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White Collar IN SPACE!
I thought about trying to come up with a better title for this, but what else could so accurately capture its essence? This is White Collar ... IN SPAAAACE! Written for ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fandom_stocking, naturally.
Alternate universe, 2100 words, gen, no spoilers for anything canonical; also posted to AO3.
Dropping out of hyperspace into a zone infested with pirates was always a gamble, but the viewscreen was clear except for the derelict hulk of the cargo ship they'd been sent to investigate. Still, Peter waited to let his guard down until Jones, manning the scanners, gave him a thumbs-up. "Looks all clear, sir."
"Bring us in," Peter told Diana, and she nodded, her hands light and deft on the pilot controls.
The Galactic Search & Rescue Patrol ship Taurus's searchlight swept across the derelict vessel's hull. Peter noted the scars of heavy weapons fire, as he'd feared. Not a hyperspace malfunction, but a pirate attack.
The ship was a Class-IV cargo transport. She would have had a minimal crew and mostly automated defenses. At least he could hope there wouldn't be too many casualties on board. He hated recovering bodies; it was one of his least favorite parts of the job. He loved the investigative aspect, figuring out what had gone wrong and searching little-explored areas of the galaxy for missing ships. But sometimes you got something like this: a pirate-stripped cargo ship, missing for weeks.
At least there was little chance that anyone was still hanging around. Stumbling upon a robbery in progress was apt to lead to a firefight that the Taurus didn't have the manpower or firepower to win. Peter glanced down at his mechanical hand, flexing it automatically: a memento of one such fight, early in his career.
Still, it wasn't necessarily clear sailing in any case. Pirates had been known to leave nasty little surprises behind, booby traps and other fun things for the authorities to stumble across. Good thing he had the very best crew in the S&R Patrol at his back. Peter swept a proud gaze across the Taurus's small bridge.
Diana guided their little ship to a great slash across the derelict's hull. Debris floated around them. "It looks good so far," Jones reported. "No life signs, and no sign of any happy little surprises from our pirate friends. The only odd thing is an anomalous energy reading from the ship's lower section."
"What's down there?"
Jones pulled up schematics of the ship's class. "It's near the engine room. Could be a lifepod; it's possible one of the crew made it that far. I can't tell any more without getting better telemetry from inside."
Of course it couldn't be easy. Peter reached for his sidearm and checked the charge. "Let's go, then."
***
By now, they had a well-established system. Jones manned the patrol ship, and Diana was at Peter's side. Snug inside their armored recon suits, they entered the derelict through its torn-up hull.
There were few signs of fighting inside, which meant the pirates had taken it quickly. The question was what the pirates had wanted. According to the manifest, the ship had been carrying botanical specimens bound for one of the newly terraformed worlds. There was nothing to interest pirates, unless they were especially desperate pirates. And this area, if Peter's information was correct, was prowled by Keller's crew. They were smart and ruthless and good at what they did. If this was their work, they'd come here looking for something specific.
The engine core had been destroyed, but Jones's directions over the comm led Peter and Diana into the corridors beyond, weightless in the darkness of the abandoned ship. "You're almost on top of it," Jones said.
"I'll be damned." It was a lifepod, human-sized and, to judge by its glowing lights, occupied. The destruction of the engine core must have masked its signals, so that the pirates had overlooked it. Peter and his crew wouldn't have picked up the readings, either, if the core's radiation hadn't had a chance to die down.
Maybe. Or maybe it was a trap.
"Looks like its charge is just about gone, boss," Diana said, studying the weakly flickering lights. "Whoever's in here is in bad shape." She touched the panel with one armored hand. "But still alive. Barely."
"Hopefully it's one of the crew, and not one of the pirates." But there was no choice in any case; they weren't just going to leave a human being to die in the cold reaches of interstellar space. They attached grapples and used the suits' powerful servos to pry the lifepod free of the debris in which it was lodged. Once they got it loose, it was a simple matter to tow it through the corridors, back to an exit point where Jones could pick them up.
In the Taurus's cargo bay, Diana scanned the pod while Peter stripped off his suit. "Clear of radiation," she reported. "Let's get it open."
Not for the first time, Peter wished they had a doctor on board. But they couldn't wait until they jumped back to civilized space to open the pod. Based on the readings, it was at the very edge of its tolerances already. These pods weren't meant for long-term use, only short-term life support.
