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hoosierbitchTitle: Second Chance
Author:hoosierbitch
Word Count: 8,200
Fandom: White Collar
Rating: PG-13
Notes: Written for the whitecollarhc kidfic fest! Thanks to the fantasticrabidchild67 and ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ivorysilk, for being awesome betas. The remaining mistakes are all mine.
Summary: He doesn't want to be here.
*
He’s sitting on the curb when the light comes for him again. Last time, he had been asleep; he’d gone to bed wearing footie pajamas, wrapped in blankets, and he’d woken up in a big bright office with too many windows, wearing a grown-up’s clothes.
He knows a little bit about the other Neal—the big Neal who works for the government and has awesome hats and tons of friends—because when they had changed places last time(swapped like marbles, changing hands and then getting stolen back again), he had gone to big Neal’s house in New York in the future, and big Neal had gone to little Neal’s apartment. He remembers both times, both places, but only in vague, blurry lines; as if he had seen it all through a pane of thick cloudy glass.
He knows that big Neal had lived in his apartment in the past, while little Neal was living with Peter and Elizabeth. He’d gotten to make cookies and got presents while big Neal had been in the past and alone over Christmas. He’d spent the following weeks being homesick for the future.
He’s awake this time. He wants to tell the light to stop it, because he has things to do today. He has plans with the kids down the block. They’re going to put up a lemonade stand by the water park. The other kids are going to bring the table and chairs and the lemonade and a sign, and Neal’s going to be really good at getting people to stop and talk to him, and also, that way he can drink lemonade, and he is very thirsty.
He is thirsty and hot and busy, and his mom is in the apartment, so it’s better that he’s not there (Dad is gone and she is sad almost all the time now).
The light comes for him and he scrunches into a little ball on the curb and closes his eyes and he knows he should run (he has always been good at that), he knows that he should not leave his mom and the kids down the street, because if he stayed he could make money and drink fresh juice, and that is important.
But the bad part of him knows that if he goes—if he goes and if he is good again, if he is still young enough and cute enough that Peter and Elizabeth still like him—maybe they will take him home again and be nice to him and buy him lemonade from the store. He is pretty sure.
And what he does not think about, very hard, is that last time—the first time that the light had come, in the winter, for Christmas—his mom had been gone when he’d left and she hadn’t come back until days after he had. (His mom had not noticed that he was gone.) He thinks maybe, this time, if he is gone for too long, she might not ever come back for him. And he will stay at home alone and wait and wait and wait.
Dad is gone and his mom is sad and Neal is bad because he wants to leave, too. He hopes, this time, when the light wraps him up and yanks him away, he hopes that maybe he will never come back.
*
They are having after-dinner drinks with Neal when the light flashes suddenly and in the
afterimage, a small six year old boy with Neal’s hair and eyes and oversized clothes appears in
the middle of the Burke’s living room. He looks around, sees her and Peter, sits down on the floor, and bawls. His face goes red and scrunchy and his hands ball up into little fists, and when he starts beating them against the floor his button-up shirt balloons around his body like a tent.
“I don’t want to be here!” Neal yells at them. “And you can’t make me and I’m gonna tell my dad and he’s gonna hurt you and you can’t make me go back and I—and I—I don’t want to,” he screams, his high voice twisting off into an angry sob.
Well. This is…different. Peter, who’s backed up against the wall, exchanges a terrified glance with Elizabeth. In the surge of pleasure that their little Neal is back and the concern about where their own laughing Neal has gone, Elizabeth is aghast: a year can’t have changed Neal this much—can it?
She recovers before Peter, who is looking a bit shell-shocked. “I’m so sorry,” Elizabeth says, over and over again. Eventually Neal wears himself out against the floor and tumbles into her arms, wrapping his arms around her shoulders. “I’m sorry, baby,” she says quietly, stroking his body as it’s wracked with giant sobs.
Peter crouches down beside them. “You okay, buddy? Anything bleeding?”
Neal pulls back, sniffles, and glares at him. “My name’s not buddy, it’s Neal. And I’m not bleeding. That’s stupid” Apparently, in the intervening months, Neal has picked up one hell of an attitude. Neal wipes his nose on his sleeve (which makes both her and Peter wince for Byron’s wardrobe) and sits back down on the floor. “I’m gonna stay here,” he declares, crossing his arms across his chest.
“Okay,” Elizabeth agrees calmly, sitting down next to him and settling in.
“Seriously?” Peter says. She glares at him, and he throws up his arms in defeat. “Fine. I’ll go get us some coffee. And a hot chocolate for you,” he says, with a double finger-point at Neal. “I learned my lesson about caffeine last time.”
She waits in silence with Neal, who glares and sniffs and finally deflates.
“I know you don’t want to be here,” she says quietly.
Neal rests his head on his knees. “I hate it here.”
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I thought you had fun, the last time you were here. We really liked having you stay at our house. I was hoping that maybe you’d come over again. You might—we don’t know how long it’s going to be,” she says carefully. “Before you go back. It’s going to be longer than it was last time. But you can stay with us until we figure out how to send you back to your parents, okay?”
“You better not keep me for long,” Neal says, his threatening tone somewhat undercut by the runny nose. “Because my mom will get really mad at you. She missed me a lot the whole time I was gone.”
“I bet she did.” She does not feel equipped to handle this. Neal hadn’t been this difficult last time; she doesn’t know what to do to make him feel better. She’d barely managed Neal when he’d been five and happy and easygoing. She doesn’t know how to handle this kind of hidden, childish hurt. “We missed you, too. Satchmo especially.”
“Really?”
She rewards his tiny smile with a big one of her own. “Yep. He looked for you every morning, because he likes taking walks with you so much.”
“I am really good at walking,” he confides.
“I’ve got something for you,” Peter says, coming back into the room and setting the coffee and hot chocolate on the table. He pulls something shiny out of his pocket. “It’s a sheriff’s badge.”
Neal climbs to his feet and moves closer to get a better view. “It’s really pretty,” he says slowly.
“And it’s yours.”
Neal stares at him with huge eyes and reaches out for it eagerly. “I’m a sheriff?”
“Well, not exactly—”
“Yes, you are,” she interrupts.
“Do I get handcuffs? Can I have a gun? Can Satchmo be a sheriff too? Are you a sheriff? Can—”
“Let’s put on shoes,” she says. “And some pants. And then we can go home and ask Satchmo if he wants to be your deputy.”
Neal fingers the badge carefully for a minute, then slips it into the oversized pocket of his big shirt. “Satchmo can be my horse,” he says quietly. “Just until my mom comes to get me.”
*
They are taking him to the house where he will live when he is big. He knows he will live there, because there are pictures of him in the house, and a bedroom that Peter and Elizabeth had said was just for him.
He remembers, from last time, that there is a wooden table in the dining room and a clean kitchen and a couch that he can nap on and also a dog. Peter and Elizabeth live there too, and right now they take care of him, but later, when he is big, they’re going to be best friends. He is certain of this, as he is certain of little else.
The last time he was here, he was very good. He didn’t break anything and he didn’t wake anybody up when he had bad dreams and he helped Elizabeth in the kitchen. He was as good as he knows how to be, and they liked him. Really they did. They would have kept him, he thinks, if they could have. They’d made him cookies and given him a hat and hugged him.
“My mom missed me the whole time I was gone,” he tells Elizabeth, as she buckles him into his carseat. It’s a stupid carseat and he’s big now and he doesn’t need it, but when he tries to tell them that, Peter glares at him. “She said that she wants me to never go away again, and also she hates you.” Neal hates them, too.
After the magic steals him into the future, his bones ache and his ears feel like he’s on an airplane and all of the colors are too bright. He knows that the world is the same, just later on; he is used to seeing things differently, and knows that it is only his eyes that have changed, not what they see.
He does not tell Peter and Elizabeth that his mom doesn’t hate them, that his mom doesn’t even know about them; his mom hadn’t noticed he was gone. He closes his mouth up tight and locks it with a key and then zips it for good measure to make sure none of his secrets can get out. Peter and Elizabeth say that they missed him, and, even though he knows how grown-ups lie, he believes them. He knows that when he is big they will be best friends, because he has seen the pictures. When he is big he will be tall (but still shorter than Peter) and his hair will still be very-dark-brown and he will wear fancy clothes.
He does not want to go to the home where he will live when he is big, even though it is very nice and has a comfy couch and a bedroom just for him and a dog, because he knows that he won’t be able to stay. He knows they like big Neal better. He knows that when he goes back to the apartment where he lives when he is small, big Neal will be back in the nice house, and they will all eat pancakes without him.
Elizabeth gets into the passenger seat and the mechanical car lady yells at Peter about optimal travel routes and Neal scrunches up against the window as small as he can and closes his eyes and pretends that he is Dorothy, and the mechanical car lady is taking them to Oz, and Neal won’t ever put on ruby slippers and click his heels together three times and so he will never ever ever have to go back home.
*
Elizabeth wakes him up the next morning. She talks to him quietly, like he’s still a little baby who gets scared, and when he puts on his clothes—they’re from last time and they’re a bit too small, but still soft and clean—and goes downstairs, there are pancakes on the table.
“Good morning, sport!”
He glares at Peter and sits at the table and folds his arms. His name is not sport and it is not a good morning.
