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White Collar fic: The Waiting Room
Title: The Waiting Room
Fandom: White Collar
Word Count: 4200
Summary: Peter finds himself in an in-between place, and he's not alone.
Notes: This is one of the stories I started for H/C Advent and didn't finish in time. I started with the idea of "It's a Wonderful Life" in the White Collar universe and ended up, instead, doing the "Peter and Kate have a conversation in the afterlife" fic that I've been wanting to write. (No deaths except canon ones in this fic, however.) This is also for my![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
hc_bingo "cuddling for warmth" square, although that aspect ended up being a much smaller part of the finished fic than I'd intended.
Cross-posted: http://archiveofourown.org/works/1109642
When Peter was eleven years old, he'd almost drowned in a frozen pond near his house. Typical small-town kid shenanigans -- he'd been horsing around with his buddies and the next thing he knew, the thin ice had cracked under him and he'd gone into the black water beneath.
He hadn't been scared, exactly. He didn't even realize until afterwards that he'd come very close to dying. There had only been shock and cold and a frantic scramble to get on top of the ice, which kept breaking under him, until one of the other kids came running with Peter's dad. He never could quite remember how he'd gotten out; his next clear memory was being bundled into an old blanket on the front seat of his dad's truck, with the heater running full blast and his dad rubbing him with a towel that smelled like dogs.
It all came back to him now, clear as if it had happened yesterday, along with the shock of cold water and the lingering sound of Neal's shout ringing in his ears. He sank, looking up toward the light, with a great pressure in his chest and a desperate feeling of loss and regret.
Elizabeth, I'm sorry ...
It wasn't supposed to happen this way. It was a pretty routine takedown, arresting smugglers on a Red Hook dock. Neal was supposed to stay in the car, but of course decided to "help" -- and he had helped, shouting a warning to Peter and the rest of his agents as another member of the gang circled around behind them. The gunman whirled and drew on Neal, and Peter didn't even have to think -- he just stood up and snapped off a shot. It all happened so fast that he didn't even realize he'd been shot until his legs stopped holding him and he fell over the retaining wall into the ocean.
As the icy water closed over his head, he hoped Neal had made it out okay. If Neal was all right, then it was worth it, in the end.
He closed his eyes.
***
Warm.
Peter cracked his eyes open. He didn't hurt. He wasn't cold. He was somewhere familiar, but it was so completely unexpected that it took him a moment to orient himself. He was sitting in front of the fireplace in the old converted farmhouse where he'd grown up. His parents had sold the house fifteen years ago and bought a condo.
But here it was, just like he remembered it: the flowered wallpaper and low ceiling; the heavy, practical furniture. There were tinsel garlands draping the walls. Yeah, it was only a few days 'til Christmas, Peter recalled -- but no, that was in the real world. The world in which he was drowning, or had already drowned, in the Upper Bay.
He sat up slowly and an afghan fell to the floor. Even that was familiar, a fuzzy old red-and-white afghan that his grandmother had crocheted. It used to be folded on the end of the couch in front of the fireplace for Peter and his cousins to wrap in after they came in from playing in the snow. It, too, had been gone for years, frayed to a rag and eventually used for pet bedding and then thrown away.
Sitting in front of the fire was a cup of hot cocoa, with a candy cane sticking out of it, just like his mom used to make for the kids in December. Peter reached out hesitantly to touch it. The cup was warm.
"I'm going insane," he said aloud.
"No," a soft voice said from behind him.
Peter spun around so fast he almost knocked over the cocoa.
The speaker was leaning against the doorway leading into the kitchen, hands in her pockets. She was backlit, her face in shadow, but Peter still recognized her by the long dark hair, even before she'd stepped forward so that light fell across her face.
"Kate."
She smiled without much humor. "There's something a little familiar here. You and me, meeting like this ... I hope you aren't going to try to intimidate me with a pinky-ring this time."
"Depends," Peter said. "You planning to shoot me?"
"Not today."
She was wearing a large fuzzy Christmas sweater, the sort of thing El's mother might knit, which kept making Peter's brain slip a gear. In all the surveillance photos and his few brief meetings with her, he'd never seen Kate anything other than impeccably put together. She was also wearing a name tag, the kind of big silly-looking tag that Peter sometimes had to wear at conferences, with HELLO MY NAME IS in large block letters, and KATE written in neat blue ink below that.
"Hey," Kate said. "My face is up here."
Peter felt his cheeks heat. "I was looking at your sweater."
"Oh," Kate said. "That. It's supposed to put you at ease." She sounded skeptical. "Like this room. Familiar surroundings and all of that."
"Where am I, really?" He had a terrible feeling what the answer was going to be.
"Not quite where you're thinking," Kate said. "This is more of a -- a waiting room, I guess you could say. A place where you hang out until things are decided."
"Whether I'm dead." He had to say it. The logical part of his brain kept telling him it was insane, trying to come up with plausible justifications involving drugs and kidnapping, but nothing could really change the fact that the last thing he remembered was getting shot and falling into the bay, and now he was sitting on a couch that no longer existed, in a house that hadn't looked like this since 1975, talking to a dead woman.
"Yep," Kate said. She leaned a hip on the back of the couch. "You're taking this better than some people do."
"You do this a lot, do you?" It came out more defensive than he'd meant it.
