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s2309Title: Can't Hold You Closer Than This
Characters (Pairings): Sara Ellis, Neal Caffrey, filler OCs (Sara/Neal)
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 4272
Spoilers: Till at least 4x16
Beta: The lovely![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
percygranger. She saw this fic when it was about 2K, and gave me plenty of wonderful advice. It is now 4K. Any and all remaining mistakes are obviously mine. And a special thank you to reve_silencieux, who caught a few crucial errors while reading the finished fic!
Disclaimer: White Collar is Jeff Eastin's brainchild. Not mine.
Summary: Sara may never learn how to fake love, but she’s always known how to fake okay. (And by the end of this story, maybe she won't even need to do that.)
Author's Note: The title is a slightly modified lyric from Eavesdrop by The Civil Wars.
This story has been in the works since July 2014. Here's proof. It has since hopped 'verses, grown quite a bit, and matured. Sara sounds much more like herself in this story than she did in the very first version.
I'll probably write Neal's side of the story (i.e. his recovery) sometime, but if this story is any indicator, you can expect to see it in October 2017. Oops.
For more in this verse, click here.
There’s no buffer of familiar faces in London, no one she can count on or trust or talk to. She didn’t even notice when that became something she needed, but now it is. Cheater, she wants to yell at whoever did that (it was probably her). And she left them behind, but it feels like they went away.
It’d be easy to blame them and move on. But she won’t, so now there’s this ugly sadness trying to creep under her skin.
So she sends Neal postcards.
(Also because she wants to. Also because it’s a middle finger to her pathetic misery. See, I’m communicating with people!)
It’s not easy. It involves hoarding all the happy moments she can find (she makes them up if she was too distracted to notice any). And picking a postcard to write them on. And (this is the hardest, to be honest) choosing the days on which she sends them with what feels like surgical precision. If she waits too long between postcards, he might notice. And she doesn't like the thought of him being able to read her from half a world away.
But maybe he can, because he sends her postcards, even though she didn't ask him to. He tells her about people he’s seen and cases he solved and carefully, so carefully, slips in a few indicators that he’s dating again. And he does it so well that even if she was the kind of person to feel jealous, she wouldn’t. (She'd be tempted to call him a sociopath again, but it doesn't quite fit, and it's a word coated in more barbs than she'd like to fling at him.)
He sends her postcards and they make her happy. He makes her happy. She’s depending on people now. When did that happen? When did she give in to that weakness again?
She almost decides to stop, just to prove to herself that she can make do without them. But then one of Neal’s cards shows up and a grin spreads across her face and she realizes, she could replace this with kitten videos and be perfectly fine, but she doesn’t want to.
He sends her postcards like lifelines, little dotted lines in the air, shrinking the distance between London and New York, bringing them so close that she feels like all she has to do is walk over and she'll be there.
But it isn't that easy, their bridge isn't quite that durable.
She'll settle for the postcards. She can settle for the postcards. She can do that.
She may never learn how to fake love, but she’s always known how to fake okay.
She wears a strut like armour, wears makeup like armour, weaponizes every damn thing on her body, makes it as sharp as it can be, till looking at herself feels like stabbing herself. That’s good. It’s good. She’s in a position that’s about paperwork and people, and she needs a little time before she can properly handle the people part of it.
But sometimes, when she’s roaming the city, she forgets. The edges slide and the weapons are lowered and she feels... just for a moment or two, she belongs. But every time she tries to put her weapons away, she remembers. London, not New York. Endless summer rain, not sunshine.
She remembers a city she left behind and she looks around at this blank slate and she should be splashing colours around but it’s just too different. Too new. There aren’t enough memories scattered around yet. She doesn’t know the corners she can retreat to for coffee or takeout or safety yet.
And she’s always wanted a blank slate and she’s always wanted a new beginning but not this way. Not this alien creature of a city that’s missing a heart and lungs and a liver but still claims to be alive.
She doesn’t remember blank slates being quite so empty.
The office is comfortable. Four walls and a desk and a finite stack of papers that she manages to drag out so much that she stays late every day (she reads every word of every file, no one reads every word of every file). She stays later than she should, later than everyone but her secretary, reading files and signing them and shifting them to an out pile that would be so much higher if she didn’t need a reason to stay awake.
She hears a knock on the door. She takes one last look at the drawing on the postcard Neal just sent her (swans, beautiful and precious and hers) and hides it between two files. “Yeah?” she calls out, and glances at her watch.
One a.m.
How is anybody else still in this office? How is she still in this office?
Her secretary pokes his head in. Of course. Ethan’s the one person in this office who insists on talking to her every chance he gets. He calls it ‘integrating her into the London office.’ She calls it ‘being a pain in the ass,’ but she doesn’t mind as much as she pretends to.
“Good morning, Ms. Ellis. Would you like some coffee?”
“I’m good, thanks,” she says, her fake smile too wide (she can’t gauge it so well, this late at night). “Why didn’t you throw me out at twelve? Ten, even?”
“Well, for one thing, I can’t exactly throw my boss out of her office. And for another, I’m fine with it. I usually stay this late. I’m guessing this is a first for you?”
“In this office, yes. You?”
“I sleep at two, wake up at six.”
“You’re much worse than I am.” She gestures him to a chair. “I’m just avoiding sleep.”
“Sleep, or something else?”
“When I want to figure it out, I’ll talk to a shrink,” she says sharply.