He eats only two pancakes and doesn’t feed any of it to Satchmo, even though he rests his head on Neal’s knee the whole time and looks really hungry. Neal kind of wants to put some pancake in his pocket to give to Satchmo later, but it’s really squishy. It’s not too hard to miss just one meal, and he knows that Peter and Elizabeth will give Satchmo more food later.
After breakfast he sits on the couch and watches Spongebob Squarepants, because he knows that Peter hates it, and he watches the front door, and wishes that his mom would show up. And he wishes that she won’t. Wishing so hard for such different things makes him sad. And angry. He turns up the volume and sings along with Spongebob really loud and waits for Peter to tell him to shut up. Peter just leaves, patting Neal on the head as he goes.
*
Despite how loudly Neal screams for her at night, after they plug in the nightlight and try to get him to sleep, Neal’s mom does not come to get him. Not the next morning, when he refuses to eat breakfast, or the next night, when he bites Peter as he tries to get Neal to take a bath, and not the day after that when he sits on the couch all day and cries silently as if his heart is breaking.
“He’s so different,” Peter says softly, his eyes fixed on Neal, who has finally cried himself to sleep. For all that Peter claims that he has no idea how to deal with kids, he has the same connection to Neal that he always has. He worries and cares just as much as he always has. “He grew up some. And he’s…”
“Different,” she agrees. His hair is longer and he’s a bit taller, but he’s still disconcertingly small and too skinny. And something else has changed. Something has taught him to be more careful. More defensive. She wonders if, maybe, it was them.
*
Over the next few days, things even out. Neal stops stealing food from the kitchen, and starts eating with them at the table; he goes with them when they walk Satchmo, and names the squirrels who live in the trees around the block. He goes to sleep easier, but most mornings he wakes up confused and scared. She thinks it might be nightmares, but Neal just smiles at her when she asks and says he’s fine. She’s pretty sure that he’s lying to her, but she doesn’t think that pushing him is going to make things any better.
“When I was big,” Neal asks one morning, when she’s sitting on the couch with her samples spread in front of her on the coffee table, “what do I do?” She smiles at Neal’s mangled tenses, which, admittedly, do make a lot of sense; Neal probably has the best grasp on the situation out of all of them.
“You work with Peter,” she explains, trying to explain the justice system in a way that a six year old can understand. “You find people who are doing bad things, and then you stop them, to make sure they can’t do it again.”
He tilts his head inquisitively. “So I see the men who are hurting people, and Peter stops them?”
She frowns at him. “No honey, you don’t—you work together. You stop people, too.”
“Yeah, but—nevermind.” He goes back to playing with her samples for a while, the subject closed while he thinks things over. “What about when I’m bad?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know, when I’m—when I’m bad, does Peter stop me?”
Yes.
She gets that sick feeling back in her stomach. It’s times like these that she wishes she could just tell Neal to stop talking. The grown up Neal wouldn’t want her to gather these hints that the younger Neal doesn’t know he’s dropping. When he switches back, he’ll be mortified, betrayed. And she just…she doesn’t want to know. She doesn’t want to know this about Neal.
“What bad things do you do, Neal?”
Neal looks as uncomfortable as she feels. “I don’t want to tell you,” he says finally. “When I’m bad, I’ll tell Peter, okay?”
“You’re not going to be bad.” Neal looks at her the same way he had when she’d been pretending to believe in Santa Claus; like he knows something she doesn’t, and doesn’t want to break her illusions. “But if you think you’ve done something wrong, you can tell me. Or you can tell Peter. And we’ll talk it over, and make sure you know how to—how to not accidentally make mistakes again.”
He gives her a sideways skeptical look and turns back to the blue section of her samples that he’s rearranging.
“You and Peter are very good partners,” she says, because she can’t let their conversation end like that. “He likes working with you very much.”
“Really?” He’s practically glowing with pride.
“Really for real.”
*
After that, Neal takes it upon himself to help Peter do his job.
He draws colorful pictures on the outside of Peter’s manila folders, writes his name on Peter’s blank forms, and occasionally looks through Peter’s briefcase for…well, she’s not actually sure what he’s looking for, but sometimes she’ll find Peter’s paperwork strewn across the floor and Peter finds toys and socks tucked into random pockets of his briefcase.
When Neal takes Peter a glass of water one night because “Peter works really hard and when I do that I get really thirsty but Peter doesn’t like juice very much,” he accidentally spills it across a pile of photographic evidence. And Peter snaps at him.
She’s not there, but she hears it. Peter’s sharp “Goddamnit,” and Neal’s immediate apologies. It’s only a few seconds of tension before Peter grabs some towels and ushers Neal out of the dining room.
Neal finds her later when she’s reading on the couch and stands by her side, leaning his weight against her leg. She waits for him to start the conversation, nudging him every so often with her knee.
“I don’t want it to be Peter,” he says eventually. His voice is pointlessly, furtively quiet. “And you said I could tell either of you when I was bad, so you can make me not do it again. I spilled water all over eeeeeverything. But I don’t want Peter to make me be the bad guy. ‘Cause then he won’t let me help him do his job anymore. And I want to, even if I’m not good at it yet. I really promise that I won’t spill again at all,” he says, his bottom lip quivering.
She doesn’t know what he’s expecting her to do. She doesn’t want to know, because whatever it is, it’s making Neal cry. And it kills her that Neal hasn’t asked her to forgive him or go easy on him or protect him, he just—she’s pretty sure that he’s asking her nicely to see if she’ll punish him instead of making Peter do it.
“What do you think I should do?” she asks, fishing for hints.
He rubs his bottom almost unconsciously, staring at the ground, his face blank; and then he starts
to undo his belt. She grabs his hand to stop him, and he doesn’t fight her, doesn’t look at her—he doesn’t even flinch.
“What I think we should do,” she says quietly, “is that we should ask Peter if he wants another glass of water, okay?” Neal looks up at her, terrified. “I’m going to help you,” she says quickly. “We’ll make sure that the glass isn’t too full, so that you won’t spill again. This way you’ll know how to do it right next time, and you can still help Peter as much as you want.”
He nods and follows her into the kitchen. She fills a glass half-full with water. When she hands Neal the glass, he takes it from her with both hands—with both hands, which are shaking. “I don’t want to spill again,” he says, the water sloshing against the sides of the glass, his eyes round and scared. He sounds even more miserable than he had when he’d been asking her to punish him and she doesn’t know what to do.
“I’m not going to spank you,” she says, crouching down on the floor in front of him to be at eye-level. “And neither is Peter. No matter what you do, no matter what you say or think or break, we are never going to hurt you. Never, ever, ever.”
The glass slips out of his hands and she shoves it across the floor before he can pick it up, then hauls him in for a hug. When Peter comes into the kitchen to see what’s happened, Neal’s bawling into her shoulder and her knees are soaked and she’s decided that she never wants Neal to grow up.
Because Neal never stops making mistakes. He’ll get older and take bigger things and learn how to steal more money, and all the punishment in the world won’t be enough to stop him. Not the FBI on his trail, not the laws of his country, not the jail time that will take four years of his life away from him.
She wants to keep him here, here in her kitchen where she can wrap herself around his shaking, skinny arms and tell him that he’s not bad and she’s not angry and no one will ever hurt him again. “You’re going to be okay,” she says, more to remind herself than to reassure Neal, her tears dripping down onto his t-shirt.
Neal sees Peter and starts crying even louder, struggling to get away from her, until Peter sits down on the floor and wraps his arms around them both. Neal burrows his head in the junction of their shoulders and his sobs reverberate against their skin.
*
The photographs that Neal had spilled on are ruined, but replaceable.
“We have to be more careful,” she says, sitting at the dining room table, the warped pictures in her hands.
“I know. I’ll stop bringing so much work home. Maybe I can set up a desk in the bedroom—”
“That’s not what I meant. Accidents happen, Peter, it’s no one’s fault.” The photos are in color, but they’re of something dark; the ink has smeared and she can’t figure out what’s in the frame. “We can’t…”
She can’t forget how Neal’s hands had looked, shaking and small, reaching for the buckle of his belt. She’d bought him that belt. It was nice and black and leather and it had an elegant, interesting buckle, and she had bought it because she thought he would like it and never, not while she was browsing through racks of accessories for boys, or while she was running her fingers over the material, when she was laying it down on the counter or pulling out her credit card to pay for it, had she thought about the marks it could leave on Neal’s skin.
“He thought we were going to belt him,” she whispers. “Because he spilled some water.”
Peter sits down heavily on the chair next to her. “Christ.” His voice is thick.
She knows it’s common. She knows that a lot of parents spank their kids. Peter’s parents had, she knows. But that didn’t—they had never—“He was so scared,” she tells him. “So…resigned.” There had been something wrong in the blankness behind his eyes. There was damage there that his retreat had hidden. “How could he think that we would hurt him like that?” Neal is upstairs, in their guest bedroom, with his stuffed Satchmo and his new pajamas, having nightmares about—she looks at the photos and tries to stop thinking.
“We can’t change what happened in the past,” Peter says. “All we can do is help him now. And who knows? Maybe he’ll remember some of this.” Maybe when they switch places again, their crossed paths tangling and blending together their memories of the different worlds, both Neals will be able to keep some memories of parents—of authority figures—who want to help them, not hurt them. Maybe. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
“I don’t know if we can do this,” she confesses. “I don’t know if I can do this.” Peter’s hands cover hers carefully. She closes her eyes. She will do the best she can, and they will both be more careful.