"It's my job," Kate said. "I didn't live what you'd call a good life, exactly. This is how I'm making up for it."
"You're on the afterlife help desk?"
She smiled, softening her face. It was the first time Peter had ever seen a genuine smile from Kate -- but then, he'd mostly been arresting her boyfriend or trying to strong-arm her, so it wasn't like he could blame her for not being friendly. "Something like that."
Peter sipped the cocoa. It hadn't cooled off at all while he was talking to Kate, and it was, of course, perfect -- exactly like his idealized memories from childhood.
"So I'm just ... waiting to die?" he asked hesitantly.
"Or to live," Kate said. "As the case may be."
"There's got to be something I can do. I'm not really the kind of person who sits around waiting. I like to get out in the field."
"I'd noticed," Kate said, with a wry twist of her lips. "Sorry, though. Your friends are going to pull you out in time, or not. Your body is going to live or it's not."
"There's nothing I can do to influence it at all?" he asked, frustrated.
"You could have some entertainment to pass the time, if you want." Kate picked up a remote control. It looked much too new to work with the big old vacuum-tube TV in the corner. The TV had knobs instead of push-buttons; they'd always had to cross the room to change the channel. When she pressed a button on the remote, though, light sparked in the middle of the TV and then the picture slowly warmed up. Peter had almost forgotten TVs used to work that way; he'd become used to modern digital sets.
"What kind of reception do you get in the afterlife?" he couldn't help asking.
"This isn't really the afterlife, like I said. It's more of a stop along the way. And it's basically the all you, all the time channel."
Now that the picture had warmed up enough to make out, Peter saw a narrow room with bunk beds and music posters on the walls. The place was a mess -- clothes strewn about, books on every surface. A gangly young man with a floppy haystack of brown hair was sprawled on the bed, reading.
Peter realized with a shock that the room was his university dorm room, and the young man was himself. He hadn't even recognized himself at first from the outside.
"Wow, you were a nerd, weren't you?" Kate said. She flipped channels. Now they were viewing a baseball game, complete with announcer commentary. Peter recognized himself at the pitcher's mound, and his stomach lurched. This wasn't the game -- yes, it was. He couldn't ever forget it.
"Turn it off," he said sharply. "I don't want to watch that."
Kate raised a brow, and switched channels again. Now he was watching himself pick Neal up from the prison, that very first day, years ago. Neal's hair was longer then, Peter thought irrelevantly. And he himself looked younger, though maybe it was just seeing himself from the outside, and from a distance.
"You've made lots of choices," Kate said. Her voice was distant; she was watching Neal on the screen. "Everyone does. Any of your choices could have taken your life a different way."
"Is this where I get the It's a Wonderful Life treatment?"
Her smile was sharper-edged this time. "Do you want to? I can show you that, if you like. What the world would be like if you'd drowned in that lake all those years ago."
"I'm not sure --" Peter began, but she'd already changed the channel.
This was a scene he hadn't seen before. Certainly nothing from his life that he remembered. It was a luxury hotel or an apartment, huge and spacious, with an unfamiliar city skyline outside the enormous, floor-to-ceiling windows.
"Where is this?" Peter asked.
"Rome, I think," Kate said.
Peter didn't see Neal until he stood up. He was wearing a black turtleneck, and looked similar to Neal as Peter remembered from their early days of working together. There was something a bit different about him, though, and as Neal strolled to the windows, Peter tried to figure out what it was. Something in the way he walked, maybe -- that graceful, confident swagger. There was an air of confidence and poise surrounding Neal that Peter didn't normally get from him ... not that Neal had any problem with ego, but he was usually a little more diffident than this.
Of course, the Neal he knew had spent four years in prison. This was Neal in his prime, Neal at the top of his game. This was a version of Neal who had never been forced to learn humility, or what it felt like to lose.
"When is this?" Peter asked, although he already knew. "I mean, when would it have been."
"Now," Kate said. "The present day."
"Neal never went to prison."
"Of course not." He couldn't read her tone. "You were the one that caught him, the only one who even came close."
Peter studied Neal on the screen, as if he could read the different course of Neal's life from the lines of his body. Neal didn't look unhappy. He seemed relaxed and confident and powerful.
"He's still a con artist?"
"Of course," Kate said, as if it was too obvious to mention. "Why change something that works? Though he doesn't run cons so much anymore; he doesn't need to. He got through the reckless years and now he's more clever about it, as well as wealthy and well connected." She sounded admiring.
"All of which he accomplished by stealing things from other people."
"If people don't hang onto their things, of course they'll be stolen," Kate said dismissively. "And he's happy. Isn't that what you want -- for Neal to be happy?"
Neal did look content, centered in himself in a way he'd rarely seemed when he was working for the FBI. Peter didn't want to examine that too closely.
"Can I see Elizabeth?"
"Sure," Kate said. She changed channels.
The new scene was an art gallery, not one Peter was familiar with. Holiday decorations glittered everywhere, and Elizabeth was at the center of a whirlwind of activity. She looked energized and excited and very much in her element.
"She's still working for the DeArmitt Gallery?" Although this didn't quite look like it.
"She's running her own," Kate said. "Rather than quitting to start her own business, as she did when she married you, she stayed with the gallery and then moved up in the art world. She's quite a jet-setter now. Doing very well for herself."
