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White Collar fanfic: Daddy Was a Rolling Stone
Title: Daddy Was a Rolling Stone
Fandom: White Collar
Word Count: 3400
Pairing: Gen
Summary: Contains major spoilers for 4x16. Wayne Calloway is not just a lawman, but a lawman in the old cowboy mode. "The law is a guideline, Mandy," he tells her, "not a straitjacket." Or: Amanda Calloway, and the decisions she makes.
Crossposted: http://archiveofourown.org/works/727590
The Calloways live all over the country while Amanda is growing up. They're in Birmingham until she's four; they live in D.C. and in Austin and in Nevada, and spend one lovely year in Hawaii.
They move frequently because Wayne Calloway works for the FBI, and as he tells little Amanda, he has to go where the bad guys are. Daddy is not just a lawman, but a lawman in the old cowboy mode. He is named for the greatest of all cinematic cowboy stars, after all. "The law is a guideline, Mandy," he tells her, "not a straitjacket." Wayne is, to Amanda, just like the heroes in those old black-and-white movies. He's a soft-spoken man, but a big one, broad-shouldered, the kind of man who fills a room.
"Sometimes you have to color outside the lines to do what's right, Mandy. The law is too small to hold every concept of justice there is."
***
There are three Calloway sisters, and Amanda is the middle one. She's the only one who dreams of growing up to follow in Daddy's footsteps. Tammy, the oldest, wants to be a veterinarian, and she follows her Pole Star and becomes one. Max, the youngest, wants to be a quantum physicist, but instead she falls in love her second year in college, has two kids and discovers that her husband wants her to be a stay-at-home mom. After years of fights, Max divorces Mr. Wrong at the age of twenty-nine and goes back to college.
The Calloway sisters aren't pushovers. Their parents always said Chase your dreams; be whoever you want to be, and that's a lesson all three girls carry with them as they become young women.
Middle-child Amanda never imagines herself as anything less than a federal agent like Daddy. Or, why not aim as high as possible? She's going to be the first female director of the FBI. She starts working for it in high school: she makes sure to stay out of trouble -- not even a joyride or a hit of pot, because she knows you have to pass a background check. She makes good grades. She takes martial arts as an elective and Daddy teaches her to shoot a gun. She's good at it.
The Calloways have a very comfortable living while Amanda is growing up. They always live in nice houses in nice neighborhoods, and all three girls get to pick any school anywhere, even the really expensive ones. It isn't something Amanda ever thinks to ask questions about. Children don't wonder where their parents' money comes from until they're older. That's Mom and Dad's business.
She is accepted to Yale, where she studies criminal justice, and she goes from there to Quantico. She isn't the best of the best, but she is bright and hard-working. It's not easy to be a woman in the FBI, even in the late '90s when the Bureau is supposedly fully integrated and sexism has been left in the past. But she does well. She graduates and starts working as a probie with the L.A. office, in a state she's never lived before.
And, slowly, now that she is really an FBI agent herself, she begins to put together a new picture of her childhood from all the little things that she only sees in hindsight. The extra money, the frequent moves (more frequent, really, than a standard roster of reassignments), all the times that Daddy's friends would come over and they wouldn't want to "talk shop" in front of Mama and the girls. The occasional rumors at Quantico, half-heard locker-room talk.
She knows. In some sense, she thinks she might always have known.
She would ask Wayne, go to the horse's mouth, but Daddy is dying, a legacy of the three-pack-a-day smoking habit he never could quit. He's a frail shadow of the big, athletic man from her childhood, hunched over an oxygen tank. Even if it's true, he's not going to trial, let alone to prison -- and she doesn't think she wants him to. He was a good Daddy, a loving husband. Dredging up the past will break her mother's heart, shatter her sisters' memories of their father. It will probably kill Grandma, literally.
And Amanda, who is deep in her heart a Southern girl, has always been raised to believe that family is the most important thing. Family are the ones that stand at your back when no one else will; they're the ones whose hands you hold until the end of time. You do anything for family, and they do anything for you.
You don't break the hearts of your family to assuage your own guilt over long-ago ponies and brand new cars. You don't force them to adhere to your own ideas of morality and justice in order to make yourself feel better. You just don't.
