This Sea Town or That Bruising City 2/
Title: This Sea Town or That Bruising City (2/?)
Author: Lymricks
Rating: PG-13
Genre and/or Pairing: Gen, Friendship, sort of AU for a bit
Spoilers: To be safe: Spoilers for everything. Literally everything is fair game. From episode one to the season three summer finale.
Warnings: Some violence, some being lost, a lot of introspection.
Word Count: 2800 this part
Notes: For this prompt at collarcorner. I really like collarcorner. I am writing a whole lot.
Summary: Neal wakes up on a beach nowhere near New York City, and everything’s the same--except when it isn’t.
“You know who I am?”
Her head tilts to the side as her lips spread slowly into one of her secretive smiles. She's so beautiful and so alive--Neal almost won't believe she's real. Her skin looks just as porcelain soft as it always had and he is struck with the urge to reach out and touch it, to catch her hair in his fingers and tangle the pair of them together so that she can't ever leave.
As he wonders how to make her stay, Neal is struck (not for the first time) by Kate's resemblance to Elizabeth. The similarity hadn’t mattered as much when neither meant anything to the other. Mrs. Theif and Mrs. Suit, as Mozzie would call them when he’d had a little too much to drink. Out here though, wherever here is, Kate reminds him of Elizabeth.
“Yes and no,” Kate answers him.
She reaches out and takes his hand, wrapping her cold fingers around his warm ones. “Kate, you’re freezing,” he says quietly. He doesn’t have a jacket to shrug off, but if he did, he would offer it to her.
“No Neal,” she says.
The way she says his name is strange. He’s always liked the way his name sounds on her lips, once he’d told her the real one. She has (had?) a soft, lilting way of speaking, especially when it was about him. She said "Neal" with the barest hint of a question tacked on the end. Even when she was angry, Kate had always said his name like she was asking for him. But the way she says it now is different. Instead of turning up, the edges of his name blur together and fall down. She says his name like she might read it in the phonebook-meaningless letters strung together that she’s told make up someone’s identity.
Neal remembers how different Alex and June were, and he swallows hard. How will Kate be different from his Kate? Can she be? He isn't sure. Neal hopes with every fiber of his being that Kate is the same as she was before. He needs her to be the same.
“Need,” Mozzie had informed him once, a long time ago, “Is American slang for ‘want.’”
“You’re dead, Kate,” he reminds her. He wonders when his life became the kind of life where people need reminding of that.
Kate stares at him, puzzled. “No Neal,” she says softly, reaching up a hand and touching his face. He leans into it. “You’re dead.”
“Huh,” Neal says, completely inarticulate in the face of something that makes so much honest-to-God sense. That answers every question he’s had since he woke up on the beach, what feels like a lifetime ago. Being dead would explain the lack of phones--the lack of anything really. Being dead explains Alex and June being so different. Being dead explains why he doesn't know where he is.
But being dead doesn’t explain the ink that still stands out as brightly on his arm as if he’d written it five minutes ago.
“How did I die?”
He’s honestly curious. It's a morbid question, to be sure, but Neal has always had a flair for the out of the ordinary. He wouldn't mind if he died on a mission, while he was busy being a hero. Although, death on the mission might mean that Peter had to see it, and Neal would rather spare him the guilt. Instead, he thinks he wouldn't mind dying as he lived: a criminal, going down in a crime he'll never be forgotten for. Hopefully, there was nothing left of his body to collect. There are so many people in the world Neal wouldn't want handling his remains. Mozzie though, Neal thinks, he would be okay with things if Mozzie handled his remains.
“In an explosion,” Kate says. Neal smiles. It’s almost romantic that he and Kate went out the same way. “An explosion on a boat,” Kate continues. She looks confused now. Her hand keeps moving up to brush her hair back from her face. Her movements are staccato and agitated, and she yanks her hand away from him as though she’s been burned. “I was hesitating-we were going to run away together-but there was someone else and I hesitated. The boat blew up with you before I could get on.”
Neal feels his heart move up into his throat, and he grabs Kate’s hand too tightly. “Kate!” he says. “What are you talking about?” because this is all wrong. That's how Kate died, sort of. So that isn't right. It isn't how he died.