“Okay,” he says easily. “I’ll get a masters in Psychology and get back to you on that.”
And damn it, her smile is too wide again, but that’s only because a smaller one couldn’t contain her hearty laugh.
They’re both going to leave in five minutes, and she’ll go back to herself (or whatever version of herself it is that lives in this city), but for now, she’s okay.
Sara swirls her coffee round her cup pointlessly. It turned into undrinkable bitter sludge about an hour ago, but she still hasn’t stepped out of her office to get a fresh cup.
She’s about to convince herself to walk through the office to the coffee machine when she hears a feeble knock at the door.
“Yes?”
A stout young woman pokes her head in. “Excuse me, Ms. Ellis, I was wondering if you wanted coffee?”
Sara squints suspiciously. “Janine, right?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Sit down.”
Janine makes her way over to the offered chair on shaky legs.
Sara closes the file on her desk and focuses on the woman in front of her. “I’ve seen your personnel file, Janine. You’ve been with Sterling-Bosch for over three years. There’s no way you’re still going on coffee runs.”
Janine bites her lip. “You’re right. That was just an excuse to start a conversation. I wasn’t sure how to approach you. You’re a little... terrifying.”
Sara blinks. “Terrifying?”
“It’s a good thing! Probably?”
Sara laughs and shakes her head. She can’t think of anyone else she knows who could land up in this situation. Only her.
“So, why are you really here?” she asks Janine.
“I was hoping for some advice. I’ve been working this one case for three days and I haven’t found a thing.” Janine hands over the file she’s holding.
“The missing Klimt,” Sara says as she begins to flip through it.
“Yes. It’s just a drawing, but it has a lot of sentimental value to the owners and I don’t want the trail to go cold.”
“Impressive work. Very thorough,” Sara murmurs absentmindedly as she takes in the detailed information Janine has gathered.
Janine smiles proudly.
“The Harrisons. Your primary suspects, right?”
Janine nods.
“Did you rummage through their trash?”
“Trash?” She looks confused.
“Yes! You want to know what they’re throwing away. I once tracked a Rothko across New York using a jitney receipt I found in the trash.”
She looks at her, awestruck. “How did you do that?”
“Rubber gloves were extremely helpful. Also the jitney driver. He didn’t just tell me the stop my suspect got off at, he even told me the house he entered, and that he had an art tube. After that, it was a cakewalk.”
“Wow. That’s really lucky.”
“I know.”
“Anyway, thanks! I’m going to go… rummage through trash.”
“That’s the spirit,” Sara calls.
Janine’s departure is accompanied by a flurry of movement at her door. Sara walks out to see what’s going on.
Nearly everyone is in motion, running to either the water cooler or the coffee machine or their desk. The one unfortunate soul who’s still hovering outside her office gathers the courage to speak up. “We heard laughter,” he says sheepishly. “We were worried.”
“Uh huh,” Sara says disbelievingly. She shakes her head and turns back to her paperwork.
Walking into the office the next day, everything seems perfectly ordinary, but the atmosphere has changed. She receives more smiles and less hostile glances from her coworkers.
The office feels just a little warmer from that day on.
Her days fall into a pattern. Paperwork and people. The category of people slowly expands from Ethan and Janine to most of the office. She gives advice on recovery cases, introduces investigators to some of her less than orthodox methods, clears up some lingering resentment with someone who expected to get her job. She does far more than she’s supposed to, and everyone loves her for it.
She gets postcards from Neal every three days, like clockwork.
She’s fine.
Three days pass with no card from Neal. Then four. Then five.
Maybe this is his goodbye. Or maybe he's in trouble. And she could call June, or Peter, but it's only been five days. He could be busy.
Or hurt.
She calls Neal, whose phone is switched off. She calls Peter, who must have set his phone to go straight to voicemail. Of course. It’s too early in New York.
Putting words together for a voicemail is harder than she thought it’d be.
She hadn’t intended a clean break, but she’d left him (and a lot of other people) behind without trying to reach out again. And even if she had, she doesn’t usually talk to Peter outside of work. And what’s she supposed to say? Hey, Peter, it’s Sara. Yes, after all this time. Oh, but I’m only calling to ask if Neal’s okay.
She doesn’t know how to phrase that politely. But she has to leave a message, so she stumbles her way through a semi-polite version of that.
It’s a small price to pay.
A week later, she nearly drops her coffee when she finds a postcard in her mailbox. It's a store bought card, which already isn't right - Neal always sketches for her. It says I'm sorry, in a very shaky hand. And the address isn't in Neal's handwriting. Which probably means that she should have followed up on that abysmal voicemail she left.
She'd meant to make a call, which is not the same as she did call and found out what happened.
It's Saturday morning, too early, so she sticks a little note on her weekend stack of files, Call Neal. She’ll probably wait for too long, much longer than she would have liked to, just so she can be sure that she’ll get the person and not the voicemail. Nothing she wants to say will sound the same in a voicemail.
Maybe she called too early. Neal sounds sleepy as he says "Hey." But she's already worked out fifteen different worst case scenarios, and she wants answers, now.
"What happened?"
"Good morning to you too," he says. "Next time you call, could you please check the time difference? It's- crap, ten o'clock."
It's a small, rather pointless victory, but she smiles nonetheless. Then she remembers why she called. "What happened?"
He's quiet for a minute. "Is it okay if we don't talk about that?"
She sighs resignedly. "Of course it is."
She didn’t expect a straight answer, but she didn’t expect him to be this frank either.
