White Collar Big Bang Fic 2/2: And the ghosts in the attic they never quite leave (PG, 14,300 words)
See Part 1 for header and awesome cover art!
They talk about safe things, during dinner.
Helen has a dozen stories about a recent Hawaiian vacation, and it’s easy to let her carry the conversation for a while. Once the plates are stacked to one side she passes around her phone, and Diana and Neal make admiring noises at photos of white sand and turquoise water.
It’s an oasis, a fragile moment of calm; when Helen leaves, she knows, Neal will head back to the hospital and Diana will follow him. Neither is a necessary errand, but they will hold the vigil until they’re needed elsewhere.
“Christie’s lucky,” Helen says, “I haven’t got around to uploading any embarrassing baby pictures on this yet.”
Diana doesn’t keep baby pictures, embarrassing or otherwise. She has only a few photos tucked into her wallet; she pulls them out and passes them around in the wavering candlelight. Her father, shaking hands with the president. Christie, smiling, in front of the Washington Monument. And sixteen-year-old Diana outside an embassy guard station, Charlie beside her, his boots pale with dust and a pistol at his belt.
“Where’s that?” Neal holds the last one close to the light.
“Dubai.” Diana squints, leaning closer, but the lettering on the plaque at the gate is too small to read. “I think.”
It’s the last picture Charlie was in, and one of the few that shows his face; in most photos he’s in the background, a shadow half-cropped from a corner or hidden behind her father.
“That’s the embassy?” Neal frowns. “That’s where you lived?”
She looks at it again and snorts, realizing what he sees: the gatehouse behind her and the guard inside with his rifle, the high embassy walls topped with thick scrolls of razor wire. “It’s nicer on the inside. Trust me.”
“I should hope so,” Neal says. “’Cause it looks a hell of a lot like a -”
It’s not even that funny. But their eyes catch at the right (or the wrong) moment and they’re both doubled over laughing, a high-pitched raw wheezing that goes on long enough to leave her breathless.
She blinks rapidly when she can sit up and breathe again; Neal swipes a hand across his face, composing himself, and Helen watches them both with an alarmed look.
A car slows, passing along the street, lights sweeping the darkened block. Diana sits up abruptly, raising one hand toward her ear and a radio that’s not there.
Down on the street level, visible through the balcony railing, she sees a dark car parked across the street; two agents are on duty inside, watching the house. She knows another two are stationed in a truck at the corner.
Neal’s eyes flick toward the street, then back to her, catching the gesture as she lets her hand fall.
“I’m guessing pictures are something to avoid, in your line of work,” Helen says, looking at him. “Incriminating evidence, and all that.”
Neal’s face splits in a grin, dazzling false glitter brighter than a signal flare. Diana thinks of a creased black-and-white ATM camera photo and wonders if he has any others of Kate; she’s reasonably certain no one has any photographs of Mozzie.
His phone buzzes before he can say anything. Fear stutters across his face for half a second before he answers it.
From the hospital, Diana thinks as he locks everything behind an apologetic smile. Her eyes track him as he retreats inside, crossing to the sink and facing away from her.
Some kind of relapse. She drums her fingers beside her wine glass, listening, and hears only the slow murmur of traffic passing at the corner. The night is warm, and snatches of music rise from open car windows. Larssen, showing up to finish what he started.
Both, perhaps, with the way their luck is going -
“She’s not unhappy here,” Helen says quietly, and Diana looks up, startled.
She's fully awake, now, and expecting the next crisis. (They’re due for one, surely; it’s been nearly eight hours since the last.)
“She’d like to be closer to home,” Helen says, “but she never liked living in the capital any better than you did.”
“I want to make her happy,” Diana says, because it’s the truth, even if she’s done a poor job so far. She doesn’t know how much Christie has told Helen, of the bitter fights when they arrived here, of the resigned, frustrated silences that grew between them afterward.
She lets her eyes drift toward the doors, staring at the line of Neal’s back as he leans against the counter, phone still pressed to his ear. She doesn’t know how to say she wouldn’t have made it through the past week, without Christie to lean on.
“She worries about you,” Helen says gently, and Diana blinks.
Someone has to do something, she told Christie. Fowler’s disappearance, barely two days after the explosion, had been all the vindication she needed for planting a fake music box. With their one suspect lost without a ripple into the dark the real box was their only lead, a fragment of a song holding the only hope of tracing him or whoever he worked for.
“She’s proud of what you do, you know,” Helen goes on. “And she knows you and Agent Burke both take risks because you care about people, and about your work. But she doesn’t want to see you get hurt.”
Why you? Christie had asked, over and over again.
Diana didn’t come here because it was safe. She came here because she wanted to be one of those who ran toward the sound of gunfire, and never again the one pushed aside to safety at another’s expense.
One block over, a roof light flickers on casting a glare on the French doors, a blurred reflection and she can’t see Neal.
She gathers up the plates and the empty bread basket to go inside. Neal turns as she enters and gives her a tired smile and a thumbs up as she sets the dishes in the sink: all’s well.
She lets her shoulders sag in relief, breathes out slowly and rinses the plates, and leaves the doors cracked open when she leaves.
“Everything all right?” Helen asks.
“Just an update from the hospital.”
Neal faces the doors, now; his voice is too low to hear but she can see his face soften, weary and open and relieved.
“Your friend who was shot?”
“Neal’s friend.” Lawyer. Partner in crime and all-around bad influence. “Family.” Or what’s left of it. “Mozzie is -”
A sheet anchor in a storm. She runs out of words and refills the wine glasses; more wine is the last thing she needs but it’s something to do with her hands.
“Mozzie is family.”
She uses the word differently than most, than Christie, but so does Neal. She watches a pair of fireflies drift upwards from the gardenia blooms, following a lazy swirling path over the rail, brief lights like embers rising.
Sometimes Neal reminds her of her father; sometimes she thinks he’s more like herself, desperate for a home without knowing how to root in solid ground when he finds it.
***
Two days after the opening press conference, half-deflated balloons still trailed beside the main entrance to the new Timmy Nolan Memorial Park.
The official groundbreaking for the new playground wouldn’t take place until spring, assuming public opinion hardened behind it enough that the city planners couldn’t back out once they realized they’d been played. The weekend after Jennings’ arrest it was only a wide field, winter-brown grass rimed with frost and a forlorn welcome banner snapping in a cold wind.
(Someone had had the sense to take down the campaign posters.)
Diana wrapped her arms around herself and scanned the field, searching, until she spotted three men in trench coats walking a yellow lab.
“That took a while,” Neal said, concern shading his voice, as Jones handed her a paper cup of hot chocolate and Satchmo shoved his face against her knees, begging for scritches.
She opened her coat enough so they could all see her badge and her gun, secure at her hip and back where they belonged. Peter caught her eye and nodded firmly.
“You did good,” he said, and she didn’t say I know.
The board of inquiry was standard procedure, any time weapons were fired; she hadn’t expected them to find fault and they didn’t.
Gary Jennings was the kind of slick politician her old boss in DC would have ignored, except to shake his head sadly, and Barrow was a sleaze and a bully and she felt better than she probably should about shooting him.
(It helped that the idiot had let her get close enough to be reasonably sure of a non-lethal shot.)
She wasn’t happy about it; it was not a thing she held lightly, and she hoped it never would be. But her hands didn’t twitch and her gun felt no heavier than it did a week ago, and part of her thought maybe it ought to.
A kite sliced through the cold air, trailing bright streamers against a watery winter sun. She wished Charlie were here. She wanted to hear him tell her it was okay for her to be okay with this.
She’d hardly had time to do more than work and sleep, over the past two months, between the cases they were working officially and the one they weren’t. She’d slid back into the old patterns of working with Peter, the two of them clicking solidly into place in a comforting rhythm.
Christie was settling into her new job, and if she and Diana and the music box still made for three uneasy roommates they hadn’t had a real fight about it in over a week.
(They hadn’t had a real conversation, either, but Christie had kissed her and whispered good luck as she left for the hearing that morning; it was a start.)