“I don’t know why you’re alive, Neal,” Kate says, “But I’ve moved on. There is…and there was…someone else in my life. He’s why I hesitated that day. I don’t want you back, Neal,” she pushes at him, pushes him back, away from her. Neal stumbles. “I don’t need you,” she insists.
Neal hears Mozzie’s voice again, “Need is American Slang for want.”
Kate doesn’t want him.
Standing in the dirt as her small hands push insistently at his chest, shoving him back and away, Neal wonders if Kate has ever wanted him. Well, if she’s ever wanted Neal.
He knows she’d fallen in love with Nick, when he was Nick,-but he is a huge difference from the reality of Neal. He was going somewhere, and Neal was too, but a very different somewhere for a set number of years. Could she have fallen out of love with him while he was in prison? Peter had warned him of something like that once, but Neal had ignored him.
Kate’s tiny hands beat against his chest hard enough to hurt, and Neal tries to duck away. “Stop,” he says softly. He’s pleading, vulnerable in a way he hasn’t been in front of anyone else before, but this is Kate, she’s seen every inch of him. She’s the only person who has.
“Why can’t you just stay gone?” she snarls. She sounds angry. Neal squeezes his eyes shut.
“Kate please stop.”
Her hands press harder against his chest and he stumbles, falls back. He lands in the dirt, staring up into Kate’s blue eyes and trying to figure out what he did wrong here. Neal is unraveling at the seams, because the only person whose ever been able to pull his threads has an iron like grip on all of them. He feels himself breaking. Neal Caffrey is going to lose it, and there won’t even be anyone here to see.
“Excuse me?” a quiet voice says from somewhere off to his left. “Miss? I believe you’re hurting him.”
Neal knows that voice better than he knows his own. He knows it without looking, without thinking. He just knows it.
“Miss?” the voice continues. “Miss you need to stop now. Please stop.”
Except, maybe he doesn’t know that voice. Neal is still staring down at his hands and the dirt he’s sitting in, but there’s no way the person he associates with that voice would ever speak so timidly or uncomfortably. He’s not talking about conspiracies or the dangers of lying in the dirt. He sounds concerned in a quiet, frightened way.
The new arrival seems to get Kate to her senses and she looks down at Neal. She doesn’t offer him a hand up, but she does stare down her nose at him like he’s so much of yesterdays bad news. “Move on,” she says, rolling those blue eyes that Neal still dreams about, “I did.”
He blinks and she’s gone, just like that. She’s disappeared from right in front of him and Neal is alone in the dirt.
“Well, I’m glad she’s gone,” Mozzie says from behind him.
Neal feels a hand on his shoulder and lets himself be guided up. When he’s standing, mostly steadily, on his own two feet, he turns around. “Oh, God,” he says quietly, because even though June lives in a house that smells like fish, and Alex rides horses, and his dead ex-girlfriend is alive, there is something truly spirit crushing about seeing Mozzie in a suit.
It’s a beautiful suit, classic and tailored, but still just a little too big on Mozzie’s smaller frame. The tie matches the shirt, the glasses match the tie, it’s more than baffling, it’s terrifying. Neal swallows hard. “What are you wearing?”
Mozzie beams at him and turns in a circle, “Do you like it?” he sounds almost shy, “I saw it and I just had to get it. I could never have enough suits.”
Neal is definitely dead. And he’s definitely in Hell. Because Mozzie is wearing a suit.
“Yeah, Moz,” Neal says, because he can’t be rude to Mozzie, “It looks great on you.”
Mozzie beams again, the smile so wide that his face nearly splits in half. “Thank you,” he says. “Now that I’ve saved you from the evil woman who was trying to kill you, I was wondering if you might like to take a walk with me.”
Mozzie is asking him questions in a soft spoken, nervous voice. It’s the kind of voice that speaks to deep insecurities-the kind of insecurities that even best friends don’t speak about. This quiet, suit wearing Mozzie is so different from the one Neal knows, but at the same time, he’s horrifying familiar. He may carry himself differently, and speak differently, and even smile differently, but there is something underneath his skin that is purely Mozzie, and Neal latches onto that shred of familiarity like a lifeboat.