What could have happened that lowered his defenses that far?
She wants to know what’s going on, of course she does. But she doesn’t need to.
"Are you okay, at least?" she asks. This, she needs to know.
"For a certain definition of the word, yes, I think so."
She smiles wryly. "That's good."
She hears a little huff of breath, can imagine the smile that goes with it.
They're quiet, but it's not awkward. And she wouldn't mind staying on the line for a few minutes (or hours), but it's an international phone call. A lot of money just to listen to someone breathing.
Then she decides, to hell with it. It's money well spent.
Would you mind terribly if I showed up on your doorstep?
She turns the card over in her hands. He’d sketched the Empire State Building on the other side. She knows what that means for them. Romance. Love. The hypothetical happily ever after that they could never have. It’s a dream of baton wielding con children and domesticity and a house that isn’t just a collection of walls with a conveniently placed bed.
Is he proposing to her again? Is he telling her that they could have an ordinary life?
What is he saying?
She doesn’t know. But she writes back anyway, Not at all.
Maybe they’ll give this another shot. Or maybe they were doomed from the start.
It’s time to find out.
She works when she doesn’t want to deal with things. So what? They’re called coping mechanisms, and they work.
But time just rushes by. His arrival is one week away, then five days, then three, and suddenly it’s the morning of the day he’s going to show up and there are no files on her desk.
She panics for thirteen straight minutes. She doesn’t want to think about it, doesn’t want to think about it, doesn’t want to-
Neal’s going to be here tonight. In London.
She’s built herself a life here, with more than a little effort. (Neal could make it brighter, of course, but he could also tear it down. He’s unpredictable like that.)
She has people now, her colleagues and the waiter at her favourite restaurant and that one barista who probably care if she lives or dies. She doesn’t need Neal.
But she’d like him to be there, all the same.
What happens if she lets him in? Does he even want to be let in?
Just then, Ethan walks in with a stack of files in his arms. “So sorry, boss. I usually get these on your desk before you’re here, but I got delayed on my way to work.” He drops the files on her desk with a remarkably loud thud.
“Ethan.”
“Yes?”
“I hate you.”
“Okay, sure.” He shrugs confusedly and walks out.
The rain has taken some getting used to. She resented it at first - it ruined five pairs of heels before she gave in and bought boots. But now that it doesn't destroy her wardrobe, she's surprisingly okay with it. Enjoys it, even. Her house reaches a temperature that is just shy of requiring blankets and slippers for survival.
It's perfect.
She isn't watching the rain, mesmerizing as it is. She's curled in an easy chair, nursing a mug of hot chocolate and poring over files. She can never sleep on rainy nights, nearly overtaken by the mad urge to get up and run around outdoors. So she waits out the storm with work for company.
She shouldn’t be working. She could just get drenched in the rain and not care for one night. It’s the weekend, and she’s nursed herself through colds before. But if she does that, there’ll be time to think, and she doesn’t want that.
She isn’t afraid of where her mind might lead her. Definitely not. Why would she be? It’s already been on one unsupervised trek today, and that turned out alright, didn’t it?
There’ll be plenty of time to worry and second-guess when Neal shows up, anyway.
The doorbell rings at a perfect moment, for once - she's almost at the end of a page. She gets up, leaves her mug of soup on a piece of furniture, reads the last paragraph as she walks to the door (she'll probably have to reread it, but what the hell).
Some corner of her brain is wondering who's here, but mostly, she's on autopilot. Her hand is on the doorknob when she remembers, Neal. But the door's already swinging open, and there is no possible way that he's going to miss the series of expressions on her face that in no shape or form resemble a smile.
"Hi," she says, too late.
"You forgot," he accuses, his voice too gentle to give his words any real ammunition.
She rolls her eyes and smiles. "I remembered."
"Oh, really? When?"
"About two seconds before I opened the door."
"Workaholic," he teases with a smile.
She laughs a little. He doesn’t know how right he is, and she’s not about to enlighten him. "Come in."
All her worries feel foolish, now that Neal’s actually here. Who cares what’ll happen? Neal’s very presence is relaxing, their banter is fun, and somehow, in this moment, that’s all that matters.
She notices, later than she should have, that he's walking with crutches, keeping all his weight off his right leg.
This must be why he wasn’t able to send her cards for those few days.
She won't mention it till he brings it up.
"Where can I leave this?" he asks. He's holding up his left crutch. She gestures to the umbrella stand.
"I pulled out the second one mostly for the airport," he explains. "I can walk with just one, but going through an airport usually involves a trek. I didn't want to risk it. Also, sprawled on the floor in a heap? Not how I want to be remembered."
She laughs, and he tries to, but he's a deer in headlights and his halfhearted attempt at a laugh says as much.
He opens his mouth to continue, but she raises a hand to stop him. “You don’t have to tell me till you’re okay with it,” she says.
He smiles, slowly, like he’s come face to face with the kind of sunset only photographers seem to find. “Okay,” he says softly. “Thank you.”
She doesn’t say ‘You don’t have to thank me’. Those words are useless to him. She just smiles warmly (and a little knowingly) and points him in the direction of a sofa.
Everyone feels better in the cold with a hot drink warming their hands and throats. Neal’s no different.
She supplies him with the remaining half of the soup in a mug identical to hers. She had to lean forward to hand it to him - he’d already installed himself on her sofa, shoes off, both legs up. He still wears the same scent. She wishes she didn’t know that.