She felt as though a weight had lifted; having too much work to do was somehow less of a constant, dragging frustration than leaving needed work undone for the wrong reasons. She and Peter might have bent a few rules badly enough to sprain them, but there were still bright lines between right and wrong and since she left DC she was surer than ever which side she was on.
Fowler and his mysterious contact might have slipped through their fingers last week but she and Peter were putting the pieces together. It was a thrill, the two of them together against powerful and corrupt enemies; the victory against Jennings was a first step, and only one of many.
This was what she was meant to do, and who she was meant to be: justice in the clean arc of a hammer, swinging down.
***
Her phone buzzes; she stands, walking toward the railing, but it’s only a text from Peter. She gives a quick response, we’re fine, and resists the urge to add stop worrying.
“Christie?” Helen asks, and then, at Diana’s headshake, “Your boss.”
“Just checking in.” She leans against the railing, solid stone cool and hard beneath her arms. Between the thick clouds coming in and the city lights spreading below her, she might be suspended above the stars, looking down into the wide bowl of the sky. A radio tower blinks a steady beat against the skyline; a distant siren keens, fading into the dark.
“Quite a view,” Helen says at last, echoing her thoughts.
Diana returns to the table, sits facing the doors and turns the stem of her wine glass, slowly, between her fingers. “It’s not Virginia.”
She’s not sure if she’s trying to offer apologies or explanations or excuses.
“Moving is never easy,” Helen says.
Diana nods, because it’s what’s expected; for her moving is as easy as finding the right gate at the airport and stepping on the plane.
Christie planted a tree in her backyard when she was nine years old; Diana has never seen it but Christie likes to tell the story. A slim cherry sapling that shot up and shed feathery pink blooms across the yard every spring for her birthday. She presses the flowers in a scrapbook every year and makes cards with them; she gave one to Diana for their three-month anniversary and had no idea why Diana was overwhelmed by it.
Diana stares at her wallet photos still lying on the table. For too many years home was a row of airport seats and a thin blanket and Charlie’s shadow watching beside her, boarding announcements and security warnings in languages she didn’t know, a runway falling beneath her and Charlie’s shoulder for a pillow.
She’s been entertained at palaces older than this country but she’s never had a tree to call her own, or stable ground to plant one.
She stifles a yawn as the French doors open and Neal returns. “I’m sorry. I’m not much of a -”
“Please.” Helen touches her hand. “Don’t apologize. It was a wonderful dinner. You’ve been very kind.”
“It’s been a hell of a week.”
She’s not sure how to explain this, the bone-deep exhaustion whlie she’s still wide awake, the sense still hanging over her that something terrible is about to happen.
She looks at Neal as he drops into a chair. “The little guy all right?”
“Sleeping. June’s still over there.” He leans back, looking briefly as tired as she feels. “She says she’s going to stay all night.”
Diana thinks Neal understands, on a deep inarticulate level; home was never a location and family has nothing to do with blood. When you live on the move, those who move with you are the only anchor you have.
Christie carved her initials in a tree truck; Diana left drawings on the walls of a hundred rooms in a dozen countries, echoes of memories hidden behind impersonal hotel paintings and another layer of paint during the twice-a-decade remodeling.
After long enough, nothing you leave remains.
“Peter says hey,” she tells him, and he makes a face, looking down and away, uncomfortable and awkward and not used to this kind of hovering concern.
(He can damn well get used to it, after a stunt like -)
“You both admire Agent Burke a great deal,” Helen says, and Diana blinks.
“He’s a good agent,” she says, and feels the ground shifting again. “And a good teacher. I’ve learned a lot from him.”
“Are you sure he’s innocent in all this?”
She doesn’t say define “innocent”. “He wouldn’t lie to me,” she says instead, and it’s the truth.
“I spent twenty years working dispatch for the Alexandria PD,” Helen says. “I knew a lot of cops, then. Good people. They took their jobs seriously.” She’s speaking slowly, as though feeling her way. “I know it’s not an easy job. You see a lot of good people get hurt, watch a lot of bad people walk.”
Diana nods, uncertain.
“A - friend of mine - knew a guy. A good cop, she’d worked with him for years. He was accused of planting drugs in a suspect’s car.
“Everybody knew this suspect was their guy. They’d been after him for months. He’d been involved in at least three shootings but he kept his hands clean, and there was never enough evidence to pin anything on him in court.”
Crickets saw a melancholy counterpoint to the cooing of a dove from a neighbor’s tree. Diana closes her eyes and a theme from Mozart teases the edges of her hearing.
“My friend knew those drugs weren’t planted. She knew there were lines this cop wouldn’t cross. She was sure he’d never do anything like that.” She shakes her head slowly. “She was wrong.”
Diana remembers Peter opening the music box for the first time, the two of them leaning in close to listen, to hear what was in this song someone would kill for.
“Good people can make mistakes,” Helen says. “And this Larssen sounds like he’s dangerous. It can be very easy to justify a small lie, to take down someone like that. It’s easy to justify a lot of things, when someone close to you gets hurt.”
Neal stands abruptly, jostling the table; the vase of gardenias rocks back and forth, splashing water across the glass. He walks over to a stone planter beside the railing and stops, staring into the darkness of the street.
“That’s - not Peter’s style.” His voice is strained and quiet.
“It’s normal to want to protect your friend.” Helen’s voice is gentle, but Diana keeps her eyes on Neal. “Just be sure you’re protecting someone who’s worth your loyalty.”
Diana remembers sitting up late with Peter at his kitchen table, two giant mugs of coffee and a box of latex gloves, one of Elizabeth’s dishcloths to wipe away Neal’s prints and an elegant little pearl-handled .38 to fill the empty space in her closet safe.
“I am,” she says, and Neal turns, his face pale and unreadable in the flickering light.
***
It was a three-month probie stuck staffing the Marshals’ office on a Sunday afternoon.
Diana offered no explanation, only her best flat glare and the kid burned a new key for the anklet without asking questions.
It was the first thing that had gone their way all day.
(No, the second.)
She tossed the anklet onto the dash as she got into the car, massaging her wrists and shutting her eyes. The passenger door thumped shut as Jones settled in beside her.
She gripped the steering wheel, black and already hot after ten minutes parked at the curb, warmth like a gun barrel recently fired. The anklet key was heavy in her pocket.
(Tell them my dog ate the damn thing, Peter had told her, and she’d heard what he hadn’t said, what he’d meant: make. this. not. have. happened.)
Jones stared at her, silent, and finally asked, “Are you okay?”
“We were supposed to see Romeo and Juliet in the park today,” she said. “Me and Christie.” The tickets were still stuck in the change compartment beside the gear shift.
An uncertain pause, and then: “I guess Caffrey owes you a rain check.”
“I never liked that play.” The words were oddly flattened. She’d agreed anyway; Christie had made plans two months ago and things were still fragile between them, so Diana had swallowed her grumbling about idiot teenagers and the things they did for love -
She’d been more excited about finally catching Fowler, anyway.
(This was her chance to be the hammer; this was what she came here for.)
“Neal wasn’t running,” she said at last, because she’d explained nothing, so far. Peter needs you at the office, she’d said, and Jones had pulled into the mostly-deserted garage to find Neal climbing out of Diana’s car wearing cuffs and no anklet; it would be anyone’s first guess. “We were moving in to arrest Fowler today, and Peter - didn’t want him involved.”
“He always suspected Fowler had something to do with that plane.”
“More than suspected.” She rubbed her arms again. “Fowler bought the explosives. We found a receipt.”
“’We’ kept that pretty quiet.”
Not quiet enough.
Jones opened his mouth like he was about to say something biting, then breathed out slowly instead. “It’s personal. I get that.” He didn’t ask the obvious questions: how long were you two planning this? and why wasn’t I included? “I’m not surprised Caffrey wanted to be there at the takedown.”
She twisted the key in the ignition, felt cold air blowing over her hands and a trickle of sweat along the back of her neck.
“He brought a gun.”
The words fell, flat; the purr of the engine was loud in the sudden silence.