When Wayne, dying in hospice, whispers over and over, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," Amanda is the only one who knows what he's talking about. She carries that weight so her sisters don't have to. And Wayne Calloway, cowboy lawman, carries his secrets to his grave.
***
Her career path forward is smooth, perhaps curiously so. But Amanda works hard. She never shirks, she never allows herself to take the easy way. She follows all the rules, dots the i's and crosses the t's. Amanda is a straight-arrow, by-the-book cop. But she's also seen other women bounce off a glass ceiling for gaining a reputation as ball-busting hardasses. It's not pleasant and it's not nice, but there still aren't very many women in the FBI, and vanishingly few at the higher management level. It's still very much a good old boy's club, run by old men of her father's generation. And they prefer women they can "work with", which is to say: women who wear business skirts, women who keep their hair nice and put on makeup, women who smile and say please and thank you.
Amanda is a damn good cop. But she's a very polite one. Most people don't realize how much of a hardass she really can be -- the Calloways didn't raise their girls to be pushovers, after all -- until her back is up against the wall. But, for Amanda, part of getting what you want is learning how to play the game. She didn't write the rules, but she is going to win by them.
***
Amanda is the youngest person ever appointed to run the Atlanta White Collar office, and the first woman. The day she's sworn in is the proudest day of her life.
And she likes Atlanta: the city, the local culture. She busts her ass making the Atlanta office run like a smooth well-oiled machine, and the grease that keeps the machine gliding along is the rules, always the rules. No one takes a bribe on Amanda Calloway's watch.
Then Senator Terrence Pratt arrives in her office, along with her boss.
She knows him, vaguely. He was a friend of her father's. She remembers once, long ago, Daddy telling her to call him Uncle Terry. Amanda never liked to. She secretly thought he was creepy, though she didn't want to tell Daddy that.
And he's still creepy, Amanda thinks, even as she smiles and makes pleasant conversation. And the conversation circles around to their reason for being here.
The director position is about to come open at the New York White Collar office, and she's been handpicked to fill it.
Amanda is breathless. This -- it's the career opportunity of a lifetime. She's shelved her one-time dream of being the first female director of the FBI for more attainable goals, but this is a conceivable stepping stone.
And then she looks at the two men in her office, the two old men of her father's generation, and her skeptical cop brain kicks in. She thinks, Why me? She's good, but she's not that good. There should be a long list of people ahead of her. People with a lot more years than she has.
"What if I --" And she can't believe she's saying this. "Purely hypothetically, what if I turn it down?"
They glance at each other, just a small glance, but Amanda's a cop; she has a lot of experience reading body language. If she were interviewing a couple of suspects, she'd know what that look meant: The fix is in.
It can't be. She's worked so hard. She's fought tooth and nail to get where she is. She's swallowed all the little slights. She's earned everything she's achieved.
Or maybe it was given to her, because she's Wayne Calloway's daughter.
It's like the floor has disappeared from under her feet, and she's in freefall now, with no idea where she'll land.
"It's an incredible opportunity for you, Amanda," her boss says smoothly. "You're wasted here. We think you could make a real difference in New York."
A real difference. The question is, what kind of difference? She still feels as if she's falling, the bottom gone from her stomach. She doesn't remember, afterwards, the rest of the conversation, except that she must have said the right things, because her boss is smiling when he leaves, and Amanda knows that even though they offered her a choice, she never had one, not really.
Now she's alone with Senator Pratt. The two of them look at each other, and his smile no longer touches his eyes, not quite. Amanda is still smiling -- she's had plenty of practice at putting on a mask to cover her true feelings -- but she senses that the two of them are sizing each other up.
"Why do you really want me?" she asks, smile firmly in place.
"You have a reputation as someone who works by the book. The New York office has been suffering from poor management for a while now. It's gone badly off track. We think you're the person to bring it back in line."
That's not quite what she's heard. New York's White Collar unit has an odd reputation among the other field offices -- half condemnation, half admiration. They get things done, even if they don't always work by the proper FBI playbook. They're lawmen in the old mode, the rumors say. They're cowboys.
Like good old Wayne Calloway. She knows how that ends.
"Our main concern is this man," Pratt tells her, and he extracts a file from his briefcase, lays it open in front of her.
"Special Agent Peter Burke," she reads, and looks up at him curiously.