Peter got a float pallet ready, unsealed a blanket and spread it out, while Diana worked on the pod's seals. She looked up; Peter nodded. Diana cracked the pod open, and Peter got his first look at the person they'd rescued.
... or at least what little he could see through the snarl of wires and tubes that made up the pod's life-support system. Peter could tell that their mystery guest was a dark-haired male, naked and stone-still, curled inside the pod's cradle. The pod's automatic disengagement protocol had been set into motion when Diana opened it, and the tubes and wires withdrew, leaving him limp and unfettered. His skin was ice-cold to the touch. Peter and Diana moved together, lifting him out. Peter got his first good look at the stranger's face -- and nearly dropped him.
"What?" Diana asked, looking up.
"It's Neal Caffrey," Peter said. His voice sounded calm to his own ears; he just hoped that it sounded normal to Diana.
Diana whistled softly. "The Neal Caffrey? He's wanted on half the planets in the known galaxy. We just stumbled onto someone with a half-million-credit bounty on his head, which, I have to say, it's a shame we're not eligible to collect." She shook her head. "Well, at least we won't have to DNA-type him to find out who he is."
Peter kept moving on autopilot, setting Neal's limp body on the float pallet and tucking the blanket gently around him. He was so still and cold that he seemed dead; only the faint rise and fall of his chest gave the lie to that. Diana slapped a handful of different metabolic-boost patches onto his shoulders, neck and forehead, and between the two of them, they floated him up to sickbay.
"You okay, boss?" Diana asked as they transferred Neal to one of the sickbay cradle-beds. This was Peter's first indication that he didn't look as calm as he thought he did.
"I'm all right," he said anyway, and looked down onto Neal's face, slack in repose. "Caffrey and I have a history, that's all. Before I started working with you."
"You chased him," Diana guessed.
"Among other things."
Half a million credits. They might have just found the pirates' motivation for attacking the ship. Except ... if Caffrey had been their objective, they'd gone off and left their prize on the derelict vessel. It was always possible that Neal had been with the pirates, but one thing Peter knew very well was that Neal was nonviolent. He'd stolen a lot of things, conned a lot of people, and even once spent 24 hours as the ruler of his own planet before the authorities caught up, but he'd never physically hurt anyone. The idea of Neal joining a pirate crew -- especially Keller's bunch -- turned Peter's stomach. It just wouldn't happen.
On the other hand, what had Neal Caffrey been doing on an ordinary cargo ship en route to a backwater planet on the edge of the galaxy?
"I get the feeling I'm going to want to hear this story," Diana said.
"Later." Much later, if he could help it. Possibly never. "I can handle things down here. Why don't you go up top and help Jones with the scanner sweeps?"
Diana rolled her eyes. "Wonderful, stuck with the gruntwork again."
"I'll be going over the scanner results from inside the ship, so don't feel like you're getting off easy," Peter said. "I just don't want to leave our boy Caffrey alone. He's known for escaping from damn near anything."
"Uh-huh," Diana said. The trouble with a smart crew, very much in tune with him, was that they knew him too well.
But she did leave. Peter made sure Neal was settled in the sickbay life-support cradle and then got himself a capsule of coffee and a palmtop reader, and drew up a chair beside Neal. The readouts looked good; his life signs were coming up, back into the green zone.
"Damn it, Caffrey," Peter muttered. Always a thorn in his side. Still.
He cued up the results from the sensor sweeps he and Diana had taken inside the ship, and began collating them into his report on the wreck. He couldn't feel the movement of the ship, with the artificial gravity compensating for acceleration, but Diana and Jones would be circling the derelict, taking more scans.
There was a faint moan from the life-support cradle. Peter hastily set down his coffee and reader, and leaned over.
Neal's eyelids fluttered. His eyes were still that same shocking shade of blue.
"Hey," Peter said gently.
Neal blinked. Squinted. Closed his eyes again. "Well, shit," he muttered, his voice a faint, dry rasp. "I guess that makes you, what, three and oh?"
"Eh, call this one a gray area," Peter said. "I wasn't actually looking for you. And you did save my life about four times back on Kieros-IV." Annoying little bastard, he just kept doing things like that.
