because sometimes it helped head off a scolding if he could distract the adults before they got around to it. And he stuck out his small hand.
The stranger stared at it, then took his hand and shook it. Neal's little hand vanished into the stranger's big one. "I'm Peter," the stranger said, and just like that, he wasn't a stranger anymore.
As soon as the words left his mouth, Peter winced. "Except I'm not supposed to tell you that," he said, and straightened up but kept Neal's hand in his, kindly but somewhat awkwardly, like he wasn't used to kids. Or maybe not used to kids like Neal. "Let's go back to your yard and block up that hole under the fence, why don't we?"
"Okay," Neal said agreeably. He wasn't worried; he knew of a half-dozen other holes, or weak places that could be enlarged into holes. Also, he was pretty sure that if he grew a little bit more, he'd be big enough to climb over the fence, and that would be even more awesome.
"You're going to be a handful, aren't you?" Peter said.
Until he started school, Neal thought that everyone had a Peter. After that first time -- which he had a vague idea might not be the first time, but it was the first time he remembered -- he saw Peter about a half-dozen more times. One time he fell into a flooded culvert while trying to look into it. Another time he climbed up on the roof of their mobile home during a lightning storm and couldn't get down. Then there was the time he got chased by the neighbor's Doberman ...
A Peter was a very useful thing to have around.
His mother didn't like him to talk about Peter, but mothers were like that. Also, his mother was busy and distracted with her boyfriends and her different jobs. She left Neal with the neighbors a lot, which usually meant he got to play on his own, or with Peter.
"Jumping off the roof in the hopes that I'll catch you isn't a game," Peter snapped, after setting Neal on the ground.
"But you did catch me."
He didn't really like making Peter upset, though. He liked Peter and wanted Peter to like him. But it made Peter upset when Neal did dangerous things, and those were also the only times that he ever saw Peter, so Peter was upset at him a lot. Neal thought Peter probably liked him anyway, though, or Peter wouldn't keep catching him when he fell (or jumped) off things. Sort of like his mom.
Then he started school, and began to figure out that no one else had a Peter of their own, or at least, no one talked about it if they did. School was a miserable experience all the way around -- Neal was small and precociously smart, a deadly combination on the recess yard, and his mother still moved around a lot, so he was always the new kid.
Mostly he could avoid the worst of it because he was small and fast and, when all else failed, sneaky. And he had Peter to fall back on. Or he thought he did. When a bunch of bigger kids cornered him against the fence during recess, he thought Peter would rescue him.
Peter didn't.
Furious, and hurting from more than his bruises, Neal skipped school for the rest of the day -- he was six -- and deliberately walked in front of a cement truck. Next thing he knew he was thumping down behind a hedge next to the road, while the shriek of the truck's brakes squealed in his ears, and Peter shook him.
"What's wrong with you, kid? You could have killed not only yourself, but the driver of that truck, too. You're a smart kid, Neal. Stop and think for a change."
Neal pulled away and crossed his arms, meeting Peter's stormcloud glower with one of his own. Peter's eyes went to the bruises on his face, his mussed-up school clothes -- the only good clothes he had -- and the anger melted away as if it had never been. Peter went down on one knee and put a hand on Neal's arm. "Awww, Neal," he said.
Neal shook him off. "I thought you'd be there," Neal said furiously. "You're always there."
"Not for things like that." Peter looked uncomfortable. "You have to get through that stuff on your own."
Hurt broke through the anger. Neal was, after all, only six, precocious or not. "I thought we were friends."
Peter stared at him helplessly. "Neal, I'm not even supposed to be talking to you right now. You aren't supposed to see me at all, or if you do, it'd be once in a lifetime -- enough to write off as the trauma of a near-death experience. You're a lot more accident-prone than most kids your age."
Neal had a finely honed adult-bullshit detector, enough to cut through everything Peter was saying to what he wasn't saying. "We're not friends," he said, hesitant, trying it out.
"I'm not allowed to be."
Neal turned his back. When he looked around again, Peter was gone. He tried to tell himself that it didn't hurt.
He started being more careful after that. Well, a little bit.
Later in life, Neal was (mostly) convinced that Peter had been a figment of his imagination. Most kids have imaginary friends, right? Maybe his had been a little more ... tangible than most, but it wasn't like he had a good sanity baseline to compare it to. His best friend was named after a childhood teddy bear, for pete's sake.
And, okay, yes, maybe he had a few more close calls and narrow escapes than most people, but he figured it was nothing more than the line of work he was in and the fact that, so far, he'd been a lucky guy. He miscalculated the timer on a smoke grenade, and it almost went off in his hand, but fortuitously stopped working. A security guard who was about to shoot him tripped over, of all the ironic things, a no-slip safety mat in the slippery museum foyer that had somehow gotten rucked up. And then there was that time he and Alex got away from a car full of furious mafia guys because the mobsters blew a tire ... He was just lucky, that's all.
Or so he believed, until he found himself on a sidewalk below the Met at three a.m., the knees of his expensive suit ripped and his palms full of gravel, staring up at the city's glow on the bellies of the clouds. There was no way to write that off to luck.
Not that he didn't try, over the next few days. Adrenaline, maybe? He'd had a really fortunate landing, and rolled, and his brain had conjured a random memory from his childhood ...
Mild head trauma, perhaps?
It had to be something like that, no matter how unlikely, because the alternative was that his childhood imaginary friend was real, and he had a real-life guardian angel, a tired-looking guy in a wrinkled overcoat who could fly.
Six months later, he and Alex were robbing a minor count's estate in northern Italy when it happened again.