Out of the crowd, a man in a tuxedo moved up to El's shoulder. He was no one Peter had ever seen before, though he bore a slight resemblance to Neal in some ways -- young, nicely dressed, and darkly handsome. He leaned close and murmured in her ear. El blushed and grinned. Peter fought off an irrational surge of jealousy.
"Yes, she's married," Kate said, glancing at him. "You can't imagine you're the only man who ever appreciated her, you know. She just met him a little later than she met you."
The depressing thing was that they made a beautiful couple, El and her handsome spouse. Probably a much more striking and photogenic couple than she made with Peter. He could all too easily imagine the two of them appearing at show openings and celebrity events. They looked like the sort of people who had red carpets rolled out for them.
In his universe, she'd settled for living on an FBI agent's salary, with a guy who wouldn't know what to do with a red carpet if it smacked him in the face.
The idea had never occurred to Peter that El might have been better off if she hadn't met him. It was harder to convince himself of that with Neal; the apartment had been gorgeous, but also rather stark and bare, without a decoration to be seen anywhere. On the other hand, Neal wasn't much of a Christmas person. And his relaxed body language had told the tale of a man who certainly wouldn't trade places with someone who'd spent four years in prison.
Still, Neal had won his way to the top of the heap by stepping on a lot of people -- Peter couldn't ignore that.
He also couldn't ignore the nagging little voice inside: Would they really be happier if I'd drowned at the age of eleven?
"Look, we can't all be George Bailey," Kate said, seeing the look on his face. "Not least because he was a fictional character. Yes, your loved ones are just fine in the world without you, Peter. What did you want -- that they'd be miserable, living terribly unhappy lives?"
"Well ..." When she put it that way, it did sound selfish. "I'm glad they're happy. I guess it'd be nice to think that I made some difference to them."
"Look, I deal with this every day, so let me tell you that most people's lives don't leave much of a mark," Kate said. "That's just how life is. If you remove one thread from the tapestry, it heals up around it. People want to think they'd leave a hole, but they don't really, in the grand scheme of things. If you think about it, aren't we all better off that way?"
"You did, though," Peter said.
He hadn't meant to hurt her -- hadn't expected, actually, to see his words land so hard. But she reeled a little; her face lost color.
"What do you mean?" she asked. Her voice was cool, but slightly breathless.
"You left one hell of a hole in Neal's life," Peter said. "Maybe if he'd never met you, he wouldn't have known the difference; who knows. But I'm one of the people who had to patch him back up after he lost you. I know what it looked like."
"Well," she said, calming herself. "Fair enough, I suppose. I ... wasn't there."
"It's not your fault," Peter said, feeling awkward. Trying to comfort a dead person over their own death wasn't a position in which he'd ever expected to find himself.
"I know," she said sharply. "And as much as I'd love to blame you, it isn't yours either. One thing you learn about in this line of work is how choices work -- yours and other people's. Confronting other people about the realities of their lives makes it harder to maintain your illusions about your own."
"That sounds rough."
"It's not a cakewalk, let me tell you." She took a deep breath, and then said in a rush, "It does matter, Peter, how you feel about going back. In the outcome, I mean."
"I thought it might," Peter said. Kate gave him a flat look, and he shrugged. "Look, I'm not familiar with this afterlife stuff, but I'm used to reading between the lines with con artists. I can tell when I'm being played."
"Fair point," she acknowledged. "My motives may not have been entirely pure in asking for this assignment."
"I don't think you've done anything that was technically against the rules." He'd known Neal was that way; he hadn't realized Kate was, too.
"I know," she said. "Nor have I lied. I'm good at my job. But I've been rather selective in what I've shown you. Would you like to see one more thing?"
He nodded, and she changed the channel again.
Peter recognized this place with a jolt in the pit of his stomach: a Red Hook dockside, with cold December rain slanting over the gray waves. There was a small huddle of people clustered on the dock. Again there was the odd sense of dislocation at seeing himself from the outside, especially this version of himself: bedraggled, bloody, slack-jawed and gray-faced.
Jones was bending over him, pumping his chest mechanically, face set and stiff. The rest of the agents were clustered around looking helpless. Peter noticed with approval, however, that they had all the members of the gang on the ground, handcuffed, with a guard on them.
It took him a moment to spot Neal, which was unusual. Neal usually drew attention like a bonfire; he always stood out, except on those occasions when he was consciously trying not to. But Neal hardly even looked like Neal -- he was soaked and crumpled on his knees in a huddle beside Peter. He seemed to have collapsed in on himself; he looked small and frightened and alone. He was gripping Peter's hand so tightly that, even in this warm room far removed from the action on the dockside, Peter could almost feel the bones in his hand grinding together. And he was crying, silent tears slipping down his face.
Peter made an abortive move toward the TV screen before he could stop himself.
"I thought that might be the case," Kate said. She sounded resigned. "It's going to hurt, you know."
"I know," Peter said. "Life does."
She tilted her head, acknowledging his point -- and him. There was challenge in her blue eyes, so much like El's. "Take care of the people you love, Peter. Remember that they'd be just fine without you, which means they must like having you around."
"I will," he said. He wasn't sure if he should do something else -- shake her hand, maybe? They certainly didn't have a hugging kind of relationship ... but then everything was wet and cold and gray, and Kate was right, it hurt, it hurt a lot.