“You made this?” he asks.
“I boiled water. The powdered meat and vegetables did the rest.”
He smiles like she spent half the evening making it for him. “It’s good.”
She rolls her eyes. “Whatever you say, Caffrey. You know, I’m surprised that your fine palate can tolerate this processed crap.”
“I can make an exception from time to time.”
She hasn’t forgotten how charming he can be. And she’s probably lost the tolerance she built up for it.
That could be a problem.
“Why are you here, Neal?” She tries to ask the question gently, but she doesn’t remember that too well either, she spends most of her days with people who have to listen what she says, there is at least a little bit of bite to her words. But she can’t take it back, can’t turn back the moment and erase that surprisingly honest, hurt look from his eyes.
“I…”
“I’m sorry.” That came out right, at least.
“No, you have a right to know.” He fiddles with the edge of his shirt before saying, “I just wanted to get away for a little while. I mean, everyone’s... amazing, but after a point I just felt choked. And you’ve never made me feel that way, so I figured maybe I should come see you.”
“So you’re here because I speak my mind?” That’s vaguely disappointing, but she can live with it.
“No! I, uh, I missed you. And I wanted to see you again.”
Sara smiles. That’s more like it. “You’re terrible.”
Neal grins unabashedly.
They talk about irrelevant things; Diana’s baby, Elizabeth’s move to DC, the weather. They spar and banter, and it’s like the space between them flees until they're suddenly less than an inch apart, lips parted.
Neal looks like he wants to lean forward, but instead, he pulls back and whispers "Can I get a minute?" He glances at his leg. He looks both embarrassed and hopeful, his eyes so heartbreakingly vulnerable.
"Of course,” she says gently.
It takes them a little time to fit together without hurting each other. His eyes stay locked on hers the whole time. He's blinking luxuriously, like they have all the time they want (they do).
Finally, finally, she leans closer and kisses him, and it hurts.
They don't neck like teenagers. Kisses never hurt this much at that age. These kisses, though, they burn of time spent apart, the ache is almost too much to bear, they're beautiful.
She can feel his face under her fingertips, can feel the muscles shift every time he winces. And she knows, just from that, that he's hurting the same way she is, that he wants this to stop. But every time they try, one of them just leans forward again.
She'd always thought that their reunion kiss would be passionate, exciting, electric, not painful. But this feels strangely right. After all this time they've spent apart, this feels right.
He tries to sleep on the sofa. Idiot boy.
It’s completely irrational, she knows that on some level. But watching him drape a sheet across the sofa one-handed, as though he'll manage a comfortable night's sleep on it, makes her shake with anger.
He’s injured, and probably in pain. Does he think that she’ll let him contort himself trying to find a comfortable position on a too-small sofa? Does he think that after what just happened, she wouldn’t want him in bed next to her? Did he not think to ask?
(Does she come across as that heartless?)
She wants to slap him hard enough to leave a mark. She wants to kiss him so gently that he can’t even think of questioning his place in her life.
She would have done one or both if he wasn't balanced on a crutch. Instead, she holds out a hand and says, "Come in?"
That probably works better than the others.
She wakes up to his hand stroking her hair gently. It isn't morning yet, nowhere near. Probably closer to midnight. But he's jetlagged and she's a light sleeper.
She shifts so she can hear his heartbeat and is about to fall asleep again when he starts talking, soft and a little hoarse.
"I was kidnapped."
She strokes his shoulder with her thumb, to let him know that she's awake.
He keeps talking.
"They didn't want anything from me, they just... wanted to break me. I guess they managed it." He lets out a bitter laugh. "My right leg was pretty much shattered from the knee down. And there was a ridiculous amount of blood, everywhere. It was... it hurt."
She goes still. Her mind paints her a picture of a single lightbulb illuminating three faceless men with bloodied clubs. It’s… unhelpful, to say the least. She has to press her lips together to prevent a little pained ‘Oh,’ from escaping.
She closes her eyes and breathes slowly and shoves the useless images out of her head before turning to him. "Do you need someone awake to talk to?"
He shakes his head slightly. "I wasn't lying when I said I was okay."
She searches his eyes for pain, sadness, or a trace of a withheld truth, but all she sees is peace. Acceptance.
He really is fine.
"Okay," she repeats. She leans back against her pillow, relief coursing through her veins, and runs a hand through his hair, messes it up a little. "Sleep?"
He hums, and shifts so he's leaning on her shoulder, throws an arm across her so it feels like he's holding her. And he's so good at it, but she doesn't know how he does it, doesn't know how to give away a little of herself and still have enough left to be a rock for someone.
But maybe, maybe this is it.
She runs her fingers through his hair, lets her nails scrape gently against his scalp.
She still doesn’t need this. If she wakes up tomorrow and he’s gone, she’ll patch herself up in a couple of days and soldier on merrily.
But it’s nice having him here.
It's warm. And she never thought she’d want that, but she does, she does.
Characters (Pairings): Sara Ellis, Neal Caffrey, filler OCs (Sara/Neal)
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 4272
Spoilers: Till at least 4x16
Beta: The lovely
percygranger. She saw this fic when it was about 2K, and gave me plenty of wonderful advice. It is now 4K. Any and all remaining mistakes are obviously mine. And a special thank you to reve_silencieux, who caught a few crucial errors while reading the finished fic!Disclaimer: White Collar is Jeff Eastin's brainchild. Not mine.
