Chapter Text
Six months. And a week and three days.
Not that he was counting.
It had been six months since Neal had broken his self-imposed exile and decided to drop a few more obvious clues to his whereabouts. The fact that Peter didn't seem to have picked up on the clues he'd left along with his "death" was ... something he'd decided not to examine too closely.
No one had picked up on it.
He had really thought they'd all figure it out in a month or two, tops.
"It's because we were all busy grieving for you, idiot," Mozzie had said, six months ago on their first night together in Paris, in the middle of a long semi-drunken ramble that was half harangue and half philosophical maundering on the nature of life and death.
And Neal had laughed uncomfortably and changed the subject, because there was something in Mozzie's voice too close to tears. Okay, yes, people had been sad, but if they'd really wanted to find him -- Mozzie was one thing, maybe, but he'd seen how Peter operated even when unhappy, even when ill or distracted. Grief wouldn't derail Peter's tenacity. If they had really wanted to find him ...
But anyway. He'd dropped clues, and Mozzie had come. There had been a part of him that wasn't sure, that hadn't even wanted to push harder because of the chance he'd turn out to be wrong. What if no one ever came at all. What if they really were that angry ...
But Mozzie wasn't; Mozzie came. And Mozzie yelled at him a little at first, but mostly it was ... good. Neal had spent the last year feeling like he was trying to walk with only one leg, missing a step whenever he had a passing comment and no one to share it with; whenever he saw something that made him think of Mozzie or Peter or Diana or June.
For years, ever since walking out of his mother's house on his eighteenth birthday, he'd traveled the world footloose and free. He had friends, he had partners and lovers, but only on his terms. He saw them when he wanted to, and skipped out of town if he didn't. During his long prison sentence, during his years on a two-mile radius, he'd looked back through a nostalgic glow at those days. And then he managed to recapture it, and couldn't understand why it just felt wrong, like trying to put on a suit of clothes tailored for someone else.
So. Mozzie came.
Peter ... didn't.
One out of two wasn't bad, right?
"Well, he's busy, you know," Mozzie said. "New baby and all. You know they named the kid after you, right?"
"Yes, Moz, you've only mentioned it about forty times."
So life went on, but it almost felt worse, now, having Mozzie there, because he still had the things-don't-fit feeling; he still had the itchy, restless feeling of pointlessness that he'd been struggling with for the entire previous year. Stealing was easy. It was no challenge at all. He could easily get enough to live on, and live well, from just a few good forgeries a year. Anything else felt ...
Pointless.
Mozzie, of course, wanted to jump back in. Mozzie was a geyser of pent-up heist plans, as if he'd been bottling it up for a year and now he had to explode.
"You're planning to rob the Louvre, right? That's why you left all of that in the shipping container for the Suit, isn't it?"
"Who doesn't want to rob the Louvre?" Neal countered, because it was better than admitting that he'd baited his hook with a lure he knew Peter couldn't resist. If Peter thought he was after the Mona Lisa, Peter would be on the next flight to Paris; he literally wouldn't be able to help himself. Go big or go home had always been the creed he'd lived by, and if he couldn't say he'd gone straight (because he hadn't) the next best thing was to drop the heist to end all heists on Peter's doorstep and see what followed. It was better than admitting he had, over the last year, committed few enough crimes that he could count them all on his fingers, and all of those were the kind of bread-and-butter, paying-the-bills criminal activities that he'd have considered beneath him in his younger days. A few forgeries, a pickpocketing or two in the beginning ... and he'd felt thoroughly guilty about those, guilty enough he'd ended up trying to aim for functionally victimless crimes as much as possible: peddling forgeries of obscure impressionists to people with enough money they weren't going to miss a few hundred thousand here or there, for example. He didn't go for anything splashy (no Rembrandt or Renoir, no long-lost Da Vinci originals). And then he had enough money to easily go for two or three years without having to break any laws at all, and then ...
... then what. That was the question. That was the problem.
He and Mozzie constructed elaborate plans to rob the Louvre, to siphon gold out of Fort Knox, to walk away with priceless Egyptian artifacts or plunder the treasures of long-vanished Persian emperors. But Neal had a feeling their plans were no more likely to come to pass than any of the schemes they'd come up with while he was still on the anklet. It was all just talk. It was a way of passing the days that stretched long and oddly boring in front of him.
A person could live to be eighty or ninety. That was fifty or sixty years of this, and what did people do to fill up all that time?
"Have you been to see Sara?" Mozzie asked.
"You're encouraging me in my romantic endeavors, rather than inviting yourself along on my dates and sweeping anyone I bring home for bugs or mind-control devices? Moz. I'm disappointed."
"That'd be a no, then."
"I don't know why you care," Neal retorted, more snappishly than he'd meant to, and then stopped as if he'd stepped on something he didn't want to step on.
This seemed to strike off a spark in Mozzie. "Maybe because I'd like to see you get out and live a little, instead of sitting at home ..." He flailed his hands as if he'd lost the words, and finally came up with, "-- drinking all the time!"
Neal raised his eyebrows. "Pot? Kettle? Anyway, I certainly am not drinking all the time." Defiantly, he topped off his glass of wine. "And I get out."
"Name one time in the last month you've done anything outside this apartment other than finding new restaurants to drink at."
"Mozzie," Neal pointed out, "most people do consider it 'going out' to have a nice meal in a decent restaurant."
"Do you listen to yourself? Someone's stolen my best friend and replaced him with an elderly suburbanite."