Somewhere in his world of pain, though, there were hands supporting him, lifting him, and then it wasn't quite so cold and didn't hurt quite as much. When he opened his eyes, squinting at the dull leaden sky, he found that the soft thing his head was resting on was Neal's lap, and someone had tucked blankets around both of them, bundling them together in a cocoon. Neal had an arm across Peter's chest, hand still wrapped around his.
"What," Peter managed to say. His voice was a croak. He was dizzy, disoriented, only Neal's grip on him keeping him from sliding away into the sky. He could feel the hot trickle of blood down his cheek.
"Don't talk," Neal said. Peter tipped his head back a little more; it hurt, but he wanted to see Neal more clearly. Neal was pale and his hair was plastered to his head. He was much too wet for it to just be the rain.
"Did you jump in after me?" Peter croaked, shamelessly violating the not-talking rule. His throat felt like it had been scoured with sandpaper and his mouth tasted like salty mud. He was intensely, miserably nauseated.
"Jones was ahead of me." Neal shifted a bit, and Peter discovered when he tried to turn his head that there was something soft pressed against the side of his temple, held in place with Neal's hand. "No," Neal said. "You were shot in the head. Grazed, rather, I guess, but it's bleeding a lot. Don't move."
Neal's teeth were chattering. Peter thought his probably would be, too, except he was too cold even to shiver. Not moving sounded good. Probably reduced the chances of throwing up.
"You weren't breathing when we pulled you out," Neal said distantly, like he was talking to himself. He pulled Peter a little closer, tucking Peter's chilled body into the warmth of his lap. Somewhere Peter could hear sirens, but moving seemed like effort. So did keeping his eyes open.
"You're only allowed to fall asleep if you keep breathing," Neal told him.
Peter wanted to tell him that didn't make any sense, but being awake was an all-around miserable experience right now, and he wasn't sure if he could open his mouth without being sick, so he let himself fall away.
***
"Choices," Kate said, and he couldn't tell if he was dreaming or not, this time. Or the other time, for that matter. She was leaning on a polished countertop and there was blue sky behind her.
"I'm fairly happy with the choices I've made," Peter told her. "I mean, not that there are things I wouldn't do differently. I know I didn't give you a fair chance, but I was protecting Neal."
"I know," she said. "So was I. You understand that, right?"
"I do now."
Peter woke with a jolt. He was bundled under so many blankets that he couldn't move. This wasn't necessarily a bad thing, because right now he didn't really hurt and he didn't feel like puking, but he had a distinct feeling that both of those things might change if he did too much wriggling around. So he opted not to.
"Elizabeth's on her way," Neal's voice said. Peter twisted just enough to see Neal, also wrapped in blankets, sitting in a chair beside the bed. The room was too bright and there was nothing but a curtain separating them from what sounded like a busy hallway. Emergency room, Peter thought. There was a sad little plastic wreath tacked to the wall beside the bed.
"They're probably not going to keep you overnight if they can get your body temperature up," Neal added. "And they want to do a CAT scan on your head to make sure nothing's likely to break loose and kill you."
"I'm hardheaded," Peter said. He still sounded (and felt) like he'd been gargling with rocks.
"Believe me, I know." Neal's teasing smile faded and he looked away. "Peter --"
"Let's pretend we already had this conversation," Peter said hastily before Neal could get too far down the road he was obviously going down.
"... Deal," Neal said after a moment. Something moved under the blankets, which Peter realized a moment later was Neal's hand when it found and clasped his own.
He still remembered talking to Kate, fuzzed with the surreal tenor of a dream. He wanted to talk to Neal about it -- about the dream, or whatever it had been, and about choices; about life and the paths people take through it, and the holes they leave behind. But not now, not when his own near-death was so raw and fresh for both of them. There would be time for all of that later, over a beer and a glass of wine in Neal's apartment.
In the meantime there was the weight of the blankets, warming him; there was Neal's hand anchoring him down. There was the knowledge that he had people who would jump into ice-cold December waters to pull him out, people who'd cry for him even if their lives might have been better without him.
Or maybe not better. His life would be a lot more stable without Neal in it, and infinitely less complicated and painful, but it wouldn't be better. And he couldn't imagine wanting trade this life, uncertain and difficult as it could be, for that hypothetical other life, the one where he turned down Neal's deal or never met him in the first place.
So he held Neal's hand, squeezing lightly so that Neal knew he was still there even when his eyes were closed, and they waited in a comfortable, drowsing silence until Elizabeth came to collect them.
~
Fandom: White Collar
Word Count: 4200
Summary: Peter finds himself in an in-between place, and he's not alone.
Notes: This is one of the stories I started for H/C Advent and didn't finish in time. I started with the idea of "It's a Wonderful Life" in the White Collar universe and ended up, instead, doing the "Peter and Kate have a conversation in the afterlife" fic that I've been wanting to write. (No deaths except canon ones in this fic, however.) This is also for my
hc_bingo "cuddling for warmth" square, although that aspect ended up being a much smaller part of the finished fic than I'd intended.Cross-posted: http://archiveofourown.org/works/1109642
When Peter was eleven years old, he'd almost drowned in a frozen pond near his house. Typical small-town kid shenanigans -- he'd been horsing around with his buddies and the next thing he knew, the thin ice had cracked under him and he'd gone into the black water beneath.