Neal swallowed, his throat working. Peter brought him a capsule of water, lifted his head and helped him drink.
"I feel like absolute shit," Neal muttered when Peter eased his head back down.
"That's because you've been in a cheap life-support pod for about a week longer than its maximum rating. It's amazing you're alive." But of course he was alive, because Neal Caffrey had nine lives -- and because he and Peter had been meeting in the damnedest places since Peter was a Galactic Fleet cadet who got drunk and lost in the markets of Terra Nova, and Neal was a twelve-year-old thief working the back alleys of those same markets. Peter might have known they'd catch up with each other again at some point, even though he was now in a division of the Galactic Fleet that shouldn't have involved chasing con artists.
And one reason why he'd requested the transfer was because he didn't in good conscience want to catch Neal anymore.
Even if Neal was still doing stupid things like this, and probably needed to be thrown in a nice safe jail cell somewhere.
"Don't suppose you want to tell me what you were doing in a life-support pod on a derelict vessel in the middle of the seventh quadrant," Peter said.
Neal blinked; he seemed on the verge of slipping back into sleep, but then his tired eyes found Peter's. "Is everyone dead?" he asked, and there was something open and vulnerable about it.
"Signs point to yes," Peter said. "But we haven't found any bodies yet."
"Oh," Neal murmured.
"You weren't with the pirates."
Neal shook his head.
"But you weren't with the crew either."
Another headshake.
Peter sighed. "You owe me that story," he said. "As payment for saving your life -- again -- if nothing else."
"Later," Neal whispered.
"Yeah," Peter said. "Later."
He tugged a blanket over Neal, dialed up the temperature a little bit, and settled back to putting his report together. Certain recordings (say, of the retrieval of a particular lifepod) might have been shuffled off to another section of the report, one which could be edited or deleted if it turned out to be absolutely necessary. It wouldn't be the first time he'd done that kind of thing.
At some point Neal's hand slipped out from under the blanket and the fingers, cold and dry, found Peter's mechanical ones. Peter let him hang on. Sooner or later they'd have to revert to cop and criminal, and sooner or later he'd need to get the full story of what had happened here.
But not right now.
And it was damned good to see him again.
~
fandom_stocking, naturally.Alternate universe, 2100 words, gen, no spoilers for anything canonical; also posted to AO3.
Dropping out of hyperspace into a zone infested with pirates was always a gamble, but the viewscreen was clear except for the derelict hulk of the cargo ship they'd been sent to investigate. Still, Peter waited to let his guard down until Jones, manning the scanners, gave him a thumbs-up. "Looks all clear, sir."
"Bring us in," Peter told Diana, and she nodded, her hands light and deft on the pilot controls.
The Galactic Search & Rescue Patrol ship Taurus's searchlight swept across the derelict vessel's hull. Peter noted the scars of heavy weapons fire, as he'd feared. Not a hyperspace malfunction, but a pirate attack.
The ship was a Class-IV cargo transport. She would have had a minimal crew and mostly automated defenses. At least he could hope there wouldn't be too many casualties on board. He hated recovering bodies; it was one of his least favorite parts of the job. He loved the investigative aspect, figuring out what had gone wrong and searching little-explored areas of the galaxy for missing ships. But sometimes you got something like this: a pirate-stripped cargo ship, missing for weeks.
At least there was little chance that anyone was still hanging around. Stumbling upon a robbery in progress was apt to lead to a firefight that the Taurus didn't have the manpower or firepower to win. Peter glanced down at his mechanical hand, flexing it automatically: a memento of one such fight, early in his career.
Still, it wasn't necessarily clear sailing in any case. Pirates had been known to leave nasty little surprises behind, booby traps and other fun things for the authorities to stumble across. Good thing he had the very best crew in the S&R Patrol at his back. Peter swept a proud gaze across the Taurus's small bridge.
Diana guided their little ship to a great slash across the derelict's hull. Debris floated around them. "It looks good so far," Jones reported. "No life signs, and no sign of any happy little surprises from our pirate friends. The only odd thing is an anomalous energy reading from the ship's lower section."
"What's down there?"
Jones pulled up schematics of the ship's class. "It's near the engine room. Could be a lifepod; it's possible one of the crew made it that far. I can't tell any more without getting better telemetry from inside."