In all fairness, parachuting into the estate hadn't been the best idea. But it was the only thing they could think of, because the defenses were good, and while Alex had a decent plan for getting out through the water main for the estate's self-contained hydroelectric power generator, it wouldn't work the other way without sucking them into the turbines. So, one bribable pilot later, here he was ...
... a thousand feet above the flanks of the Alps with a parachute that didn't work.
"Oh, you've got to be kidding me," he muttered, yanking the cord with increasing desperation. He caught sight of the glimmer of Alex's chute off to his left, though the wind was carrying her away from the estate, not towards it. Irony was having a field day with them this time. At least she and Moz wouldn't have to worry about breaking into the estate to remove his remains, because at this height and this speed, there wouldn't be enough left of him to bother.
Then he stopped falling with a jerk as someone's hands caught his own. At this speed, both their arms should have been dislocated, but all he felt was a sharp wrenching and then he staggered forward, grass under his feet, falling against --
"Peter," Neal said, and hung onto Peter's hands, not letting him vanish off to wherever it was that Peter went when he wasn't saving Neal's life.
Peter stepped backwards. Even by the light of the moon, he looked like Neal remembered: rumpled and tired and annoyed.
"You do remember me," Peter said. "You're not supposed to. Of course, no one is supposed to almost die as often as you do, either."
"If I let go, will you stay?" Neal asked. That came out a bit desperate, so he amended it quickly. "To talk a minute. I want to ask some questions."
"I'll just bet you do," Peter said with a sigh. He crossed his arms. "Since it looks like this is going to keep happening, we may as well. Ask away."
Neal grinned inwardly, but managed to keep it on the inside. He usually got his way sooner or later. "Let's go somewhere that we can sit down, at least." When Peter did nothing, Neal said, "Come on, a minute ago I was a thousand feet in the air and now I'm standing on the ground. I don't know if you want to call it teleportation or something else, but I know you can do it."
Peter heaved a sigh. "This," he said, "this is why we don't talk to you people, because you aren't supposed to know things like that," and he took Neal by the elbow, and suddenly they were standing in the middle of Neal's sumptuous hotel suite. "Better?"
Neal staggered, caught off guard by the sudden change of scenery, but hastily slapped the smiling, slightly bored mask back on his face. "Perfect." Alex was going to be furious, but she could take care of herself and he'd probably never get a better opportunity to ask the questions that had plagued him all his life. He crossed to the bar and poured himself a shot of Ketel One. "What are you drinking?"
"Beer, if you've got it."
Neal turned and looked at him. "Angels drink beer?"
"This one does."
It was expensive beer, at least. Neal opened one and handed it over. "So are you an angel?"
Peter sighed and sat on the arm of one of the spare, sleek-looking couches in the hotel suite's lounge. "More or less. Close enough to count, I suppose. I was human once, a long time ago."
"Really?" Neal said curiously.
Peter shrugged and sipped the beer. "They recruit from those of us who were lawmen in life. The guardian angel gig is a pretty big deal, actually." He turned the beer around to read the label. "Mmm. That's good beer."
"Lawmen, huh?" It just figured that he'd have a guardian angel that was a cop. This was precisely the kind of irony that life loved throwing at him. "What were you? Police? FBI?"
"It was a little before the FBI," Peter said with a slight grin.
"Seriously? How old are you?"
"Why don't we talk about you," Peter said, gesturing to him with the beer. "The point of having a guardian angel isn't so you can pull stupid stunts while fleecing other people of their money, you know. The vast majority of people don't have or need a guardian angel once they're past the age of, oh, twenty or so. The whole point to my department is to make sure that the human race survives the years when they haven't yet figured out that fire is hot, strange dogs bite, and following black-clad men into alleyways isn't a good idea. Then most people develop some common sense, and what happens after that is on their heads, and not the business of the guardian angel division."
Neal grinned brightly. "I'm special, am I?"
"You certainly are," Peter said gloomily. "Do you know how many times I've saved your life in the last year alone?"
"Really? How many?"
"Classified," Peter snapped. "Too many to count off the top of my head, anyway."
Neal thought back on it. "I only saw you the once."
"That's because I'm good at my job. We're not supposed to be seen at all. Sometimes there's not enough advance warning to come up with an unobtrusive way of saving your life, though." He set down the empty bottle, crossed to the bar and opened another one.
"Hey, slow down or they'll confiscate your wings for drunken flying." Peter scowled at him; Neal grinned, unrepentant. "Does alcohol even affect you?" he asked, curious.
"Sure. When I'm here, that is, physically present as I am at the moment, I'm just as solid and real as you are. I can get drunk. I can eat. If I'm careless enough, I can even die. Well," Peter added, "I wouldn't die, technically. I'd most likely be reassigned. Getting killed in the line of duty is a definite screw-up for a guardian angel; they don't tend to give us second chances."
"Taking a bullet for me isn't in your job description?"
"No," Peter said flatly. "My job as your guardian angel is to make sure that I never have to. If it does come down to a situation where there really is no other choice -- either you die, or I die saving you -- then the rule is that I let you go." His eyes were distant, and Neal wondered if he was thinking back to a time that he'd done exactly that, on some previous assignment.
"That's a bit harsh, especially if you're talking about a five-year-old."
"Life is harsh," Peter pointed out. "Kids die. We try to make sure they don't, but there's only so much we can do. In fact, I wasn't supposed to expose myself to you --" He paused, blinked, as Neal snorted quiet laughter. "-- reveal myself in the first place."
"That's not any better."