He hadn't been scared, exactly. He didn't even realize until afterwards that he'd come very close to dying. There had only been shock and cold and a frantic scramble to get on top of the ice, which kept breaking under him, until one of the other kids came running with Peter's dad. He never could quite remember how he'd gotten out; his next clear memory was being bundled into an old blanket on the front seat of his dad's truck, with the heater running full blast and his dad rubbing him with a towel that smelled like dogs.
It all came back to him now, clear as if it had happened yesterday, along with the shock of cold water and the lingering sound of Neal's shout ringing in his ears. He sank, looking up toward the light, with a great pressure in his chest and a desperate feeling of loss and regret.
Elizabeth, I'm sorry ...
It wasn't supposed to happen this way. It was a pretty routine takedown, arresting smugglers on a Red Hook dock. Neal was supposed to stay in the car, but of course decided to "help" -- and he had helped, shouting a warning to Peter and the rest of his agents as another member of the gang circled around behind them. The gunman whirled and drew on Neal, and Peter didn't even have to think -- he just stood up and snapped off a shot. It all happened so fast that he didn't even realize he'd been shot until his legs stopped holding him and he fell over the retaining wall into the ocean.
As the icy water closed over his head, he hoped Neal had made it out okay. If Neal was all right, then it was worth it, in the end.
He closed his eyes.
***
Warm.
Peter cracked his eyes open. He didn't hurt. He wasn't cold. He was somewhere familiar, but it was so completely unexpected that it took him a moment to orient himself. He was sitting in front of the fireplace in the old converted farmhouse where he'd grown up. His parents had sold the house fifteen years ago and bought a condo.
But here it was, just like he remembered it: the flowered wallpaper and low ceiling; the heavy, practical furniture. There were tinsel garlands draping the walls. Yeah, it was only a few days 'til Christmas, Peter recalled -- but no, that was in the real world. The world in which he was drowning, or had already drowned, in the Upper Bay.
He sat up slowly and an afghan fell to the floor. Even that was familiar, a fuzzy old red-and-white afghan that his grandmother had crocheted. It used to be folded on the end of the couch in front of the fireplace for Peter and his cousins to wrap in after they came in from playing in the snow. It, too, had been gone for years, frayed to a rag and eventually used for pet bedding and then thrown away.
Sitting in front of the fire was a cup of hot cocoa, with a candy cane sticking out of it, just like his mom used to make for the kids in December. Peter reached out hesitantly to touch it. The cup was warm.
"I'm going insane," he said aloud.
"No," a soft voice said from behind him.
Peter spun around so fast he almost knocked over the cocoa.
The speaker was leaning against the doorway leading into the kitchen, hands in her pockets. She was backlit, her face in shadow, but Peter still recognized her by the long dark hair, even before she'd stepped forward so that light fell across her face.
"Kate."
She smiled without much humor. "There's something a little familiar here. You and me, meeting like this ... I hope you aren't going to try to intimidate me with a pinky-ring this time."
"Depends," Peter said. "You planning to shoot me?"
"Not today."
She was wearing a large fuzzy Christmas sweater, the sort of thing El's mother might knit, which kept making Peter's brain slip a gear. In all the surveillance photos and his few brief meetings with her, he'd never seen Kate anything other than impeccably put together. She was also wearing a name tag, the kind of big silly-looking tag that Peter sometimes had to wear at conferences, with HELLO MY NAME IS in large block letters, and KATE written in neat blue ink below that.
"Hey," Kate said. "My face is up here."
Peter felt his cheeks heat. "I was looking at your sweater."
"Oh," Kate said. "That. It's supposed to put you at ease." She sounded skeptical. "Like this room. Familiar surroundings and all of that."
"Where am I, really?" He had a terrible feeling what the answer was going to be.
"Not quite where you're thinking," Kate said. "This is more of a -- a waiting room, I guess you could say. A place where you hang out until things are decided."
"Whether I'm dead." He had to say it. The logical part of his brain kept telling him it was insane, trying to come up with plausible justifications involving drugs and kidnapping, but nothing could really change the fact that the last thing he remembered was getting shot and falling into the bay, and now he was sitting on a couch that no longer existed, in a house that hadn't looked like this since 1975, talking to a dead woman.
"Yep," Kate said. She leaned a hip on the back of the couch. "You're taking this better than some people do."
"You do this a lot, do you?" It came out more defensive than he'd meant it.
"It's my job," Kate said. "I didn't live what you'd call a good life, exactly. This is how I'm making up for it."
"You're on the afterlife help desk?"
She smiled, softening her face. It was the first time Peter had ever seen a genuine smile from Kate -- but then, he'd mostly been arresting her boyfriend or trying to strong-arm her, so it wasn't like he could blame her for not being friendly. "Something like that."
Peter sipped the cocoa. It hadn't cooled off at all while he was talking to Kate, and it was, of course, perfect -- exactly like his idealized memories from childhood.
"So I'm just ... waiting to die?" he asked hesitantly.
"Or to live," Kate said. "As the case may be."
"There's got to be something I can do. I'm not really the kind of person who sits around waiting. I like to get out in the field."
"I'd noticed," Kate said, with a wry twist of her lips. "Sorry, though. Your friends are going to pull you out in time, or not. Your body is going to live or it's not."