*
They make him go to school.
They walk him inside and Elizabeth hugs him goodbye and Peter checks Neal’s backpack to make sure he has his lunch and his new box of 64 crayons which are all different colors and a notebook. And then they bring him to his classroom, and they leave him.
The teacher lets him inside the room and makes him stand at the front of the class. “Everybody, we have a new student joining us today. His name is Neal Caffrey, and I want you all to make him feel very welcome, okay?”
He stares at his sneakers, which are Batman, who is awesome, and pretends that he has on a cape and a mask and no one can hurt him, and then he goes to find a seat. All the tables are circles and most of them are full. The one he sits down at is full of mostly boys, and they’re all wearing clothes as nice and clean as Neal’s. He wishes his name was Neal Burke or that he was at his old school where nobody looked nice.
“My name’s Jeff,” says the kid on Neal’s left. Jeff rattles off the names of all the other kids at the table and Neal tells himself to be extra nice to Jeff, so that he will keep helping Neal fit in. Most of the kids are friendly. Tabitha and Frank smile at him a bit too brightly, which might mean that they’ll share their stuff with him, but might also mean they’ll ask too many questions and not leave him alone, and Joe, who is bigger than Neal, doesn’t say “hello” back to him, and will need to be watched carefully.
The teacher, Miss Kennedy, is in the middle of reading them a story about talking rabbits. And then they do numbers, which is okay, because he already knows how to add and subtract. They get a break for snacks, which are grapes, and he only eats as many as Jeff does. And then all the kids go to their cubbies and get out the same book and they settle in to read. Jeff shares his book with Neal, and Miss Kennedy calls on Jeff first to read a page of the story. Jeff’s good at reading, and so is Sally and the other kids, even if some of them go slow and make mistakes (which Miss Kennedy catches every single time).
He likes the pictures in the book that they’re reading. They have more colors than he has crayons and even though the edges of the pages are a bright, glossy white, the pictures are dark and vibrant and real. Like a photo, but messier. He wants to turn the pictures into letters, because then he might be able to sort them into words, but the story that the pictures tell him isn’t the same as the one he’s supposed to be able to read.
He bets even Batman knows how to read. Robin probably does too, because if he didn’t, Batman would call him stupid and kick him out of the Batcave, because only stupid kids don’t know how to read.
Soon it’s lunch time, and they stop in the middle of the story and line up to go to the cafeteria. Miss Kennedy says they’ll keep reading after recess. Neal stands behind Joe, because Joe is so much bigger than him, and waits until they pass a bathroom to break away from the rest of the class. The bathroom is glossy white, like the edges of the pages in the picture book, and when he pushes the window open and climbs out of it, his escape route unfolds before him like a messy photo that only he knows how to read.
He sneaks around the edge of the building and then runs across the playground. It’s so easy that it makes him nervous. This school doesn’t even have fences around it. Maybe that’s just part of the future; kids don’t want to run away and there’s nobody mean who wants to break in. Maybe it’s the future, or maybe it’s just that this school is nice, but it doesn’t matter—he’s little Neal, not big Neal, and he’s never been normal and he’s always been good at getting away.
The problem, he soon realizes, is that he doesn’t know this neighborhood as well as he knows his old one, and he had left his lunchbox in the bathroom. He’d been too nervous to eat breakfast that morning, and he’s starting to get hungry. He can go without one meal really easy, just like Satchmo, who only gets fed two times a day. Peter and Elizabeth always feed Satchmo, even when he chews on the couch or pees on the carpet. Satchmo’s theirs, though.
He finds a small road that cuts behind two rows of houses. It’s full of dumpsters and thrown away furniture, but from there he can sneak into peoples’ backyards. It’s not a very good plan. He’ll need to think of a better one for tomorrow (and also he will need to remember to put breakfast food in his pockets in case he has to leave his lunch behind again).
He finds a backyard with an unlocked fence and sneaks inside. There’s a bench, and a fountain that’s not turned on, and flowers growing all around the edges. He sits down on the bench and hugs his knees and thinks that maybe he shouldn’t have run away. He can’t do this every day. Peter and Elizabeth will find out when they come to pick him up and he’s not there with all of the other kids.
He should have stayed and pretended that he needed glasses to see the words, or say that they didn’t teach kids how to read in the past and so it wasn’t his fault, he should have acted like his stomach hurt and gone to sit with the nurse.
Now, when Peter and Elizabeth find out that Neal’s too stupid to read, they’ll also find out that he’d run away from school in the middle of the day. And he’d forgotten his new backpack and all of his crayons and his lunch and he wanted so badly for Peter and Elizabeth to know that the presents they gave him were the best things in the entire world and he’d meant to take really good care of them.
The backyard is quiet, and boring, and even his fear doesn’t keep him awake for very long.
*
When he wakes up, it’s evening and the sirens are calling him. There are police car sirens and somebody yelling Neal over and over. There are policemen, and they know his name. The flashing red and blue lights mix with the sunset, which is beautiful, but messy, like watercolors in plastic trays that get wet and blend together, making a swirling rainbow out of everything until all they’re good for is brown. The sun is painting the clouds, and the rest of the sky is turning a dark blue, and Neal is in trouble.
The lights in the house that he’s hiding behind are all on, and through the curtains he can see people moving. He isn’t safe here anymore, but he can’t make himself move.
The police are looking for him. The police will find him, and arrest him, and call the welfare lady who is nice to him, but mean to his mom, and what if—what if—
He doesn’t know what’s happening, but it’s getting hard to breathe. There’s a rushing sound in his ears, like the fountain in front of him got turned on and is making waterfall noises in his head, but it’s still just him alone on the bench.
—what if they find his mom?
He hadn’t asked if she was alive, hadn’t asked if big Neal loved and hated her as much as he did; he hadn’t asked Peter and Elizabeth if they’d told his mom he was alive, and she just hadn’t wanted to come pick him up. He hadn’t asked, because most of him thinks she’s probably dead.
Before he can move, the sirens fade away, and the lights on the police cars stop turning the world blue and red (which blend together to make purple, he knows how all the colors work, sometimes he isn’t dumb at all).
He hadn’t thought that running away from school was that bad of a thing to do, but the police cars are coming for him. He doesn’t want to be arrested, and he doesn’t want to go to jail, so he knows he can’t stay here.
He is going to miss Peter the most, he decides, as he slips out the back gate and walks towards the road, hiding in the shadows, being careful not to step on any of the broken glass. He is going to miss Satchmo too, but Satchmo’s just a dog, and so he will miss Peter the most. Elizabeth is nice and pretty and perfect, but Neal’s mom could be nice and pretty and perfect sometimes, too; he knows not to trust friendly faces. Waiting for Elizabeth to get mean has been wearing him out. Peter’s face was friendly, but mostly he was tired or confused and sometimes a little angry, which Neal can understand.
Maybe he can sneak on a bus. Maybe he can pick quarters off the ground until he has enough money to go to Florida, or New Zealand, or back to his own world—except to do that he’d have to know how to do magic and he hasn’t learned that yet. Probably there are books about it. Books with really small writing and no pictures.
Maybe he can hitchhike. But that involves strangers, and getting into cars that he might not be able to get out of, and he thinks that going to jail—like all the other bad guys that Peter catches—might be better than running. Maybe in jail Peter will come see him sometimes.
He only makes it two more blocks before a black SUV going down the opposite direction screeches in an enormous U-turn and comes after him.
He runs, which he knows is stupid, because running will just make them angrier, but there has always been a part of him that is too mean to give up. It’s what keeps him fed and gives him the courage to steal and makes him promises. He feels that fire now, feels anger and fear all the way down to his toes, and he lets it carry him away as fast as it can.
He runs and runs and runs, until all of his breath is gone and his lungs feel like they’re being eaten up by flames, and still he hears the voice behind him yelling Neal, Neal, Neal.
He falls, but gets back up. He slips through a small hole in somebody’s fence and takes off through another row of backyards. The grass is slick and soon his nice new pants and his Batman sneakers are covered in mud and his palms are bleeding. He is almost free—almost to another road, another set of sidewalks to disappear down, maybe a bus stop not too far away—when Peter finds him. Peter was coming around the corner, and he tackles Neal, knocking him over. They both slide on somebody’s wet lawn, Peter’s body trapping Neal against the ground.
“No,” he yells, as loud as he can with no breath left in his body. “Let me go!”
He won’t let Peter hurt him. He wants his memory of Peter to be perfect. And right now Peter is hauling Neal to his feet and holding onto his arms with big hands and Neal closes his eyes and doesn’t know which world he’s in.
What he does know is that they definitely won’t take him back to the house where he will live when he is big, because he hasn’t learned to be good yet. No one will tell him how big Neal figured it out, how he got to be so nice and smart and tall, how he became the kind of person that Peter and Elizabeth want to be friends with instead of the kind of person who feels fire in their feet and runs away when they’re not supposed to and likes pictures more than letters and makes everybody so mad all the time.
He’s shaking in Peter’s arms, or maybe Peter’s shaking him, he doesn’t know. He’s dizzy, and the world, when he opens his eyes, is flashing with red and blue lights; they make purple shadows on Peter’s face; they make Peter look old.
