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“Peter - listen to me. When they come for us, let them take me.” Neal grabs Peter’s lapels.

“No - no way. You don’t get to do this.” Peter is panting, adrenalin making his heart rate surge. “I’m supposed to protect you. I won’t let you do this.”

“No - Peter. Please - just listen to me. If I die - it’s just me. If you die - what about Elizabeth? Your family? You’re invested - you’ve got a life.”

“Neal - what are you talking about? Don’t you have a life too - what about us? And don’t you dare think that El would grieve any less if you ... you died.” Peter wraps his arms around Neal, both shaking and hugging him. “You don’t get to play the martyr. You don’t get to die for me.”

Neal pulls himself from Peter’s arms and steps back. He shakes his head. “Peter - I love you, more than I’ve loved anyone, and Elizabeth - she is the miracle of my life, but if we were to balance the scales - it’s not me who should walk out of here.”

Peter reaches out and hauls Neal back into his arms. “Neither of us may survive, you know that?” He felt Neal’s head nod. “I’ve been trained for this...I can handle it.”

Neal looks up at Peter and grimly laughs. “Yeah, right. You have no idea - and your training isn’t worth the paper the manual was printed on. I was in prison for four years - believe me, of the two of us, I’m the one much better equipped to survive torture. Maybe I can buy us - you - some time.”

Peter shudders - in this, Neal is right. Peter’s brief stint with the counterterrorism unit at the start of his FBI career and the training he underwent was probably as effective as a wall of sand, particularly when the intent was to cause as much pain as possible, not to extract information. But he can’t, he won’t, let Neal stand in for him. Neal’s just a random factor in the equation between him and Eversett.

Random factor that Neal may be, he’s not going to let them take Peter. Nothing is more important than Peter - Peter and Elizabeth. Neither Neal nor Elizabeth could survive his loss - not like this, not with what he knows has been planned. Neal runs his hand down the side of Peter’s face, a gentle and loving caress. He kisses Peter, deeply, sweetly, sadly, and whispers “Forgive me. You need to go home to Elizabeth” as he cold cocks Peter and gently lowers him to the floor.

He brushes his lips against Peter’s temple, where he struck him and stands up, ready for them to come for him.

He doesn’t have long to wait - the door opens and two of Eversett’s thugs grab hold of Neal. They drag him out of the cell and Eversett looked at Peter, lying unconscious on the floor.

“Wake him up - I want him to hear what we’re doing to his pretty, pretty boy.”

For hours, Peter listens to Neal scream in agony.

Eversett keeps up a running narrative, a play-by-play commentary of the tortures his thugs are inflicting on Neal. Rape is the least of it - Eversett tells Peter how they are breaking Neal, bone and flesh and spirit. Peter loses all track of time, as Neal’s screams faded to moans, becoming fainter and fainter until someone would try some new torture and Neal again shrieks and screams in pain.

Peter screams too, he fights the guards that are holding his arms, he tries to break out of the cage they are keeping him in. Oddly, they don’t beat Peter, they just keep him restrained. Eversett finally addresses him directly, “Peter - you want to watch? Good.” They drag him into another room and he can’t even put up a fight as he’s shacked to a chair. All Peter can see is blood and Neal’s blue eyes.

“It’s almost over, Burke. Your boy here put up a nice struggle. No matter how hard we tried, he never screamed your name. Do you think he blames you? After all, if you had let him stay in prison, he’d be just fine. You can end it for him. You can end his pain, his suffering right now.”

A million curses, a million threats crowd Peter’s mouth, but the only thing that comes out is a sob. He keeps his gaze on Neal’s blue eyes and the shocking realization comes in an instant. Neal is already dead. He doesn’t blink and his beautiful, tearstained face, the only part of him left untouched, is slack in death, in the time before rigor sets in. Peter doesn’t know if Eversett knows this, or if it’s part of the bastard’s plan to torment him. But regardless, he won’t let him inflict another indignity on Neal’s corpse.