"He's dirty," Pratt says. "Dirty as they come."
"That's OPR's job, not mine."
"OPR tried. Couldn't pin anything on him." Pratt taps the file. "It's all in here. Burke is running his own games on the side. He has to be stopped."
And what game are you running? she almost asks. Should have asked. Still, no one has passed a fat wad of cash across her desk.
No, just jumped a few lines of seniority to give you directorship of a field office that should have gone to someone with ten more years of experience. That's not a bribe at all.
But she's already gotten the impression that she can't turn this down without torpedoing the career she's worked so hard for. And they haven't asked her to do anything illegal.
So she makes a resolution. They might think to play her for a patsy, but she'll show them. She'll do exactly what they hired her to do: she'll make the New York office the best damned office in the country, the jewel in the FBI crown. She'll clean it up, she'll tighten the reins, she'll run it like another smooth, well-oiled machine.
Even if this whole damn organization is dirty, she won't let it dirty her.
And from what she's already seen in his file, this Agent Burke is another one like her dad. Another wannabe cowboy, another self-appointed vigilante who thinks the rules don't apply to him. She doesn't know why Pratt has it in for him. She doesn't like what she's mired in. But if they want Burke reined in, then she can do that. She'll do it gladly.
***
In another lifetime, she thinks she might have been able to work well with Burke. She isn't sure whether she likes him or not. His entire approach to FBI work is the opposite of hers. Burke has made a career out of upsetting people in power, pushing the boundaries, making up his own rules. And, Amanda thinks, as a male agent in this boy's club, he has the privilege to do that. He's not going to shoot himself down if he gets a reputation as a troublemaker, an iconoclast, as someone who doesn't play well with others. That's a luxury she's never had.
She concurs with Pratt that Burke is dirty. There are too many little clues, too many question marks for him not to be. He's just clever about it.
But Pratt is also dirty. She knows it down to her bones. And Pratt is in tight with her former boss in Atlanta, and God knows how many more of the old white men who run this show, the good old boys, all the men who came up through the ranks of various law-enforcement organizations at the same time.
And yet ... it's the same problem that she had with her father. All of these people have families and good reputations. They're all part of the law-enforcement fraternity. The family. And most of them are pretty close to retirement, if not past it. Is it worth ripping off the bandage, exposing the gaping wound, when most of the people who were hurt have already receded decades into the past?
She couldn't do it to her father or her own family. Does she have a right to do it to someone else's? There's a reason she's not in OPR. This is an ugly, if necessary, side of the business and, while she'll do it when she's ordered to, she doesn't like it.
And worse, there is the cold hard calculus of deciding how far she wants to risk her own neck. She's always been good at figuring out which way the wind is blowing, and making sure she's on the right side of it. And she knows which way the wind is blowing now. Burke's going down (and he probably deserves to). Pratt is getting off (and this, he doesn't deserve).
She wonders what, exactly, is in the box that Pratt wants so very badly. He says it contains evidence against Bennett. Burke says the evidence is against Pratt instead. Amanda suspects there is a very real possibility that both are correct. A lot of people's careers might be in that box. Including her father's.
Once that box is in the FBI's hands -- then what? She isn't sure. She knows Burke can't be allowed to find it first, because then it will disappear, or worse, vanish briefly only to reappear filled with fabrications and lies.
But ... given all she knows, she wonders if it is really safer in the FBI's evidence warehouse. Well, no, she has to be honest with herself. It's probably going to vanish in either case. The difference is that in one case Burke gets the opportunity to decide what's in it, and in the other, Pratt does.
Agent Burke represents a small, petty kind of evil: the self-styled cowboys who run roughshod over the rules, who can't resist the opportunity to pull strings to get their friend off the hook for a crime. The guys who pick up a bag of cash because the wife wants a new car.
Guys like her father.
And Pratt ... if it's true, if Pratt is really dirty, it's something much bigger and uglier. These are men who control the very seats of power. He has connections in the FBI, in the police. These are the men who are truly the devils of their time.
No one will ever bring him down. He's too well-connected. Anyone who tries will find walls thrown in their path; their own careers will begin to fall apart. And the case will be closed, every time, as she's already been ordered to close Burke's investigation into Pratt.
