elrhiarhodan | White Collar Fic - The Illusion of Control

Title: The Illusion of Control
Author:

elrhiarhodan
Fandom: White Collar
Rating: NC-17
Characters/Pairings: Neal Caffrey
Word Count: ~1100
Spoilers: None
Warnings/Enticements/Triggers: Extreme angst. Food issues, non-sexual consent issues, psychological issues, prison fic, Author chooses not to provide additional warnings. Please see entry tags for additional information.
Beta Credit:

miri_thompson
Summary: Neal is sent back to prison for the rest of his life, and he finds the one thing he can control in his highly regimented life.

Author’s Note: Written for the “Hunger/Starvation” square for my Hurt/Comfort Bingo Card.

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The reality of prison is simple. You have no power over anything. It's more than being confined, it's about being controlled.

When you're an prisoner, you might seize on the least little thing to assert yourself. And that hidden display of power could be the salvation for your sanity. Or it could mean your death.

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The first time Neal went to prison, he was young and he should have been the target for every hardened lifer in Sing-Sing. But he managed to laugh and smile and con his way into everyone's good graces without having to give up too much. The guards were paid well to watch over him, the other convicts understood his value to them - a value that was so much greater as long as he remained undamaged. Neal might have lived for Kate's weekly visits, but he survived because he was smart enough play the right games.

The second time Neal went inside, he was too numb to care. Too numb to realize that he had powerful friends looking out for him. For the first month, he didn't even know he was on a suicide watch. And after that, it was clear that Peter was moving heaven and earth to get him out of here. He was protected, the guards knew that if anything happened to him there would be hell to pay.

Neal used that because he wasn't the type of man who would let any sort of leverage go wasted. He didn’t ask for much – an extra blanket, a pillow that wasn't decades old, a few minutes privacy in the showers. Just enough to make life a little more endurable.

The second time he left prison, Neal was in much the same condition as he'd entered it. Except that the dozens of tiny burn marks had healed and his ears weren't ringing anymore. He was fit and lean, and despite the ever-present weight of grief, sane.

The third time Neal went to prison, it was with the clear understanding that there was no one looking out for him, no one working to secure his release, no one who waiting for him when he got out, because he was never going to be free again. Neal understood that time was going to be meaningless now - he'd broken too many laws, disappointed too many people and even though he hadn't run, even though he'd spent the past three years doing a lot of good, none of that counted when the judge passed sentence.

There was no one who had any words of mercy for him.

Or maybe there was. Someone in the Bureau of Prisons had read his file and realized that Neal Caffrey, former criminal consultant to the FBI, couldn't go into GenPop. So Neal had a cell all to himself in one of the most secure facilities in the system. He was kept on a tier where contact with other humans – guards or inmates – was not just strictly limited, it was almost non-existent. The Bureau of Prisons was going to do its best to make sure that no one would get to Neal Caffrey and end him. His life had value, if just for the statistic that his life represented.

All of this security, the safety protocols, the minor privileges granted to Neal were meaningless. He could survive the loneliness, the boredom, the absence of hope, the lack of a future beyond these cement walls, but it was the loss of control that was slowly eating away at his sanity.

It was killing Neal by inches. He had no choices anymore, nothing to bargain with, or more accurately, no one to bargain with. The guards might just as well have been robots, soulless machines programmed to complete a task without any interest in the outcome.

It took about a year to realize that there was something he did have control over. Three times a day, a tray was pushed through the slot in his door. The food on that tray was nutritious, for a certain value of that word. At first, it wasn't a conscious decision not to eat. There were too many calories on the tray for a man who had limited options to burn them off. Neal simply wasn't hungry. He began skipping breakfast - the mass-cooked powdered eggs, runny cereal and piece of tasteless bread weren't really worth the effort needed to consume them. When lunch came, he'd eat his legally mandated piece of “fresh” fruit and leave almost everything else over.

Dinner was much the same.

After a while, the guards commented about his diet, if just to inquire if he was feeling okay or needed to go to the infirmary.

Neal just smiled – not that they could see the expression – and said no, he wasn’t hungry. This became his way to say “fuck you” to the prison system without getting his cell tossed in punishment. Eating – or not eating – was the one part of his life he had control over and he’d be damned if he’d give that up.

It didn’t take all that much effort to figure out the minimum number of calories he needed to stay alive. He could do the math in his head. He was leading a sedentary life, so ten calories a day per pound was the recommended amount. He halved that. He wasn’t trying to kill himself, not at all, he was trying to stay sane. To remain in control in a place where he had no control at all.

What he didn't realize was that ultimately, the system could take even that away. A man of his height, with no diseases, weighing eight-nine pounds was a cause for concern. Prison officials questioned him, was he on a hunger strike, was he protesting his treatment?

Neal enjoyed the attention, it was nice to have someone to talk with, but he just said “No.” He explained that he wasn't hungry, he didn't want to eat and there was nothing they could do to make him eat.

Except that there was. The kind men and women he spoke with were psychologists and psychiatrists and while they were impressed with his determination to assert some amount of control over his life, to them it was too extreme. Neal lost even the illusion of control when they each signed off on a psych evaluation stating that Prisoner Caffrey was a danger to himself and all necessary measures should be taken to preserve his life and a feeding tube should be inserted.

In the end, nothing they did to him, for him, mattered.

Two hours after he was taken from his cell and the tube inserted to deliver life-saving nutrition, someone came into the infirmary and stuck a shiv between his ribs. Neal died, handcuffed to a worn gurney, sedated.

He never knew.

FIN