“Of course,” he says, “Lead the way.”
They start off down the road together, and as they walk, Mozzie talks. He’s the first person who has answers to Neal’s questions since he woke up on that beach. It’s soothing to listen to Mozzie plan, even though neither of them know what they’re planning for. The few feet stretch into miles and miles, and in the distance, Neal sees a city.
“I’m afraid I can’t take you any further,” Mozzie says, turning to look at Neal and smiling. “But you can find your way, and if you can’t, you can always come back and I’ll take you with me, wherever I go,” this Mozzie looks at Neal for a long time, and in that quiet, honest voice, he says, “I’m very lonely.”
For some reason, Neal can only say, “I’m sorry,” and “I know.”
They shake hands and Mozzie gives him important bits and pieces of wisdom. Neal sets off toward the city in the distance, but before he gets more than a few yards away, Mozzie calls his name. “Neal!” he says.
Neal turns. “Yes?”
“I know you think that every door closes once you walk out of it, but you’re wrong. To be kept out, you have to lock the door behind you.”
It’s a weird thing to say, but Mozzie turns and walks away before Neal can ask him what he means.
~ ~ ~
It doesn’t matter how far or long he walks, every time Neal looks up, the city skyline is still so far away. It looks a lot like New York, Neal can even recognize a few buildings, and he knows that he wants to get there, he just doesn’t know how. He keeps looking behind him, wondering if there’s any way he could possibly be walking in place, but every time he looks, he sees a tree or bush he passed, way back, far in the distance. He’s definitely moving forward, but the city must be too.
He’s not getting any closer to it, and suddenly, he’s exhausted.
This day doesn’t seem any closer to ending than the city seems to Neal, and all he wants to do is lie down. The dirty grass on the side of the dirt road looks inviting, and Neal wonders if anyone would miss him if he just stopped for a short nap. He closes his eyes and feels his whole body list to the right, toward the grass. He just wants to lie down for a minute.
“Oh sweetie,” a voice says quietly, right next to him. “You can’t just give up.” He jumps a foot in the air, and next to him, Elizabeth laughs. “I’m sorry,” she says earnestly, “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
“You didn’t,” Neal lies.
“Of course I didn’t,” Elizabeth says knowingly. She presses a hand to Neal’s cheek. “I know you’re tired,” she says quietly, “But you really need to keep going.”
Neal is exhausted, and Elizabeth looks like Kate, but her voice is so much softer than Kate’s ever was. Her eyes are so much kinder. He feels safe enough to fall to pieces, just a little bit. “I don’t know where I’m going,” he says, frustrated.
“Yes you do,” Elizabeth says, and she takes Neal’s hand and gives it a reassuring squeeze. “It says it all right here.” She turns Neal’s palm over, baring the skin of his arm to the bright sunlight. Neal looks tiredly down at the quotation he’s memorized by now.
“This isn’t a map,” he protests, “It’s a quote. A stupid quote.”
Elizabeth only smiles at him, “You’re tired,” she says softly. “Why don’t you sit with me for a moment?”
Neal wants to tell her he’s tired of people telling him to stay, to go, to move on, to walk, and to sit, but instead, he plops down in the grass and wraps his arms around his knees. “I don’t know what to do.”
“Of course you don’t,” she says, sitting down next to him. If anyone were there to watch, Neal might feel embarrassed about how soothing it is when she starts rubbing his back, but he doesn’t say anything. He just lets her hand make slow, warm circles against his skin through the cotton fabric of his shirt. People touch Neal all the time, but so few people touch him with as much-what’s the word he’s looking for-honest affection as Elizabeth does.
Someone else does, he knows it. He can feel it in the firm grasp of a handshake, or a warm hand pressed reassuringly against the back of his neck, but he can’t place who either belong to. He can only focus on the tangible here and now, the feeling of Elizabeth’s soft warmth pressed against his side. Neal shudders.
“A lot of times,” Elizabeth says from next to him, “We never know where we’re going. A lot of times, where we’re going is just where we stop moving.” She looks around them at the endless stretch of grass and road, and the city so far away that Neal still isn’t sure it’s real. Finally, her kind eyes land back on Neal, and she smiles. “Is this really where you want to have gone?”