“You’re okay,” Peter’s saying, pulling Neal in close and making his lungs burn even more, like his ribs are about to crack and everything fragile and squishy inside of him will break through his skin and fly away. “You’re okay, you’re—you’re okay, right? Neal, buddy—talk to me.”
His name’s not buddy, it’s Neal, and he can’t talk right now, because he’s busy crying. He’s crying like a dumb baby and Peter’s shaking him and hugging him and Peter’s on his knees on the lawn and so his pants are getting dirty too and Neal always makes a mess of everything.
“I’m sorry,” he says, and it comes out in hiccups so he tries to say it again. “I’m sorry I ran away, I didn’t mean to, and I—I don’t wanna go to jail,” he says. The only thing that’s keeping him upright is Peter’s grip on his arms. “Don’t make me, please, please don’t make me—”
There are other people around them: Peter’s friends from work, Diana and Clinton, and two men in police uniforms; they’re all talking at the same time and there’s static and more voices coming from their radios and so he almost doesn’t hear Peter say, “Never. Never. I’m never going to let that happen.”
When Peter pulls him in tight again, he goes limp. He’s tired.
It was his first day of school today.
Elizabeth’s there soon, and before Neal can stop her, she’s on her knees in the dirty grass, and she’s hugging him and Peter at the same time, and she’s crying, and—and so is Peter. He’s tired and his feet hurt and he’s hungry and nobody’s yelling at him anymore.
“You’re not mad,” Neal says slowly, figuring it out as he goes, because it doesn’t make any sense at all. “You’re—you’re sad?”
“You terrified us,” Peter says, and Neal cringes.
“Don’t ever do that again,” Elizabeth says, shaking him a little the same way Peter had, like an angry hug, pulling Neal in so tight that it almost hurts.
He’d scared them. They—he’d run away for an afternoon, for a few hours, and they—they’d noticed he was missing. And they’d called their friends to come look for him. They’d been really, really worried about him.
Neal doesn’t like to cry very much, because it makes his nose stuffy and then his face gets all red and ugly, and only babies cry. But he can’t help himself. It feels good and bad at the same time, crying so hard that it makes his whole body dance with every sob; it feels good and bad that Peter and Elizabeth are so much bigger than he is, because when they pull him in for tight angry hugs they make him feel small and protected at the same time.
“I wanna go home,” he says, because only Peter had said that Neal wasn’t going to jail and the policepeople are still standing nearby and what if Elizabeth doesn’t want him anymore?
“Okay,” Elizabeth says, pulling back and wiping Neal’s tears away before she wipes her own. “Okay. Let’s go home.”
*
Once they’re back in the car, Neal safely buckled in the back seat, she feels like she can breathe again, for the first time since Peter had called her that afternoon.
“Can you tell us what happened?” Peter asks. Neal nods his head slowly. “Why did you run from school? Was someone mean to you?” Neal looks away shiftily. “Who was it? What did they do?”
“Nothing! I just—I don’t like school. It’s stupid.”
“Neal,” Elizabeth says gently, “you have to tell us why you ran away. Was someone mean to you?”
He looks between them quickly, and nods his head in agreement. “Yes. The other kids. They made fun of me.”
“Are you telling us the truth, Neal?” Neal flinches at Peter’s stern stare, even filtered as it is through the rearview mirror.
“Don’t want to talk about it,” Neal mutters. He picks at the dirt on his jeans the rest of the ride home.
*
When Neal gets out of his bath later that night, she sees the bruises on his arms. There are fingerprints dots in rows down his pale biceps.
“Sweetie—what are these? Did someone hurt you? Is that why you ran away from the school? Neal—”
“It’s nothing,” he stutters, yanking his arm out of her grip. “I fell.”
“How did you fall?”
“Um,” he says, looking at Peter for a second before looking back down at his feet. “I don’t remember.”
“Did I do that?” Peter’s hand slides gently over the bruises and Neal flinches away from him.
“It’s okay,” Neal tells him quickly, leaning back into his grip. “You didn’t mean to at all, and you didn’t really hurt me. ‘Cause you weren’t angry,” he says earnestly.
“I was sad,” Peter says, a sick look on his face. “And very, very worried. But I didn’t mean to hurt you. I should have been more careful. I shouldn’t have done that.”
“Okay,” Neal says with a shrug.
“If anybody else hurts you, or we do—even if it’s an accident—you have to tell us, okay?” Neal looks at Peter like he’s gone slightly mad, but he agrees. “Promise,” Peter says fiercely. Neal shrinks against Elizabeth’s side and Peter backs away carefully. “I don’t want you to get hurt,” Peter says quietly.
She holds onto Neal’s thin shoulders and wants Peter to take it back. “I promise,” Neal says solemnly, and she hates—she hates that he is going to be taken away from them so soon.
Because Neal isn’t theirs; they won’t be able to keep him. And the Neal in the other world—the world which had taught him so many things that no one should have to know—that Neal needed to lie to keep himself safe.
Only—it’s not another world, is it? It’s theirs. This Neal is going to become their Neal.
Soon he’s going to be taken back, and he won’t have anyone to talk to about his hurts and fears and bruises, he’s going to where the people who should take care of him are the ones who hurt him. She doesn’t want Peter to take Neal’s lies from him if they’re what protect him from more pain
After Neal changes for bed, Peter asks him again about what happened earlier. It takes some prodding, but thankfully Peter’s learned how to modify his interrogation techniques to suit a six year old.
“They were reading a book,” Neal says finally. She waits for him to continue, but he stays silent, his eyes lowered, his small hands twisting in his lap.
“Was it…a sad book?” She’d gone through more than one bookshelf in the library trying to find stories that weren’t about orphans or lost children or evil stepparents; she understands the pitfalls presented by children’s literature.
“No. It had rabbits,” he says. That…doesn’t make any sense at all. Neal likes rabbits. Not as much as he likes Satchmo or squirrels, admittedly, but she can’t think of a reason why a book about rabbits would prompt such an extreme reaction. Unless it was the rabbit in Monty Python, but she’s reasonably certain that this Neal is unfamiliar with the Holy Grail.
“We don’t understand,” Peter says. “I need you to explain what happened.”
Neal just sits on the edge of his bed, staring at his bare feet, shrinking further and further into himself with every question that they ask.
“I couldn’t read the book,” he says finally, his breath hitching.
“Was it too hard?” she asks. Reading levels must have changed, in the last twenty years; she should have thought of that.
“No,” he whispers. “I’m just—I’m really stupid sometimes.” His cheeks are flushed a dark red and his shoulder blades draw tense lines against the loose fabric of the t-shirt that Neal had stolen out of Peter’s closet.
“No, you’re not,” she says—too loudly, because it makes him flinch. “You are so smart, and—”
Peter interrupts her. “Oh. You don’t know how to read, do you, buddy?”
She hears the echo of Neal in his silence: my name’s not buddy. Neal doesn’t say anything, though.
“It’s fine,” she says hurriedly. “Everybody learns at their own speed. And you went to a different school than those kids did, so you haven’t had as much time as they have, right?
She stares at Peter over Neal’s bowed head.
“That’s—that’s normal, though, right? For his time? You’re only six, aren’t you, Neal? What about the other kids in your class back home? I bet they didn’t all know how to read either, did they?”
*
He does not tell them that of course he was not the only kid in his class (his class back home which means back home with mom) who could not read. There had been a few of them. He’d known them all; he’d sold lemonade with them and stolen candy bars with them and hidden the teachers’ purses with them.
Together they had all hated the kids in the class who could open the words that the books held.
Everybody at Neal’s new school (new school but old Neal, little wrong misplaced dirty Neal) wears nice clothes and has good lunches and they all can open the words that the books hold.
“I left my backpack at school,” he mumbles, kicking his feet against the mattress. “And I got dirt on Batman, and my pants, and I—” and he doesn’t want to go back. “I’ll do better tomorrow.”
He will do better. He’ll sit at Jeff’s table and stare at the pictures in the book until the words chase the meaning out of them, and he’ll eat lunch by big Joe and try and make friends, and he’ll—it’s better to be stupid than bad, right?
He catches himself rubbing the bruises on his arms and snatches his hands away. “You look tired,” Elizabeth says. “How about Peter tells you a bedtime story tonight? Not from a book,” she says, nudging Peter’s shoulder. “Tell him an adventure about—about kings and thieves and princesses. And Satchmo.” Those are Neal’s favorite kinds of stories, but usually he tells them to Peter. He draws pictures to go along with them, and the pictures say all the words that he would write down if he could.
“Sure,” Peter says. “Right. Okay. I can do this. Once upon a time, there was a…a deputy. Duke. Sheriff! And he, uh—he had a…sword.”
It’s not a very good story, but it’s a really, really long one, and Peter strokes his hair the whole time he tells it.
*
When Neal falls asleep, Peter joins her hallway vigil. Peter looks old, in the craggy shadows that Neal’s nightlight casts; she suspects that she does, too. “What are we going to do?” she asks, voiced hushed so that she won’t disturb Neal.
“I don’t know. Look into charter schools, maybe? Or we could just drop the whole school thing, we don’t know how long he’s going to be here—”
“No,” she says. “I meant…what are we going to do when he changes back?”
Their guest room is filling up with toys and little boy socks and crayon studies of squirrels and Satchmo and the three of them, standing in front of the ‘house where Neal will live when he is big.’ Their guest room isn’t a guest room anymore, it’s Neal’s room. They have made their house his home.