Neal snorted. "Fine. We'll go somewhere. Name a place. Halfway around the world, why not? Let's board a flight tonight and we can be having authentic sushi in Tokyo tomorrow, or lounging on a beach in the Bahamas. Name it and we'll do it."
"That's not the point," Mozzie said, taken aback.
"Isn't it?" Neal asked. "Isn't it exactly the point? We're living the dream here. All the money we want, and not a care in the world. We can literally do anything we want and nobody can stop us."
Mozzie squinted at him. "You're drunk. At three in the afternoon."
"Am not," Neal snapped, and sulked off to the balcony with the rest of the bottle of wine.
Okay, so it was possible he wasn't dealing with total freedom quite as well as he'd expected.
"Have you thought about just calling the Suit?" Mozzie asked, a day or two later. "You know, rather than leaving cryptic bread crumb trails as part of that peculiarly twisted federal agent-con artist mating dance I usually try not to think about."
"What's this obsession with everyone I used to know, all of a sudden? I thought you spent most of the time we were in New York wanting it to be back to just the two of us."
"No I didn't," Mozzie said promptly.
"Yes, you did."
"... all right, maybe I did, but primarily on the general principle that I wanted my best friend back, rather than the clipped-wings junior-FBI-clone version of him. Not ..." He waved a hand wildly in Neal's general direction. "This. I'd happily take FBI Neal over this, any day."
"I don't know what you're talking about!" Neal protested, exasperated beyond belief.
This degenerated into a fight and ended with Mozzie signing up for a month-long tour of endangered bat habitat in Greece, via a contact with some sort of rare-bat researcher he had apparently met and dated while she was on vacation in Paris in the last month or two ... which Neal now realized he'd had no knowledge of at the time.
"You had an entire Parisian love affair with a bat geek without telling me about it?"
"I hate to break it to you, mon frère, but it's difficult to tell you anything when you can't hear me over the sound of your own pity party."
Mozzie was still upset about the FBI thing, clearly. Even if Neal still couldn't figure out exactly what aspect of the FBI thing was upsetting him now, or why he hadn't stopped harping on it when that was all in the past anyway.
"Have a great time with your damned bats, Moz."
"Better than here, probably," Mozzie muttered, and stomped out the door with a large backpack and a net on a pole.
So there he was ... again. Alone in Paris. Making things worse, it was winter now. Neal couldn't help remembering how utterly dismal he'd found the previous winter, a far cry from the magical wonderland of colored lights and Christmas markets he'd sometimes envisioned while he was stuck on his radius. Instead he'd found it cold and damp and dreary, and had spent the entire winter with a miserable case of bronchitis that came and went. For the actual holiday itself, he'd ended up fleeing Paris entirely and hiding out in a Tunisian beach town where nothing even remotely resembled Christmas.
This year ... this year, he'd thought he might go out and look at the lights and the markets with Mozzie. Maybe they could have done a tour of famous Christmas markets and choirs, heading across the border into Germany, over to Vienna ... but no, he was alone again, entirely his own fault this time (like it wasn't the last time too, he thought gloomily) and adding insult to injury, he was sick again -- a cold that seemed to be developing into another case of bronchitis like last year, based on his persistent coughing and general feeling of low-grade misery. Christmas came and went with little fanfare and no calls from Mozzie, who was probably still upset.
It didn't help to know that being ill, like all the rest of it, was probably his fault too. He knew he hadn't been taking care of himself. Mozzie was right, he was drinking too much; he wasn't eating properly, wasn't sleeping enough. It just didn't seem to matter. And the worst part was, he was pretty sure he knew why.
I've been in prison so long I don't know how to be out anymore.
No wonder Mozzie didn't know how to deal with him now. He'd actually become one of those tragic ex-cons the two of them used to pity, the kind who had been inside for so long that they'd lost the ability to imagine a future on the outside.
In his case, of course, it wasn't prison per se; it was a two-mile radius and a tracking anklet and a government-assigned job that he'd only taken as a temporary stepping stone to finding Kate. And it wasn't that he wanted to be back there. He remembered, in a strictly academic kind of way, how much he'd hated having the government monitor his every step; how the terrifying specter of an entire lifetime on the tracking anklet had loomed ahead of him when he'd realized the FBI had no intention of letting him go, and there was nothing Peter could do to protect him, no agreement they'd be willing to honor. Peter had believed a piece of paper with a signature on it could do it, because Peter had the luxury of believing in things like that.
The Panthers had given him an honorable excuse to cut the tie, that was all.
And now, alone in the City of Lights in midwinter, he had to admit to himself, if to no one else, that it had never been more than an excuse. He'd run because running was what he knew; he hadn't trusted Peter to try to fix it because he had never been in the habit of trusting anyone but himself. For three years on the anklet he'd fooled himself that things could be different, and then he had to admit that he was who he was, and he could never change it. He'd left New York in the belief that he could go back to his old life -- a different glamorous hotel room every night, glittering casinos and high-stakes cons -- only to find that the life no longer fulfilled him, after he'd burned all bridges to that other life he'd left behind.
Now he had no idea who he was. He wasn't the guy Peter thought he could be, but somehow he'd turned into a person who wasn't the guy he used to be either. He was caught between two worlds, miserable in both places, unwelcome in either.
And now he was pretty sure he was running a fever, and it hurt to breathe deeply, so maybe he'd just lie here in his apartment until he felt better. Mozzie wouldn't be back for weeks. There was no one checking up on him, no one following him around stalking him with an anklet tracking app. He could lie here as long as he wanted and no one was going to even notice.
Total freedom. Exactly what he'd always wanted.
It sucked.