Neal’s eyes move slowly around him. The grass is dying, he notes absentmindedly, and the road is cracked and chipping. Everything here looks as tired as he feels, except for Elizabeth. “Is this where you went?” he asks her curiously, because he’s given up on trying to figure all these people out. He still hasn’t ruled out Kate’s theory of his death.
“No,” Elizabeth says with a smile. “I came here looking for you.”
For longer than he’d like to admit, Neal considers sagging into her side and burrowing his face in her shoulder. He considers giving everything up to lie here with the comfort that Elizabeth offers, just by being who she is. She’s like a big sister, except nicer. Someone who is protecting him from the hard realities of the landscape. He doesn’t sag though, he straightens up, because in the back of his mind, he knows that if he does give up now, he’ll have disappointed her.
Neal takes a deep breath and scrubs at his face with his hands. He only hesitates for a second before he stands up. Like a gentleman, he offers a hand to Elizabeth and pulls her to her feet. She’s beautiful, he thinks, and she loves him.
Neal’s cheeks flush. Elizabeth is proud of him.
“You’re doing so well,” she tells him quietly, clasping his hands in hers. “I know you can fix all those things that went wrong in the past,” she lets go of his hand and runs a finger over the ink on his arm. “Neal,” she says, so softly and privately that if his relationship with her wasn’t so overtly platonic, it might have made him blush, “This isn’t a stupid quote. It tells you everything you need to know.”
Elizabeth leans in and kisses his cheek, then hugs him tightly. He leans into her and notices that she smells like peppermint and dog and something else, something ancient and soft and lovely.
When she finally lets him go, he isn’t tired or thirsty anymore. He doesn’t want to give up. Not just for himself, but for Elizabeth, too. He wants to make her proud. He turns away and starts walking toward the city again, he stares it down, determined to reach it and reach it soon. Maybe there he’ll find some answers.
As he’s walking away, a thought occurs to him.
“Elizabeth?” he asks, turning back toward her. “Where’s Peter?”
Elizabeth frowns and tilts her head to the side. “Who’s Peter?” she asks.
Author: Lymricks
Rating: PG-13
Genre and/or Pairing: Gen, Friendship, sort of AU for a bit
Spoilers: To be safe: Spoilers for everything. Literally everything is fair game. From episode one to the season three summer finale.
Warnings: Some violence, some being lost, a lot of introspection.
Word Count: 2800 this part
Notes: For this prompt at collarcorner. I really like collarcorner. I am writing a whole lot.
Summary: Neal wakes up on a beach nowhere near New York City, and everything’s the same--except when it isn’t.
“You know who I am?”
Her head tilts to the side as her lips spread slowly into one of her secretive smiles. She's so beautiful and so alive--Neal almost won't believe she's real. Her skin looks just as porcelain soft as it always had and he is struck with the urge to reach out and touch it, to catch her hair in his fingers and tangle the pair of them together so that she can't ever leave.
As he wonders how to make her stay, Neal is struck (not for the first time) by Kate's resemblance to Elizabeth. The similarity hadn’t mattered as much when neither meant anything to the other. Mrs. Theif and Mrs. Suit, as Mozzie would call them when he’d had a little too much to drink. Out here though, wherever here is, Kate reminds him of Elizabeth.
“Yes and no,” Kate answers him.
She reaches out and takes his hand, wrapping her cold fingers around his warm ones. “Kate, you’re freezing,” he says quietly. He doesn’t have a jacket to shrug off, but if he did, he would offer it to her.
“No Neal,” she says.
The way she says his name is strange. He’s always liked the way his name sounds on her lips, once he’d told her the real one. She has (had?) a soft, lilting way of speaking, especially when it was about him. She said "Neal" with the barest hint of a question tacked on the end. Even when she was angry, Kate had always said his name like she was asking for him. But the way she says it now is different. Instead of turning up, the edges of his name blur together and fall down. She says his name like she might read it in the phonebook-meaningless letters strung together that she’s told make up someone’s identity.
Neal remembers how different Alex and June were, and he swallows hard. How will Kate be different from his Kate? Can she be? He isn't sure. Neal hopes with every fiber of his being that Kate is the same as she was before. He needs her to be the same.