What are they going to do when he changes back?
Author:
hoosierbitch Word Count: 8,200
Fandom: White Collar
Rating: PG-13
Notes: Written for the whitecollarhc kidfic fest! Thanks to the fantastic
rabidchild67 and ivorysilk, for being awesome betas. The remaining mistakes are all mine.Summary: He doesn't want to be here.
*
He’s sitting on the curb when the light comes for him again. Last time, he had been asleep; he’d gone to bed wearing footie pajamas, wrapped in blankets, and he’d woken up in a big bright office with too many windows, wearing a grown-up’s clothes.
He knows a little bit about the other Neal—the big Neal who works for the government and has awesome hats and tons of friends—because when they had changed places last time(swapped like marbles, changing hands and then getting stolen back again), he had gone to big Neal’s house in New York in the future, and big Neal had gone to little Neal’s apartment. He remembers both times, both places, but only in vague, blurry lines; as if he had seen it all through a pane of thick cloudy glass.
He knows that big Neal had lived in his apartment in the past, while little Neal was living with Peter and Elizabeth. He’d gotten to make cookies and got presents while big Neal had been in the past and alone over Christmas. He’d spent the following weeks being homesick for the future.
He’s awake this time. He wants to tell the light to stop it, because he has things to do today. He has plans with the kids down the block. They’re going to put up a lemonade stand by the water park. The other kids are going to bring the table and chairs and the lemonade and a sign, and Neal’s going to be really good at getting people to stop and talk to him, and also, that way he can drink lemonade, and he is very thirsty.
He is thirsty and hot and busy, and his mom is in the apartment, so it’s better that he’s not there (Dad is gone and she is sad almost all the time now).
The light comes for him and he scrunches into a little ball on the curb and closes his eyes and he knows he should run (he has always been good at that), he knows that he should not leave his mom and the kids down the street, because if he stayed he could make money and drink fresh juice, and that is important.
But the bad part of him knows that if he goes—if he goes and if he is good again, if he is still young enough and cute enough that Peter and Elizabeth still like him—maybe they will take him home again and be nice to him and buy him lemonade from the store. He is pretty sure.
And what he does not think about, very hard, is that last time—the first time that the light had come, in the winter, for Christmas—his mom had been gone when he’d left and she hadn’t come back until days after he had. (His mom had not noticed that he was gone.) He thinks maybe, this time, if he is gone for too long, she might not ever come back for him. And he will stay at home alone and wait and wait and wait.
Dad is gone and his mom is sad and Neal is bad because he wants to leave, too. He hopes, this time, when the light wraps him up and yanks him away, he hopes that maybe he will never come back.
*
They are having after-dinner drinks with Neal when the light flashes suddenly and in the
afterimage, a small six year old boy with Neal’s hair and eyes and oversized clothes appears in
the middle of the Burke’s living room. He looks around, sees her and Peter, sits down on the floor, and bawls. His face goes red and scrunchy and his hands ball up into little fists, and when he starts beating them against the floor his button-up shirt balloons around his body like a tent.
“I don’t want to be here!” Neal yells at them. “And you can’t make me and I’m gonna tell my dad and he’s gonna hurt you and you can’t make me go back and I—and I—I don’t want to,” he screams, his high voice twisting off into an angry sob.
Well. This is…different. Peter, who’s backed up against the wall, exchanges a terrified glance with Elizabeth. In the surge of pleasure that their little Neal is back and the concern about where their own laughing Neal has gone, Elizabeth is aghast: a year can’t have changed Neal this much—can it?
She recovers before Peter, who is looking a bit shell-shocked. “I’m so sorry,” Elizabeth says, over and over again. Eventually Neal wears himself out against the floor and tumbles into her arms, wrapping his arms around her shoulders. “I’m sorry, baby,” she says quietly, stroking his body as it’s wracked with giant sobs.
Peter crouches down beside them. “You okay, buddy? Anything bleeding?”
Neal pulls back, sniffles, and glares at him. “My name’s not buddy, it’s Neal. And I’m not bleeding. That’s stupid” Apparently, in the intervening months, Neal has picked up one hell of an attitude. Neal wipes his nose on his sleeve (which makes both her and Peter wince for Byron’s wardrobe) and sits back down on the floor. “I’m gonna stay here,” he declares, crossing his arms across his chest.
“Okay,” Elizabeth agrees calmly, sitting down next to him and settling in.
“Seriously?” Peter says. She glares at him, and he throws up his arms in defeat. “Fine. I’ll go get us some coffee. And a hot chocolate for you,” he says, with a double finger-point at Neal. “I learned my lesson about caffeine last time.”
She waits in silence with Neal, who glares and sniffs and finally deflates.
“I know you don’t want to be here,” she says quietly.
Neal rests his head on his knees. “I hate it here.”
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I thought you had fun, the last time you were here. We really liked having you stay at our house. I was hoping that maybe you’d come over again. You might—we don’t know how long it’s going to be,” she says carefully. “Before you go back. It’s going to be longer than it was last time. But you can stay with us until we figure out how to send you back to your parents, okay?”
“You better not keep me for long,” Neal says, his threatening tone somewhat undercut by the runny nose. “Because my mom will get really mad at you. She missed me a lot the whole time I was gone.”
“I bet she did.” She does not feel equipped to handle this. Neal hadn’t been this difficult last time; she doesn’t know what to do to make him feel better. She’d barely managed Neal when he’d been five and happy and easygoing. She doesn’t know how to handle this kind of hidden, childish hurt. “We missed you, too. Satchmo especially.”
“Really?”
She rewards his tiny smile with a big one of her own. “Yep. He looked for you every morning, because he likes taking walks with you so much.”
“I am really good at walking,” he confides.
“I’ve got something for you,” Peter says, coming back into the room and setting the coffee and hot chocolate on the table. He pulls something shiny out of his pocket. “It’s a sheriff’s badge.”
Neal climbs to his feet and moves closer to get a better view. “It’s really pretty,” he says slowly.
“And it’s yours.”
Neal stares at him with huge eyes and reaches out for it eagerly. “I’m a sheriff?”
“Well, not exactly—”
“Yes, you are,” she interrupts.
“Do I get handcuffs? Can I have a gun? Can Satchmo be a sheriff too? Are you a sheriff? Can—”
“Let’s put on shoes,” she says. “And some pants. And then we can go home and ask Satchmo if he wants to be your deputy.”
Neal fingers the badge carefully for a minute, then slips it into the oversized pocket of his big shirt. “Satchmo can be my horse,” he says quietly. “Just until my mom comes to get me.”
*
They are taking him to the house where he will live when he is big. He knows he will live there, because there are pictures of him in the house, and a bedroom that Peter and Elizabeth had said was just for him.
He remembers, from last time, that there is a wooden table in the dining room and a clean kitchen and a couch that he can nap on and also a dog. Peter and Elizabeth live there too, and right now they take care of him, but later, when he is big, they’re going to be best friends. He is certain of this, as he is certain of little else.
The last time he was here, he was very good. He didn’t break anything and he didn’t wake anybody up when he had bad dreams and he helped Elizabeth in the kitchen. He was as good as he knows how to be, and they liked him. Really they did. They would have kept him, he thinks, if they could have. They’d made him cookies and given him a hat and hugged him.
“My mom missed me the whole time I was gone,” he tells Elizabeth, as she buckles him into his carseat. It’s a stupid carseat and he’s big now and he doesn’t need it, but when he tries to tell them that, Peter glares at him. “She said that she wants me to never go away again, and also she hates you.” Neal hates them, too.
After the magic steals him into the future, his bones ache and his ears feel like he’s on an airplane and all of the colors are too bright. He knows that the world is the same, just later on; he is used to seeing things differently, and knows that it is only his eyes that have changed, not what they see.
He does not tell Peter and Elizabeth that his mom doesn’t hate them, that his mom doesn’t even know about them; his mom hadn’t noticed he was gone. He closes his mouth up tight and locks it with a key and then zips it for good measure to make sure none of his secrets can get out. Peter and Elizabeth say that they missed him, and, even though he knows how grown-ups lie, he believes them. He knows that when he is big they will be best friends, because he has seen the pictures. When he is big he will be tall (but still shorter than Peter) and his hair will still be very-dark-brown and he will wear fancy clothes.
He does not want to go to the home where he will live when he is big, even though it is very nice and has a comfy couch and a bedroom just for him and a dog, because he knows that he won’t be able to stay. He knows they like big Neal better. He knows that when he goes back to the apartment where he lives when he is small, big Neal will be back in the nice house, and they will all eat pancakes without him.
Elizabeth gets into the passenger seat and the mechanical car lady yells at Peter about optimal travel routes and Neal scrunches up against the window as small as he can and closes his eyes and pretends that he is Dorothy, and the mechanical car lady is taking them to Oz, and Neal won’t ever put on ruby slippers and click his heels together three times and so he will never ever ever have to go back home.
*
Elizabeth wakes him up the next morning. She talks to him quietly, like he’s still a little baby who gets scared, and when he puts on his clothes—they’re from last time and they’re a bit too small, but still soft and clean—and goes downstairs, there are pancakes on the table.
“Good morning, sport!”
He glares at Peter and sits at the table and folds his arms. His name is not sport and it is not a good morning.