"No comments from the peanut gallery." But Peter was clearly struggling to suppress his own amusement. Neal got the impression that his guardian angel was really feeling that beer-and-a-half; presumably they didn't drink much in the heavenly cafeteria or wherever he hung out when he wasn't saving Neal from plummeting to his death. "My supervisor wrote me up for that, you know. According to procedure, I should've let the car hit you, or diverted it some other way. And you saw why -- I'm sure you remember how you reacted when you believed that you couldn't die. Can you imagine a world in which every five-year-old child knew that he or she could be as reckless as humanly possible, with no ill effects?"
Neal thought back to his childhood spree of roof-jumping. "I'm not getting why that's bad, though, except it'd keep you guys busy. Better than one of those five-year-olds being flattened by a bus, certainly."
"It's bad because you have to grow up and become a responsible human being. Pain and an understanding of consequences is part of that process." Peter frowned, went for another gulp of the beer only to discover that this one, too, was empty. "I wonder if you're the way you are now because you never really got that understanding hammered into you as a kid."
"I'd say it was hammered pretty hard," Neal said, remembering the bullies in the schoolyard, all those years ago. The sense of betrayal was attenuated by time and maturity, though, into something softer and more like regret.
"Not like it would have been if you hadn't known I was there. Maybe there's some kind of critical period for figuring these things out. Maybe you were already past it when I finally did the right thing and stopped interacting with you. Maybe everything you've stolen in the last fifteen years is on my head ..." Peter reached for another beer, then sighed and stopped himself. "Look, I'm almost certainly going to get yet another demerit when I write up this conversation in my daily report, so I think this is about as far as we ought to go. If I'm not even supposed to show myself to you -- shut up, Neal -- then having long conversations with you is definitely out."
Neal had a vision of a heavenly bureaucracy, angels with little fluttery wings carrying stacks of files, clipboards, Blackberrys ... "So don't report it, then."
Peter stared at him. "You realize I'm an angel, right? And you want me to lie to my superiors?"
"It's what I would do."
Peter stared at him a moment longer, then shook his head. "Yeah. You probably would." And he vanished without another word.
Neal gazed at the empty air. "You still there?" he asked, but the air, of course, did not reply. He collected the beer bottles and dropped them in the trash. At least there was some tangible evidence that he hadn't imagined the whole thing.
Alex turned up on his doorstep ten hours later, covered with mud and grass stains, and furious. Neal told her he'd missed the landing zone, too. He didn't mention the rest of it.
Neal wished he'd taken better advantage of his one opportunity to talk to Peter, because in the following weeks, he kept thinking of questions he really should have asked. Like, was Peter watching him all the time? He didn't want to get too paranoid -- he already had Mozzie as an excellent cautionary tale -- but he had to resist the temptation to shower without turning the bathroom lights on. This also had the potential to put a major crimp in his sex life, not that there was much of that at the moment, since Kate was still incommunicado.
He and Alex went their separate ways in the wake of the botched heist, and Neal moved back to New York for a while. The attraction of Europe was wearing off again, and he missed the city he called home, inasmuch as he called anyplace home. He missed Mozzie. And he'd like to see if he could find Kate.
"You know, you could make your angel self useful and help me find her," Neal said to the empty air in his new apartment. It was a nice place, and dirt cheap for the location. He'd run into the nice older lady who owned the house by pure chance, and it turned out she was open to the idea of having a tenant around the place, so here he was and he paid next to nothing for it. Neal had started out thinking that he was conning her, and was left wondering if he'd actually been taken for a ride instead, or perhaps they'd met in the middle. He had not mentioned what he did for a living, but some of his oblique conversations with June gave him the impression that she knew a whole lot more about him than she let on.
But Peter didn't make himself useful, and Kate had gone underground so thoroughly that even Moz's contacts didn't know where she was, so Neal turned his attention to playing the tourist for a while. He didn't want for money, and New York was relatively safe for him at the moment, with Interpol still combing Europe. So he was temporarily content to spend his days wandering the city's many attractions and art galleries, planning fantasy heists that he never intended to pull off. Peter probably appreciated the time off, Neal thought.
He found his next job at the DeArmitt Gallery. By New York standards, it wasn't a particularly large or famous gallery, but it tended to attract an extremely high quality of work, including some quite expensive pieces. Neal enjoyed most of their shows, and on one of his trips there, he picked up a postcard from a stack at the front desk advertising their upcoming Kleinfeld exhibit.
"Most of Kleinfeld's work was destroyed during the second world war and the years leading up to it," he told Moz over a glass of wine in June's loft. "There are only a handful of pieces in the world, and most of them are going to be in New York in a couple of weeks."
"It's not worth that much," Mozzie objected. "Not even compared to most midlist 20th-century painters. Also, every Kleinfeld I've ever seen was so ugly it hurt the eyes, and these eyes have seen a lot, man."
"That's not the point." Neal was starting to get excited, the more he thought about it. "The point is that this guy was a collage artist, one of the Berlin Dadaists. His art would be next to impossible to forge, not only because of the modern-day scarcity of the materials he used, but also --"
"-- because no one wants to?"
"Because he's obscure enough that it's not easy to find copies or slides of his work at a high enough resolution to work from." Neal grinned and rubbed his hands together. He could feel himself coming alive. "Collage isn't my preferred medium, but that's what makes it a challenge."
"What's security at the gallery like?" Mozzie asked.
"Let's find out."
"Excellent. I'll break out my extensive collection of disguises."
Neal shook his head. "I have a better idea. We'll just ask."