Amanda has always prided herself on never doing things the easy way. Only now she realizes that maybe that's exactly what she has been doing, all these years. Wearing the skirt. Putting on the smile. No one ever understood how hard it was -- but, she thinks, perhaps she never understood how hard it was for those who stood outside the boundaries of what they want you to be, who couldn't color inside the lines if they wanted to.
As long as you live by all the rules, you know where the lines are. You know what's right and wrong. But when bad people get inside the system, and manipulate the rules to their own ends -- what is right and wrong then?
***
On the fifty-first floor of the Empire State Building, she confiscates Burke's gun, and then, at this most confusing of moments, she makes a dumb, probie mistake. Or so her report will say later, even though she probably wouldn't have done something like this by accident even when she was a probie.
She leaves Burke's gun on Pratt's desk.
It feels like stepping off another cliff -- or, maybe, after falling for so long, she's finally landed.
Pratt is dirty. Filthy. She doesn't know what's in that box -- and no one is ever going to know, now, because Burke and his CI got to it first, and Amanda has no doubt that between them the Bennetts, father and son, will make sure the box vanishes, never to be seen again. Burke may or may not be truly dirty; his worst sin, in the end, might only be that he allowed himself to be duped by a con artist.
But it's not over yet. There are still factors in play. The case is not closed, not by a long shot.
She leaves Burke's gun on Pratt's desk because she wants to know what kind of man Agent Peter Burke really is, and she thinks he deserves a chance to prove himself. When Pratt realizes that his plans have fallen apart, there will be Burke, and there will be the gun.
She can't be in that room. She has to be elsewhere, searching for the box that she knows is already out of the building. But Burke is uniquely positioned to maybe, just maybe, catch Pratt in the act of giving himself away. And the gun is there. Burke can make an arrest.
Alternatively, he's in a position to silence Pratt forever.
In a terrible way, it's a test, and it's also a tremendous act of trust. It's an opportunity for Burke, and for her. She can't bring Pratt down herself. He's boxed her in too thoroughly. And, Amanda thinks, he's got her measure. She plays by the rules. To look the other way, even for a moment, is a violation of everything she's worked for, fought for.
Which is why he'll never see it coming.
She's finally settled the question of whether she really is her father's daughter, not a good girl but a cowboy after all. And a part of her breaks, just a little.
And when she and Watson arrest Peter Burke for Pratt's murder, a part of her breaks a little more. She really had believed he was better than that -- if only because she wanted to believe that her father was better. That she herself was better.
But that's not the world they live in. She gambled on Burke's integrity and lost. Burke is a killer, and Amanda will have to live with what she's done. What he's done.
"Peter, you have the right to remain silent. Anything you do or say can be used against you in a court of law ..."
"I didn't do it," he tells her as they take him to the stairs. No sign of James Bennett has been found in the building. Amanda didn't think there would be.
"Be silent," she tells him again, and he is.
~
Fandom: White Collar
Word Count: 3400
Pairing: Gen
Summary: Contains major spoilers for 4x16. Wayne Calloway is not just a lawman, but a lawman in the old cowboy mode. "The law is a guideline, Mandy," he tells her, "not a straitjacket." Or: Amanda Calloway, and the decisions she makes.
Crossposted: http://archiveofourown.org/works/727590
The Calloways live all over the country while Amanda is growing up. They're in Birmingham until she's four; they live in D.C. and in Austin and in Nevada, and spend one lovely year in Hawaii.
They move frequently because Wayne Calloway works for the FBI, and as he tells little Amanda, he has to go where the bad guys are. Daddy is not just a lawman, but a lawman in the old cowboy mode. He is named for the greatest of all cinematic cowboy stars, after all. "The law is a guideline, Mandy," he tells her, "not a straitjacket." Wayne is, to Amanda, just like the heroes in those old black-and-white movies. He's a soft-spoken man, but a big one, broad-shouldered, the kind of man who fills a room.
"Sometimes you have to color outside the lines to do what's right, Mandy. The law is too small to hold every concept of justice there is."