“Need,” Mozzie had informed him once, a long time ago, “Is American slang for ‘want.’”
“You’re dead, Kate,” he reminds her. He wonders when his life became the kind of life where people need reminding of that.
Kate stares at him, puzzled. “No Neal,” she says softly, reaching up a hand and touching his face. He leans into it. “You’re dead.”
“Huh,” Neal says, completely inarticulate in the face of something that makes so much honest-to-God sense. That answers every question he’s had since he woke up on the beach, what feels like a lifetime ago. Being dead would explain the lack of phones--the lack of anything really. Being dead explains Alex and June being so different. Being dead explains why he doesn't know where he is.
But being dead doesn’t explain the ink that still stands out as brightly on his arm as if he’d written it five minutes ago.
“How did I die?”
He’s honestly curious. It's a morbid question, to be sure, but Neal has always had a flair for the out of the ordinary. He wouldn't mind if he died on a mission, while he was busy being a hero. Although, death on the mission might mean that Peter had to see it, and Neal would rather spare him the guilt. Instead, he thinks he wouldn't mind dying as he lived: a criminal, going down in a crime he'll never be forgotten for. Hopefully, there was nothing left of his body to collect. There are so many people in the world Neal wouldn't want handling his remains. Mozzie though, Neal thinks, he would be okay with things if Mozzie handled his remains.
“In an explosion,” Kate says. Neal smiles. It’s almost romantic that he and Kate went out the same way. “An explosion on a boat,” Kate continues. She looks confused now. Her hand keeps moving up to brush her hair back from her face. Her movements are staccato and agitated, and she yanks her hand away from him as though she’s been burned. “I was hesitating-we were going to run away together-but there was someone else and I hesitated. The boat blew up with you before I could get on.”
Neal feels his heart move up into his throat, and he grabs Kate’s hand too tightly. “Kate!” he says. “What are you talking about?” because this is all wrong. That's how Kate died, sort of. So that isn't right. It isn't how he died.
“I don’t know why you’re alive, Neal,” Kate says, “But I’ve moved on. There is…and there was…someone else in my life. He’s why I hesitated that day. I don’t want you back, Neal,” she pushes at him, pushes him back, away from her. Neal stumbles. “I don’t need you,” she insists.
Neal hears Mozzie’s voice again, “Need is American Slang for want.”
Kate doesn’t want him.
Standing in the dirt as her small hands push insistently at his chest, shoving him back and away, Neal wonders if Kate has ever wanted him. Well, if she’s ever wanted Neal.
He knows she’d fallen in love with Nick, when he was Nick,-but he is a huge difference from the reality of Neal. He was going somewhere, and Neal was too, but a very different somewhere for a set number of years. Could she have fallen out of love with him while he was in prison? Peter had warned him of something like that once, but Neal had ignored him.
Kate’s tiny hands beat against his chest hard enough to hurt, and Neal tries to duck away. “Stop,” he says softly. He’s pleading, vulnerable in a way he hasn’t been in front of anyone else before, but this is Kate, she’s seen every inch of him. She’s the only person who has.
“Why can’t you just stay gone?” she snarls. She sounds angry. Neal squeezes his eyes shut.
“Kate please stop.”
Her hands press harder against his chest and he stumbles, falls back. He lands in the dirt, staring up into Kate’s blue eyes and trying to figure out what he did wrong here. Neal is unraveling at the seams, because the only person whose ever been able to pull his threads has an iron like grip on all of them. He feels himself breaking. Neal Caffrey is going to lose it, and there won’t even be anyone here to see.
“Excuse me?” a quiet voice says from somewhere off to his left. “Miss? I believe you’re hurting him.”
Neal knows that voice better than he knows his own. He knows it without looking, without thinking. He just knows it.
“Miss?” the voice continues. “Miss you need to stop now. Please stop.”
Except, maybe he doesn’t know that voice. Neal is still staring down at his hands and the dirt he’s sitting in, but there’s no way the person he associates with that voice would ever speak so timidly or uncomfortably. He’s not talking about conspiracies or the dangers of lying in the dirt. He sounds concerned in a quiet, frightened way.