One advantage to the DeArmitt Gallery being rather small was that it wasn't hard to get a lunch appointment with the gallery's assistant manager, whose name was Elizabeth Hart. She sounded nice on the phone, and turned out to be even nicer in person, which almost made Neal feel guilty that they were about to rob her blind.
Almost.
He assumed a cover identity that he and Moz had concocted for a previous job and then never used: artist and sculptor Nick Winters. They still had the old website and all the fake newspaper clippings that they'd thrown together, and the time gap just made it more plausible, since his cover story was that he'd been out of the public eye for a couple of years working on a new collection of paintings. He wasn't quite ready to put on a show yet, but he was looking for a gallery to display them. On his way to the meeting with Elizabeth, he stopped by the storage unit where he kept most of his own art, and used his phone to snap a few pictures of his favorite pieces for demonstration purposes.
"Yes, I've seen you at our openings a few times," Elizabeth said. He had to mask a look of surprise. This woman paid a whole lot more attention to the gallery's daily goings-on than he'd expected.
In fact, she turned out to be a very hands-on manager. The gallery couldn't afford a large staff, and she often ended up doing everything from hanging paintings to making flyers when their in-house artist was on vacation. She was willing to answer Neal's paranoid-artist questions about security, mostly to his satisfaction, and he only had to drop a couple of hints before she invited him to come by the following day and tour their facilities. "And bring a portfolio with you," she added. "Obviously I can't make promises until my boss and I review your work, but I believe one of the functions of an art gallery is to showcase the work of upcoming local artists from the community as well as the internationally known. We like to show a mix of different artists and styles, so we'll also be considering how your work fits into our show calendar as a whole. In the upcoming month, for example, we have a Kleinfeld exhibit and a show of Tang Dynasty sculpture opening together."
"The postmodern and the traditional, juxtaposed," Neal said. "Very smart." He'd been drawn to the forgery challenge of the Kleinfelds, but he wondered if it would be possible to walk off with a bit of Tang sculpture while he was at it. Just a small sculpture ...
He took his leave from her after making an appointment to tour the gallery tomorrow afternoon, and went back to June's loft to prepare a portfolio of some sort. He'd been as vague as possible about "Nick's" show, which would give him leeway to look through his existing original work and come up with a suitably commercial-sounding theme that fit a subset of it. He still had time to create a few new pieces if he needed to, and it wasn't like any of it was going to hang in the gallery anyway; once the robbery occurred, or on some other pretext if necessary, "Nick" would get cold feet and pull out --
"Do you realize what you'll be doing to Elizabeth Hart's career?" said Peter's voice behind him, and Neal jumped a foot in the air.
"Sneak up on a person, why don't you," he said when his heart rate calmed down.
"I wasn't sneaking, I was already here," Peter said, and while Neal tried to figure out how to point out that this was not actually any better, he went on: "She's responsible for the security of the exhibit. She'll probably be fired at the very least, and she may even end up being charged as an accessory if you go through with this."
Neal firmly tamped down guilt. "I'm an art thief, Peter; it's what I do. Elizabeth Hart will be just fine. She may never even realize that a theft took place at all, if Moz and I do a thorough job." He frowned, as the realization crept upon him that this was the first time he'd seen Peter when his life wasn't at risk. That he knew about ... "Is something lethal about to happen to me?"
"What? Not that I'm aware of. The future isn't in my jurisdiction," Peter said. "No, I came to talk you out of this idiocy."
"This idiocy is my life's work," Neal said. He retrieved a wine glass from the cabinet above the sink and held it out. "Wine? No beer, sorry."
"I don't want a drink, I want to convince you not to steal the painting," Peter said.
"You've never tried to stop me before."
"I never realized that your entire criminal career might be my fault before," Peter said with a very un-angelic air of gloom, then drew himself together. "So, if I did break you somehow, it's my responsibility to get you back on the path that you should have been on in the first place, if I hadn't messed up all those years ago by revealing myself when I rescued you."
"And what path would that be?" Neal asked, amused.
"I'm not sure. But clearly it isn't this. Neal, you're smart, you're talented, and you are, even if you like to deny it, a decent person. You're better than this."
"That's your setting-my-life-straight pep talk?" Neal said, and laughed. "Come on, Peter. Regardless of why things turned out this way, and personally I think you're giving yourself way too much credit -- I like my life. There's nothing I'd want to change about it."
"You make your living by destroying other people's lives."
"That's a bit of a stretch, don't you think? I take things from faceless corporations or from people who have so much money they don't know what to do with it. I'm hardly Robin Hood, I must admit, but I'm not a --" He floundered for some kind of suitable insult. "I'm not a common street thief, and I never take anything from people who can't afford to lose it."
"Fine. I hoped I wouldn't have to do this, but ..." Peter held out a hand, which was now holding a stack of neat, color-coded file folders that Neal was pretty sure had been nowhere on his person a minute ago.
"What's that?" Neal asked, eyeing them with trepidation.
"With you behaving like a sane adult for the last few weeks, I've been able to afford the time to do a little research." Peter flipped open the top file folder. "Do you remember Frank Kozlowski?"
Neal ran the name around his brain. "Can't say it rings a bell, no."
"He was one of the security guards at the bank that you and your little buddy robbed in 2003. Remember that? Cleaned out the safe deposit boxes."
"Yes, I do remember that, and I also remember that not a single person was hurt. Mozzie and I didn't lay a finger on anybody; we didn't even see anybody. We were in and out, and no one was the wiser until the next morning."
"Until next morning, that's right," Peter said, flipping through the file. "By which time you two were long gone. But you didn't think the bank manager was simply going to roll over and accept the loss of several million dollars in deposit-box contents, and the resulting loss of business from some of their wealthiest clients, did you? They had to pin the blame on someone. Both Kozlowski and his partner were fired, and it took him eight months to find another job. He and his wife lost their house."