***
There are three Calloway sisters, and Amanda is the middle one. She's the only one who dreams of growing up to follow in Daddy's footsteps. Tammy, the oldest, wants to be a veterinarian, and she follows her Pole Star and becomes one. Max, the youngest, wants to be a quantum physicist, but instead she falls in love her second year in college, has two kids and discovers that her husband wants her to be a stay-at-home mom. After years of fights, Max divorces Mr. Wrong at the age of twenty-nine and goes back to college.
The Calloway sisters aren't pushovers. Their parents always said Chase your dreams; be whoever you want to be, and that's a lesson all three girls carry with them as they become young women.
Middle-child Amanda never imagines herself as anything less than a federal agent like Daddy. Or, why not aim as high as possible? She's going to be the first female director of the FBI. She starts working for it in high school: she makes sure to stay out of trouble -- not even a joyride or a hit of pot, because she knows you have to pass a background check. She makes good grades. She takes martial arts as an elective and Daddy teaches her to shoot a gun. She's good at it.
The Calloways have a very comfortable living while Amanda is growing up. They always live in nice houses in nice neighborhoods, and all three girls get to pick any school anywhere, even the really expensive ones. It isn't something Amanda ever thinks to ask questions about. Children don't wonder where their parents' money comes from until they're older. That's Mom and Dad's business.
She is accepted to Yale, where she studies criminal justice, and she goes from there to Quantico. She isn't the best of the best, but she is bright and hard-working. It's not easy to be a woman in the FBI, even in the late '90s when the Bureau is supposedly fully integrated and sexism has been left in the past. But she does well. She graduates and starts working as a probie with the L.A. office, in a state she's never lived before.
And, slowly, now that she is really an FBI agent herself, she begins to put together a new picture of her childhood from all the little things that she only sees in hindsight. The extra money, the frequent moves (more frequent, really, than a standard roster of reassignments), all the times that Daddy's friends would come over and they wouldn't want to "talk shop" in front of Mama and the girls. The occasional rumors at Quantico, half-heard locker-room talk.
She knows. In some sense, she thinks she might always have known.
She would ask Wayne, go to the horse's mouth, but Daddy is dying, a legacy of the three-pack-a-day smoking habit he never could quit. He's a frail shadow of the big, athletic man from her childhood, hunched over an oxygen tank. Even if it's true, he's not going to trial, let alone to prison -- and she doesn't think she wants him to. He was a good Daddy, a loving husband. Dredging up the past will break her mother's heart, shatter her sisters' memories of their father. It will probably kill Grandma, literally.
And Amanda, who is deep in her heart a Southern girl, has always been raised to believe that family is the most important thing. Family are the ones that stand at your back when no one else will; they're the ones whose hands you hold until the end of time. You do anything for family, and they do anything for you.
You don't break the hearts of your family to assuage your own guilt over long-ago ponies and brand new cars. You don't force them to adhere to your own ideas of morality and justice in order to make yourself feel better. You just don't.
When Wayne, dying in hospice, whispers over and over, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," Amanda is the only one who knows what he's talking about. She carries that weight so her sisters don't have to. And Wayne Calloway, cowboy lawman, carries his secrets to his grave.
***
Her career path forward is smooth, perhaps curiously so. But Amanda works hard. She never shirks, she never allows herself to take the easy way. She follows all the rules, dots the i's and crosses the t's. Amanda is a straight-arrow, by-the-book cop. But she's also seen other women bounce off a glass ceiling for gaining a reputation as ball-busting hardasses. It's not pleasant and it's not nice, but there still aren't very many women in the FBI, and vanishingly few at the higher management level. It's still very much a good old boy's club, run by old men of her father's generation. And they prefer women they can "work with", which is to say: women who wear business skirts, women who keep their hair nice and put on makeup, women who smile and say please and thank you.
Amanda is a damn good cop. But she's a very polite one. Most people don't realize how much of a hardass she really can be -- the Calloways didn't raise their girls to be pushovers, after all -- until her back is up against the wall. But, for Amanda, part of getting what you want is learning how to play the game. She didn't write the rules, but she is going to win by them.
***
Amanda is the youngest person ever appointed to run the Atlanta White Collar office, and the first woman. The day she's sworn in is the proudest day of her life.
And she likes Atlanta: the city, the local culture. She busts her ass making the Atlanta office run like a smooth well-oiled machine, and the grease that keeps the machine gliding along is the rules, always the rules. No one takes a bribe on Amanda Calloway's watch.