Summary: Sara may never learn how to fake love, but she’s always known how to fake okay. (And by the end of this story, maybe she won't even need to do that.)
Author's Note: The title is a slightly modified lyric from Eavesdrop by The Civil Wars.
This story has been in the works since July 2014. Here's proof. It has since hopped 'verses, grown quite a bit, and matured. Sara sounds much more like herself in this story than she did in the very first version.
I'll probably write Neal's side of the story (i.e. his recovery) sometime, but if this story is any indicator, you can expect to see it in October 2017. Oops.
For more in this verse, click here.
There’s no buffer of familiar faces in London, no one she can count on or trust or talk to. She didn’t even notice when that became something she needed, but now it is. Cheater, she wants to yell at whoever did that (it was probably her). And she left them behind, but it feels like they went away.
It’d be easy to blame them and move on. But she won’t, so now there’s this ugly sadness trying to creep under her skin.
So she sends Neal postcards.
(Also because she wants to. Also because it’s a middle finger to her pathetic misery. See, I’m communicating with people!)
It’s not easy. It involves hoarding all the happy moments she can find (she makes them up if she was too distracted to notice any). And picking a postcard to write them on. And (this is the hardest, to be honest) choosing the days on which she sends them with what feels like surgical precision. If she waits too long between postcards, he might notice. And she doesn't like the thought of him being able to read her from half a world away.
But maybe he can, because he sends her postcards, even though she didn't ask him to. He tells her about people he’s seen and cases he solved and carefully, so carefully, slips in a few indicators that he’s dating again. And he does it so well that even if she was the kind of person to feel jealous, she wouldn’t. (She'd be tempted to call him a sociopath again, but it doesn't quite fit, and it's a word coated in more barbs than she'd like to fling at him.)
He sends her postcards and they make her happy. He makes her happy. She’s depending on people now. When did that happen? When did she give in to that weakness again?
She almost decides to stop, just to prove to herself that she can make do without them. But then one of Neal’s cards shows up and a grin spreads across her face and she realizes, she could replace this with kitten videos and be perfectly fine, but she doesn’t want to.
He sends her postcards like lifelines, little dotted lines in the air, shrinking the distance between London and New York, bringing them so close that she feels like all she has to do is walk over and she'll be there.
But it isn't that easy, their bridge isn't quite that durable.
She'll settle for the postcards. She can settle for the postcards. She can do that.
-:-
She may never learn how to fake love, but she’s always known how to fake okay.
She wears a strut like armour, wears makeup like armour, weaponizes every damn thing on her body, makes it as sharp as it can be, till looking at herself feels like stabbing herself. That’s good. It’s good. She’s in a position that’s about paperwork and people, and she needs a little time before she can properly handle the people part of it.
But sometimes, when she’s roaming the city, she forgets. The edges slide and the weapons are lowered and she feels... just for a moment or two, she belongs. But every time she tries to put her weapons away, she remembers. London, not New York. Endless summer rain, not sunshine.
She remembers a city she left behind and she looks around at this blank slate and she should be splashing colours around but it’s just too different. Too new. There aren’t enough memories scattered around yet. She doesn’t know the corners she can retreat to for coffee or takeout or safety yet.
And she’s always wanted a blank slate and she’s always wanted a new beginning but not this way. Not this alien creature of a city that’s missing a heart and lungs and a liver but still claims to be alive.
She doesn’t remember blank slates being quite so empty.
-:-
The office is comfortable. Four walls and a desk and a finite stack of papers that she manages to drag out so much that she stays late every day (she reads every word of every file, no one reads every word of every file). She stays later than she should, later than everyone but her secretary, reading files and signing them and shifting them to an out pile that would be so much higher if she didn’t need a reason to stay awake.
She hears a knock on the door. She takes one last look at the drawing on the postcard Neal just sent her (swans, beautiful and precious and hers) and hides it between two files. “Yeah?” she calls out, and glances at her watch.
One a.m.
How is anybody else still in this office? How is she still in this office?
Her secretary pokes his head in. Of course. Ethan’s the one person in this office who insists on talking to her every chance he gets. He calls it ‘integrating her into the London office.’ She calls it ‘being a pain in the ass,’ but she doesn’t mind as much as she pretends to.
“Good morning, Ms. Ellis. Would you like some coffee?”
“I’m good, thanks,” she says, her fake smile too wide (she can’t gauge it so well, this late at night). “Why didn’t you throw me out at twelve? Ten, even?”
“Well, for one thing, I can’t exactly throw my boss out of her office. And for another, I’m fine with it. I usually stay this late. I’m guessing this is a first for you?”
“In this office, yes. You?”
“I sleep at two, wake up at six.”
“You’re much worse than I am.” She gestures him to a chair. “I’m just avoiding sleep.”
“Sleep, or something else?”
“When I want to figure it out, I’ll talk to a shrink,” she says sharply.
“Okay,” he says easily. “I’ll get a masters in Psychology and get back to you on that.”
And damn it, her smile is too wide again, but that’s only because a smaller one couldn’t contain her hearty laugh.
They’re both going to leave in five minutes, and she’ll go back to herself (or whatever version of herself it is that lives in this city), but for now, she’s okay.
-:-
Sara swirls her coffee round her cup pointlessly. It turned into undrinkable bitter sludge about an hour ago, but she still hasn’t stepped out of her office to get a fresh cup.
She’s about to convince herself to walk through the office to the coffee machine when she hears a feeble knock at the door.