"Listen, it's not like we planned --"
"Or this," Peter said, opening the file underneath. "What about Lydia Drummond? Does that one ring a bell?"
Neal sighed and sat down at the table, resigned to the fact that this guilt trip was probably going to continue for a while. "I'm not going to like this, am I?"
"Lydia Drummond was one of the bank customers whose jewelry you stole. Diamond necklace, matching earrings and bracelet?"
"I think I remember the jewelry," Neal said cautiously. "But that doesn't mean -- Look, everyone we stole from had more money than they knew what to do with. I don't remember Lydia Drummond specifically, you're right, but there wasn't a single person we stole from in that heist who couldn't have afforded to replace the things we took a dozen times over."
"Some things can't be replaced," Peter said. "That diamond necklace had been a gift from her first husband when he was courting her. He died ten years later, but she never stopped loving him. She only took it out on the anniversary of his death. Until you stole and fenced it, of course."
"Tell me she didn't kill herself or anything like that."
"Does it matter to you?" Peter asked gently.
"Of course it matters! Come on, Peter, you know me; you've been watching me since I was a kid. You know I don't get my rocks off by hurting people."
Peter sighed. He closed the folder. "I know you don't intend to. But I've just listed two people who were directly hurt by your actions, two people whose names you didn't even bother to learn. One was rich, one wasn't, but they're both human beings, just like you." He set the stack of files on the edge of the table. "Here are more. I'm going to leave this here for you to read."
"Wait --" Neal began, but Peter vanished as soon as his fingertips left the stack of files.
Neal groaned. Morbidly curious, he slid a random file out of the stack, then put it back without opening it.
"You're my guardian angel, not my conscience," he said aloud to the empty room. "My conscience works just fine, thanks. I don't need you looking over my shoulder, let alone trying to run my life."
There was no response, and the emptiness felt very ... empty. Neal dialed Moz's number; he could use some help going through and collating his art for "Nick Winters'" portfolio.
He was right on time for his tour of the gallery, and Elizabeth came down to meet him at the front desk. He'd expected to be pawned off on an underling, but he wasn't unhappy to see her again.
"Most of our smaller temporary exhibits end up in either the Sato Room or the Whitney Room," she said, leading him across the gallery's spotless white floor with brisk taps of her high heels. "The Sato is bigger, with more floor space, but the Whitney has better light."
The Whitney Room, Neal recalled, was where the Kleinfeld exhibit was going to be. He tried not to show undue interest in it, instead guiding Elizabeth into a discussion of the possibility for setting up refreshment tables offering wine and hors d'ouevres in the larger room.
There was a stepladder half-hidden in an alcove in the Sato Room; he probably wouldn't have noticed it except that he was checking all the corners, entrances, exits, locations of cameras and so forth. Peeking around the corner, he saw that a panel was stripped off the wall. "Renovations?"
"Of a sort," Elizabeth said, coolly herding him away. "We're actually upgrading our security cameras in this room for the Tang exhibit. It was overdue anyway."
He couldn't really fish too much more on that topic without looking suspicious, but before he left he got a look at the "This premises protected by ..." security sticker on one of the cameras, and made a mental note of the company name, Diamond Security. Slipping Mozzie onto the team upgrading the cameras would give them a perfect opportunity to plant a little hardware of their own ...
Feeling cheerful and confident, he opened the door to June's loft and stopped dead at the sight of Peter sitting at his table with a brand-new stack of file folders.
"Oh, come on, now what?"
"Some more reading material for you," Peter said, holding them up. "You said you don't like hurting people. Excellent. Prove it. These are dossiers on everyone who works at the DeArmitt Gallery, starting with Elizabeth Hart. Reading about them years after the theft, when there's nothing you can do to change it, is one thing. Can you go through with it if they all have names, faces, lives? If they're not just an abstract idea to you, but fellow human beings?"
"You're really becoming a pain, you know that?" Neal uncorked a bottle of wine, trying to ignore his unwelcome houseguest.
Peter flipped open the top folder. "Let's start with Elizabeth, why don't we, since you've been seeing so much of her lately. Elizabeth Frances Hart, born January 23, 1974 in Syracuse, New York. One sister, three years younger --"
"Let me make myself clear. This isn't funny anymore, Peter. I want you to leave. Now."
"It was never meant to be funny," Peter said quietly, and he disappeared, leaving the stack of files behind. The top one was still open.
Neal crossed to the table, reluctantly, and reached to close the file, then hesitated, arrested by Elizabeth's smiling photo pinned neatly to the edge. Where had that photo come from? It looked recent; she was still wearing her hair the same way, at least. He had an amusing but vaguely creepy mental image of his guardian angel sneaking around invisibly taking photographs. Skimming the first page of the dossier, he started reading a paragraph at random: Hobbies: cooking, reading novels (prefers literary fiction, with a weakness for military adventure fiction: Tom Clancy, etc). Captain of roller derby team in college, still plays occasionally --
He snapped it shut. If Peter wanted to play angel stalker with the staff of the DeArmitt Gallery, that was his business. Neal didn't have to join in. In two weeks he'd never see any of these people again, anyway.
Over the next week, things fell into place, one piece at a time. Mozzie was able to get a close look at the security cameras and plant some of their own hardware under the guise of a Diamond Security consultant, though he wasn't forthcoming with the exact details -- "Better you don't know," was all he'd had to say. Neal threw himself into forging a picture-perfect Kleinfeld, and tuned out the world, cheerfully immersed in his favorite pastime. Well, one of his favorite pastimes, anyway.