She closed her eyes, saw a courtyard of warm pink brick and a fountain at the center, and Neal with a straight line on his target, sprinting up the stairs.
She didn’t say it would have been me. It wasn’t; she didn’t fire; no one did.
She didn’t fire but her wrists ached all the way up to her shoulder blades, like she’d just come from a day at the range.
She put on the turn signal, stared at the blinking indicator, clicking steadily like a heartbeat. She saw brightly-dressed dignitaries milling like bees around the fountain and Neal, backlit against the open window at the top of the stairs, his eyes flat as a steel blade and holding no room for compromises.
It was a clean arc, across that courtyard and through the window on the other side; it was a clear straight line down the end of his sight. And all the bonds that held Neal were made of paper; in the end she could only watch them burn.
***
The next phone call is for Helen. It’s Christie, heading into her last two hours, and Helen goes inside and leaves Diana and Neal to the dark.
Diana tops off the wine glasses, sets the empty bottle back in the bucket, now more water than ice, surface broken by a dying moth, wet wings fluttering and frantic.
Neal gathers up her wallet photos, still lying on the table; he stares for a moment at her younger self before holding them out to her.
His voice is hushed. “He was with you in a lot of places.”
“Yeah.” She’s told him about Charlie already; there’s not much more to say. She tucks the photos back in her wallet, as if she can sheathe edged memories by keeping them out of sight.
He walks away from the table, shoves his hands into his pockets and removes them again. She stands beside him, resting her elbows on the railing as he folds his arms tightly across his chest. His body language is classic uncertainty, defensiveness and confusion; as a professional con he knows this, and yet he lets her see it anyway, which means … something.
She wishes she knew what.
He tips his head back and stares up toward the roof. “They get the guy who did it?”
The words are carefully noncommittal; he doesn’t look at her.
Below them, streetlamps throw overlapping pools of white and pale orange along the sidewalk, piling shadows in inky dark heaps behind parked cars and under hedges. Two agents are watching from one of those cars, she knows.
Two agents are drinking burnt coffee and eating Chinese takeout while she and Neal sip expensive French wine, and she’d give anything to be in that car with them.
It’s a simple duty, to watch and to guard in the dark, to stay awake and alert, to stop anyone who might hurt Neal. But it’s not the charge Peter gave her, tonight.
The silence lengthens; crickets hold a hushed conference with the breeze whispering among the azaleas. Bats swoop lower, toward the abandoned table, moving in to snatch their own dinner from the moths lured in by the candlelight.
Peter asked her to make Neal get some sleep but she can’t do that. The most she can do is distract him, and that only for so long; they’ve had no chance, yet, to slow down and stop and think about any of it, and now it’s all catching up and they can only brace for impact.
Peter needs her to protect Neal from himself, to make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid, and she’s trying.
(Peter charged her to stop Neal, last Sunday; she can still hear his voice, rough and desperate.)
Neal is asking for something else entirely.
“Sniper shot him from the roof,” she says at last, and doesn’t look up. “About two seconds after -”
The bare facts are simple enough, but those aren’t what Neal needs.
She could tell him it didn’t help, having the shooter’s blood splashed across her shirt along with Charlie’s. It didn’t stop the nightmares; it didn’t numb the pain. It didn’t fill the empty hole at her shoulder, every time she turned around. But that’s not what he’s asking.
She lifts a hand, moving as if to squeeze his shoulder, then lets it fall on the stone. He’s not asking for that, either.
He’s asking - begging - for answers she doesn’t have, to questions she’s wrestled since she was seventeen. She looks at him and the glass walls of rage are gone from his eyes, replaced by something raw and lost and searching.
He’s listening, finally; he’s looking to her for some hope or solace and she has none to give.
Last Sunday things were simple and now they aren’t anymore; sometimes the straight path leads over a cliff’s edge and you can’t see - not until the ground is giving way beneath your feet - that it’s a long way down.
She hears footsteps as a lone figure turns the corner down on the street and imagines the agents below snapping to alert. Now she does grip Neal’s arm, tugging him back from the railing.
(She can do this; she can check the angles and watch the street and pull him out of the way of potential snipers.)
She feels him exhale, sees his shoulders sag, tension going out of him, relief or defeat or both as he rakes a hand through his hair.
A thin horned moon throws a wavering pearl reflection in the water spilled across the table; she blots it away with a crumpled napkin as the candle flames jump, light stirring the shadows like a breeze against a curtain.
(She can cuff him; she can drag him back from that cliff’s edge and she can guide him down those twisting stairs when he stumbles, blind with shock.)
She can try to put the pieces back together. They’re all trying, holding onto shards like broken glass, but the edges are ragged and sharp and won’t align, and someone forgot to bring the glue.
She could grope for any of a hundred platitudes, useless lies well-meaning people told her. She can say that someday those days when Kate’s absence sucks all the air out of the world, those days won’t come so close together; she can’t say they’ll ever go away.
Nothing will heal this but time, and she can’t bring herself to lie to him.
***
It was Charlie who taught her how to shoot.
He’d stood behind her, guiding her as she placed her feet that first time, adjusting her stance and her aim and her grip. He’d been her first teacher and he’d taught her the first rule of firearms; the first rule was iron and she had never broken it: don’t ever pull a gun you’re not prepared to fire.
Charlie was gone and he couldn’t teach her anymore; he couldn’t give her answers while she was still groping for the questions.
She’d thought she was ready to make that call.
She almost asked Peter, later, what he would have wanted her to do. She never wanted to find herself in that place again, but she wanted (needed) an answer all the same: did you mean for me to take the shot?
As if she could put off that responsibility, even hypothetical, onto him.
Three times, she almost asked. In the silent parking garage when Peter handed her cuffs back to her; as they left the antique shop, listening to Neal’s phone ring through to voicemail over and over; in the back seat of Peter’s car on the way to the hospital, following the ambulance, with her hand on Neal’s neck holding his head down between his knees.
She never did ask. She knew what he’d say.
He wasn’t going to do it, Peter would have told her. There was never any need. I knew he wouldn’t shoot.
She remembered the fear in Peter’s eyes, in his voice; if she’d asked he would have lied, to her and to himself because he had to. Because he couldn’t think about what almost happened and so she swallowed the question because she didn’t want to think about it either.
(Her gun and Neal’s in a line like a blade’s edge and Peter off to the side, his gun aimed at the floor, his eyes on Neal when she looked to him; she was alone, two lives weighed in her hands.)
She came here seeking justice beyond rules; she came here because she was tired of protecting criminals. And she was this close to shooting a friend to protect a murderer and Charlie was gone. He was gone and Peter was silent.
(She couldn’t see Neal’s face. She could see Fowler’s, and that was enough; she watched him close his eyes and she knew he knew the threat was real.)
She couldn’t stop thinking about it.
But perhaps if she didn’t ask, if she didn’t talk about it the question rolling over and over in her mind would stutter to a stop, and fade away.
***
They go inside for dessert.
The decision is hardly rational. There’s a detail outside and if they fail Neal’s glass doors are no protection; if Larssen wanted Neal dead Neal wouldn’t still be breathing but the balcony feels suddenly exposed.
Neal blows out the candle lanterns and Diana collects the wine glasses. Helen is tucking her phone away when they come in, blinking in the warm yellow light.
“It looks like rain,” Diana says, and no one questions her.
“Christie says she loves you and you’d better save her some dessert,” Helen says.
Neal makes the coffee. And it’s good coffee, better than Diana has ever had at work and miles above the stale sludge from the hospital cafeteria and she leans against the counter and breathes in the aroma as it steeps.
He pours into three mugs and adds a generous slug of Bailey’s to each.
“Friends old and new,” he toasts, and they all clink their mugs together.
Diana pulls the crème brûlée from the fridge, sets four ramekins out; they’ve chilled and set by now, not even quivering as she sets them on the table. Neal brings over the sugar and the blowtorch.
“This is the fun part.” He lays out three clean spoons and they each take a heaping spoonful of sugar, dusting it over the surface of the custard.