“Yes?”
A stout young woman pokes her head in. “Excuse me, Ms. Ellis, I was wondering if you wanted coffee?”
Sara squints suspiciously. “Janine, right?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Sit down.”
Janine makes her way over to the offered chair on shaky legs.
Sara closes the file on her desk and focuses on the woman in front of her. “I’ve seen your personnel file, Janine. You’ve been with Sterling-Bosch for over three years. There’s no way you’re still going on coffee runs.”
Janine bites her lip. “You’re right. That was just an excuse to start a conversation. I wasn’t sure how to approach you. You’re a little... terrifying.”
Sara blinks. “Terrifying?”
“It’s a good thing! Probably?”
Sara laughs and shakes her head. She can’t think of anyone else she knows who could land up in this situation. Only her.
“So, why are you really here?” she asks Janine.
“I was hoping for some advice. I’ve been working this one case for three days and I haven’t found a thing.” Janine hands over the file she’s holding.
“The missing Klimt,” Sara says as she begins to flip through it.
“Yes. It’s just a drawing, but it has a lot of sentimental value to the owners and I don’t want the trail to go cold.”
“Impressive work. Very thorough,” Sara murmurs absentmindedly as she takes in the detailed information Janine has gathered.
Janine smiles proudly.
“The Harrisons. Your primary suspects, right?”
Janine nods.
“Did you rummage through their trash?”
“Trash?” She looks confused.
“Yes! You want to know what they’re throwing away. I once tracked a Rothko across New York using a jitney receipt I found in the trash.”
She looks at her, awestruck. “How did you do that?”
“Rubber gloves were extremely helpful. Also the jitney driver. He didn’t just tell me the stop my suspect got off at, he even told me the house he entered, and that he had an art tube. After that, it was a cakewalk.”
“Wow. That’s really lucky.”
“I know.”
“Anyway, thanks! I’m going to go… rummage through trash.”
“That’s the spirit,” Sara calls.
Janine’s departure is accompanied by a flurry of movement at her door. Sara walks out to see what’s going on.
Nearly everyone is in motion, running to either the water cooler or the coffee machine or their desk. The one unfortunate soul who’s still hovering outside her office gathers the courage to speak up. “We heard laughter,” he says sheepishly. “We were worried.”
“Uh huh,” Sara says disbelievingly. She shakes her head and turns back to her paperwork.
-:-
Walking into the office the next day, everything seems perfectly ordinary, but the atmosphere has changed. She receives more smiles and less hostile glances from her coworkers.
The office feels just a little warmer from that day on.
-:-
Her days fall into a pattern. Paperwork and people. The category of people slowly expands from Ethan and Janine to most of the office. She gives advice on recovery cases, introduces investigators to some of her less than orthodox methods, clears up some lingering resentment with someone who expected to get her job. She does far more than she’s supposed to, and everyone loves her for it.
She gets postcards from Neal every three days, like clockwork.
She’s fine.
-:-
Three days pass with no card from Neal. Then four. Then five.
Maybe this is his goodbye. Or maybe he's in trouble. And she could call June, or Peter, but it's only been five days. He could be busy.
Or hurt.
She calls Neal, whose phone is switched off. She calls Peter, who must have set his phone to go straight to voicemail. Of course. It’s too early in New York.
Putting words together for a voicemail is harder than she thought it’d be.
She hadn’t intended a clean break, but she’d left him (and a lot of other people) behind without trying to reach out again. And even if she had, she doesn’t usually talk to Peter outside of work. And what’s she supposed to say? Hey, Peter, it’s Sara. Yes, after all this time. Oh, but I’m only calling to ask if Neal’s okay.
She doesn’t know how to phrase that politely. But she has to leave a message, so she stumbles her way through a semi-polite version of that.
It’s a small price to pay.
-:-
A week later, she nearly drops her coffee when she finds a postcard in her mailbox. It's a store bought card, which already isn't right - Neal always sketches for her. It says I'm sorry, in a very shaky hand. And the address isn't in Neal's handwriting. Which probably means that she should have followed up on that abysmal voicemail she left.
She'd meant to make a call, which is not the same as she did call and found out what happened.
It's Saturday morning, too early, so she sticks a little note on her weekend stack of files, Call Neal. She’ll probably wait for too long, much longer than she would have liked to, just so she can be sure that she’ll get the person and not the voicemail. Nothing she wants to say will sound the same in a voicemail.
-:-
Maybe she called too early. Neal sounds sleepy as he says "Hey." But she's already worked out fifteen different worst case scenarios, and she wants answers, now.
"What happened?"
"Good morning to you too," he says. "Next time you call, could you please check the time difference? It's- crap, ten o'clock."
It's a small, rather pointless victory, but she smiles nonetheless. Then she remembers why she called. "What happened?"
He's quiet for a minute. "Is it okay if we don't talk about that?"
She sighs resignedly. "Of course it is."
She didn’t expect a straight answer, but she didn’t expect him to be this frank either.
What could have happened that lowered his defenses that far?
She wants to know what’s going on, of course she does. But she doesn’t need to.
"Are you okay, at least?" she asks. This, she needs to know.
"For a certain definition of the word, yes, I think so."
She smiles wryly. "That's good."
She hears a little huff of breath, can imagine the smile that goes with it.
They're quiet, but it's not awkward. And she wouldn't mind staying on the line for a few minutes (or hours), but it's an international phone call. A lot of money just to listen to someone breathing.
