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“Excuse me, sir!” the kid called out. The dark-haired, blue-eyed kid who had caught Diana’s eye immediately, almost as though she was meant to see him, seemed to be around eight or nine years old. The man he was addressing turned around, and the kid held up a wallet. “You dropped this.”
“Oh!” the man quickly walked over to the kid, reclaiming his wallet. “Thank you. Would be pretty bad if I lost this, huh?”
“Of course,” the kid agreed. Once the man had walked away, the kid turned the other direction and started walking away, now moving closer to Diana. His friendly demeanor, which Diana hadn’t realized had been drawing her in and making her inclined to trust him, dropped completely, and he pulled a wad of cash out of his pocket, counting the money he’d apparently just stolen.
“You shouldn’t do that, you know,” Diana said as he was about to pass her.
He paused, looking up at her. “Do what?” he asked innocently. He had the most adorable, unassuming innocent face.
“Pick people’s pockets,” she said. “Steal money. It’s wrong.” She wasn’t sure why she was lecturing a kid on stealing when what she should be worrying about was how she got here and why. It hadn’t been difficult to figure out she wasn’t in New York City—spotting the Gateway Arch in the distance had been a pretty big tip-off—but the part that really threw her for a loop was that, judging by the clothing, hairstyles, and lack of smartphones, she seemed to have traveled over twenty years back in time.
“I didn’t steal,” the kid lied. “The guy dropped his wallet and I gave it back.”
“And that money was already yours,” Diana said disbelievingly, nodding to the cash in his hands.
The kid nodded.
Diana gave him a look.
The kid dropped the act and sighed. “I don’t like it either, you know. But I don’t have money, and he does have money.” He shrugged guiltily. “So I take just a little bit of his money. Don’t worry, he’s still a whole lot richer than me.”
Diana’s heart cracked a little inside. No kid his age should have to worry about money in that way. Of course he wouldn’t see many options—he couldn’t just go get a job, not at his age. He should be in school. Diana took note of the time of day and hoped it was a Saturday. “Where are your parents?”
The kid raised an eyebrow. “You mean why don’t my parents take care of the money?”
Diana winced, but she nodded.
“My mom tries and spectacularly fails, and my dad is dead,” he said frankly. “Ellen basically keeps us alive, but she shouldn’t have to.”
“So you steal money.”
The kid winced. “Uh, yeah. I haven’t had to for staying-alive reasons yet, though I think Ellen is stretching herself pretty thin to help us out. This is for other reasons.”
Just an average day—somehow go from New York City in 2012 to St. Louis in 1980-something and immediately learn the sad life story of a kid who grabbed some guy’s wallet. She should be more concerned about how to get back to her normal place and time, but they didn’t cover supernatural time and space travel at Quantico, so she wasn’t sure there was anything she could actually do. “What reasons?” she asked, because she might as well.
“The school is doing a field trip to the art museum. There’s reservation fees though, and every student has to pay the school money to be allowed to go. I really like art, but don’t have money. My mom said if I can find the money, I can go, so I’m finding the money.”
“You couldn’t ask…?” Diana had forgotten the name already. “Your aunt? Family friend?”
“Ellen? I guess I could, but she does enough,” he mumbled. Then he seemed to look through her for a second before his eyes refocused on my face. “What are you?”
“What am I?” Not who?
“Are you my guardian angel?” he continued. “I didn’t believe in those before, I thought they were just a myth or a comforting lie or something, but I’m the only one who can see you, and no one seems to be able to tell I’m talking to you, and you’re lecturing me on right and wrong, so it seems like you must be my guardian angel.”
No one else could see her?
Diana looked around, tried waving at a few people, but couldn’t catch anyone’s attention. “Hey,” she tried calling, but no one but the kid seemed to hear. “Huh.”
“Did you not know you were invisible?” the kid wondered. “I mean, multiple people have walked through you.”
“What?!”
He shrugged. “I thought you knew. So, are you my guardian angel?”