The torch hisses as Neal lights it, a bright flare and then a steady blue flame; he’s in his element, here. He’s an accomplished craftsman, showing off his art.
Diana sips her coffee; it’s as good as it smells. Better, even. She watches as he passes the torch over the sprinkled sugar, a flame like a paintbrush tip layering rich caramel glaze as smooth as glass. There’s an artistry to it, and Neal’s smile fades to a look of intent concentration, leaning over the table like a fine canvas.
“Voila!” He presents the finished dish with a flourish, switching off the torch and offering it to Helen; she blinks, and he says, “I’ll show you.”
He guides Helen’s hands, at first, then steps back to let her finish the glaze herself. When she’s done she hands the torch back to him.
“Your turn.” He offers the torch to Diana, catching her eye with a grin.
The grin is real, not the fake plastic thing he’s worn all evening. The light in his eyes is unaffected, uncomplicated fun and it catches her off guard. It’s a light she hasn’t seen since they closed the Dutchman case.
It’s like watching someone learn to walk again.
And for a suspended moment all she can see is the back of his head and the angle of his shoulders down the end of her gun sight and she turns away and sets her mug down, carefully, before she breaks it.
She breathes slowly, in and out, and clenches her hands around the lip of the sink until her fingers ache.
When she turns back Neal has finished glazing hers and Christie’s both. His face is a polite mask as he lays the torch aside, suave and smooth and false and she sees a haunted shadow behind it, a twisting guilt to think he could be happy, even for a few seconds, in a world without Kate.
Diana knows that feeling, too; she can’t tell him that will ever go away, either.
***
The hospital was quiet and tense and it was easy to forget, in the windowless lounge at the end of the ward, that it was nearly midnight. It was as easy to believe Mozzie had only gone into surgery five minutes ago, as it was to think he’d been there forever.
Neal’s face was shocky and set under the unforgiving fluorescents, a tensely-coiled mess of pain radiating don’t touch me in waves she could feel halfway across the room.
“Three more hours,” he said, as she sat in the chair beside him. “They said. At least. If he doesn’t -” Broken phrases stumbling to a halt and he let out a soft, shaking breath. “Do you think -”
Broken glass sparkled in his hair as he turned; she resisted the urge to brush it away. “They’re doing everything they can.”
“Do you think you -” He turned, a quick glance encompassing her and Peter both. Peter stood covering the entrance to the lounge, on guard, and Neal’s look might be seeking reassurance or escape from a trap, she couldn’t tell which. “Do you think you and Peter can hold off the Marshals until there’s - some news?”
His voice cracked on the last words, splintering into fragments.
“The Marshals aren’t coming, Neal.”
He thought he was going back to prison.
He wasn’t, for a great number of reasons, some having to do with sympathy for him and others to do with potentially awkward questions about the music box that they’d prefer to avoid, but most of which boiled down to one stark fact: letting the Marshals take Neal would require her and Peter to let him out of their sight, and there was absolutely no way that was going to happen tonight.
Neal stared at her like the words meant nothing.
She’d spent the last hour on the phone with her father; she’d spend hours more, in the days to come, making whatever deals she had to, in whatever dark rooms she could find, to keep Neal here. And all for what might be a temporary, ineffective bandage; she knew if Mozzie didn’t survive they were going to lose Neal, too, one way or another.
“The Marshals aren’t coming.” And she wasn’t sure if she wanted to hug him or punch his lights out, but she made herself speak gently, with an effort. “You’re not going anywhere.”
***
Diana wished Christie could have joined them for dessert; the smooth taste melts away any remaining awkwardness and before long the dishes are empty, the spoons collected, and Helen’s cab is honking downstairs.
They all follow Helen out to the curb. Neal carries her suitcase and they put her in the cab, after another round of heartfelt, genuine hugs. The street is dark after the cab turns the corner, and Diana feels the last of the mask slip away. She turns to Neal; his face is open and raw and tired.
Back upstairs, Neal washes the dishes. Diana stands beside him, drying the plates and glasses as he hands them to her. It’s an uncertain rhythm and slightly off, alcohol and a post-adrenaline crash beginning to take a toll.
“This was nice,” she says, finally, because someone should say something and it’s true. “Thanks for helping out.”
“I owe you one,” he says. “Several. A lot, really -” There’s an awkward silence, like he wants to say something and he’s trying to figure out how. Then, “It was an invasion of your privacy, yours and Christie’s, and I never …”
She stares at him as he trails off, her brain wading through wine and exhaustion after his meaning. And it hits her: he’s trying to work his way around to apologizing for Alex Hunter.
He thinks she’s angry about a knife scratch on her window frame and the theft of something that was never hers in the first place and it’s such a spectacular case of missing the goddamn point she doesn’t know whether to laugh or scream.
She slams her hand down on the counter and he starts; a wine glass in the sink falls on its side and cracks.
“Diana.” He leans in, damp fingers touching her wrist. “You want to tell me what’s wrong?”
She says, flat and precise, “I almost killed someone a week ago. And I’m still having a really hard time dealing with that, all right?”
His head snaps back, wary suspicion in his eyes, like he’s not sure if she’s mocking him.
“I almost had to shoot you.” Somehow saying it out loud makes it real, in a way it wasn’t before. Her voice drops, low and fierce. “Do you get that, Neal?”
He stares at her; the silence presses down and he takes a breath as if to speak but says nothing.
“What was I supposed to do?" she demands. Peter would lie, if she asked him; Neal gives her no such comfort. He only blinks, his face pale and his eyes huge.
She wonders if suicide by cop had been part of his plan, or if he simply didn’t have a plan beyond Fowler’s death.
She can’t bring herself to ask that question. It looms over all of them, huge and massive and when it falls they will have nowhere to go.
“Do you have any idea what kind of trouble - even assuming the official investigation didn’t end with me or Peter in prison for falsifying federal evidence and God knows what else I’d still have one more person I care about who’s dead because of me and how the hell am I supposed to live with that?”
She stops when she runs out of breath and they stare at each other; she’s not sure which of them is more stunned.
“Diana -”
“Don’t.” She throws out a hand, blocking whatever line of unreason he intends to use. “I don’t even -”
They both reach for the broken glass in the sink at the same time.
“I’ve got it,” Neal says, quiet and hoarse, and she watches as he gathers the pieces and lays them on a towel, though to her eyes it looks beyond fixing.
“You have a lot of people, here, who care about you,” she says finally, as if words can fix anything; these are all she has. “Please try not to forget that.”
They finish the dishes without speaking, and if her hands aren’t entirely steady she can try to blame it on the alcohol. When the clean plates are all stacked she stares blankly at the empty sink until Neal says, again, “I got this.”
She blinks at him; they’re both supposed to be resting, but she knows he meant to head back to the hospital once dinner was over, and she’d been intending to follow.
“Couch,” he says, and she lets him boss her, here, in his apartment, gives him back the illusion of control.
She leans her head back against the cushions and watches him put away the dishes.
“Moz swears that’s the most comfortable couch he’s ever slept on. Of course, given where he usually sleeps -” He trails off. “I won’t go anywhere,” he says. “I promise.”
She gives him a flat, suspicious stare; he tries for his classic innocent look for about half a second.
“You need to rest, too,” she says. Before he can protest: “Try. For a little while.”
She thinks he’s going to argue but he only crosses the room to the light switch and the room goes dark.
He drops his belt over a chair back but stretches out still in his Westwood trousers. On the couch Diana tugs her holster off her belt, tucks the sidearm under a gilt embroidered pillow and draws up her feet, hiding them under the throw.
She hears the bed creaking as Neal shifts, and a soft sigh, and he says, “Night, Daisy.”
She grabs the pillow and hurls it in the general direction of the bed; there’s a thump and she hopes whatever she knocked over wasn’t too expensive. She gropes for another pillow and wedges it against the armrest. “Call me that again,” she says, around a yawn, “and I’ll break both your arms.”
The only response is a weary chuckle. She lies in the darkness, listening to his breathing even out. Something ticks steadily from the direction of the stove, or maybe the refrigerator, a slow tapping of electronic kitchen noises like an echo of footsteps, pacing.