Four days after Neal's meeting with Elizabeth at the gallery, Peter popped into existence in June's apartment, causing Neal to fling his handful of carefully prepared bits of 1920s German newspapers all over the floor. At least he didn't drop the glue pot, which would have been a worse disaster. "You enjoy doing that, don't you?"
"It does give me some pleasure, yes." Peter frowned at the partly completed collage on the easel. "I see you're still determined to persist in this insanity."
"This insanity is my job, my calling, my reason for getting up in the morning -- so yes. I do." He straightened up with a handful of newspaper scraps, and reached for his glue pot.
"If appealing to your better nature isn't having any effect," Peter said, "perhaps your sense of self-preservation might work, assuming you have one. You and Mozzie aren't the only people casing the gallery."
Neal laid the glue pot back down, intrigued. "Really? Someone else wants the Kleinfelds? I'm going to love telling Moz that."
"I don't think they're after the Kleinfelds," Peter said. "Based on their surveillance, my guess would be it's the Tang Dynasty art they want."
He might have known he'd have some competition if he wanted to go after those. "Who are they? Do you know?"
"I'm not sure," Peter said, sounding frustrated. "At a guess, I'd say the Russian mafia, because I'm fairly sure that's the language they've been speaking when I've managed to eavesdrop on them. And Russian, at least modern Russian, happens to be one of the languages I don't understand."
"Let me get this straight," Neal said. "You've spent the last four days lurking around the gallery?"
"Not the entire four days, and I don't think lurking is the most accurate --"
"How in the world do you justify all of this in your reports, if you aren't even supposed to talk to me? I'd think steering me onto a new career path is blowing your non-interference policy all to hell, so to speak."
Peter's evasive expression was answer enough. Neal laughed in sheer delight. "You're falsifying reports, aren't you?"
"I wouldn't say falsifying," Peter said stiffly. "I may have left a few things out."
"Like everything you've done in the last week?"
Peter disappeared without another word. Once he stopped laughing, Neal did feel a little guilty. Just a little. Maybe the corruption was going both ways and Peter was successfully managing to infect Neal with his angelic guilt complex.
A little guilt, Neal thought, was probably a good thing: it would keep him on his toes. He needed to stop listening to Peter, though, before it got worse. And he'd have to ask Moz if there was any word on the street about an upcoming heist at the DeArmitt. He was pretty sure that Peter wasn't far enough gone yet to lie just to keep him away from the gallery, which meant there really was a rival group casing it, and that could be trouble.
Between forging the Kleinfeld and planning the actual art swap, Neal was so engrossed that it came as a total surprise when Elizabeth called him to set up another meeting to talk about the scheduling of his imaginary art show. He'd completely forgotten about it -- so completely, in fact, that he almost answered the phone as "Neal" rather than "Nick" even when her name came up on the caller ID. Sloppy.
They arranged to meet in Central Park. It was a gorgeous day -- brilliantly sunny, but with the slight undercurrent of coolness that heralded the approach of fall. They bought lunch from a sidewalk vendor and strolled in the dappled sun and shade while they ate.
"I'm afraid we don't have any openings on our show calendar until next summer," Elizabeth said, balling up her napkin and tossing it into a nearby trash bin. "We're definitely interested in showing your work, though, Nick. The manager and I both thought your Chicago show was excellent, although your recent work is in a very different style."
She'd been looking at the website, then. The fake images from the Chicago show were actually a number of charcoal nude studies Neal had done while sitting in on a couple of art classes, photoshopped into some pictures he'd taken on an entirely unrelated visit to the Art Institute of Chicago.
"I've been experimenting with new techniques," Neal said. "I don't want to get stale, get stuck in a --" He had to force himself not to stop with his mouth hanging open, but just keep moving, keep talking. "-- rut. Creatively and personally. You know how it is."
His mouth rambled on, but his eyes kept roaming, because he'd just seen Peter, fully corporeal and visible, sitting on one of the park benches watching them. A bench they were about to pass shortly. Still babbling about creative technique, Neal steered Elizabeth back into the shade of the trees and down a different path.
He'd figured it wouldn't help, and he was right. They ran into Peter another hundred yards or so along the path: they rounded a turn and there he was, stepping forward. "Hi, Neal," he said with sardonic cheer.
Neal froze on the verge of answering, as he realized that it wouldn't help his cover to make Elizabeth think that Nick Winters had conversations with himself. He glanced sideways at her, saw her uncertain but friendly smile in Peter's direction, and the question was answered: he wasn't the only person who could see Peter. Unfortunately the delay meant that Elizabeth had an opportunity to speak first. "I'm afraid you've mistaken us for someone else," she said.
"Nope," Peter said. "Regardless of what he's told you, his name is Neal Caffrey." Neal was making frantic throat-cutting gestures out of Elizabeth's line of sight, which his meddlesome guardian angel ignored. "He's a con artist and art thief. He's planning to rob your gallery. I'm sorry," he added softly, as Elizabeth stared at him with wide, baffled blue eyes.
"Excuse me, we need to have a talk right now." Neal grabbed Peter by the arm -- he was still dressed just the same as every other time Neal had seen him, in the long camel-colored overcoat. "Old frat buddy, thinks he's a lot funnier than he is," he said over his shoulder, and towed Peter a few yards away so that they could speak without being overheard. "What are you doing?" he demanded through a pasted-on smile for Elizabeth's benefit.
"Saving you from yourself," Peter retorted.
"Destroying everything Mozzie and I have worked for, you mean."