The new arrival seems to get Kate to her senses and she looks down at Neal. She doesn’t offer him a hand up, but she does stare down her nose at him like he’s so much of yesterdays bad news. “Move on,” she says, rolling those blue eyes that Neal still dreams about, “I did.”
He blinks and she’s gone, just like that. She’s disappeared from right in front of him and Neal is alone in the dirt.
“Well, I’m glad she’s gone,” Mozzie says from behind him.
Neal feels a hand on his shoulder and lets himself be guided up. When he’s standing, mostly steadily, on his own two feet, he turns around. “Oh, God,” he says quietly, because even though June lives in a house that smells like fish, and Alex rides horses, and his dead ex-girlfriend is alive, there is something truly spirit crushing about seeing Mozzie in a suit.
It’s a beautiful suit, classic and tailored, but still just a little too big on Mozzie’s smaller frame. The tie matches the shirt, the glasses match the tie, it’s more than baffling, it’s terrifying. Neal swallows hard. “What are you wearing?”
Mozzie beams at him and turns in a circle, “Do you like it?” he sounds almost shy, “I saw it and I just had to get it. I could never have enough suits.”
Neal is definitely dead. And he’s definitely in Hell. Because Mozzie is wearing a suit.
“Yeah, Moz,” Neal says, because he can’t be rude to Mozzie, “It looks great on you.”
Mozzie beams again, the smile so wide that his face nearly splits in half. “Thank you,” he says. “Now that I’ve saved you from the evil woman who was trying to kill you, I was wondering if you might like to take a walk with me.”
Mozzie is asking him questions in a soft spoken, nervous voice. It’s the kind of voice that speaks to deep insecurities-the kind of insecurities that even best friends don’t speak about. This quiet, suit wearing Mozzie is so different from the one Neal knows, but at the same time, he’s horrifying familiar. He may carry himself differently, and speak differently, and even smile differently, but there is something underneath his skin that is purely Mozzie, and Neal latches onto that shred of familiarity like a lifeboat.
“Of course,” he says, “Lead the way.”
They start off down the road together, and as they walk, Mozzie talks. He’s the first person who has answers to Neal’s questions since he woke up on that beach. It’s soothing to listen to Mozzie plan, even though neither of them know what they’re planning for. The few feet stretch into miles and miles, and in the distance, Neal sees a city.
“I’m afraid I can’t take you any further,” Mozzie says, turning to look at Neal and smiling. “But you can find your way, and if you can’t, you can always come back and I’ll take you with me, wherever I go,” this Mozzie looks at Neal for a long time, and in that quiet, honest voice, he says, “I’m very lonely.”
For some reason, Neal can only say, “I’m sorry,” and “I know.”
They shake hands and Mozzie gives him important bits and pieces of wisdom. Neal sets off toward the city in the distance, but before he gets more than a few yards away, Mozzie calls his name. “Neal!” he says.
Neal turns. “Yes?”
“I know you think that every door closes once you walk out of it, but you’re wrong. To be kept out, you have to lock the door behind you.”
It’s a weird thing to say, but Mozzie turns and walks away before Neal can ask him what he means.
~ ~ ~
It doesn’t matter how far or long he walks, every time Neal looks up, the city skyline is still so far away. It looks a lot like New York, Neal can even recognize a few buildings, and he knows that he wants to get there, he just doesn’t know how. He keeps looking behind him, wondering if there’s any way he could possibly be walking in place, but every time he looks, he sees a tree or bush he passed, way back, far in the distance. He’s definitely moving forward, but the city must be too.
He’s not getting any closer to it, and suddenly, he’s exhausted.
This day doesn’t seem any closer to ending than the city seems to Neal, and all he wants to do is lie down. The dirty grass on the side of the dirt road looks inviting, and Neal wonders if anyone would miss him if he just stopped for a short nap. He closes his eyes and feels his whole body list to the right, toward the grass. He just wants to lie down for a minute.
“Oh sweetie,” a voice says quietly, right next to him. “You can’t just give up.” He jumps a foot in the air, and next to him, Elizabeth laughs. “I’m sorry,” she says earnestly, “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
“You didn’t,” Neal lies.
