White Collar Ficlet - Career Advice
Aug. 20th, 2012 04:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elrhiarhodanTitle: Career Advice
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
elrhiarhodan
Fandom: White Collar
Rating: PG
Characters/Pairings: Neal Caffrey, Peter Burke (Implied P/E/N)
Prompt #112 - Laugh
Spoilers: None
Warnings/Enticements/Triggers: None
Word Count: 300 – Exactly
Summary: Not everything you read is true
A/N: No beta, all mistakes are mine and mine alone.
__________________
They had a good arrangement.
Friday nights, particularly those when El was working and Peter and Neal weren’t, were spent in Neal’s apartment. So were Saturday mornings, when El showed up and they all went for breakfast.
This Friday was as typical a Friday as Neal could ever hope for. He was sitting on the couch, enjoying a good book. Peter was at the table and working on some of the never-ending FBI paperwork. It was domestic bliss, as Neal would define it.
The book was good, and to his occasionally warped sense of humor, amusing. So much so that Neal let out a sharp bark of laughter, shaking his head in bitter-tinged amusement.
“What’s so funny.” Peter looked up from the case file he was annotating.
“Nothing – just something I read.” And he read it again, and laughed again. It was still unfunny in the funniest of ways.
“Come on, what gives?” Peter set the file aside and joined him on the couch. Neal didn’t even both to play keep-away when Peter reached for his book. “The FBI Career Guide? Are you serious?”
Neal snatched the book back. “It was on the remainder shelf at Rizzoli’s; it looked interesting.”
“Okaaaaay. Then what’s so damn amusing?”
Neal cleared his throat. “Informants do not operate out of the goodness of their hearts. Some want money, and truly exceptional informants may be paid substantial sums.”
“Don’t tell me that after all this time, you’re still pissed off about your salary?”
“You mean my pittance?”
Peter gave him The Look. The one meant to cow. It didn’t work. Still, Neal kept his amusement to himself when he read the words on the next page:
“There is an old saw in the Bureau that has much truth: Never fall in love with an informant.”
FIN
Author’s Note: The FBI Career Guide: Inside Information on Getting Chosen for and Succeeding in One of the Toughest, Most Prestigious Jobs in the World, is a real book (clearly I would not make up quite such a fatuous subtitle). It was written by Joseph W. Koletar, a former FBI agent, in 2006 and published by AMACOM, the American Management Association. I was looking for the definition of “case agent” and came across this book, and a six page excerpt in Google Books. The last line in the excerpt was the last line of this ficlet.
Despite the misinformation about how agents should not fall in love with their CIs (Philip Kramer may have had a hand in that chapter), the book provides an excellent overview of the training, the FBI hierarchy, and how an agent progresses up the career ladder. Thinking that someone should send a copy to Jeff Eastin.
Author:
elrhiarhodanFandom: White Collar
Rating: PG
Characters/Pairings: Neal Caffrey, Peter Burke (Implied P/E/N)
Prompt #112 - Laugh
Spoilers: None
Warnings/Enticements/Triggers: None
Word Count: 300 – Exactly
Summary: Not everything you read is true
A/N: No beta, all mistakes are mine and mine alone.
They had a good arrangement.
Friday nights, particularly those when El was working and Peter and Neal weren’t, were spent in Neal’s apartment. So were Saturday mornings, when El showed up and they all went for breakfast.
This Friday was as typical a Friday as Neal could ever hope for. He was sitting on the couch, enjoying a good book. Peter was at the table and working on some of the never-ending FBI paperwork. It was domestic bliss, as Neal would define it.
The book was good, and to his occasionally warped sense of humor, amusing. So much so that Neal let out a sharp bark of laughter, shaking his head in bitter-tinged amusement.
“What’s so funny.” Peter looked up from the case file he was annotating.
“Nothing – just something I read.” And he read it again, and laughed again. It was still unfunny in the funniest of ways.
“Come on, what gives?” Peter set the file aside and joined him on the couch. Neal didn’t even both to play keep-away when Peter reached for his book. “The FBI Career Guide? Are you serious?”
Neal snatched the book back. “It was on the remainder shelf at Rizzoli’s; it looked interesting.”
“Okaaaaay. Then what’s so damn amusing?”
Neal cleared his throat. “Informants do not operate out of the goodness of their hearts. Some want money, and truly exceptional informants may be paid substantial sums.”
“Don’t tell me that after all this time, you’re still pissed off about your salary?”
“You mean my pittance?”
Peter gave him The Look. The one meant to cow. It didn’t work. Still, Neal kept his amusement to himself when he read the words on the next page:
“There is an old saw in the Bureau that has much truth: Never fall in love with an informant.”
Author’s Note: The FBI Career Guide: Inside Information on Getting Chosen for and Succeeding in One of the Toughest, Most Prestigious Jobs in the World, is a real book (clearly I would not make up quite such a fatuous subtitle). It was written by Joseph W. Koletar, a former FBI agent, in 2006 and published by AMACOM, the American Management Association. I was looking for the definition of “case agent” and came across this book, and a six page excerpt in Google Books. The last line in the excerpt was the last line of this ficlet.
Despite the misinformation about how agents should not fall in love with their CIs (Philip Kramer may have had a hand in that chapter), the book provides an excellent overview of the training, the FBI hierarchy, and how an agent progresses up the career ladder. Thinking that someone should send a copy to Jeff Eastin.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2012-08-22 10:19 am (UTC)I bet Neal finds something he finds ridiculous on almost every page.
LOL that Kramer wrote that line.
no subject
Date: 2012-08-22 07:14 pm (UTC)I do think that Neal will enjoy the book immensely - it'll go far in preparing him for the next time he has to go undercover as an FBI agent.
:D