"Keeping you from being shot by Russian mobsters is more like it."
"Peter," Neal said between his teeth. "I'm an adult, remember? I've been an adult for years. What happened to letting me make my own mistakes so that I can learn from them? Or do your rules only apply when they're convenient for you?"
Neal shut up, as Elizabeth was approaching them. "I really feel like I've missed a few key pieces of this conversation," she said, looking back and forth between the two of them. Her tone was polite bafflement with steel underneath, and Neal suddenly, for the first time, got the impression that underneath all of her sweet smiles, Elizabeth Hart might be a force to be reckoned with.
Peter opened his mouth, looked at Neal, and shut it again. He was clearly in the throes of a major moral dilemma. "Like I said," Neal said, "it's a running joke between us that got a little out of hand this time. Elizabeth, this is Peter, a very old friend. Peter, meet Elizabeth, the manager of the gallery where I plan to show my work next year, which I believe we've already talked about."
He said all of this as fast as possible, in the hopes that Peter wouldn't be able to squeeze a word in until he'd already gotten his version of the story into Elizabeth's ears. Peter glared at him, and then shifted gears, giving Elizabeth a flustered smile. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to get you involved in this," he said, which was certainly ambiguous enough to apply to either Neal's version of events or his own.
Elizabeth looked politely confused, but held out her hand, which Peter, looking even more flustered, accepted. "I'm happy to meet a friend of Nick's," she said. "We were going to get ice cream -- would you like to join us?"
Peter's look of frozen terror was, Neal thought, probably matched or exceeded by his own. Unfortunately Peter caught Neal's expression, firmed up and managed to say, "Okay," in a somewhat faint voice.
Neal expected the whole experience to be excruciating, but actually it was ... fun: himself and the guardian angel he'd known all his life and a pretty, intelligent lady who liked to talk about art, all strolling in the park in the sunshine eating ice cream. Peter's attempts to sabotage Neal's heist had gone underground, in the form of small barbs or verbal feints that Neal was able to head off before they veered into dangerous territory. Peter didn't talk much at all, though, because he couldn't exactly talk about himself, so Elizabeth talked about herself -- mostly information that had been in the dossier, though it wasn't like Neal could bring that up -- or she and Neal talked about art.
"Oh, goodness," Elizabeth said, checking her watch. "I was supposed to be back to the gallery half an hour ago. It was very nice meeting you, Peter."
Peter blushed to the roots of his hair, and Neal thought Oh crap as the penny suddenly dropped. He hadn't seen this particular complication coming, though he realized in retrospect that he should have.
Elizabeth hesitated a moment longer, as if she wanted to say something but couldn't quite get the words out. Asking for a phone number? Good luck with that one, Neal thought. Then she said a hasty goodbye to both of them and hurried off.
Neal said, "So all that lurking around the gallery wasn't just to keep an eye on the Russians, huh?"
"I have no idea what you're talking about," Peter snapped.
"Yeah, you do."
He expected Peter to just vanish, his usual way of avoiding awkward conversations, but instead Peter took him by the arm and hauled him behind the nearest tree. An instant later they were in Neal's apartment.
Neal staggered and caught the edge of the table. "I wish you'd warn me before you do that."
Peter ignored him, sank down at the table and buried his face in his hands. "I'm in so much trouble," he said, muffled.
"You really do fail at the whole non-interference thing," Neal pointed out. "Beer?" After the last time the angel had showed up unannounced in his apartment, he'd decided that it was just going to keep happening. He might as well resign himself to it and lay in appropriate supplies.
Peter took it and downed a third of the bottle in one long swallow. "It's never gonna go anywhere, you know," he said. "It couldn't. I'm an angel. She's a human. It wouldn't work."
"I don't see what the problem is," Neal said, pouring himself a glass of wine. "You were human once, right?"
"Yeah, two thousand years ago. The dating scene has changed a bit since then."
"Really? That long?" Neal tried to imagine Peter as a Roman centurion. The image of Peter in a toga was disturbing enough that he shook his head to get rid of it. "Look, the details might change, but people have been figuring out this dating thing for a lot longer than two thousand years. If you want it and she wants it, and I can tell you, she certainly didn't look unwilling -- what's the problem?"
"The problem is it's against the rules. Fraternizing with a human? They'd do a whole lot more than take my wings for that."
"You do have wings! I knew it." Neal glanced at the air above Peter's shoulders. "Why can't I see them?"
"Because you're human," Peter said snappishly. "You don't have eyes that can see. But anyway, even leaving aside the fact that it's highly illegal for an angel to even think about doing anything like that with a human, there's also the fact that whenever you become capable of surviving on your own -- not that you appear to be in any danger of that yet --"
"Hey."
"-- I'll be reassigned Heaven only knows where ... and I mean that literally. My next assignment could be in Nairobi, in rural Mongolia, in a tiny sheepherding town in the Pyrenees. What would I do, ask Elizabeth to move there? Write letters to her?" He tilted the bottle and found it empty.
Neal set the whole six-pack on the table in front of him. Lending a sympathetic ear to an angel having a romantic crisis wasn't exactly how he'd planned to spend his evening, but, well, they were ahead of schedule on the heist, so he had time. And he'd always wondered what would happen if he got Peter drunk.
The answer, come to find out, was that Peter drunk was very much the same as Peter sober, except a little more talkative and relaxed. They veered off the topic of Elizabeth and somehow started talking about Kate -- not that there was much about the Kate situation that Peter didn't know, since he'd been there for all of it, but it was oddly nice to be able to talk about Kate to someone who would just listen. Mozzie had very definite opinions on the Kate situation, and Alex ... well, talking to Alex about any part of his romantic life got too awkward.