Then Senator Terrence Pratt arrives in her office, along with her boss.
She knows him, vaguely. He was a friend of her father's. She remembers once, long ago, Daddy telling her to call him Uncle Terry. Amanda never liked to. She secretly thought he was creepy, though she didn't want to tell Daddy that.
And he's still creepy, Amanda thinks, even as she smiles and makes pleasant conversation. And the conversation circles around to their reason for being here.
The director position is about to come open at the New York White Collar office, and she's been handpicked to fill it.
Amanda is breathless. This -- it's the career opportunity of a lifetime. She's shelved her one-time dream of being the first female director of the FBI for more attainable goals, but this is a conceivable stepping stone.
And then she looks at the two men in her office, the two old men of her father's generation, and her skeptical cop brain kicks in. She thinks, Why me? She's good, but she's not that good. There should be a long list of people ahead of her. People with a lot more years than she has.
"What if I --" And she can't believe she's saying this. "Purely hypothetically, what if I turn it down?"
They glance at each other, just a small glance, but Amanda's a cop; she has a lot of experience reading body language. If she were interviewing a couple of suspects, she'd know what that look meant: The fix is in.
It can't be. She's worked so hard. She's fought tooth and nail to get where she is. She's swallowed all the little slights. She's earned everything she's achieved.
Or maybe it was given to her, because she's Wayne Calloway's daughter.
It's like the floor has disappeared from under her feet, and she's in freefall now, with no idea where she'll land.
"It's an incredible opportunity for you, Amanda," her boss says smoothly. "You're wasted here. We think you could make a real difference in New York."
A real difference. The question is, what kind of difference? She still feels as if she's falling, the bottom gone from her stomach. She doesn't remember, afterwards, the rest of the conversation, except that she must have said the right things, because her boss is smiling when he leaves, and Amanda knows that even though they offered her a choice, she never had one, not really.
Now she's alone with Senator Pratt. The two of them look at each other, and his smile no longer touches his eyes, not quite. Amanda is still smiling -- she's had plenty of practice at putting on a mask to cover her true feelings -- but she senses that the two of them are sizing each other up.
"Why do you really want me?" she asks, smile firmly in place.
"You have a reputation as someone who works by the book. The New York office has been suffering from poor management for a while now. It's gone badly off track. We think you're the person to bring it back in line."
That's not quite what she's heard. New York's White Collar unit has an odd reputation among the other field offices -- half condemnation, half admiration. They get things done, even if they don't always work by the proper FBI playbook. They're lawmen in the old mode, the rumors say. They're cowboys.
Like good old Wayne Calloway. She knows how that ends.
"Our main concern is this man," Pratt tells her, and he extracts a file from his briefcase, lays it open in front of her.
"Special Agent Peter Burke," she reads, and looks up at him curiously.
"He's dirty," Pratt says. "Dirty as they come."
"That's OPR's job, not mine."
"OPR tried. Couldn't pin anything on him." Pratt taps the file. "It's all in here. Burke is running his own games on the side. He has to be stopped."
And what game are you running? she almost asks. Should have asked. Still, no one has passed a fat wad of cash across her desk.
No, just jumped a few lines of seniority to give you directorship of a field office that should have gone to someone with ten more years of experience. That's not a bribe at all.
But she's already gotten the impression that she can't turn this down without torpedoing the career she's worked so hard for. And they haven't asked her to do anything illegal.
So she makes a resolution. They might think to play her for a patsy, but she'll show them. She'll do exactly what they hired her to do: she'll make the New York office the best damned office in the country, the jewel in the FBI crown. She'll clean it up, she'll tighten the reins, she'll run it like another smooth, well-oiled machine.
Even if this whole damn organization is dirty, she won't let it dirty her.
And from what she's already seen in his file, this Agent Burke is another one like her dad. Another wannabe cowboy, another self-appointed vigilante who thinks the rules don't apply to him. She doesn't know why Pratt has it in for him. She doesn't like what she's mired in. But if they want Burke reined in, then she can do that. She'll do it gladly.