Of course it couldn't be easy. Peter reached for his sidearm and checked the charge. "Let's go, then."
***
By now, they had a well-established system. Jones manned the patrol ship, and Diana was at Peter's side. Snug inside their armored recon suits, they entered the derelict through its torn-up hull.
There were few signs of fighting inside, which meant the pirates had taken it quickly. The question was what the pirates had wanted. According to the manifest, the ship had been carrying botanical specimens bound for one of the newly terraformed worlds. There was nothing to interest pirates, unless they were especially desperate pirates. And this area, if Peter's information was correct, was prowled by Keller's crew. They were smart and ruthless and good at what they did. If this was their work, they'd come here looking for something specific.
The engine core had been destroyed, but Jones's directions over the comm led Peter and Diana into the corridors beyond, weightless in the darkness of the abandoned ship. "You're almost on top of it," Jones said.
"I'll be damned." It was a lifepod, human-sized and, to judge by its glowing lights, occupied. The destruction of the engine core must have masked its signals, so that the pirates had overlooked it. Peter and his crew wouldn't have picked up the readings, either, if the core's radiation hadn't had a chance to die down.
Maybe. Or maybe it was a trap.
"Looks like its charge is just about gone, boss," Diana said, studying the weakly flickering lights. "Whoever's in here is in bad shape." She touched the panel with one armored hand. "But still alive. Barely."
"Hopefully it's one of the crew, and not one of the pirates." But there was no choice in any case; they weren't just going to leave a human being to die in the cold reaches of interstellar space. They attached grapples and used the suits' powerful servos to pry the lifepod free of the debris in which it was lodged. Once they got it loose, it was a simple matter to tow it through the corridors, back to an exit point where Jones could pick them up.
In the Taurus's cargo bay, Diana scanned the pod while Peter stripped off his suit. "Clear of radiation," she reported. "Let's get it open."
Not for the first time, Peter wished they had a doctor on board. But they couldn't wait until they jumped back to civilized space to open the pod. Based on the readings, it was at the very edge of its tolerances already. These pods weren't meant for long-term use, only short-term life support.
Peter got a float pallet ready, unsealed a blanket and spread it out, while Diana worked on the pod's seals. She looked up; Peter nodded. Diana cracked the pod open, and Peter got his first look at the person they'd rescued.
... or at least what little he could see through the snarl of wires and tubes that made up the pod's life-support system. Peter could tell that their mystery guest was a dark-haired male, naked and stone-still, curled inside the pod's cradle. The pod's automatic disengagement protocol had been set into motion when Diana opened it, and the tubes and wires withdrew, leaving him limp and unfettered. His skin was ice-cold to the touch. Peter and Diana moved together, lifting him out. Peter got his first good look at the stranger's face -- and nearly dropped him.
"What?" Diana asked, looking up.
"It's Neal Caffrey," Peter said. His voice sounded calm to his own ears; he just hoped that it sounded normal to Diana.
Diana whistled softly. "The Neal Caffrey? He's wanted on half the planets in the known galaxy. We just stumbled onto someone with a half-million-credit bounty on his head, which, I have to say, it's a shame we're not eligible to collect." She shook her head. "Well, at least we won't have to DNA-type him to find out who he is."
Peter kept moving on autopilot, setting Neal's limp body on the float pallet and tucking the blanket gently around him. He was so still and cold that he seemed dead; only the faint rise and fall of his chest gave the lie to that. Diana slapped a handful of different metabolic-boost patches onto his shoulders, neck and forehead, and between the two of them, they floated him up to sickbay.
"You okay, boss?" Diana asked as they transferred Neal to one of the sickbay cradle-beds. This was Peter's first indication that he didn't look as calm as he thought he did.
"I'm all right," he said anyway, and looked down onto Neal's face, slack in repose. "Caffrey and I have a history, that's all. Before I started working with you."
"You chased him," Diana guessed.
"Among other things."
Half a million credits. They might have just found the pirates' motivation for attacking the ship. Except ... if Caffrey had been their objective, they'd gone off and left their prize on the derelict vessel. It was always possible that Neal had been with the pirates, but one thing Peter knew very well was that Neal was nonviolent. He'd stolen a lot of things, conned a lot of people, and even once spent 24 hours as the ruler of his own planet before the authorities caught up, but he'd never physically hurt anyone. The idea of Neal joining a pirate crew -- especially Keller's bunch -- turned Peter's stomach. It just wouldn't happen.