"There's nothing I can do to influence it at all?" he asked, frustrated.
"You could have some entertainment to pass the time, if you want." Kate picked up a remote control. It looked much too new to work with the big old vacuum-tube TV in the corner. The TV had knobs instead of push-buttons; they'd always had to cross the room to change the channel. When she pressed a button on the remote, though, light sparked in the middle of the TV and then the picture slowly warmed up. Peter had almost forgotten TVs used to work that way; he'd become used to modern digital sets.
"What kind of reception do you get in the afterlife?" he couldn't help asking.
"This isn't really the afterlife, like I said. It's more of a stop along the way. And it's basically the all you, all the time channel."
Now that the picture had warmed up enough to make out, Peter saw a narrow room with bunk beds and music posters on the walls. The place was a mess -- clothes strewn about, books on every surface. A gangly young man with a floppy haystack of brown hair was sprawled on the bed, reading.
Peter realized with a shock that the room was his university dorm room, and the young man was himself. He hadn't even recognized himself at first from the outside.
"Wow, you were a nerd, weren't you?" Kate said. She flipped channels. Now they were viewing a baseball game, complete with announcer commentary. Peter recognized himself at the pitcher's mound, and his stomach lurched. This wasn't the game -- yes, it was. He couldn't ever forget it.
"Turn it off," he said sharply. "I don't want to watch that."
Kate raised a brow, and switched channels again. Now he was watching himself pick Neal up from the prison, that very first day, years ago. Neal's hair was longer then, Peter thought irrelevantly. And he himself looked younger, though maybe it was just seeing himself from the outside, and from a distance.
"You've made lots of choices," Kate said. Her voice was distant; she was watching Neal on the screen. "Everyone does. Any of your choices could have taken your life a different way."
"Is this where I get the It's a Wonderful Life treatment?"
Her smile was sharper-edged this time. "Do you want to? I can show you that, if you like. What the world would be like if you'd drowned in that lake all those years ago."
"I'm not sure --" Peter began, but she'd already changed the channel.
This was a scene he hadn't seen before. Certainly nothing from his life that he remembered. It was a luxury hotel or an apartment, huge and spacious, with an unfamiliar city skyline outside the enormous, floor-to-ceiling windows.
"Where is this?" Peter asked.
"Rome, I think," Kate said.
Peter didn't see Neal until he stood up. He was wearing a black turtleneck, and looked similar to Neal as Peter remembered from their early days of working together. There was something a bit different about him, though, and as Neal strolled to the windows, Peter tried to figure out what it was. Something in the way he walked, maybe -- that graceful, confident swagger. There was an air of confidence and poise surrounding Neal that Peter didn't normally get from him ... not that Neal had any problem with ego, but he was usually a little more diffident than this.
Of course, the Neal he knew had spent four years in prison. This was Neal in his prime, Neal at the top of his game. This was a version of Neal who had never been forced to learn humility, or what it felt like to lose.
"When is this?" Peter asked, although he already knew. "I mean, when would it have been."
"Now," Kate said. "The present day."
"Neal never went to prison."
"Of course not." He couldn't read her tone. "You were the one that caught him, the only one who even came close."
Peter studied Neal on the screen, as if he could read the different course of Neal's life from the lines of his body. Neal didn't look unhappy. He seemed relaxed and confident and powerful.
"He's still a con artist?"
"Of course," Kate said, as if it was too obvious to mention. "Why change something that works? Though he doesn't run cons so much anymore; he doesn't need to. He got through the reckless years and now he's more clever about it, as well as wealthy and well connected." She sounded admiring.
"All of which he accomplished by stealing things from other people."
"If people don't hang onto their things, of course they'll be stolen," Kate said dismissively. "And he's happy. Isn't that what you want -- for Neal to be happy?"
Neal did look content, centered in himself in a way he'd rarely seemed when he was working for the FBI. Peter didn't want to examine that too closely.
"Can I see Elizabeth?"
"Sure," Kate said. She changed channels.
The new scene was an art gallery, not one Peter was familiar with. Holiday decorations glittered everywhere, and Elizabeth was at the center of a whirlwind of activity. She looked energized and excited and very much in her element.
"She's still working for the DeArmitt Gallery?" Although this didn't quite look like it.
"She's running her own," Kate said. "Rather than quitting to start her own business, as she did when she married you, she stayed with the gallery and then moved up in the art world. She's quite a jet-setter now. Doing very well for herself."
Out of the crowd, a man in a tuxedo moved up to El's shoulder. He was no one Peter had ever seen before, though he bore a slight resemblance to Neal in some ways -- young, nicely dressed, and darkly handsome. He leaned close and murmured in her ear. El blushed and grinned. Peter fought off an irrational surge of jealousy.
"Yes, she's married," Kate said, glancing at him. "You can't imagine you're the only man who ever appreciated her, you know. She just met him a little later than she met you."
The depressing thing was that they made a beautiful couple, El and her handsome spouse. Probably a much more striking and photogenic couple than she made with Peter. He could all too easily imagine the two of them appearing at show openings and celebrity events. They looked like the sort of people who had red carpets rolled out for them.
In his universe, she'd settled for living on an FBI agent's salary, with a guy who wouldn't know what to do with a red carpet if it smacked him in the face.