Then she decides, to hell with it. It's money well spent.
-:-
Would you mind terribly if I showed up on your doorstep?
She turns the card over in her hands. He’d sketched the Empire State Building on the other side. She knows what that means for them. Romance. Love. The hypothetical happily ever after that they could never have. It’s a dream of baton wielding con children and domesticity and a house that isn’t just a collection of walls with a conveniently placed bed.
Is he proposing to her again? Is he telling her that they could have an ordinary life?
What is he saying?
She doesn’t know. But she writes back anyway, Not at all.
Maybe they’ll give this another shot. Or maybe they were doomed from the start.
It’s time to find out.
-:-
She works when she doesn’t want to deal with things. So what? They’re called coping mechanisms, and they work.
But time just rushes by. His arrival is one week away, then five days, then three, and suddenly it’s the morning of the day he’s going to show up and there are no files on her desk.
She panics for thirteen straight minutes. She doesn’t want to think about it, doesn’t want to think about it, doesn’t want to-
Neal’s going to be here tonight. In London.
She’s built herself a life here, with more than a little effort. (Neal could make it brighter, of course, but he could also tear it down. He’s unpredictable like that.)
She has people now, her colleagues and the waiter at her favourite restaurant and that one barista who probably care if she lives or dies. She doesn’t need Neal.
But she’d like him to be there, all the same.
What happens if she lets him in? Does he even want to be let in?
Just then, Ethan walks in with a stack of files in his arms. “So sorry, boss. I usually get these on your desk before you’re here, but I got delayed on my way to work.” He drops the files on her desk with a remarkably loud thud.
“Ethan.”
“Yes?”
“I hate you.”
“Okay, sure.” He shrugs confusedly and walks out.
-:-
The rain has taken some getting used to. She resented it at first - it ruined five pairs of heels before she gave in and bought boots. But now that it doesn't destroy her wardrobe, she's surprisingly okay with it. Enjoys it, even. Her house reaches a temperature that is just shy of requiring blankets and slippers for survival.
It's perfect.
She isn't watching the rain, mesmerizing as it is. She's curled in an easy chair, nursing a mug of hot chocolate and poring over files. She can never sleep on rainy nights, nearly overtaken by the mad urge to get up and run around outdoors. So she waits out the storm with work for company.
She shouldn’t be working. She could just get drenched in the rain and not care for one night. It’s the weekend, and she’s nursed herself through colds before. But if she does that, there’ll be time to think, and she doesn’t want that.
She isn’t afraid of where her mind might lead her. Definitely not. Why would she be? It’s already been on one unsupervised trek today, and that turned out alright, didn’t it?
There’ll be plenty of time to worry and second-guess when Neal shows up, anyway.
-:-
The doorbell rings at a perfect moment, for once - she's almost at the end of a page. She gets up, leaves her mug of soup on a piece of furniture, reads the last paragraph as she walks to the door (she'll probably have to reread it, but what the hell).
Some corner of her brain is wondering who's here, but mostly, she's on autopilot. Her hand is on the doorknob when she remembers, Neal. But the door's already swinging open, and there is no possible way that he's going to miss the series of expressions on her face that in no shape or form resemble a smile.
"Hi," she says, too late.
"You forgot," he accuses, his voice too gentle to give his words any real ammunition.
She rolls her eyes and smiles. "I remembered."
"Oh, really? When?"
"About two seconds before I opened the door."
"Workaholic," he teases with a smile.
She laughs a little. He doesn’t know how right he is, and she’s not about to enlighten him. "Come in."
All her worries feel foolish, now that Neal’s actually here. Who cares what’ll happen? Neal’s very presence is relaxing, their banter is fun, and somehow, in this moment, that’s all that matters.
She notices, later than she should have, that he's walking with crutches, keeping all his weight off his right leg.
This must be why he wasn’t able to send her cards for those few days.
She won't mention it till he brings it up.
"Where can I leave this?" he asks. He's holding up his left crutch. She gestures to the umbrella stand.
"I pulled out the second one mostly for the airport," he explains. "I can walk with just one, but going through an airport usually involves a trek. I didn't want to risk it. Also, sprawled on the floor in a heap? Not how I want to be remembered."
She laughs, and he tries to, but he's a deer in headlights and his halfhearted attempt at a laugh says as much.
He opens his mouth to continue, but she raises a hand to stop him. “You don’t have to tell me till you’re okay with it,” she says.
He smiles, slowly, like he’s come face to face with the kind of sunset only photographers seem to find. “Okay,” he says softly. “Thank you.”
She doesn’t say ‘You don’t have to thank me’. Those words are useless to him. She just smiles warmly (and a little knowingly) and points him in the direction of a sofa.
-:-
Everyone feels better in the cold with a hot drink warming their hands and throats. Neal’s no different.
She supplies him with the remaining half of the soup in a mug identical to hers. She had to lean forward to hand it to him - he’d already installed himself on her sofa, shoes off, both legs up. He still wears the same scent. She wishes she didn’t know that.
“You made this?” he asks.
“I boiled water. The powdered meat and vegetables did the rest.”
He smiles like she spent half the evening making it for him. “It’s good.”
She rolls her eyes. “Whatever you say, Caffrey. You know, I’m surprised that your fine palate can tolerate this processed crap.”
“I can make an exception from time to time.”
She hasn’t forgotten how charming he can be. And she’s probably lost the tolerance she built up for it.
That could be a problem.