“His suffering is over - you’ve killed him.” The tears stream down Peter’s face, uncaring, unchecked. “You might as well kill me too - because it’s over. It’s over. It’s over.”

Eversett checks Neal’s pulse, and confirms that Neal is, in fact dead. He picks up a gun and rapidly shoots the two animals that had been torturing Neal, and then the two thugs that had been standing guard over Peter. He picks up a bag and walks out the door, leaving Peter shackled to a chair in a room with five corpses.

Peter is rescued forty-eight hours later, located from an anonymous tip.


 

You have to understand, sanity is a relative thing. You appear normal - you walk and talk and eat and fuck and everyone around you can think you’re doing fine, you’ve recovered from your ordeal. But you know that your sanity is a masque, a thing worn so other people don’t run screaming from you. You live your life as if it’s a play, but you know that you can remove that masque, you can end that play, and you would never have to take a curtain call.


 

Three Weeks and Some Days

Eversett is caught. Even a so-called master criminal gets sloppy. The RFID tag on his forged passport doesn’t feed back the proper information when he is going through immigration at Heathrow, and an enterprising security officer runs his photo through the Interpol database. He's extradited back to the United States within 48 hours, and will stand trial for five counts of capital murder, each of which carry the death penalty.


 

Six Months

Peter goes back to work. He’s been attending daily counseling sessions, and the psych evaluations indicate that while he it still suffering from some residual trauma, he appears to have accepted Neal’s death and processed the events. Elizabeth attends grief counseling and doesn’t accept anything. She wants to rage at Peter’s apparent indifference, but since he is rarely home now - there is no one to rage at.

Peter’s a smart man. He knows what answers to give, what to say and what not to say. The psychiatrists don’t have to know that if he has to make a choice between hearing the memory of Neal’s shrieks and screams and a silence punctuated only by his heartbeats, he prefers to hear the screams. The silence is that of a room filled with five corpses.


 

Eight Months, Give or Take

There is much debate between the U.S. Attorney and the FBI about having Peter testify. But there is no way to avoid it, since Peter is the only eyewitness. Trial prep is brutal - particularly for the charges against Eversett for Neal’s murder. Peter only heard Neal being tortured, not seen it and everyone worries that his ability to relate the hours of agony that Neal endured before his death will be shaky. The federal attorneys also know that Eversett’s lawyers will come after Neal’s reputation and the Burkes’ sexual relationship with him.

In the end, Peter testifies. He spends hours on the stand, describing his relationship with Neal Caffrey, from the very beginning, to the last words he hears Neal speak. He’s unapologetic about his liaison with the other man, using words like honor and respect and love and polyamory to describe the three-way relationship between Neal, himself and his wife. Peter is cross-examined relentlessly about this in an attempt to discredit his judgment and his testimony. The U.S. Attorney does a masterful job of getting any line of questioning that smears Neal’s reputation suppressed, and after three days, the Government rests its case.

When presenting the defendant’s case, Eversett’s attorney tries to throw more mud at Neal, at Peter, but nothing sticks.

The jury returns a guilty verdict in less than four hours. The penalty phase takes another two weeks, and the entire White Collar staff, from Hughes on down requests the right to make victim impact statements. In the end, it’s Peter, Elizabeth and Reese Hughes who testify. As Peter testifies, he sees Moz sitting in the back of the courtroom, fists and jaw clenched. Afterwards, he tries to approach Neal’s friend to apologize. Moz turns his back on him and walks off. Peter never sees him again.

The jury takes less than a day to come back with an affirmative to the Government’s bill for the death penalty on all five murders. There is an automatic appeal.

A few weeks after the trial is over, June tells him that she’s sold the mansion and will be moving in with her daughter in Chicago. She asks if there is anything of Neal’s he’d like from the apartment before she moves. Peter takes a small painting - he’s not sure if it’s something that Neal had forged or was part of the decoration before he moved it. He also takes Neal’s black hat. He gives the painting to Elizabeth and he puts the hat in a box in the basement.