He eats only two pancakes and doesn’t feed any of it to Satchmo, even though he rests his head on Neal’s knee the whole time and looks really hungry. Neal kind of wants to put some pancake in his pocket to give to Satchmo later, but it’s really squishy. It’s not too hard to miss just one meal, and he knows that Peter and Elizabeth will give Satchmo more food later.
After breakfast he sits on the couch and watches Spongebob Squarepants, because he knows that Peter hates it, and he watches the front door, and wishes that his mom would show up. And he wishes that she won’t. Wishing so hard for such different things makes him sad. And angry. He turns up the volume and sings along with Spongebob really loud and waits for Peter to tell him to shut up. Peter just leaves, patting Neal on the head as he goes.
*
Despite how loudly Neal screams for her at night, after they plug in the nightlight and try to get him to sleep, Neal’s mom does not come to get him. Not the next morning, when he refuses to eat breakfast, or the next night, when he bites Peter as he tries to get Neal to take a bath, and not the day after that when he sits on the couch all day and cries silently as if his heart is breaking.
“He’s so different,” Peter says softly, his eyes fixed on Neal, who has finally cried himself to sleep. For all that Peter claims that he has no idea how to deal with kids, he has the same connection to Neal that he always has. He worries and cares just as much as he always has. “He grew up some. And he’s…”
“Different,” she agrees. His hair is longer and he’s a bit taller, but he’s still disconcertingly small and too skinny. And something else has changed. Something has taught him to be more careful. More defensive. She wonders if, maybe, it was them.
*
Over the next few days, things even out. Neal stops stealing food from the kitchen, and starts eating with them at the table; he goes with them when they walk Satchmo, and names the squirrels who live in the trees around the block. He goes to sleep easier, but most mornings he wakes up confused and scared. She thinks it might be nightmares, but Neal just smiles at her when she asks and says he’s fine. She’s pretty sure that he’s lying to her, but she doesn’t think that pushing him is going to make things any better.
“When I was big,” Neal asks one morning, when she’s sitting on the couch with her samples spread in front of her on the coffee table, “what do I do?” She smiles at Neal’s mangled tenses, which, admittedly, do make a lot of sense; Neal probably has the best grasp on the situation out of all of them.
“You work with Peter,” she explains, trying to explain the justice system in a way that a six year old can understand. “You find people who are doing bad things, and then you stop them, to make sure they can’t do it again.”
He tilts his head inquisitively. “So I see the men who are hurting people, and Peter stops them?”
She frowns at him. “No honey, you don’t—you work together. You stop people, too.”
“Yeah, but—nevermind.” He goes back to playing with her samples for a while, the subject closed while he thinks things over. “What about when I’m bad?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know, when I’m—when I’m bad, does Peter stop me?”
Yes.
She gets that sick feeling back in her stomach. It’s times like these that she wishes she could just tell Neal to stop talking. The grown up Neal wouldn’t want her to gather these hints that the younger Neal doesn’t know he’s dropping. When he switches back, he’ll be mortified, betrayed. And she just…she doesn’t want to know. She doesn’t want to know this about Neal.
“What bad things do you do, Neal?”
Neal looks as uncomfortable as she feels. “I don’t want to tell you,” he says finally. “When I’m bad, I’ll tell Peter, okay?”
“You’re not going to be bad.” Neal looks at her the same way he had when she’d been pretending to believe in Santa Claus; like he knows something she doesn’t, and doesn’t want to break her illusions. “But if you think you’ve done something wrong, you can tell me. Or you can tell Peter. And we’ll talk it over, and make sure you know how to—how to not accidentally make mistakes again.”
He gives her a sideways skeptical look and turns back to the blue section of her samples that he’s rearranging.
“You and Peter are very good partners,” she says, because she can’t let their conversation end like that. “He likes working with you very much.”
“Really?” He’s practically glowing with pride.
“Really for real.”
*
After that, Neal takes it upon himself to help Peter do his job.
He draws colorful pictures on the outside of Peter’s manila folders, writes his name on Peter’s blank forms, and occasionally looks through Peter’s briefcase for…well, she’s not actually sure what he’s looking for, but sometimes she’ll find Peter’s paperwork strewn across the floor and Peter finds toys and socks tucked into random pockets of his briefcase.
When Neal takes Peter a glass of water one night because “Peter works really hard and when I do that I get really thirsty but Peter doesn’t like juice very much,” he accidentally spills it across a pile of photographic evidence. And Peter snaps at him.
She’s not there, but she hears it. Peter’s sharp “Goddamnit,” and Neal’s immediate apologies. It’s only a few seconds of tension before Peter grabs some towels and ushers Neal out of the dining room.
Neal finds her later when she’s reading on the couch and stands by her side, leaning his weight against her leg. She waits for him to start the conversation, nudging him every so often with her knee.
“I don’t want it to be Peter,” he says eventually. His voice is pointlessly, furtively quiet. “And you said I could tell either of you when I was bad, so you can make me not do it again. I spilled water all over eeeeeverything. But I don’t want Peter to make me be the bad guy. ‘Cause then he won’t let me help him do his job anymore. And I want to, even if I’m not good at it yet. I really promise that I won’t spill again at all,” he says, his bottom lip quivering.
She doesn’t know what he’s expecting her to do. She doesn’t want to know, because whatever it is, it’s making Neal cry. And it kills her that Neal hasn’t asked her to forgive him or go easy on him or protect him, he just—she’s pretty sure that he’s asking her nicely to see if she’ll punish him instead of making Peter do it.
“What do you think I should do?” she asks, fishing for hints.
He rubs his bottom almost unconsciously, staring at the ground, his face blank; and then he starts
to undo his belt. She grabs his hand to stop him, and he doesn’t fight her, doesn’t look at her—he doesn’t even flinch.
“What I think we should do,” she says quietly, “is that we should ask Peter if he wants another glass of water, okay?” Neal looks up at her, terrified. “I’m going to help you,” she says quickly. “We’ll make sure that the glass isn’t too full, so that you won’t spill again. This way you’ll know how to do it right next time, and you can still help Peter as much as you want.”
He nods and follows her into the kitchen. She fills a glass half-full with water. When she hands Neal the glass, he takes it from her with both hands—with both hands, which are shaking. “I don’t want to spill again,” he says, the water sloshing against the sides of the glass, his eyes round and scared. He sounds even more miserable than he had when he’d been asking her to punish him and she doesn’t know what to do.
“I’m not going to spank you,” she says, crouching down on the floor in front of him to be at eye-level. “And neither is Peter. No matter what you do, no matter what you say or think or break, we are never going to hurt you. Never, ever, ever.”
The glass slips out of his hands and she shoves it across the floor before he can pick it up, then hauls him in for a hug. When Peter comes into the kitchen to see what’s happened, Neal’s bawling into her shoulder and her knees are soaked and she’s decided that she never wants Neal to grow up.
Because Neal never stops making mistakes. He’ll get older and take bigger things and learn how to steal more money, and all the punishment in the world won’t be enough to stop him. Not the FBI on his trail, not the laws of his country, not the jail time that will take four years of his life away from him.
She wants to keep him here, here in her kitchen where she can wrap herself around his shaking, skinny arms and tell him that he’s not bad and she’s not angry and no one will ever hurt him again. “You’re going to be okay,” she says, more to remind herself than to reassure Neal, her tears dripping down onto his t-shirt.
Neal sees Peter and starts crying even louder, struggling to get away from her, until Peter sits down on the floor and wraps his arms around them both. Neal burrows his head in the junction of their shoulders and his sobs reverberate against their skin.
*
The photographs that Neal had spilled on are ruined, but replaceable.
“We have to be more careful,” she says, sitting at the dining room table, the warped pictures in her hands.
“I know. I’ll stop bringing so much work home. Maybe I can set up a desk in the bedroom—”
“That’s not what I meant. Accidents happen, Peter, it’s no one’s fault.” The photos are in color, but they’re of something dark; the ink has smeared and she can’t figure out what’s in the frame. “We can’t…”
She can’t forget how Neal’s hands had looked, shaking and small, reaching for the buckle of his belt. She’d bought him that belt. It was nice and black and leather and it had an elegant, interesting buckle, and she had bought it because she thought he would like it and never, not while she was browsing through racks of accessories for boys, or while she was running her fingers over the material, when she was laying it down on the counter or pulling out her credit card to pay for it, had she thought about the marks it could leave on Neal’s skin.
“He thought we were going to belt him,” she whispers. “Because he spilled some water.”
Peter sits down heavily on the chair next to her. “Christ.” His voice is thick.
She knows it’s common. She knows that a lot of parents spank their kids. Peter’s parents had, she knows. But that didn’t—they had never—“He was so scared,” she tells him. “So…resigned.” There had been something wrong in the blankness behind his eyes. There was damage there that his retreat had hidden. “How could he think that we would hurt him like that?” Neal is upstairs, in their guest bedroom, with his stuffed Satchmo and his new pajamas, having nightmares about—she looks at the photos and tries to stop thinking.
“We can’t change what happened in the past,” Peter says. “All we can do is help him now. And who knows? Maybe he’ll remember some of this.” Maybe when they switch places again, their crossed paths tangling and blending together their memories of the different worlds, both Neals will be able to keep some memories of parents—of authority figures—who want to help them, not hurt them. Maybe. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
“I don’t know if we can do this,” she confesses. “I don’t know if I can do this.” Peter’s hands cover hers carefully. She closes her eyes. She will do the best she can, and they will both be more careful.