“Why are you here, Neal?” She tries to ask the question gently, but she doesn’t remember that too well either, she spends most of her days with people who have to listen what she says, there is at least a little bit of bite to her words. But she can’t take it back, can’t turn back the moment and erase that surprisingly honest, hurt look from his eyes.
“I…”
“I’m sorry.” That came out right, at least.
“No, you have a right to know.” He fiddles with the edge of his shirt before saying, “I just wanted to get away for a little while. I mean, everyone’s... amazing, but after a point I just felt choked. And you’ve never made me feel that way, so I figured maybe I should come see you.”
“So you’re here because I speak my mind?” That’s vaguely disappointing, but she can live with it.
“No! I, uh, I missed you. And I wanted to see you again.”
Sara smiles. That’s more like it. “You’re terrible.”
Neal grins unabashedly.
-:-
They talk about irrelevant things; Diana’s baby, Elizabeth’s move to DC, the weather. They spar and banter, and it’s like the space between them flees until they're suddenly less than an inch apart, lips parted.
Neal looks like he wants to lean forward, but instead, he pulls back and whispers "Can I get a minute?" He glances at his leg. He looks both embarrassed and hopeful, his eyes so heartbreakingly vulnerable.
"Of course,” she says gently.
It takes them a little time to fit together without hurting each other. His eyes stay locked on hers the whole time. He's blinking luxuriously, like they have all the time they want (they do).
Finally, finally, she leans closer and kisses him, and it hurts.
They don't neck like teenagers. Kisses never hurt this much at that age. These kisses, though, they burn of time spent apart, the ache is almost too much to bear, they're beautiful.
She can feel his face under her fingertips, can feel the muscles shift every time he winces. And she knows, just from that, that he's hurting the same way she is, that he wants this to stop. But every time they try, one of them just leans forward again.
She'd always thought that their reunion kiss would be passionate, exciting, electric, not painful. But this feels strangely right. After all this time they've spent apart, this feels right.
-:-
He tries to sleep on the sofa. Idiot boy.
It’s completely irrational, she knows that on some level. But watching him drape a sheet across the sofa one-handed, as though he'll manage a comfortable night's sleep on it, makes her shake with anger.
He’s injured, and probably in pain. Does he think that she’ll let him contort himself trying to find a comfortable position on a too-small sofa? Does he think that after what just happened, she wouldn’t want him in bed next to her? Did he not think to ask?
(Does she come across as that heartless?)
She wants to slap him hard enough to leave a mark. She wants to kiss him so gently that he can’t even think of questioning his place in her life.
She would have done one or both if he wasn't balanced on a crutch. Instead, she holds out a hand and says, "Come in?"
That probably works better than the others.
-:-
She wakes up to his hand stroking her hair gently. It isn't morning yet, nowhere near. Probably closer to midnight. But he's jetlagged and she's a light sleeper.
She shifts so she can hear his heartbeat and is about to fall asleep again when he starts talking, soft and a little hoarse.
"I was kidnapped."
She strokes his shoulder with her thumb, to let him know that she's awake.
He keeps talking.
"They didn't want anything from me, they just... wanted to break me. I guess they managed it." He lets out a bitter laugh. "My right leg was pretty much shattered from the knee down. And there was a ridiculous amount of blood, everywhere. It was... it hurt."
She goes still. Her mind paints her a picture of a single lightbulb illuminating three faceless men with bloodied clubs. It’s… unhelpful, to say the least. She has to press her lips together to prevent a little pained ‘Oh,’ from escaping.
She closes her eyes and breathes slowly and shoves the useless images out of her head before turning to him. "Do you need someone awake to talk to?"
He shakes his head slightly. "I wasn't lying when I said I was okay."
She searches his eyes for pain, sadness, or a trace of a withheld truth, but all she sees is peace. Acceptance.
He really is fine.
"Okay," she repeats. She leans back against her pillow, relief coursing through her veins, and runs a hand through his hair, messes it up a little. "Sleep?"
He hums, and shifts so he's leaning on her shoulder, throws an arm across her so it feels like he's holding her. And he's so good at it, but she doesn't know how he does it, doesn't know how to give away a little of herself and still have enough left to be a rock for someone.
But maybe, maybe this is it.
She runs her fingers through his hair, lets her nails scrape gently against his scalp.
She still doesn’t need this. If she wakes up tomorrow and he’s gone, she’ll patch herself up in a couple of days and soldier on merrily.
But it’s nice having him here.
It's warm. And she never thought she’d want that, but she does, she does.
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no subject
Date: 2016-03-03 01:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-03 01:59 pm (UTC)Neal is the ultimate romantic :3
It will c: They'll fix everything they can, and the love will do the rest.
no subject
Date: 2016-03-06 12:49 am (UTC)...and really, you can't go wrong with a little Neal whump, and teasing banter!
"You forgot," he accuses, his voice too gentle to give his words any real ammunition.
Heee! I love how Neal can say that but so casually. I can hear him in my head and it's perfect!
no subject
Date: 2016-03-06 05:31 am (UTC)I think Sara and Neal are similar in that they use their clothes as a shield of sorts. Both of them have armour, and both of them are absolute cinnamon rolls underneath. Like attracts like, I guess c:
It's so much fun to write their banter c:
Yay!
no subject
Date: 2016-03-06 11:21 am (UTC)And it's a wonderful story besides :-)
no subject
Date: 2016-03-06 11:56 am (UTC)