 

Almost A Year

Peter hits the ESC key, dismissing the alert his computer sends him. Next week is his twelfth wedding anniversary. He finds himself unmoved, disinterested. He’s not surprised, there is little that either moves or interests him these days - little outside of the thought of putting a bullet in his brain. Peter does his job, he goes home. He walks Satchmo, who has finally stopped looking past him, looking for Neal. He goes to bed in the guest room and plugs in headphones and plays Bach and Vivaldi and Buxtehude and the mathematical precision of the high Baroque helps distract him from the memory of Neal's screams and the echoes of silence.

He somehow makes it through each day, and if he can’t meet Elizabeth’s eyes, well… he can’t meet his own, either.

Today is a particularly bad day. For some godforsaken reason, there was a pack of screaming children in the restaurant that he had gone to for lunch. Their shrieks and screams make him break out in a sweat. Peter threw some money on the table and left before his food arrived.

“Peter, what are you doing?

He looks up at the unexpected question. Neal’s sitting across from him, in his usual seat, in his usual position, with that familiar smile on his face. Peter blinks, but Neal’s still there. He doesn’t breath, waiting for the hallucination to disappear. It doesn’t.

“I said, what are you doing? Your anniversary is in a week. You haven’t even thought about a gift for Elizabeth, have you?”

Peter’s frozen. Of all the things that Neal would chose to haunt him about, it would be his anniversary.

“Aren’t you going to say anything?”

Peter gets up and opens the door, Neal walks out of the office and they go down to garage, perhaps the most private place to talk with a ghost.

Neal keeps up a single-sided conversation all the way down to the car; mostly about the weather (it’s too warm for this time of year, whether or not Jones will accept the promotion Peter’s put him in for, and a half-dozen other inconsequentialities). He gets to his car and after a moment of indecision, opens the passenger door and then closes it. Peter gets behind the wheel, but doesn’t bother to start the engine. He sits there, not looking at Neal, not looking at anything but the cement block wall in front of him.

“By the way, Peter. I am not a ghost.”

That gets Peter’s attention, and he finally says something to Neal. “If you’re not a ghost, then what are you?”

Neal laughs, lightly, grimly. “I’m the manifestation of your psychotic break. You really don’t think you’re going to be able to continue the way you have been going?”

“Oh. Okay.”

Neal’s surprised. “Okay? That’s all you’ve got to say?”

“Pretty much. I know I’m losing it. I don’t think I’ll be able to go on much longer.”

“I know. That’s why I’m here now.”

Peter turns to Neal. “I am sorry - I am so sorry. I shouldn’t have let that happen to you.”

“You couldn’t have stopped it, Peter. He was going to use me to fuck you over. There was no escaping that. You know that.”

“But I still should have stopped it - I should have...done something.”

“Peter, Peter - you know that there was nothing you could have done. I am going to keep telling you that until you start believing it.”

“Neal, I know. But…”

“But nothing. We need to move on from this. You have an anniversary coming up. What are you are you going to do for Elizabeth?”

“Neal - I don’t know. I think she’s going to leave me.”

“Yeah - I do too. I would if I were her. You’ve completely shut her out. You’ve ignored her grief, you’ve closed yourself off from the one person who really, truly matters. And if she leaves you, you’ll have made my sacrifice in vain.”

Peter lets out a small sob. “She wants to talk about what happened. I can’t - I can’t go back there.” Another sob. “Who the fuck am I kidding? I’m there every waking minute. I can’t leave that room.”

Neal sighs. “We’ve got a lot of work to do...you are going to have to share your grief with Elizabeth, and you are going to have to allow her to grieve with you, too. It’s not going to be easy. Remember what you said to me that first day? The amount of work you do equals certain things in the real world. You want to keep Elizabeth? You want to keep some part of your life, you’re going to have to work on in.”

“I can’t do this alone.”

“You’re not alone, Peter - I’m here. I’m always with you. Remember the deal you gave me? I’m giving it to you. For the next four years - or the rest of your life, I own you. Your mine.”