The idea had never occurred to Peter that El might have been better off if she hadn't met him. It was harder to convince himself of that with Neal; the apartment had been gorgeous, but also rather stark and bare, without a decoration to be seen anywhere. On the other hand, Neal wasn't much of a Christmas person. And his relaxed body language had told the tale of a man who certainly wouldn't trade places with someone who'd spent four years in prison.
Still, Neal had won his way to the top of the heap by stepping on a lot of people -- Peter couldn't ignore that.
He also couldn't ignore the nagging little voice inside: Would they really be happier if I'd drowned at the age of eleven?
"Look, we can't all be George Bailey," Kate said, seeing the look on his face. "Not least because he was a fictional character. Yes, your loved ones are just fine in the world without you, Peter. What did you want -- that they'd be miserable, living terribly unhappy lives?"
"Well ..." When she put it that way, it did sound selfish. "I'm glad they're happy. I guess it'd be nice to think that I made some difference to them."
"Look, I deal with this every day, so let me tell you that most people's lives don't leave much of a mark," Kate said. "That's just how life is. If you remove one thread from the tapestry, it heals up around it. People want to think they'd leave a hole, but they don't really, in the grand scheme of things. If you think about it, aren't we all better off that way?"
"You did, though," Peter said.
He hadn't meant to hurt her -- hadn't expected, actually, to see his words land so hard. But she reeled a little; her face lost color.
"What do you mean?" she asked. Her voice was cool, but slightly breathless.
"You left one hell of a hole in Neal's life," Peter said. "Maybe if he'd never met you, he wouldn't have known the difference; who knows. But I'm one of the people who had to patch him back up after he lost you. I know what it looked like."
"Well," she said, calming herself. "Fair enough, I suppose. I ... wasn't there."
"It's not your fault," Peter said, feeling awkward. Trying to comfort a dead person over their own death wasn't a position in which he'd ever expected to find himself.
"I know," she said sharply. "And as much as I'd love to blame you, it isn't yours either. One thing you learn about in this line of work is how choices work -- yours and other people's. Confronting other people about the realities of their lives makes it harder to maintain your illusions about your own."
"That sounds rough."
"It's not a cakewalk, let me tell you." She took a deep breath, and then said in a rush, "It does matter, Peter, how you feel about going back. In the outcome, I mean."
"I thought it might," Peter said. Kate gave him a flat look, and he shrugged. "Look, I'm not familiar with this afterlife stuff, but I'm used to reading between the lines with con artists. I can tell when I'm being played."
"Fair point," she acknowledged. "My motives may not have been entirely pure in asking for this assignment."
"I don't think you've done anything that was technically against the rules." He'd known Neal was that way; he hadn't realized Kate was, too.
"I know," she said. "Nor have I lied. I'm good at my job. But I've been rather selective in what I've shown you. Would you like to see one more thing?"
He nodded, and she changed the channel again.
Peter recognized this place with a jolt in the pit of his stomach: a Red Hook dockside, with cold December rain slanting over the gray waves. There was a small huddle of people clustered on the dock. Again there was the odd sense of dislocation at seeing himself from the outside, especially this version of himself: bedraggled, bloody, slack-jawed and gray-faced.
Jones was bending over him, pumping his chest mechanically, face set and stiff. The rest of the agents were clustered around looking helpless. Peter noticed with approval, however, that they had all the members of the gang on the ground, handcuffed, with a guard on them.
It took him a moment to spot Neal, which was unusual. Neal usually drew attention like a bonfire; he always stood out, except on those occasions when he was consciously trying not to. But Neal hardly even looked like Neal -- he was soaked and crumpled on his knees in a huddle beside Peter. He seemed to have collapsed in on himself; he looked small and frightened and alone. He was gripping Peter's hand so tightly that, even in this warm room far removed from the action on the dockside, Peter could almost feel the bones in his hand grinding together. And he was crying, silent tears slipping down his face.
Peter made an abortive move toward the TV screen before he could stop himself.
"I thought that might be the case," Kate said. She sounded resigned. "It's going to hurt, you know."
"I know," Peter said. "Life does."
She tilted her head, acknowledging his point -- and him. There was challenge in her blue eyes, so much like El's. "Take care of the people you love, Peter. Remember that they'd be just fine without you, which means they must like having you around."
"I will," he said. He wasn't sure if he should do something else -- shake her hand, maybe? They certainly didn't have a hugging kind of relationship ... but then everything was wet and cold and gray, and Kate was right, it hurt, it hurt a lot.
Somewhere in his world of pain, though, there were hands supporting him, lifting him, and then it wasn't quite so cold and didn't hurt quite as much. When he opened his eyes, squinting at the dull leaden sky, he found that the soft thing his head was resting on was Neal's lap, and someone had tucked blankets around both of them, bundling them together in a cocoon. Neal had an arm across Peter's chest, hand still wrapped around his.
"What," Peter managed to say. His voice was a croak. He was dizzy, disoriented, only Neal's grip on him keeping him from sliding away into the sky. He could feel the hot trickle of blood down his cheek.
"Don't talk," Neal said. Peter tipped his head back a little more; it hurt, but he wanted to see Neal more clearly. Neal was pale and his hair was plastered to his head. He was much too wet for it to just be the rain.