*
They make him go to school.
They walk him inside and Elizabeth hugs him goodbye and Peter checks Neal’s backpack to make sure he has his lunch and his new box of 64 crayons which are all different colors and a notebook. And then they bring him to his classroom, and they leave him.
The teacher lets him inside the room and makes him stand at the front of the class. “Everybody, we have a new student joining us today. His name is Neal Caffrey, and I want you all to make him feel very welcome, okay?”
He stares at his sneakers, which are Batman, who is awesome, and pretends that he has on a cape and a mask and no one can hurt him, and then he goes to find a seat. All the tables are circles and most of them are full. The one he sits down at is full of mostly boys, and they’re all wearing clothes as nice and clean as Neal’s. He wishes his name was Neal Burke or that he was at his old school where nobody looked nice.
“My name’s Jeff,” says the kid on Neal’s left. Jeff rattles off the names of all the other kids at the table and Neal tells himself to be extra nice to Jeff, so that he will keep helping Neal fit in. Most of the kids are friendly. Tabitha and Frank smile at him a bit too brightly, which might mean that they’ll share their stuff with him, but might also mean they’ll ask too many questions and not leave him alone, and Joe, who is bigger than Neal, doesn’t say “hello” back to him, and will need to be watched carefully.
The teacher, Miss Kennedy, is in the middle of reading them a story about talking rabbits. And then they do numbers, which is okay, because he already knows how to add and subtract. They get a break for snacks, which are grapes, and he only eats as many as Jeff does. And then all the kids go to their cubbies and get out the same book and they settle in to read. Jeff shares his book with Neal, and Miss Kennedy calls on Jeff first to read a page of the story. Jeff’s good at reading, and so is Sally and the other kids, even if some of them go slow and make mistakes (which Miss Kennedy catches every single time).
He likes the pictures in the book that they’re reading. They have more colors than he has crayons and even though the edges of the pages are a bright, glossy white, the pictures are dark and vibrant and real. Like a photo, but messier. He wants to turn the pictures into letters, because then he might be able to sort them into words, but the story that the pictures tell him isn’t the same as the one he’s supposed to be able to read.
He bets even Batman knows how to read. Robin probably does too, because if he didn’t, Batman would call him stupid and kick him out of the Batcave, because only stupid kids don’t know how to read.
Soon it’s lunch time, and they stop in the middle of the story and line up to go to the cafeteria. Miss Kennedy says they’ll keep reading after recess. Neal stands behind Joe, because Joe is so much bigger than him, and waits until they pass a bathroom to break away from the rest of the class. The bathroom is glossy white, like the edges of the pages in the picture book, and when he pushes the window open and climbs out of it, his escape route unfolds before him like a messy photo that only he knows how to read.
He sneaks around the edge of the building and then runs across the playground. It’s so easy that it makes him nervous. This school doesn’t even have fences around it. Maybe that’s just part of the future; kids don’t want to run away and there’s nobody mean who wants to break in. Maybe it’s the future, or maybe it’s just that this school is nice, but it doesn’t matter—he’s little Neal, not big Neal, and he’s never been normal and he’s always been good at getting away.
The problem, he soon realizes, is that he doesn’t know this neighborhood as well as he knows his old one, and he had left his lunchbox in the bathroom. He’d been too nervous to eat breakfast that morning, and he’s starting to get hungry. He can go without one meal really easy, just like Satchmo, who only gets fed two times a day. Peter and Elizabeth always feed Satchmo, even when he chews on the couch or pees on the carpet. Satchmo’s theirs, though.
He finds a small road that cuts behind two rows of houses. It’s full of dumpsters and thrown away furniture, but from there he can sneak into peoples’ backyards. It’s not a very good plan. He’ll need to think of a better one for tomorrow (and also he will need to remember to put breakfast food in his pockets in case he has to leave his lunch behind again).
He finds a backyard with an unlocked fence and sneaks inside. There’s a bench, and a fountain that’s not turned on, and flowers growing all around the edges. He sits down on the bench and hugs his knees and thinks that maybe he shouldn’t have run away. He can’t do this every day. Peter and Elizabeth will find out when they come to pick him up and he’s not there with all of the other kids.
He should have stayed and pretended that he needed glasses to see the words, or say that they didn’t teach kids how to read in the past and so it wasn’t his fault, he should have acted like his stomach hurt and gone to sit with the nurse.
Now, when Peter and Elizabeth find out that Neal’s too stupid to read, they’ll also find out that he’d run away from school in the middle of the day. And he’d forgotten his new backpack and all of his crayons and his lunch and he wanted so badly for Peter and Elizabeth to know that the presents they gave him were the best things in the entire world and he’d meant to take really good care of them.
The backyard is quiet, and boring, and even his fear doesn’t keep him awake for very long.
*
When he wakes up, it’s evening and the sirens are calling him. There are police car sirens and somebody yelling Neal over and over. There are policemen, and they know his name. The flashing red and blue lights mix with the sunset, which is beautiful, but messy, like watercolors in plastic trays that get wet and blend together, making a swirling rainbow out of everything until all they’re good for is brown. The sun is painting the clouds, and the rest of the sky is turning a dark blue, and Neal is in trouble.
The lights in the house that he’s hiding behind are all on, and through the curtains he can see people moving. He isn’t safe here anymore, but he can’t make himself move.
The police are looking for him. The police will find him, and arrest him, and call the welfare lady who is nice to him, but mean to his mom, and what if—what if—
He doesn’t know what’s happening, but it’s getting hard to breathe. There’s a rushing sound in his ears, like the fountain in front of him got turned on and is making waterfall noises in his head, but it’s still just him alone on the bench.
—what if they find his mom?
He hadn’t asked if she was alive, hadn’t asked if big Neal loved and hated her as much as he did; he hadn’t asked Peter and Elizabeth if they’d told his mom he was alive, and she just hadn’t wanted to come pick him up. He hadn’t asked, because most of him thinks she’s probably dead.
Before he can move, the sirens fade away, and the lights on the police cars stop turning the world blue and red (which blend together to make purple, he knows how all the colors work, sometimes he isn’t dumb at all).
He hadn’t thought that running away from school was that bad of a thing to do, but the police cars are coming for him. He doesn’t want to be arrested, and he doesn’t want to go to jail, so he knows he can’t stay here.
He is going to miss Peter the most, he decides, as he slips out the back gate and walks towards the road, hiding in the shadows, being careful not to step on any of the broken glass. He is going to miss Satchmo too, but Satchmo’s just a dog, and so he will miss Peter the most. Elizabeth is nice and pretty and perfect, but Neal’s mom could be nice and pretty and perfect sometimes, too; he knows not to trust friendly faces. Waiting for Elizabeth to get mean has been wearing him out. Peter’s face was friendly, but mostly he was tired or confused and sometimes a little angry, which Neal can understand.
Maybe he can sneak on a bus. Maybe he can pick quarters off the ground until he has enough money to go to Florida, or New Zealand, or back to his own world—except to do that he’d have to know how to do magic and he hasn’t learned that yet. Probably there are books about it. Books with really small writing and no pictures.
Maybe he can hitchhike. But that involves strangers, and getting into cars that he might not be able to get out of, and he thinks that going to jail—like all the other bad guys that Peter catches—might be better than running. Maybe in jail Peter will come see him sometimes.
He only makes it two more blocks before a black SUV going down the opposite direction screeches in an enormous U-turn and comes after him.
He runs, which he knows is stupid, because running will just make them angrier, but there has always been a part of him that is too mean to give up. It’s what keeps him fed and gives him the courage to steal and makes him promises. He feels that fire now, feels anger and fear all the way down to his toes, and he lets it carry him away as fast as it can.
He runs and runs and runs, until all of his breath is gone and his lungs feel like they’re being eaten up by flames, and still he hears the voice behind him yelling Neal, Neal, Neal.
He falls, but gets back up. He slips through a small hole in somebody’s fence and takes off through another row of backyards. The grass is slick and soon his nice new pants and his Batman sneakers are covered in mud and his palms are bleeding. He is almost free—almost to another road, another set of sidewalks to disappear down, maybe a bus stop not too far away—when Peter finds him. Peter was coming around the corner, and he tackles Neal, knocking him over. They both slide on somebody’s wet lawn, Peter’s body trapping Neal against the ground.
“No,” he yells, as loud as he can with no breath left in his body. “Let me go!”
He won’t let Peter hurt him. He wants his memory of Peter to be perfect. And right now Peter is hauling Neal to his feet and holding onto his arms with big hands and Neal closes his eyes and doesn’t know which world he’s in.
What he does know is that they definitely won’t take him back to the house where he will live when he is big, because he hasn’t learned to be good yet. No one will tell him how big Neal figured it out, how he got to be so nice and smart and tall, how he became the kind of person that Peter and Elizabeth want to be friends with instead of the kind of person who feels fire in their feet and runs away when they’re not supposed to and likes pictures more than letters and makes everybody so mad all the time.
He’s shaking in Peter’s arms, or maybe Peter’s shaking him, he doesn’t know. He’s dizzy, and the world, when he opens his eyes, is flashing with red and blue lights; they make purple shadows on Peter’s face; they make Peter look old.
“You’re okay,” Peter’s saying, pulling Neal in close and making his lungs burn even more, like his ribs are about to crack and everything fragile and squishy inside of him will break through his skin and fly away. “You’re okay, you’re—you’re okay, right? Neal, buddy—talk to me.”