On the other hand, what had Neal Caffrey been doing on an ordinary cargo ship en route to a backwater planet on the edge of the galaxy?
"I get the feeling I'm going to want to hear this story," Diana said.
"Later." Much later, if he could help it. Possibly never. "I can handle things down here. Why don't you go up top and help Jones with the scanner sweeps?"
Diana rolled her eyes. "Wonderful, stuck with the gruntwork again."
"I'll be going over the scanner results from inside the ship, so don't feel like you're getting off easy," Peter said. "I just don't want to leave our boy Caffrey alone. He's known for escaping from damn near anything."
"Uh-huh," Diana said. The trouble with a smart crew, very much in tune with him, was that they knew him too well.
But she did leave. Peter made sure Neal was settled in the sickbay life-support cradle and then got himself a capsule of coffee and a palmtop reader, and drew up a chair beside Neal. The readouts looked good; his life signs were coming up, back into the green zone.
"Damn it, Caffrey," Peter muttered. Always a thorn in his side. Still.
He cued up the results from the sensor sweeps he and Diana had taken inside the ship, and began collating them into his report on the wreck. He couldn't feel the movement of the ship, with the artificial gravity compensating for acceleration, but Diana and Jones would be circling the derelict, taking more scans.
There was a faint moan from the life-support cradle. Peter hastily set down his coffee and reader, and leaned over.
Neal's eyelids fluttered. His eyes were still that same shocking shade of blue.
"Hey," Peter said gently.
Neal blinked. Squinted. Closed his eyes again. "Well, shit," he muttered, his voice a faint, dry rasp. "I guess that makes you, what, three and oh?"
"Eh, call this one a gray area," Peter said. "I wasn't actually looking for you. And you did save my life about four times back on Kieros-IV." Annoying little bastard, he just kept doing things like that.
Neal swallowed, his throat working. Peter brought him a capsule of water, lifted his head and helped him drink.
"I feel like absolute shit," Neal muttered when Peter eased his head back down.
"That's because you've been in a cheap life-support pod for about a week longer than its maximum rating. It's amazing you're alive." But of course he was alive, because Neal Caffrey had nine lives -- and because he and Peter had been meeting in the damnedest places since Peter was a Galactic Fleet cadet who got drunk and lost in the markets of Terra Nova, and Neal was a twelve-year-old thief working the back alleys of those same markets. Peter might have known they'd catch up with each other again at some point, even though he was now in a division of the Galactic Fleet that shouldn't have involved chasing con artists.
And one reason why he'd requested the transfer was because he didn't in good conscience want to catch Neal anymore.
Even if Neal was still doing stupid things like this, and probably needed to be thrown in a nice safe jail cell somewhere.
"Don't suppose you want to tell me what you were doing in a life-support pod on a derelict vessel in the middle of the seventh quadrant," Peter said.
Neal blinked; he seemed on the verge of slipping back into sleep, but then his tired eyes found Peter's. "Is everyone dead?" he asked, and there was something open and vulnerable about it.
"Signs point to yes," Peter said. "But we haven't found any bodies yet."
"Oh," Neal murmured.
"You weren't with the pirates."
Neal shook his head.
"But you weren't with the crew either."
Another headshake.
Peter sighed. "You owe me that story," he said. "As payment for saving your life -- again -- if nothing else."
"Later," Neal whispered.
"Yeah," Peter said. "Later."
He tugged a blanket over Neal, dialed up the temperature a little bit, and settled back to putting his report together. Certain recordings (say, of the retrieval of a particular lifepod) might have been shuffled off to another section of the report, one which could be edited or deleted if it turned out to be absolutely necessary. It wouldn't be the first time he'd done that kind of thing.
At some point Neal's hand slipped out from under the blanket and the fingers, cold and dry, found Peter's mechanical ones. Peter let him hang on. Sooner or later they'd have to revert to cop and criminal, and sooner or later he'd need to get the full story of what had happened here.
But not right now.
And it was damned good to see him again.
~
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I will always love the way you do AUs, breathing new life into the characters while still keeping them themselves.
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I really did enjoy writing this a lot, and I'm so happy that you liked it!