The sound fades away and Diana sleeps.
They talk about safe things, during dinner.
Helen has a dozen stories about a recent Hawaiian vacation, and it’s easy to let her carry the conversation for a while. Once the plates are stacked to one side she passes around her phone, and Diana and Neal make admiring noises at photos of white sand and turquoise water.
It’s an oasis, a fragile moment of calm; when Helen leaves, she knows, Neal will head back to the hospital and Diana will follow him. Neither is a necessary errand, but they will hold the vigil until they’re needed elsewhere.
“Christie’s lucky,” Helen says, “I haven’t got around to uploading any embarrassing baby pictures on this yet.”
Diana doesn’t keep baby pictures, embarrassing or otherwise. She has only a few photos tucked into her wallet; she pulls them out and passes them around in the wavering candlelight. Her father, shaking hands with the president. Christie, smiling, in front of the Washington Monument. And sixteen-year-old Diana outside an embassy guard station, Charlie beside her, his boots pale with dust and a pistol at his belt.
“Where’s that?” Neal holds the last one close to the light.
“Dubai.” Diana squints, leaning closer, but the lettering on the plaque at the gate is too small to read. “I think.”
It’s the last picture Charlie was in, and one of the few that shows his face; in most photos he’s in the background, a shadow half-cropped from a corner or hidden behind her father.
“That’s the embassy?” Neal frowns. “That’s where you lived?”
She looks at it again and snorts, realizing what he sees: the gatehouse behind her and the guard inside with his rifle, the high embassy walls topped with thick scrolls of razor wire. “It’s nicer on the inside. Trust me.”
“I should hope so,” Neal says. “’Cause it looks a hell of a lot like a -”
It’s not even that funny. But their eyes catch at the right (or the wrong) moment and they’re both doubled over laughing, a high-pitched raw wheezing that goes on long enough to leave her breathless.
She blinks rapidly when she can sit up and breathe again; Neal swipes a hand across his face, composing himself, and Helen watches them both with an alarmed look.
A car slows, passing along the street, lights sweeping the darkened block. Diana sits up abruptly, raising one hand toward her ear and a radio that’s not there.
Down on the street level, visible through the balcony railing, she sees a dark car parked across the street; two agents are on duty inside, watching the house. She knows another two are stationed in a truck at the corner.
Neal’s eyes flick toward the street, then back to her, catching the gesture as she lets her hand fall.
“I’m guessing pictures are something to avoid, in your line of work,” Helen says, looking at him. “Incriminating evidence, and all that.”
Neal’s face splits in a grin, dazzling false glitter brighter than a signal flare. Diana thinks of a creased black-and-white ATM camera photo and wonders if he has any others of Kate; she’s reasonably certain no one has any photographs of Mozzie.
His phone buzzes before he can say anything. Fear stutters across his face for half a second before he answers it.
From the hospital, Diana thinks as he locks everything behind an apologetic smile. Her eyes track him as he retreats inside, crossing to the sink and facing away from her.
Some kind of relapse. She drums her fingers beside her wine glass, listening, and hears only the slow murmur of traffic passing at the corner. The night is warm, and snatches of music rise from open car windows. Larssen, showing up to finish what he started.
Both, perhaps, with the way their luck is going -
“She’s not unhappy here,” Helen says quietly, and Diana looks up, startled.
She's fully awake, now, and expecting the next crisis. (They’re due for one, surely; it’s been nearly eight hours since the last.)
“She’d like to be closer to home,” Helen says, “but she never liked living in the capital any better than you did.”
“I want to make her happy,” Diana says, because it’s the truth, even if she’s done a poor job so far. She doesn’t know how much Christie has told Helen, of the bitter fights when they arrived here, of the resigned, frustrated silences that grew between them afterward.
She lets her eyes drift toward the doors, staring at the line of Neal’s back as he leans against the counter, phone still pressed to his ear. She doesn’t know how to say she wouldn’t have made it through the past week, without Christie to lean on.
“She worries about you,” Helen says gently, and Diana blinks.
Someone has to do something, she told Christie. Fowler’s disappearance, barely two days after the explosion, had been all the vindication she needed for planting a fake music box. With their one suspect lost without a ripple into the dark the real box was their only lead, a fragment of a song holding the only hope of tracing him or whoever he worked for.
“She’s proud of what you do, you know,” Helen goes on. “And she knows you and Agent Burke both take risks because you care about people, and about your work. But she doesn’t want to see you get hurt.”
Why you? Christie had asked, over and over again.
Diana didn’t come here because it was safe. She came here because she wanted to be one of those who ran toward the sound of gunfire, and never again the one pushed aside to safety at another’s expense.
One block over, a roof light flickers on casting a glare on the French doors, a blurred reflection and she can’t see Neal.
She gathers up the plates and the empty bread basket to go inside. Neal turns as she enters and gives her a tired smile and a thumbs up as she sets the dishes in the sink: all’s well.
She lets her shoulders sag in relief, breathes out slowly and rinses the plates, and leaves the doors cracked open when she leaves.
“Everything all right?” Helen asks.
“Just an update from the hospital.”
Neal faces the doors, now; his voice is too low to hear but she can see his face soften, weary and open and relieved.
“Your friend who was shot?”
“Neal’s friend.” Lawyer. Partner in crime and all-around bad influence. “Family.” Or what’s left of it. “Mozzie is -”
A sheet anchor in a storm. She runs out of words and refills the wine glasses; more wine is the last thing she needs but it’s something to do with her hands.
“Mozzie is family.”
She uses the word differently than most, than Christie, but so does Neal. She watches a pair of fireflies drift upwards from the gardenia blooms, following a lazy swirling path over the rail, brief lights like embers rising.
Sometimes Neal reminds her of her father; sometimes she thinks he’s more like herself, desperate for a home without knowing how to root in solid ground when he finds it.
***
Two days after the opening press conference, half-deflated balloons still trailed beside the main entrance to the new Timmy Nolan Memorial Park.
The official groundbreaking for the new playground wouldn’t take place until spring, assuming public opinion hardened behind it enough that the city planners couldn’t back out once they realized they’d been played. The weekend after Jennings’ arrest it was only a wide field, winter-brown grass rimed with frost and a forlorn welcome banner snapping in a cold wind.
(Someone had had the sense to take down the campaign posters.)
Diana wrapped her arms around herself and scanned the field, searching, until she spotted three men in trench coats walking a yellow lab.
“That took a while,” Neal said, concern shading his voice, as Jones handed her a paper cup of hot chocolate and Satchmo shoved his face against her knees, begging for scritches.
She opened her coat enough so they could all see her badge and her gun, secure at her hip and back where they belonged. Peter caught her eye and nodded firmly.
“You did good,” he said, and she didn’t say I know.
The board of inquiry was standard procedure, any time weapons were fired; she hadn’t expected them to find fault and they didn’t.
Gary Jennings was the kind of slick politician her old boss in DC would have ignored, except to shake his head sadly, and Barrow was a sleaze and a bully and she felt better than she probably should about shooting him.
(It helped that the idiot had let her get close enough to be reasonably sure of a non-lethal shot.)
She wasn’t happy about it; it was not a thing she held lightly, and she hoped it never would be. But her hands didn’t twitch and her gun felt no heavier than it did a week ago, and part of her thought maybe it ought to.
A kite sliced through the cold air, trailing bright streamers against a watery winter sun. She wished Charlie were here. She wanted to hear him tell her it was okay for her to be okay with this.
She’d hardly had time to do more than work and sleep, over the past two months, between the cases they were working officially and the one they weren’t. She’d slid back into the old patterns of working with Peter, the two of them clicking solidly into place in a comforting rhythm.
Christie was settling into her new job, and if she and Diana and the music box still made for three uneasy roommates they hadn’t had a real fight about it in over a week.
(They hadn’t had a real conversation, either, but Christie had kissed her and whispered good luck as she left for the hearing that morning; it was a start.)