Peter gives a small huff of laugher - tinged with tears. “Neal - I may be crazy, but I’ve worked hard at hiding it. People are going to know if I start talking to a figment of my imagination.”

Neal punched him lightly in the arm. Peter feels nothing. “I am a bit more than a figment, thank you very much. But we don’t have to actually verbalize our conversations. I live inside you. I’ll talk, and you listen - you follow my lead. I’ll be there when you can’t handle it. And when you need to, you talk and I listen. I’ll keep the silence away - and if you listen to my voice, you won’t hear my screams anymore.”

Peter starts to nod and then simply thinks, ”yes”.

“Good. Now - back to what’s important. You are going to go home tonight, and you and your wife, the woman you love more than anything, you are going to try to talk. I’ll give you all the help you need.”

Peter snorts. “Since when did I need help talking to my wife?”

“Since I was murdered.”

Peter doesn’t reply to the absolute truth of that statement.

“You are going to listen to her, you are going to move back into your bedroom and hopefully, some day really, really soon, you’re going to have sex with her. Because, just because YOU haven’t been too interested, I’ve been missing your wife something fierce.”

Peter smiles. “Should I tell her about you?”

”No, not now. Maybe not ever. She worries enough about you.”
 

Two Years, Seven Months

“Peter.”

It’s Hughes, who usually knocks, even when the door is opened.

“What’s up?”

Hughes comes in and shuts the door behind him. “I just heard from the U.S. Attorney’s office. Eversett’s last statutory appeal has been denied. His execution has been scheduled. Do you want to attend?”

”Peter - not a good idea. We’ve made a lot of progress - this would be a huge step backwards.”

“Reese - thank you for letting me know. But I don’t think so.” Peter smiles, sadly. “It won’t bring Neal back.”

Hughes nods in agreement. “A wise decision.” He turns and looks out over the bullpen. A few weeks after Neal’s murder, he had ordered a minor reorganization of the setup, to remove the desk that Neal had occupied. Not to erase the memory of that brilliant young man, but to ease the pain of the older one who shouldn’t have too look out and see that empty space every day. “I still miss him. I wish …”

Peter sighs, a shudder rippling through his breath. Even with Neal a warm and comforting presence in his head, whispering to him, giving him strength, the loss cuts through him almost as fresh as the day it occurred. “We can’t go back, we can only go forward.”

Yes, Peter. That’s right...we need to keep moving forward.

Hughes turns back and looks at Peter, really looks at him. He’s not the same man he was before...but there’s strength in him, a clarity in his eyes that Hughes had never expected to see again. There were times, during that first year, that he thought he’d get a call in the middle of the night from Elizabeth, or a knock on the door from the NYPD or one of his agents with news that Peter took his own life. He had both expected it and dreaded it. Yet, about four months after Eversett’s trial, Peter seemed to recover something of himself - work became more than rote motion. The old brilliance seemed to have returned, with it, something new - insights and leaps of faith - perhaps a legacy from his time with Neal. Thankfully, Peter’s relationship with Elizabeth has recovered too. And the days that Peter smiles and makes small jokes with his team outweighs the days that he spends shut in his office.

Reese Hughes doesn’t believe in miracles, which is why he never says anything to anyone about the times he sees Peter sitting in his car during his lunch hour, talking to someone who wasn’t there.
 

Five Years, and Then Some

It’s Saturday morning, and Peter goes downstairs. Elizabeth had gotten in late last night, some banquet for the Mayor’s office, and he lets her sleep. Satchmo’s in his usual spot on the landing, but he doesn’t give Peter his usual tail thump. He doesn’t move. Peter tries to wake him, but the old lab is gone.

Peter is frozen and Neal cries out, a sound terrible and wretched in sorrow. Elizabeth comes running. She sees Peter on his knees, tears are pouring down his face - all the anguish she never saw after...after Neal was killed. Heartbroken, she goes to her knees next to him and he wraps his arms around her. The comfort is welcome and unexpected.