***
In another lifetime, she thinks she might have been able to work well with Burke. She isn't sure whether she likes him or not. His entire approach to FBI work is the opposite of hers. Burke has made a career out of upsetting people in power, pushing the boundaries, making up his own rules. And, Amanda thinks, as a male agent in this boy's club, he has the privilege to do that. He's not going to shoot himself down if he gets a reputation as a troublemaker, an iconoclast, as someone who doesn't play well with others. That's a luxury she's never had.
She concurs with Pratt that Burke is dirty. There are too many little clues, too many question marks for him not to be. He's just clever about it.
But Pratt is also dirty. She knows it down to her bones. And Pratt is in tight with her former boss in Atlanta, and God knows how many more of the old white men who run this show, the good old boys, all the men who came up through the ranks of various law-enforcement organizations at the same time.
And yet ... it's the same problem that she had with her father. All of these people have families and good reputations. They're all part of the law-enforcement fraternity. The family. And most of them are pretty close to retirement, if not past it. Is it worth ripping off the bandage, exposing the gaping wound, when most of the people who were hurt have already receded decades into the past?
She couldn't do it to her father or her own family. Does she have a right to do it to someone else's? There's a reason she's not in OPR. This is an ugly, if necessary, side of the business and, while she'll do it when she's ordered to, she doesn't like it.
And worse, there is the cold hard calculus of deciding how far she wants to risk her own neck. She's always been good at figuring out which way the wind is blowing, and making sure she's on the right side of it. And she knows which way the wind is blowing now. Burke's going down (and he probably deserves to). Pratt is getting off (and this, he doesn't deserve).
She wonders what, exactly, is in the box that Pratt wants so very badly. He says it contains evidence against Bennett. Burke says the evidence is against Pratt instead. Amanda suspects there is a very real possibility that both are correct. A lot of people's careers might be in that box. Including her father's.
Once that box is in the FBI's hands -- then what? She isn't sure. She knows Burke can't be allowed to find it first, because then it will disappear, or worse, vanish briefly only to reappear filled with fabrications and lies.
But ... given all she knows, she wonders if it is really safer in the FBI's evidence warehouse. Well, no, she has to be honest with herself. It's probably going to vanish in either case. The difference is that in one case Burke gets the opportunity to decide what's in it, and in the other, Pratt does.
Agent Burke represents a small, petty kind of evil: the self-styled cowboys who run roughshod over the rules, who can't resist the opportunity to pull strings to get their friend off the hook for a crime. The guys who pick up a bag of cash because the wife wants a new car.
Guys like her father.
And Pratt ... if it's true, if Pratt is really dirty, it's something much bigger and uglier. These are men who control the very seats of power. He has connections in the FBI, in the police. These are the men who are truly the devils of their time.
No one will ever bring him down. He's too well-connected. Anyone who tries will find walls thrown in their path; their own careers will begin to fall apart. And the case will be closed, every time, as she's already been ordered to close Burke's investigation into Pratt.
Amanda has always prided herself on never doing things the easy way. Only now she realizes that maybe that's exactly what she has been doing, all these years. Wearing the skirt. Putting on the smile. No one ever understood how hard it was -- but, she thinks, perhaps she never understood how hard it was for those who stood outside the boundaries of what they want you to be, who couldn't color inside the lines if they wanted to.
As long as you live by all the rules, you know where the lines are. You know what's right and wrong. But when bad people get inside the system, and manipulate the rules to their own ends -- what is right and wrong then?
***
On the fifty-first floor of the Empire State Building, she confiscates Burke's gun, and then, at this most confusing of moments, she makes a dumb, probie mistake. Or so her report will say later, even though she probably wouldn't have done something like this by accident even when she was a probie.
She leaves Burke's gun on Pratt's desk.
It feels like stepping off another cliff -- or, maybe, after falling for so long, she's finally landed.
Pratt is dirty. Filthy. She doesn't know what's in that box -- and no one is ever going to know, now, because Burke and his CI got to it first, and Amanda has no doubt that between them the Bennetts, father and son, will make sure the box vanishes, never to be seen again. Burke may or may not be truly dirty; his worst sin, in the end, might only be that he allowed himself to be duped by a con artist.
But it's not over yet. There are still factors in play. The case is not closed, not by a long shot.
She leaves Burke's gun on Pratt's desk because she wants to know what kind of man Agent Peter Burke really is, and she thinks he deserves a chance to prove himself. When Pratt realizes that his plans have fallen apart, there will be Burke, and there will be the gun.