His name’s not buddy, it’s Neal, and he can’t talk right now, because he’s busy crying. He’s crying like a dumb baby and Peter’s shaking him and hugging him and Peter’s on his knees on the lawn and so his pants are getting dirty too and Neal always makes a mess of everything.
“I’m sorry,” he says, and it comes out in hiccups so he tries to say it again. “I’m sorry I ran away, I didn’t mean to, and I—I don’t wanna go to jail,” he says. The only thing that’s keeping him upright is Peter’s grip on his arms. “Don’t make me, please, please don’t make me—”
There are other people around them: Peter’s friends from work, Diana and Clinton, and two men in police uniforms; they’re all talking at the same time and there’s static and more voices coming from their radios and so he almost doesn’t hear Peter say, “Never. Never. I’m never going to let that happen.”
When Peter pulls him in tight again, he goes limp. He’s tired.
It was his first day of school today.
Elizabeth’s there soon, and before Neal can stop her, she’s on her knees in the dirty grass, and she’s hugging him and Peter at the same time, and she’s crying, and—and so is Peter. He’s tired and his feet hurt and he’s hungry and nobody’s yelling at him anymore.
“You’re not mad,” Neal says slowly, figuring it out as he goes, because it doesn’t make any sense at all. “You’re—you’re sad?”
“You terrified us,” Peter says, and Neal cringes.
“Don’t ever do that again,” Elizabeth says, shaking him a little the same way Peter had, like an angry hug, pulling Neal in so tight that it almost hurts.
He’d scared them. They—he’d run away for an afternoon, for a few hours, and they—they’d noticed he was missing. And they’d called their friends to come look for him. They’d been really, really worried about him.
Neal doesn’t like to cry very much, because it makes his nose stuffy and then his face gets all red and ugly, and only babies cry. But he can’t help himself. It feels good and bad at the same time, crying so hard that it makes his whole body dance with every sob; it feels good and bad that Peter and Elizabeth are so much bigger than he is, because when they pull him in for tight angry hugs they make him feel small and protected at the same time.
“I wanna go home,” he says, because only Peter had said that Neal wasn’t going to jail and the policepeople are still standing nearby and what if Elizabeth doesn’t want him anymore?
“Okay,” Elizabeth says, pulling back and wiping Neal’s tears away before she wipes her own. “Okay. Let’s go home.”
*
Once they’re back in the car, Neal safely buckled in the back seat, she feels like she can breathe again, for the first time since Peter had called her that afternoon.
“Can you tell us what happened?” Peter asks. Neal nods his head slowly. “Why did you run from school? Was someone mean to you?” Neal looks away shiftily. “Who was it? What did they do?”
“Nothing! I just—I don’t like school. It’s stupid.”
“Neal,” Elizabeth says gently, “you have to tell us why you ran away. Was someone mean to you?”
He looks between them quickly, and nods his head in agreement. “Yes. The other kids. They made fun of me.”
“Are you telling us the truth, Neal?” Neal flinches at Peter’s stern stare, even filtered as it is through the rearview mirror.
“Don’t want to talk about it,” Neal mutters. He picks at the dirt on his jeans the rest of the ride home.
*
When Neal gets out of his bath later that night, she sees the bruises on his arms. There are fingerprints dots in rows down his pale biceps.
“Sweetie—what are these? Did someone hurt you? Is that why you ran away from the school? Neal—”
“It’s nothing,” he stutters, yanking his arm out of her grip. “I fell.”
“How did you fall?”
“Um,” he says, looking at Peter for a second before looking back down at his feet. “I don’t remember.”
“Did I do that?” Peter’s hand slides gently over the bruises and Neal flinches away from him.
“It’s okay,” Neal tells him quickly, leaning back into his grip. “You didn’t mean to at all, and you didn’t really hurt me. ‘Cause you weren’t angry,” he says earnestly.
“I was sad,” Peter says, a sick look on his face. “And very, very worried. But I didn’t mean to hurt you. I should have been more careful. I shouldn’t have done that.”
“Okay,” Neal says with a shrug.
“If anybody else hurts you, or we do—even if it’s an accident—you have to tell us, okay?” Neal looks at Peter like he’s gone slightly mad, but he agrees. “Promise,” Peter says fiercely. Neal shrinks against Elizabeth’s side and Peter backs away carefully. “I don’t want you to get hurt,” Peter says quietly.
She holds onto Neal’s thin shoulders and wants Peter to take it back. “I promise,” Neal says solemnly, and she hates—she hates that he is going to be taken away from them so soon.
Because Neal isn’t theirs; they won’t be able to keep him. And the Neal in the other world—the world which had taught him so many things that no one should have to know—that Neal needed to lie to keep himself safe.
Only—it’s not another world, is it? It’s theirs. This Neal is going to become their Neal.
Soon he’s going to be taken back, and he won’t have anyone to talk to about his hurts and fears and bruises, he’s going to where the people who should take care of him are the ones who hurt him. She doesn’t want Peter to take Neal’s lies from him if they’re what protect him from more pain
After Neal changes for bed, Peter asks him again about what happened earlier. It takes some prodding, but thankfully Peter’s learned how to modify his interrogation techniques to suit a six year old.
“They were reading a book,” Neal says finally. She waits for him to continue, but he stays silent, his eyes lowered, his small hands twisting in his lap.
“Was it…a sad book?” She’d gone through more than one bookshelf in the library trying to find stories that weren’t about orphans or lost children or evil stepparents; she understands the pitfalls presented by children’s literature.
“No. It had rabbits,” he says. That…doesn’t make any sense at all. Neal likes rabbits. Not as much as he likes Satchmo or squirrels, admittedly, but she can’t think of a reason why a book about rabbits would prompt such an extreme reaction. Unless it was the rabbit in Monty Python, but she’s reasonably certain that this Neal is unfamiliar with the Holy Grail.
“We don’t understand,” Peter says. “I need you to explain what happened.”
Neal just sits on the edge of his bed, staring at his bare feet, shrinking further and further into himself with every question that they ask.
“I couldn’t read the book,” he says finally, his breath hitching.
“Was it too hard?” she asks. Reading levels must have changed, in the last twenty years; she should have thought of that.
“No,” he whispers. “I’m just—I’m really stupid sometimes.” His cheeks are flushed a dark red and his shoulder blades draw tense lines against the loose fabric of the t-shirt that Neal had stolen out of Peter’s closet.
“No, you’re not,” she says—too loudly, because it makes him flinch. “You are so smart, and—”
Peter interrupts her. “Oh. You don’t know how to read, do you, buddy?”
She hears the echo of Neal in his silence: my name’s not buddy. Neal doesn’t say anything, though.
“It’s fine,” she says hurriedly. “Everybody learns at their own speed. And you went to a different school than those kids did, so you haven’t had as much time as they have, right?
She stares at Peter over Neal’s bowed head.
“That’s—that’s normal, though, right? For his time? You’re only six, aren’t you, Neal? What about the other kids in your class back home? I bet they didn’t all know how to read either, did they?”
*
He does not tell them that of course he was not the only kid in his class (his class back home which means back home with mom) who could not read. There had been a few of them. He’d known them all; he’d sold lemonade with them and stolen candy bars with them and hidden the teachers’ purses with them.
Together they had all hated the kids in the class who could open the words that the books held.
Everybody at Neal’s new school (new school but old Neal, little wrong misplaced dirty Neal) wears nice clothes and has good lunches and they all can open the words that the books hold.
“I left my backpack at school,” he mumbles, kicking his feet against the mattress. “And I got dirt on Batman, and my pants, and I—” and he doesn’t want to go back. “I’ll do better tomorrow.”
He will do better. He’ll sit at Jeff’s table and stare at the pictures in the book until the words chase the meaning out of them, and he’ll eat lunch by big Joe and try and make friends, and he’ll—it’s better to be stupid than bad, right?
He catches himself rubbing the bruises on his arms and snatches his hands away. “You look tired,” Elizabeth says. “How about Peter tells you a bedtime story tonight? Not from a book,” she says, nudging Peter’s shoulder. “Tell him an adventure about—about kings and thieves and princesses. And Satchmo.” Those are Neal’s favorite kinds of stories, but usually he tells them to Peter. He draws pictures to go along with them, and the pictures say all the words that he would write down if he could.
“Sure,” Peter says. “Right. Okay. I can do this. Once upon a time, there was a…a deputy. Duke. Sheriff! And he, uh—he had a…sword.”
It’s not a very good story, but it’s a really, really long one, and Peter strokes his hair the whole time he tells it.
*
When Neal falls asleep, Peter joins her hallway vigil. Peter looks old, in the craggy shadows that Neal’s nightlight casts; she suspects that she does, too. “What are we going to do?” she asks, voiced hushed so that she won’t disturb Neal.
“I don’t know. Look into charter schools, maybe? Or we could just drop the whole school thing, we don’t know how long he’s going to be here—”
“No,” she says. “I meant…what are we going to do when he changes back?”
Their guest room is filling up with toys and little boy socks and crayon studies of squirrels and Satchmo and the three of them, standing in front of the ‘house where Neal will live when he is big.’ Their guest room isn’t a guest room anymore, it’s Neal’s room. They have made their house his home.
What are they going to do when he changes back?