“Of course I didn’t,” Elizabeth says knowingly. She presses a hand to Neal’s cheek. “I know you’re tired,” she says quietly, “But you really need to keep going.”
Neal is exhausted, and Elizabeth looks like Kate, but her voice is so much softer than Kate’s ever was. Her eyes are so much kinder. He feels safe enough to fall to pieces, just a little bit. “I don’t know where I’m going,” he says, frustrated.
“Yes you do,” Elizabeth says, and she takes Neal’s hand and gives it a reassuring squeeze. “It says it all right here.” She turns Neal’s palm over, baring the skin of his arm to the bright sunlight. Neal looks tiredly down at the quotation he’s memorized by now.
“This isn’t a map,” he protests, “It’s a quote. A stupid quote.”
Elizabeth only smiles at him, “You’re tired,” she says softly. “Why don’t you sit with me for a moment?”
Neal wants to tell her he’s tired of people telling him to stay, to go, to move on, to walk, and to sit, but instead, he plops down in the grass and wraps his arms around his knees. “I don’t know what to do.”
“Of course you don’t,” she says, sitting down next to him. If anyone were there to watch, Neal might feel embarrassed about how soothing it is when she starts rubbing his back, but he doesn’t say anything. He just lets her hand make slow, warm circles against his skin through the cotton fabric of his shirt. People touch Neal all the time, but so few people touch him with as much-what’s the word he’s looking for-honest affection as Elizabeth does.
Someone else does, he knows it. He can feel it in the firm grasp of a handshake, or a warm hand pressed reassuringly against the back of his neck, but he can’t place who either belong to. He can only focus on the tangible here and now, the feeling of Elizabeth’s soft warmth pressed against his side. Neal shudders.
“A lot of times,” Elizabeth says from next to him, “We never know where we’re going. A lot of times, where we’re going is just where we stop moving.” She looks around them at the endless stretch of grass and road, and the city so far away that Neal still isn’t sure it’s real. Finally, her kind eyes land back on Neal, and she smiles. “Is this really where you want to have gone?”
Neal’s eyes move slowly around him. The grass is dying, he notes absentmindedly, and the road is cracked and chipping. Everything here looks as tired as he feels, except for Elizabeth. “Is this where you went?” he asks her curiously, because he’s given up on trying to figure all these people out. He still hasn’t ruled out Kate’s theory of his death.
“No,” Elizabeth says with a smile. “I came here looking for you.”
For longer than he’d like to admit, Neal considers sagging into her side and burrowing his face in her shoulder. He considers giving everything up to lie here with the comfort that Elizabeth offers, just by being who she is. She’s like a big sister, except nicer. Someone who is protecting him from the hard realities of the landscape. He doesn’t sag though, he straightens up, because in the back of his mind, he knows that if he does give up now, he’ll have disappointed her.
Neal takes a deep breath and scrubs at his face with his hands. He only hesitates for a second before he stands up. Like a gentleman, he offers a hand to Elizabeth and pulls her to her feet. She’s beautiful, he thinks, and she loves him.
Neal’s cheeks flush. Elizabeth is proud of him.
“You’re doing so well,” she tells him quietly, clasping his hands in hers. “I know you can fix all those things that went wrong in the past,” she lets go of his hand and runs a finger over the ink on his arm. “Neal,” she says, so softly and privately that if his relationship with her wasn’t so overtly platonic, it might have made him blush, “This isn’t a stupid quote. It tells you everything you need to know.”
Elizabeth leans in and kisses his cheek, then hugs him tightly. He leans into her and notices that she smells like peppermint and dog and something else, something ancient and soft and lovely.
When she finally lets him go, he isn’t tired or thirsty anymore. He doesn’t want to give up. Not just for himself, but for Elizabeth, too. He wants to make her proud. He turns away and starts walking toward the city again, he stares it down, determined to reach it and reach it soon. Maybe there he’ll find some answers.
As he’s walking away, a thought occurs to him.
“Elizabeth?” he asks, turning back toward her. “Where’s Peter?”
Elizabeth frowns and tilts her head to the side. “Who’s Peter?” she asks.