She felt as though a weight had lifted; having too much work to do was somehow less of a constant, dragging frustration than leaving needed work undone for the wrong reasons. She and Peter might have bent a few rules badly enough to sprain them, but there were still bright lines between right and wrong and since she left DC she was surer than ever which side she was on.
Fowler and his mysterious contact might have slipped through their fingers last week but she and Peter were putting the pieces together. It was a thrill, the two of them together against powerful and corrupt enemies; the victory against Jennings was a first step, and only one of many.
This was what she was meant to do, and who she was meant to be: justice in the clean arc of a hammer, swinging down.
***
Her phone buzzes; she stands, walking toward the railing, but it’s only a text from Peter. She gives a quick response, we’re fine, and resists the urge to add stop worrying.
“Christie?” Helen asks, and then, at Diana’s headshake, “Your boss.”
“Just checking in.” She leans against the railing, solid stone cool and hard beneath her arms. Between the thick clouds coming in and the city lights spreading below her, she might be suspended above the stars, looking down into the wide bowl of the sky. A radio tower blinks a steady beat against the skyline; a distant siren keens, fading into the dark.
“Quite a view,” Helen says at last, echoing her thoughts.
Diana returns to the table, sits facing the doors and turns the stem of her wine glass, slowly, between her fingers. “It’s not Virginia.”
She’s not sure if she’s trying to offer apologies or explanations or excuses.
“Moving is never easy,” Helen says.
Diana nods, because it’s what’s expected; for her moving is as easy as finding the right gate at the airport and stepping on the plane.
Christie planted a tree in her backyard when she was nine years old; Diana has never seen it but Christie likes to tell the story. A slim cherry sapling that shot up and shed feathery pink blooms across the yard every spring for her birthday. She presses the flowers in a scrapbook every year and makes cards with them; she gave one to Diana for their three-month anniversary and had no idea why Diana was overwhelmed by it.
Diana stares at her wallet photos still lying on the table. For too many years home was a row of airport seats and a thin blanket and Charlie’s shadow watching beside her, boarding announcements and security warnings in languages she didn’t know, a runway falling beneath her and Charlie’s shoulder for a pillow.
She’s been entertained at palaces older than this country but she’s never had a tree to call her own, or stable ground to plant one.
She stifles a yawn as the French doors open and Neal returns. “I’m sorry. I’m not much of a -”
“Please.” Helen touches her hand. “Don’t apologize. It was a wonderful dinner. You’ve been very kind.”
“It’s been a hell of a week.”
She’s not sure how to explain this, the bone-deep exhaustion whlie she’s still wide awake, the sense still hanging over her that something terrible is about to happen.
She looks at Neal as he drops into a chair. “The little guy all right?”
“Sleeping. June’s still over there.” He leans back, looking briefly as tired as she feels. “She says she’s going to stay all night.”
Diana thinks Neal understands, on a deep inarticulate level; home was never a location and family has nothing to do with blood. When you live on the move, those who move with you are the only anchor you have.
Christie carved her initials in a tree truck; Diana left drawings on the walls of a hundred rooms in a dozen countries, echoes of memories hidden behind impersonal hotel paintings and another layer of paint during the twice-a-decade remodeling.
After long enough, nothing you leave remains.
“Peter says hey,” she tells him, and he makes a face, looking down and away, uncomfortable and awkward and not used to this kind of hovering concern.
(He can damn well get used to it, after a stunt like -)
“You both admire Agent Burke a great deal,” Helen says, and Diana blinks.
“He’s a good agent,” she says, and feels the ground shifting again. “And a good teacher. I’ve learned a lot from him.”
“Are you sure he’s innocent in all this?”
She doesn’t say define “innocent”. “He wouldn’t lie to me,” she says instead, and it’s the truth.
“I spent twenty years working dispatch for the Alexandria PD,” Helen says. “I knew a lot of cops, then. Good people. They took their jobs seriously.” She’s speaking slowly, as though feeling her way. “I know it’s not an easy job. You see a lot of good people get hurt, watch a lot of bad people walk.”
Diana nods, uncertain.
“A - friend of mine - knew a guy. A good cop, she’d worked with him for years. He was accused of planting drugs in a suspect’s car.
“Everybody knew this suspect was their guy. They’d been after him for months. He’d been involved in at least three shootings but he kept his hands clean, and there was never enough evidence to pin anything on him in court.”
Crickets saw a melancholy counterpoint to the cooing of a dove from a neighbor’s tree. Diana closes her eyes and a theme from Mozart teases the edges of her hearing.
“My friend knew those drugs weren’t planted. She knew there were lines this cop wouldn’t cross. She was sure he’d never do anything like that.” She shakes her head slowly. “She was wrong.”
Diana remembers Peter opening the music box for the first time, the two of them leaning in close to listen, to hear what was in this song someone would kill for.
“Good people can make mistakes,” Helen says. “And this Larssen sounds like he’s dangerous. It can be very easy to justify a small lie, to take down someone like that. It’s easy to justify a lot of things, when someone close to you gets hurt.”
Neal stands abruptly, jostling the table; the vase of gardenias rocks back and forth, splashing water across the glass. He walks over to a stone planter beside the railing and stops, staring into the darkness of the street.
“That’s - not Peter’s style.” His voice is strained and quiet.
“It’s normal to want to protect your friend.” Helen’s voice is gentle, but Diana keeps her eyes on Neal. “Just be sure you’re protecting someone who’s worth your loyalty.”
Diana remembers sitting up late with Peter at his kitchen table, two giant mugs of coffee and a box of latex gloves, one of Elizabeth’s dishcloths to wipe away Neal’s prints and an elegant little pearl-handled .38 to fill the empty space in her closet safe.
“I am,” she says, and Neal turns, his face pale and unreadable in the flickering light.
***
It was a three-month probie stuck staffing the Marshals’ office on a Sunday afternoon.
Diana offered no explanation, only her best flat glare and the kid burned a new key for the anklet without asking questions.
It was the first thing that had gone their way all day.
(No, the second.)
She tossed the anklet onto the dash as she got into the car, massaging her wrists and shutting her eyes. The passenger door thumped shut as Jones settled in beside her.
She gripped the steering wheel, black and already hot after ten minutes parked at the curb, warmth like a gun barrel recently fired. The anklet key was heavy in her pocket.
(Tell them my dog ate the damn thing, Peter had told her, and she’d heard what he hadn’t said, what he’d meant: make. this. not. have. happened.)
Jones stared at her, silent, and finally asked, “Are you okay?”
“We were supposed to see Romeo and Juliet in the park today,” she said. “Me and Christie.” The tickets were still stuck in the change compartment beside the gear shift.
An uncertain pause, and then: “I guess Caffrey owes you a rain check.”
“I never liked that play.” The words were oddly flattened. She’d agreed anyway; Christie had made plans two months ago and things were still fragile between them, so Diana had swallowed her grumbling about idiot teenagers and the things they did for love -
She’d been more excited about finally catching Fowler, anyway.
(This was her chance to be the hammer; this was what she came here for.)
“Neal wasn’t running,” she said at last, because she’d explained nothing, so far. Peter needs you at the office, she’d said, and Jones had pulled into the mostly-deserted garage to find Neal climbing out of Diana’s car wearing cuffs and no anklet; it would be anyone’s first guess. “We were moving in to arrest Fowler today, and Peter - didn’t want him involved.”
“He always suspected Fowler had something to do with that plane.”
“More than suspected.” She rubbed her arms again. “Fowler bought the explosives. We found a receipt.”
“’We’ kept that pretty quiet.”
Not quiet enough.
Jones opened his mouth like he was about to say something biting, then breathed out slowly instead. “It’s personal. I get that.” He didn’t ask the obvious questions: how long were you two planning this? and why wasn’t I included? “I’m not surprised Caffrey wanted to be there at the takedown.”
She twisted the key in the ignition, felt cold air blowing over her hands and a trickle of sweat along the back of her neck.
“He brought a gun.”
The words fell, flat; the purr of the engine was loud in the sudden silence.
She closed her eyes, saw a courtyard of warm pink brick and a fountain at the center, and Neal with a straight line on his target, sprinting up the stairs.
