elrhiarhodan

Title: The Quality of Light
Author:

elrhiarhodan
Fandom: White Collar
Rating: PG-13
Characters/Pairings: Neal Caffrey
Word Count: ~2000
Spoilers: Nothing specific, Season 5 storylines implied
Warnings/Enticements/Triggers: Themes of grief and loss. Author declines to provide other warnings, please see entry tags for additional information.
Beta Credit:

miri_thompson,

coffeethyme4me and

rabidchild
Summary: For fifty years, Neal has kept something just above his heart, something he stole because it reminded him of the one person who once believed that he could be more than just a thief.

Author’s Note: Written as an extra story for my Fic-Can-Ukah meme, for my dear friend,

daria234, who selected the prompt "A painting, dark and ancient." My deepest thanks to

theatregirl7299 who gave me the nudge in the right direction.

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It may be a cliché, but Paris is lovely in the springtime. April is wonderful, but May is better, and June is the best month of all. The sunlight and the warmth feel good on his old bones, on the skin thinned by age. In another month, Paris will be too hot and he’ll head north for a while. The vineyard in Burgundy is perfect for the summer; the ancient farmhouse has thick stone walls to keep the heat at bay. When the seasons change again, he'll move on – or maybe not.

But for now, Paris is perfect and Neal takes joy in the light as it twists and glimmers on the Seine. This is his place; if not the home of his heart, then the home of his body. At least for now. When that time comes, and it will, because he’s not immortal, all the arrangements have been made and he will go home.

The server brings him another cup of his preferred café au lait with the essential pitcher of steamed milk. He pours the milk and adds a cube of sugar from the box on the table. He’s past the age when he can enjoy unraveling the bitter complexities of espresso. These days, he needs the bitterness smoothed over, a touch sweeter than he once preferred.

It's a pity that a tiny pitcher of milk and a box of sugar can't smooth over the many other moments of bitterness in his daily life: the never-ending loneliness, the dogged feelings of loss and grief. The inescapable decay of age. He can mask those feelings; forget about them in the daily routine of being alive. He can lose himself in the soaring beauty of this ancient city. It’s the nights that are difficult – they always have been, even when his bed was a slab of concrete covered by a thin and well-worn mattress.

Even more so when his nights are spent wrapped in the finest linen, when his head rests on soft eider down and the only sounds to disturb him are the lapping of waves against the quai and the melodic ringing of church bells calling worshipers to prayer.

The server smiles at him. She’s young and pretty and he’s not averse to flirting with her. It’s all part of the joie de vivre that he convinces himself that he feels. So Neal gives her the full-fledged Caffrey. She blushes and murmurs something he can’t quite hear and looks at him from under her lashes. It makes him a little proud to know that despite the head of snow white hair, the slight tremor in his hands and the cane that keeps him steady as he slowly makes his way, he’s still got what it takes to make someone’s heart beat a little faster.

The girl reminds him of someone he once knew. He thinks that every time he sees her. He’s quite not sure, though, who that memory belongs to. She’s got big blue eyes and a little pointed chin and masses of dark hair. He can remember art and music and the taste of his favorite wine without effort, but these days, the names and the faces that populate his past often escape him.

Neal finishes his coffee, drops a few Euros on the table, including a generous tip that is contrary to Parisian custom, and leaves. The day is young and unlike him, it won't grow tired for a long while yet. He walks slowly back to his apartment on the Île Saint Louis. There was once a time when he'd been able to walk the length and breadth of Paris, from the Eiffel Tower to Montmartre, easily climbing the three hundred steps to the top of the Basilica's dome just to make a quick sketch of the magnificence of the city spread out before him.

These days, he's grateful to make it from his apartment to Notre Dame – just a few blocks away – without needing to pause for breath and rest his aching bones. Growing old is a terrible thing, but as bad as that is, Neal knows that the alternative is worse.

He's a touch breathless as he turns the corner onto the tiny street where he lives. Neal loves the old building, originally built in the seventeenth century and refurbished during the height of the Art Nouveau era. He loves the ornamental stonework and delicately curving wrought iron trim and the muted colors of the interior tile work, but today, he loves the open cage elevator most of all. He's winded, his heart's pounding too hard to manage the three flights to the top of the building: his sanctuary.

Of all the places he's lived over the past fifty years, this one is closest to the one he thinks of as home. It doesn't have the same breathtaking views (although this stretch of the Seine is lovely) or a terrace as big as the apartment itself, but there's a similar quality to the woodwork, how the floors creak. And sometimes, like now, when the light is just right, he can be a young man again, playing at a young man's games. Neal closes his eyes against that light and in his memories, he bobs and weaves, feinting right, and going left. He's chased and caught and set free in a single breath.