Once Peter got a few beers in him, Neal managed to get him to talk about the world he'd grown up in, just a little bit. He was still vague about where it had been -- Neal thought maybe Britain around the time of the Roman occupation, if he were going to guess. Wherever it had been, Peter had several hilarious and risque stories about the other guys he'd served with in the army or clan peacekeeping force or whatever branch of service he'd been in. A lawman, Neal thought. He was a cop in 200 A.D. and he's still a cop now, he's just an invisible cop with wings.
But he was also good company, which was something Neal had never suspected, or at least hadn't consciously realized. And there was another thing he'd never realized, but he found himself thinking about it, as he poured himself another glass of wine and looked at the tired, rumpled, now slightly drunken man across the table from him. He really liked Peter. When the inevitable reassignment came, as Peter kept assuring him that it would, Neal was going to miss him. And not just because he'd have to be a little more careful about checking his safety harness before climbing tall buildings.
Although, well, that too. But it wasn't the most important reason. Not at all. It wasn't Peter the angel that he'd miss; it was Peter the human being.
Elizabeth called him the next day. "Nick, I'm sorry to bother you. I really feel very silly for asking you this."
"Hey, you're the lady who's offering me a gallery show; you can ask me anything." He was almost done with the forged Kleinfeld, and feeling on top of the world; making a pretty woman smile would be the icing on the cake.
"It's not a big thing," she said, and hesitated. "Your friend Peter. I don't even know his last name, so I can't look him up, and I was just wondering if you might have his number."
Crud. The thought occurred to him that it would serve Peter right for all his guardian-angel meddling if Neal went and did the same thing back to him. He entertained the amusing fantasy of matchmaking Peter and Elizabeth for a few seconds before realizing that it wouldn't be fair to Elizabeth, who seemed like a nice person, to jerk her around like that. "Just a minute," he said, and covered the phone with his hand. "Peter?" he said to the empty air in the apartment. No answer. Peter was probably over at the gallery stalking her in person, anyway. "Sorry, I can't find it. Why don't I look around and text it to you later?"
"Thank you; I appreciate that." She laughed. "Before I go, can I ask you a personal question, Nick?"
"Um, sure?" Of course, the answer to most personal questions for "Nick" wouldn't be the same as for Neal; he mentally prepared himself to come up with a lie on the spot.
"I know this is terribly silly, and I never believed in anything of the sort before, but when I met your friend Peter yesterday -- I don't know, Nick, I've heard of love at first sight and always thought it was a myth, but I really did feel something. Do you believe that you can look at a person and know they're the one, even before you speak to them?"
He thought instantly of Kate -- looking across a crowded room, seeing her face, her eyes, and just knowing. "Yes," he said quietly. "I do believe that. I don't know if Peter is the one for you" -- for both your sakes, I really hope not -- "but I do believe it can happen."
"Thank you, Nick," she said, and something inside him twinged. He didn't figure out what was bothering him until he'd said goodbye and disconnected the call; then it came to him, as he stood gazing at the forgery on his easel. He liked Elizabeth, and there was a part of him -- a tiny, perverse, stubborn part -- that wanted to blurt it all out to her: his real name, his real identity, his real reason for contacting the gallery. As Peter had done yesterday, he thought, and though he'd never admit it to Peter, there was a tiny little corner of himself that had actually been relieved. Let Elizabeth see him as he really was ...
... a thief, a liar, and a man whose only purpose in talking to her was to rob her gallery, he thought, seeing himself for an uncomfortable instant through her eyes, as she surely must see him if she ever learned the truth.
His phone buzzed: Mozzie. Saved by the bell, he thought.
"I don't know where you got your tip from, but your mystery informant was right," Mozzie said. "The Russian mob's been sniffing around the DeArmitt Gallery. Well, actually not the mob as a whole; the mobster in question is a very minor player in their power games named Vladimir Dimikov. He's known on the street as Vlad the Impaler."
"Do I want to know how he got the nickname?"
"Not really, no."
"Think they're here for the Tang sculptures?"
"I would make an educated guess that they're not after the Kleinfelds," Mozzie said. "We could pull the plug on this one, man. Dimikov's not a guy you want to mess with."
Neal thought about it, then said, "No. This could work to our advantage, actually." His mind began to spin the possibilities, and he felt the rising excitement of a successful heist in the making. "Another robbery at the same time, especially if it's a more high-profile one, will keep the cops busy and confuse everyone. We might even be able to openly throw suspicion on Dimikov's bunch, give the police someone to chase after, while we sip wine back at June's."
And for that matter, he thought as he hung up, Elizabeth and Peter's mutual attraction couldn't have come at a better time. Elizabeth probably would have followed up on Peter's suspicious comments about Neal the previous day -- hell, suspicious nothing; he'd blown the whole charade -- if she hadn't been too distracted by Peter himself, and Peter was too busy mooning after Elizabeth to keep a close eye on Neal.
As long as he's still paying enough attention to do his job when the time comes.
Close on the heels of this thought came another one, even more unwelcome: Would I have been quite so willing to take on Dimikov's goons if I didn't know there was a guardian angel hovering over my shoulder, ready to snatch me away if anything does go wrong?
But Mozzie had no such guarantee. Neither, for that matter, did Elizabeth, or anyone else who worked at the gallery.
Maybe Peter's right; maybe it does make me behave more recklessly, knowing he's there. And other people get caught in the crossfire.
He'd just have to be careful, he thought, and more than usually prepared to back out if things started going wrong.
Part Two