She can't be in that room. She has to be elsewhere, searching for the box that she knows is already out of the building. But Burke is uniquely positioned to maybe, just maybe, catch Pratt in the act of giving himself away. And the gun is there. Burke can make an arrest.
Alternatively, he's in a position to silence Pratt forever.
In a terrible way, it's a test, and it's also a tremendous act of trust. It's an opportunity for Burke, and for her. She can't bring Pratt down herself. He's boxed her in too thoroughly. And, Amanda thinks, he's got her measure. She plays by the rules. To look the other way, even for a moment, is a violation of everything she's worked for, fought for.
Which is why he'll never see it coming.
She's finally settled the question of whether she really is her father's daughter, not a good girl but a cowboy after all. And a part of her breaks, just a little.
And when she and Watson arrest Peter Burke for Pratt's murder, a part of her breaks a little more. She really had believed he was better than that -- if only because she wanted to believe that her father was better. That she herself was better.
But that's not the world they live in. She gambled on Burke's integrity and lost. Burke is a killer, and Amanda will have to live with what she's done. What he's done.
"Peter, you have the right to remain silent. Anything you do or say can be used against you in a court of law ..."
"I didn't do it," he tells her as they take him to the stairs. No sign of James Bennett has been found in the building. Amanda didn't think there would be.
"Be silent," she tells him again, and he is.
~
no subject
It's so interesting what she and Neal did with what they learned about their fathers--Calloway tried to do the right and correct thing, while Neal very willfully did the wrong thing--and where they ended up. And yet if you tried to get them to understand each other, I think both would refuse to see it. Neal's easygoing nature goes out the window when you mess with his family (Peter, not James), and Calloway would see someone who took the easy way out when she worked so hard to do the right thing. (And neither of those assessments are wrong; they're just incomplete.)
I love your frank assessment of what Calloway does to get ahead; how she plays nice and conforms to expectations in order to further her own interests, how very aware she is of the environment she works in. And that's why it hit me so hard when she reached a new understanding of what she was doing.
but, she thinks, perhaps she never understood how hard it was for those who stood outside the boundaries of what they want you to be, who couldn't color inside the lines if they wanted to.
Uh, excuse me. I think I have something in my eye.
And then there's her view of Peter which is both completely wrong and a little too close for comfort.
the self-styled cowboys who run roughshod over the rules, who can't resist the opportunity to pull strings to get their friend off the hook for a crime. The guys who pick up a bag of cash because the wife wants a new car.
Of course Peter would never do that last one, but the one before it? Um, yeah.
I also really like her observation that Peter can safely be seen as a troublemaker, while the same cannot be said for her. Because it's devastatingly true.
And the ending makes me hurt so bad for her. For all of them.
God, I love fanfiction. Because it can do this.
no subject
It was really interesting, as I developed the story, how many different things the story ended up having to say about performative femininity, and axes of privilege, and different points of view.
It's so interesting what she and Neal did with what they learned about their fathers--Calloway tried to do the right and correct thing, while Neal very willfully did the wrong thing--and where they ended up. And yet if you tried to get them to understand each other, I think both would refuse to see it. Neal's easygoing nature goes out the window when you mess with his family (Peter, not James), and Calloway would see someone who took the easy way out when she worked so hard to do the right thing. (And neither of those assessments are wrong; they're just incomplete.)
Yeah; it was interesting to play with all the different ways that different people are motivated by family loyalty, and the different places it takes them. For that matter, I was also thinking in terms of Calloway vs. Peter, because her decision (choosing to ignore her father's crimes so as not to hurt her family) is almost certainly the opposite of what Peter would have done, but I wanted it to be a clearly sympathetic decision nonetheless.
I have no idea if Calloway will be back next season, or in what role, but I would love to see her developed from an antagonist into an ally. I think there's a lot of scope for that in the role.
no subject
Sorry, any chance to talk about the WC women. It's really interesting to imagine this version of Callaway and Diana talking about being a woman in the FBI (a black, gay woman in Diana's case).
And I would love to see Callaway back as an ally! I admit, my assumption has been that they'll forget her like they forgot Fowler and Kramer, but maybe not. She's still in charge of the office, after all.