In the days after Satchmo dies, Peter is not extravagant in his grief, but he is opened about his feelings, his loss and El holds onto him the way she couldn’t five years ago. From somewhere, Peter finds a sketch that Neal had done of Satch and he has it carved onto the grave marker. They talk and make love and for the first time in half a decade, she tells her husband how much she loves him and she truly means it.

But their home is too quiet, and they decide, after much consideration, to get another dog. Neither of them wants to be tied down to a puppy, although they could both be charmed into one. They resist, and adopt a rescued greyhound. Despite her pedigree, she’s a lazy, but beautiful bitch, content to lie at Peter’s feet and grow fat on table scraps. Since she came home on Christmas Eve, they call her Noelle.
 

Eight Years, Just About

They talk about Neal occasionally. Sometimes she’ll see something on television that reminds her of him or something he would have liked, sometimes Peter will talk about a case they had worked on – and how it gives him some insight into a current matter. Neal is never forgotten, but after so long, he’s more like a sweet dream than a part of their lives. She can recall the shape of his lips, the blue of his eyes, the way his lashes cast a shadow on his cheekbones when he slept, but she can’t remember the sound of his voice or how his hands felt cupping her breasts.

Sometimes, though – she wonders about Peter. In unguarded moments, she can still see the sadness in his eyes, and she accepts that the sadness will never going to go away. Yet, it is more than just sadness – there are times that he goes blank – just for a second or two. Then Peter smiles and everything seems to be fine. Elizabeth worries a little, but she never says anything.

It’s hard for her to believe, but it’s their twentieth anniversary. They discuss taking a long vacation, not back to the Caribbean – maybe Hawaii, maybe Tahiti. In the end, they just go out for dinner and dancing at the Carlyle. A month ago, Reese Hughes retired and Peter accepted a promotion to SAIC for the White Collar division; taking a two-week vacation at this time is impossible.

Their evening is delightful – Peter is wonderfully attentive and unabashedly romantic. She jokes and teases him about aging like a fine wine and he spins and dips her on the dance floor. The only off moment of the evening happens when someone pops a bottle of champagne and a too bright, too young thing sharply squeals and shrieks in mock horror at getting drenched with bubbly. Peter holds his breath and Elizabeth watches as his eyes go blank and unfocused. Then he smiles and gives her an explicitly erotic kiss and whispers that it’s time to go home. Peter had splurged, and rented a limo for the evening. They make sure the privacy screen is engaged and spend the whole trip back to Brooklyn making out like a pair of teenagers.

They get home and Noelle is practically prancing in her need to go out. Elizabeth lets her do her business in the back yard and Peter goes down to the basement to lock up his sidearm in the gun safe. He’s still downstairs when she comes back in with the dog, so El goes up and changes into a slinky nightgown. At 44, her body may not be as supple as a twenty-something, but her curves are still firm and everything points in the direction it should. She waits and waits, but Peter never comes back upstairs.
She goes back down, nearly tripping over Noelle, who likes to sprawl at the foot of the staircase. The light is on in the basement and she creeps down, suddenly afraid of what she’ll find.

She hears whispering. It’s Peter, but not like she’s ever heard him before. He’s talking to someone, his voice broken and he’s begging for something.

“No, no, no, no. I can’t. Please Neal...I can’t. Stay just for a while more. I need you. You have to stay. I can’t I can’t I can’t do this. I can’t. Please, Please Neal, Please stay I need you I need you. Stay with me. Stay with me. Stay with me. Stay. Stay. Stay. Please. Don’t leave me. Please don’t leave me... ”

He’s bent over a small table, holding something – black and shapeless, worrying around and around it in his hands, in time with those sobbing whispers. In a moment of utter horror, Elizabeth recognizes that Peter’s holding onto Neal’s hat.

Elizabeth hears only Peter’s begging, but Peter hears Neal’s voice. Comforting him, giving him the solace he needs. After all these years, after all this time, the triggers are still there, and Neal is still protecting Peter, watching over him, stepping in and giving him the strength he needs to go forward, to live out his life, to be the person he once was and still needs to be.

Neal is always there for Peter, and he always will be.

FIN