She didn’t say it would have been me. It wasn’t; she didn’t fire; no one did.
She didn’t fire but her wrists ached all the way up to her shoulder blades, like she’d just come from a day at the range.
She put on the turn signal, stared at the blinking indicator, clicking steadily like a heartbeat. She saw brightly-dressed dignitaries milling like bees around the fountain and Neal, backlit against the open window at the top of the stairs, his eyes flat as a steel blade and holding no room for compromises.
It was a clean arc, across that courtyard and through the window on the other side; it was a clear straight line down the end of his sight. And all the bonds that held Neal were made of paper; in the end she could only watch them burn.
***
The next phone call is for Helen. It’s Christie, heading into her last two hours, and Helen goes inside and leaves Diana and Neal to the dark.
Diana tops off the wine glasses, sets the empty bottle back in the bucket, now more water than ice, surface broken by a dying moth, wet wings fluttering and frantic.
Neal gathers up her wallet photos, still lying on the table; he stares for a moment at her younger self before holding them out to her.
His voice is hushed. “He was with you in a lot of places.”
“Yeah.” She’s told him about Charlie already; there’s not much more to say. She tucks the photos back in her wallet, as if she can sheathe edged memories by keeping them out of sight.
He walks away from the table, shoves his hands into his pockets and removes them again. She stands beside him, resting her elbows on the railing as he folds his arms tightly across his chest. His body language is classic uncertainty, defensiveness and confusion; as a professional con he knows this, and yet he lets her see it anyway, which means … something.
She wishes she knew what.
He tips his head back and stares up toward the roof. “They get the guy who did it?”
The words are carefully noncommittal; he doesn’t look at her.
Below them, streetlamps throw overlapping pools of white and pale orange along the sidewalk, piling shadows in inky dark heaps behind parked cars and under hedges. Two agents are watching from one of those cars, she knows.
Two agents are drinking burnt coffee and eating Chinese takeout while she and Neal sip expensive French wine, and she’d give anything to be in that car with them.
It’s a simple duty, to watch and to guard in the dark, to stay awake and alert, to stop anyone who might hurt Neal. But it’s not the charge Peter gave her, tonight.
The silence lengthens; crickets hold a hushed conference with the breeze whispering among the azaleas. Bats swoop lower, toward the abandoned table, moving in to snatch their own dinner from the moths lured in by the candlelight.
Peter asked her to make Neal get some sleep but she can’t do that. The most she can do is distract him, and that only for so long; they’ve had no chance, yet, to slow down and stop and think about any of it, and now it’s all catching up and they can only brace for impact.
Peter needs her to protect Neal from himself, to make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid, and she’s trying.
(Peter charged her to stop Neal, last Sunday; she can still hear his voice, rough and desperate.)
Neal is asking for something else entirely.
“Sniper shot him from the roof,” she says at last, and doesn’t look up. “About two seconds after -”
The bare facts are simple enough, but those aren’t what Neal needs.
She could tell him it didn’t help, having the shooter’s blood splashed across her shirt along with Charlie’s. It didn’t stop the nightmares; it didn’t numb the pain. It didn’t fill the empty hole at her shoulder, every time she turned around. But that’s not what he’s asking.
She lifts a hand, moving as if to squeeze his shoulder, then lets it fall on the stone. He’s not asking for that, either.
He’s asking - begging - for answers she doesn’t have, to questions she’s wrestled since she was seventeen. She looks at him and the glass walls of rage are gone from his eyes, replaced by something raw and lost and searching.
He’s listening, finally; he’s looking to her for some hope or solace and she has none to give.
Last Sunday things were simple and now they aren’t anymore; sometimes the straight path leads over a cliff’s edge and you can’t see - not until the ground is giving way beneath your feet - that it’s a long way down.
She hears footsteps as a lone figure turns the corner down on the street and imagines the agents below snapping to alert. Now she does grip Neal’s arm, tugging him back from the railing.
(She can do this; she can check the angles and watch the street and pull him out of the way of potential snipers.)
She feels him exhale, sees his shoulders sag, tension going out of him, relief or defeat or both as he rakes a hand through his hair.
A thin horned moon throws a wavering pearl reflection in the water spilled across the table; she blots it away with a crumpled napkin as the candle flames jump, light stirring the shadows like a breeze against a curtain.
(She can cuff him; she can drag him back from that cliff’s edge and she can guide him down those twisting stairs when he stumbles, blind with shock.)
She can try to put the pieces back together. They’re all trying, holding onto shards like broken glass, but the edges are ragged and sharp and won’t align, and someone forgot to bring the glue.
She could grope for any of a hundred platitudes, useless lies well-meaning people told her. She can say that someday those days when Kate’s absence sucks all the air out of the world, those days won’t come so close together; she can’t say they’ll ever go away.
Nothing will heal this but time, and she can’t bring herself to lie to him.
***
It was Charlie who taught her how to shoot.
He’d stood behind her, guiding her as she placed her feet that first time, adjusting her stance and her aim and her grip. He’d been her first teacher and he’d taught her the first rule of firearms; the first rule was iron and she had never broken it: don’t ever pull a gun you’re not prepared to fire.
Charlie was gone and he couldn’t teach her anymore; he couldn’t give her answers while she was still groping for the questions.
She’d thought she was ready to make that call.
She almost asked Peter, later, what he would have wanted her to do. She never wanted to find herself in that place again, but she wanted (needed) an answer all the same: did you mean for me to take the shot?
As if she could put off that responsibility, even hypothetical, onto him.
Three times, she almost asked. In the silent parking garage when Peter handed her cuffs back to her; as they left the antique shop, listening to Neal’s phone ring through to voicemail over and over; in the back seat of Peter’s car on the way to the hospital, following the ambulance, with her hand on Neal’s neck holding his head down between his knees.
She never did ask. She knew what he’d say.
He wasn’t going to do it, Peter would have told her. There was never any need. I knew he wouldn’t shoot.
She remembered the fear in Peter’s eyes, in his voice; if she’d asked he would have lied, to her and to himself because he had to. Because he couldn’t think about what almost happened and so she swallowed the question because she didn’t want to think about it either.
(Her gun and Neal’s in a line like a blade’s edge and Peter off to the side, his gun aimed at the floor, his eyes on Neal when she looked to him; she was alone, two lives weighed in her hands.)
She came here seeking justice beyond rules; she came here because she was tired of protecting criminals. And she was this close to shooting a friend to protect a murderer and Charlie was gone. He was gone and Peter was silent.
(She couldn’t see Neal’s face. She could see Fowler’s, and that was enough; she watched him close his eyes and she knew he knew the threat was real.)
She couldn’t stop thinking about it.
But perhaps if she didn’t ask, if she didn’t talk about it the question rolling over and over in her mind would stutter to a stop, and fade away.
***
They go inside for dessert.
The decision is hardly rational. There’s a detail outside and if they fail Neal’s glass doors are no protection; if Larssen wanted Neal dead Neal wouldn’t still be breathing but the balcony feels suddenly exposed.
Neal blows out the candle lanterns and Diana collects the wine glasses. Helen is tucking her phone away when they come in, blinking in the warm yellow light.
“It looks like rain,” Diana says, and no one questions her.
“Christie says she loves you and you’d better save her some dessert,” Helen says.
Neal makes the coffee. And it’s good coffee, better than Diana has ever had at work and miles above the stale sludge from the hospital cafeteria and she leans against the counter and breathes in the aroma as it steeps.
He pours into three mugs and adds a generous slug of Bailey’s to each.
“Friends old and new,” he toasts, and they all clink their mugs together.
Diana pulls the crème brûlée from the fridge, sets four ramekins out; they’ve chilled and set by now, not even quivering as she sets them on the table. Neal brings over the sugar and the blowtorch.
“This is the fun part.” He lays out three clean spoons and they each take a heaping spoonful of sugar, dusting it over the surface of the custard.
The torch hisses as Neal lights it, a bright flare and then a steady blue flame; he’s in his element, here. He’s an accomplished craftsman, showing off his art.