Diana wasn’t sure how to answer that. She did, however, realize why her eyes had been so drawn to this kid when she’d ended up in the past. If he was the only one who could see her, he must be the one she was meant to see. Realizing the kid was waiting for an answer, she simply gave the truth: “I’m Diana.”
He nodded thoughtfully. “That’s a good guardian angel name. So like, what’s real?”
“Hm?”
“Religion. Afterlife. Since you’re a guardian angel. Come on, it’s not cheating for you to give me the answers, right? Since you’re letting me see you and all. Should I become Catholic? Or is it the protestants who have guardian angels? What happens to people when they die?”
“I don’t know,” Diana said honestly.
“God doesn’t tell the angels what happens to people when they die?”
“I’m not an angel,” she finally said before he could keep grilling her on religion and the unanswerable questions of the universe. She had to admit, it was a smart line of questioning to go down if you thought you’d met an angel, but since she wasn’t one, she couldn’t give him any of the answers he was looking for.
“Then what are you?”
Back to that question again.
“I’m just a person,” she said. “I don’t know what I’m doing here, or why you’re the only one who can see me. What’s your name?”
“Danny,” he answered.
Diana didn’t know anyone named Danny. Had she really been supernaturally transported to St. Louis in the 80s so she could talk to a random kid she had no connection to? Suddenly, she found herself wishing she had some invisible guardian angel she could ask the big questions of the universe to.
“That’s unfortunate that you’re not an angel,” Danny said. “I was going to ask you if you knew why some people are allowed to have too much money when other people don’t have enough.”
Diana wasn’t equipped for this conversation. She found herself completely at a loss for what to say. Eventually, she settled on, “I think a lot of people would like to know the answer to that.”
Was this a lesson in gratitude over how well she’d had it compared to others? What was her purpose here?
“This is enough for the field trip form,” Danny said, stuffing the cash back in his pocket. “I’m gonna go back to the apartment. You can come too. I’m the only one who can see you, anyway. Even if you’re not an angel, I think I’m supposed to keep you with me.”
Diana couldn’t argue with that. “How far away is your apartment?”
“Far enough I’d rather not walk. We can take the bus. I have a pass—sorta—and you only exist to me, so you don’t need one.”
“What do you mean ‘sorta?’”
“Technically I made mine,” Danny said sheepishly. “No one’s figured it out yet, though, so it must look pretty good.”
Diana’s eyes widened. Was this why she was here? What aspect of the universe (perhaps Danny’s real guardian angel, if such a thing existed?) decided to pull someone from the New York White Collar Crime division of the FBI to go teach a literal child to stop stealing and forging things? “So it’s… forged.”
The word made Danny wince. “I mean, it’s not like I’m actually taking any money,” he said, pointedly ignoring the fact that he’d done exactly that just a few minutes ago to someone else. “I can’t afford it either way, so either I find a way to take the bus for free or I just walk everywhere. Either way they can’t get any money from me.”
Diana had a hard time finding a flaw in his logic. She knew what she’d say if she were talking to an adult, but this was a child. A literal child.
She blamed the mom. She wasn’t sure what to think of this “Ellen” character yet.
“Are you supposed to be my conscience or something?” Danny asked, raising an eyebrow. “Like Jiminy Cricket?”
“Maybe,” Diana said, unsure of the answer herself.
“Huh. Well, I’m still going to use the fake bus pass,” he said, almost defiantly, like he was daring her to argue.
She didn’t. “Alright. Let’s go.”
Danny’s apartment wasn’t extravagant, but it looked well managed. Diana had a sinking feeling Danny did most of the managing, since it sounded like he went out of his way to not ask Ellen for things she’d probably be willing to help with. “If you’re my conscience,” Danny said quietly once they were inside, “I feel like you’re judging me.”
“Maybe that’s your actual conscience talking,” Diana suggested.
“You don’t think wanting to go on a museum field trip is a good reason to steal someone’s money.”