And the memories cascade, names and faces and places that he longs to revisit. People he wishes he could see just one more time. The tears come too easily these days. He's an old and foolish man, living alone amongst the ruin of his mistakes. But he doesn't regret a single moment. He might have done the wrong things, but he always did them for the best of reasons.

The light is changing and he loses the sensation of youth and flight and the endless array of possibilities before him. This light is softer now, tinged with time as it reflects in stones that were ancient when the world he'd left behind was new.

Neal opens the floor-to-ceiling windows, struggling as he pulls at the wide casements. Their heavy, wrinkled glass and wooden frames strain his arms, reminding him of the fragility that's the gift of living too long. He steps out onto the small balcony and basks in the sun for a moment. The light is good, it's soft and pure, gold and blue and he remembers why he lives in Paris.

Because it is not the city of his heart.

It's hard to believe that it's been half a century since he walked out a set of glass doors, finally free of the shackle he'd worn for so long, unwilling to admit that he was bereft at its absence.

He'd once told a group of men and women, in the most earnest of tones, that he wanted nothing more than a life of good work. To show up on a Monday knowing that there was a desk and a pile of assignments – some boring, some exciting – waiting for him. It hadn't been a lie but a dream. But like so many other dreams he'd had, it died.

On that last day, waiting for the elevator to come, he had turned and looked back, hoping for a wave or a smile, but it never came. Life was going to go on without him; he was already a footnote in these people's lives. The elevator doors opened, and for the last time, he'd stepped through them and left that life behind.

Moz had been waiting with his bag, a passport and enough cash to set him up wherever he wanted to go – him, not them. His friend had developed itchy feet and after so many years staying by his side, he called him mon frère for the last time and they parted ways.

The postcards came without any regularity, and they grew more cryptic and less frequent as the years passed, until one day, an envelope had arrived with the details of the passing of Theodosius Mozart Winters. Despite the sadness at this loss, Neal had smiled. After everything, his old friend still couldn't abandon the last link to an impossible dream.

It’s been almost a lifetime since he received that letter, two decades and more.

Other letters have come his way, too, letting him know of friends who have crossed the bridge. Some, peacefully. Others not.

He remembers the day when the last letter came. He'd been dreading this for as long as he'd been gone, and it was a loss as inevitable as time and circumstance. The notice was cold and clinical – lawyers’ words. But there was something else with the letter: an old envelope that looked as if it had been opened and resealed a dozen times. Seeing his name in that handwriting, “Neal Caffrey” lined in those bold strokes he'd once so enjoyed recreating, had made his heart ache.

The words inside that envelope were ones of love, of regret, of sorrow for the loss of something that could never be mended, never be recreated or regained.

He'd thought about burning that letter. Keeping it seemed needlessly painful. But he couldn't destroy this last link to the life he couldn't keep.

The letter is gone, though. The cheap paper had disintegrated to dust from decades of constant handling. But Neal doesn't need the letter to remember the words.

He turns his back to the light and blinks at the stinging in his eyes. Blinded from the memory and the tears, Neal makes his way through the shadows and into his bedroom, and sits next to the window, the gauze curtain softening the light.

Neal reaches into his jacket pocket, just above his heart.

He found this in an antique market just a few weeks after arriving in Paris. It was old, the leather case dark and stained from centuries of handling. He opens it, revealing the treasure inside – a miniature portrait, not drawn with ink and tints on ivory, but made of enamel on silver – dark and bright and durable. He took it, not because he didn't have the money to buy it, but simply because he could.

For fifty years, the irony of that theft never leaves him. He stole the portrait because it reminded him of the one person who had believed that he could be better than a thief and a criminal, the one person who never recovered from the disappointment that that was all he wanted to be.

Neal leans back in the chair, his breath shallow, his eyes focused on the image, but it's blurring. He can hear his name spoken in a thousand different inflections – curiosity and affection, exasperation, anger, worry, the fury brought on by fear, the pain by regret. A single syllable uttered in so many variations.

He misses them all.

He wishes with everything that he has that he could hear his name just one more time – spoken with the one emotion that he's longed for for over a half a century.

The light grows bright, too bright, and Neal struggles. The portrait slips from his grasp and falls to the carpet. He reaches out but the light steals his will and he realizes that he has regrets, too many to count, too strong to bear.

He falls back, helpless as the light takes him, exposing all the flaws and faults of a life spent in denial.

But as strong and brutal as the light is, he is healed with a single word.

His name, spoken with love.

FIN