Diana sips her coffee; it’s as good as it smells. Better, even. She watches as he passes the torch over the sprinkled sugar, a flame like a paintbrush tip layering rich caramel glaze as smooth as glass. There’s an artistry to it, and Neal’s smile fades to a look of intent concentration, leaning over the table like a fine canvas.
“Voila!” He presents the finished dish with a flourish, switching off the torch and offering it to Helen; she blinks, and he says, “I’ll show you.”
He guides Helen’s hands, at first, then steps back to let her finish the glaze herself. When she’s done she hands the torch back to him.
“Your turn.” He offers the torch to Diana, catching her eye with a grin.
The grin is real, not the fake plastic thing he’s worn all evening. The light in his eyes is unaffected, uncomplicated fun and it catches her off guard. It’s a light she hasn’t seen since they closed the Dutchman case.
It’s like watching someone learn to walk again.
And for a suspended moment all she can see is the back of his head and the angle of his shoulders down the end of her gun sight and she turns away and sets her mug down, carefully, before she breaks it.
She breathes slowly, in and out, and clenches her hands around the lip of the sink until her fingers ache.
When she turns back Neal has finished glazing hers and Christie’s both. His face is a polite mask as he lays the torch aside, suave and smooth and false and she sees a haunted shadow behind it, a twisting guilt to think he could be happy, even for a few seconds, in a world without Kate.
Diana knows that feeling, too; she can’t tell him that will ever go away, either.
***
The hospital was quiet and tense and it was easy to forget, in the windowless lounge at the end of the ward, that it was nearly midnight. It was as easy to believe Mozzie had only gone into surgery five minutes ago, as it was to think he’d been there forever.
Neal’s face was shocky and set under the unforgiving fluorescents, a tensely-coiled mess of pain radiating don’t touch me in waves she could feel halfway across the room.
“Three more hours,” he said, as she sat in the chair beside him. “They said. At least. If he doesn’t -” Broken phrases stumbling to a halt and he let out a soft, shaking breath. “Do you think -”
Broken glass sparkled in his hair as he turned; she resisted the urge to brush it away. “They’re doing everything they can.”
“Do you think you -” He turned, a quick glance encompassing her and Peter both. Peter stood covering the entrance to the lounge, on guard, and Neal’s look might be seeking reassurance or escape from a trap, she couldn’t tell which. “Do you think you and Peter can hold off the Marshals until there’s - some news?”
His voice cracked on the last words, splintering into fragments.
“The Marshals aren’t coming, Neal.”
He thought he was going back to prison.
He wasn’t, for a great number of reasons, some having to do with sympathy for him and others to do with potentially awkward questions about the music box that they’d prefer to avoid, but most of which boiled down to one stark fact: letting the Marshals take Neal would require her and Peter to let him out of their sight, and there was absolutely no way that was going to happen tonight.
Neal stared at her like the words meant nothing.
She’d spent the last hour on the phone with her father; she’d spend hours more, in the days to come, making whatever deals she had to, in whatever dark rooms she could find, to keep Neal here. And all for what might be a temporary, ineffective bandage; she knew if Mozzie didn’t survive they were going to lose Neal, too, one way or another.
“The Marshals aren’t coming.” And she wasn’t sure if she wanted to hug him or punch his lights out, but she made herself speak gently, with an effort. “You’re not going anywhere.”
***
Diana wished Christie could have joined them for dessert; the smooth taste melts away any remaining awkwardness and before long the dishes are empty, the spoons collected, and Helen’s cab is honking downstairs.
They all follow Helen out to the curb. Neal carries her suitcase and they put her in the cab, after another round of heartfelt, genuine hugs. The street is dark after the cab turns the corner, and Diana feels the last of the mask slip away. She turns to Neal; his face is open and raw and tired.
Back upstairs, Neal washes the dishes. Diana stands beside him, drying the plates and glasses as he hands them to her. It’s an uncertain rhythm and slightly off, alcohol and a post-adrenaline crash beginning to take a toll.
“This was nice,” she says, finally, because someone should say something and it’s true. “Thanks for helping out.”
“I owe you one,” he says. “Several. A lot, really -” There’s an awkward silence, like he wants to say something and he’s trying to figure out how. Then, “It was an invasion of your privacy, yours and Christie’s, and I never …”
She stares at him as he trails off, her brain wading through wine and exhaustion after his meaning. And it hits her: he’s trying to work his way around to apologizing for Alex Hunter.
He thinks she’s angry about a knife scratch on her window frame and the theft of something that was never hers in the first place and it’s such a spectacular case of missing the goddamn point she doesn’t know whether to laugh or scream.
She slams her hand down on the counter and he starts; a wine glass in the sink falls on its side and cracks.
“Diana.” He leans in, damp fingers touching her wrist. “You want to tell me what’s wrong?”
She says, flat and precise, “I almost killed someone a week ago. And I’m still having a really hard time dealing with that, all right?”
His head snaps back, wary suspicion in his eyes, like he’s not sure if she’s mocking him.
“I almost had to shoot you.” Somehow saying it out loud makes it real, in a way it wasn’t before. Her voice drops, low and fierce. “Do you get that, Neal?”
He stares at her; the silence presses down and he takes a breath as if to speak but says nothing.
“What was I supposed to do?" she demands. Peter would lie, if she asked him; Neal gives her no such comfort. He only blinks, his face pale and his eyes huge.
She wonders if suicide by cop had been part of his plan, or if he simply didn’t have a plan beyond Fowler’s death.
She can’t bring herself to ask that question. It looms over all of them, huge and massive and when it falls they will have nowhere to go.
“Do you have any idea what kind of trouble - even assuming the official investigation didn’t end with me or Peter in prison for falsifying federal evidence and God knows what else I’d still have one more person I care about who’s dead because of me and how the hell am I supposed to live with that?”
She stops when she runs out of breath and they stare at each other; she’s not sure which of them is more stunned.
“Diana -”
“Don’t.” She throws out a hand, blocking whatever line of unreason he intends to use. “I don’t even -”
They both reach for the broken glass in the sink at the same time.
“I’ve got it,” Neal says, quiet and hoarse, and she watches as he gathers the pieces and lays them on a towel, though to her eyes it looks beyond fixing.
“You have a lot of people, here, who care about you,” she says finally, as if words can fix anything; these are all she has. “Please try not to forget that.”
They finish the dishes without speaking, and if her hands aren’t entirely steady she can try to blame it on the alcohol. When the clean plates are all stacked she stares blankly at the empty sink until Neal says, again, “I got this.”
She blinks at him; they’re both supposed to be resting, but she knows he meant to head back to the hospital once dinner was over, and she’d been intending to follow.
“Couch,” he says, and she lets him boss her, here, in his apartment, gives him back the illusion of control.
She leans her head back against the cushions and watches him put away the dishes.
“Moz swears that’s the most comfortable couch he’s ever slept on. Of course, given where he usually sleeps -” He trails off. “I won’t go anywhere,” he says. “I promise.”
She gives him a flat, suspicious stare; he tries for his classic innocent look for about half a second.
“You need to rest, too,” she says. Before he can protest: “Try. For a little while.”
She thinks he’s going to argue but he only crosses the room to the light switch and the room goes dark.
He drops his belt over a chair back but stretches out still in his Westwood trousers. On the couch Diana tugs her holster off her belt, tucks the sidearm under a gilt embroidered pillow and draws up her feet, hiding them under the throw.
She hears the bed creaking as Neal shifts, and a soft sigh, and he says, “Night, Daisy.”
She grabs the pillow and hurls it in the general direction of the bed; there’s a thump and she hopes whatever she knocked over wasn’t too expensive. She gropes for another pillow and wedges it against the armrest. “Call me that again,” she says, around a yawn, “and I’ll break both your arms.”
The only response is a weary chuckle. She lies in the darkness, listening to his breathing even out. Something ticks steadily from the direction of the stove, or maybe the refrigerator, a slow tapping of electronic kitchen noises like an echo of footsteps, pacing.
The sound fades away and Diana sleeps.