"Did you jump in after me?" Peter croaked, shamelessly violating the not-talking rule. His throat felt like it had been scoured with sandpaper and his mouth tasted like salty mud. He was intensely, miserably nauseated.
"Jones was ahead of me." Neal shifted a bit, and Peter discovered when he tried to turn his head that there was something soft pressed against the side of his temple, held in place with Neal's hand. "No," Neal said. "You were shot in the head. Grazed, rather, I guess, but it's bleeding a lot. Don't move."
Neal's teeth were chattering. Peter thought his probably would be, too, except he was too cold even to shiver. Not moving sounded good. Probably reduced the chances of throwing up.
"You weren't breathing when we pulled you out," Neal said distantly, like he was talking to himself. He pulled Peter a little closer, tucking Peter's chilled body into the warmth of his lap. Somewhere Peter could hear sirens, but moving seemed like effort. So did keeping his eyes open.
"You're only allowed to fall asleep if you keep breathing," Neal told him.
Peter wanted to tell him that didn't make any sense, but being awake was an all-around miserable experience right now, and he wasn't sure if he could open his mouth without being sick, so he let himself fall away.
***
"Choices," Kate said, and he couldn't tell if he was dreaming or not, this time. Or the other time, for that matter. She was leaning on a polished countertop and there was blue sky behind her.
"I'm fairly happy with the choices I've made," Peter told her. "I mean, not that there are things I wouldn't do differently. I know I didn't give you a fair chance, but I was protecting Neal."
"I know," she said. "So was I. You understand that, right?"
"I do now."
Peter woke with a jolt. He was bundled under so many blankets that he couldn't move. This wasn't necessarily a bad thing, because right now he didn't really hurt and he didn't feel like puking, but he had a distinct feeling that both of those things might change if he did too much wriggling around. So he opted not to.
"Elizabeth's on her way," Neal's voice said. Peter twisted just enough to see Neal, also wrapped in blankets, sitting in a chair beside the bed. The room was too bright and there was nothing but a curtain separating them from what sounded like a busy hallway. Emergency room, Peter thought. There was a sad little plastic wreath tacked to the wall beside the bed.
"They're probably not going to keep you overnight if they can get your body temperature up," Neal added. "And they want to do a CAT scan on your head to make sure nothing's likely to break loose and kill you."
"I'm hardheaded," Peter said. He still sounded (and felt) like he'd been gargling with rocks.
"Believe me, I know." Neal's teasing smile faded and he looked away. "Peter --"
"Let's pretend we already had this conversation," Peter said hastily before Neal could get too far down the road he was obviously going down.
"... Deal," Neal said after a moment. Something moved under the blankets, which Peter realized a moment later was Neal's hand when it found and clasped his own.
He still remembered talking to Kate, fuzzed with the surreal tenor of a dream. He wanted to talk to Neal about it -- about the dream, or whatever it had been, and about choices; about life and the paths people take through it, and the holes they leave behind. But not now, not when his own near-death was so raw and fresh for both of them. There would be time for all of that later, over a beer and a glass of wine in Neal's apartment.
In the meantime there was the weight of the blankets, warming him; there was Neal's hand anchoring him down. There was the knowledge that he had people who would jump into ice-cold December waters to pull him out, people who'd cry for him even if their lives might have been better without him.
Or maybe not better. His life would be a lot more stable without Neal in it, and infinitely less complicated and painful, but it wouldn't be better. And he couldn't imagine wanting trade this life, uncertain and difficult as it could be, for that hypothetical other life, the one where he turned down Neal's deal or never met him in the first place.
So he held Neal's hand, squeezing lightly so that Neal knew he was still there even when his eyes were closed, and they waited in a comfortable, drowsing silence until Elizabeth came to collect them.
~
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I liked your subtle, understated portrayal of Kate, the way you work in her con artist POV. You pack in a lot of complexity, mostly by implication. (Which depresses me a tiny bit, because it tells me that actual canon could have done better by her even without expanding her minimal screen time.)
And of course, the end is very sweet, with Peter and Neal having their not!conversation. And hand holding! I'm a sucker for hand holding.
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And yeah, this particular twist on the "It's a Wonderful Life" idea is something that I really wanted to write, because yes, exactly: the idea of people who would be just fine on their own, but choose to be together, is very touching and powerful to me. I've also enjoyed canons in which the characters' lives would have been crushingly lonely or awful if they'd never met, but with the WC characters I really don't think that's true at all; Peter and Neal would arguably be better off if they'd never met each other, but all of them are in each others' lives because they want to be. Especially with everything that's going on in canon right now, I wanted to play with that a bit, too.
And yeah, I'm kind of a sucker for handholding too. :)
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But, yeah, I thought Kate came across as sympathetic. Heh, I'm not sure how much that's worth though. On the one hand, I love her, so I'm going to be on the alert for (what I see as) poor portrayals. On the other hand, I'm already inclined to see Kate as sympathetic, so.
It's funny, when I look at my past fandoms, I tended to latch onto the relationships that are needy, and co-dependent, and so, so messy. The kind that are unhealthy as hell, and yet they're also the best thing for the characters in question. Their relationships may be messed up, but they'd be lost without each other. And yet, right now, that's not what I'm into at all. I don't know if it's just the fandom I happen to be in--as you pointed out, the WC characters just don't work like that---or if my tastes are actually changing.