I don’t think there IS a good reason to steal someone’s money, Diana wanted to say. But she looked down at this kid who didn’t seem to have any of the support he deserved, and wondered what on Earth she would do in his situation.
He was a kid. Of course he wanted to do something fun every now and then instead of worrying about the bills his mother should be paying or whether they had enough money to stay alive or how much they’d have to lean on the family friend who seemed to look after him.
“I don’t like doing illegal things, you know,” he said as he unzipped his school backpack and fished through it. “All the other kids get to go to school on time and have enough money to go on the field trip without doing anything bad. Here it is,” he said, pulling out a wrinkled form. “The permission form.”
Diana watched as he counted cash, put it in an envelope, and cut the permission slip off the form. He wrote his name and his mother’s in impressively adult handwriting for a second grader. The only thing left was his mother’s signature.
“Where’s your mom?” Diana wondered.
Danny sighed. “I have no idea,” he said, resigned. And then, like a skill so practiced it was easy, he signed his mother’s name on the bottom line. Diana was still gaping when he folded the paper and placed it in the envelope with the cash. He closed the envelope and wrote his name on the back in handwriting that looked more natural for a second grader, and Diana realized that when he’d been filling out the form before, he’d been intentionally using his mother’s handwriting.
Wow.
“And now you’re going to tell me I shouldn’t do that either,” Danny muttered.
“Why does this museum field trip mean so much to you?” Diana wondered, no longer having any desire to talk to the kid about the difference between right and wrong. She’d walked into a decision too complicated for her to truly be his “conscience.” “Other than the fact that it isn’t fair for the other kids to get to go and you to have to stay.”
“I mean, it wouldn’t be fair,” Danny pointed out. “A lot of the kids were complaining that an art museum isn’t exciting enough. I love art, though. It’s like a person decided to show you a way of seeing the world or a person or an object or something. Instead of reading or hearing about it, which is all great, you get to see what they did, how they understood what they were making, something they created,” he gushed.
Diana smiled. He was adorable when he was talking about something he seemed so passionate about. “Are you an artist?”
Danny shrugged. “I do a lot of art. I like doing it, but I don’t have time for it very often. I’m gonna bring my sketchbook to the museum and draw the paintings so I can remember them.”
Diana was beginning to suspect that the grand lesson here was that every art forger has a backstory, since there seemed to be no other reason for some universal power to yank an FBI agent out of the White Collar unit and connect her to this specific child. Because that was what this had to be leading to, right? It had all the clues; his need to steal, his talent for forgery, his affinity for art, his currently innocent decision to draw the paintings…
The ground shifted beneath her feet, like an illusion of an earthquake, and for a moment, her vision blurred. The next moment, her surroundings had completely changed, and she wondered for a moment if she’d figured out the lesson and was now back in New York.
She wasn’t. In fact, this looked like the same apartment she’d just been standing in, just slightly different. The furniture, though it was the same, looked older and had been slightly rearranged.
A knock sounded on the door, and Danny walked out of the kitchen area. It looked like the same kid, but slightly older. She would guess his age was around eleven or twelve.
So she had hopped slightly into the future—just not to her correct time period. And she was still in St. Louis with this “Danny” kid, who she highly suspected was a white collar criminal in the making, not because he acted like one, but because she couldn’t imagine any other reason a person like her would be randomly selected to have insight into the life of this kid.
Danny answered the door, not having noticed her yet. He cracked it open slightly, and Diana noticed that he tensed. “Mom’s not home,” he said, and shut the door in the guy’s face.
The guy pounded on the door again, shouting about how he didn’t believe Danny, and Danny put his back up against the door, as though he was worried the man would try to open it without permission. “She’s not here,” he said through gritted teeth.
“You gotta let me see her!” the guy yelled. Diana winced along with Danny at the sound of his voice. “You can’t slam doors in my face forever, kid, as long as she’s mine you are too!”
“SHE’S NOT HERE,” Danny shouted, “and I don’t want you here!”
Diana held her breath, wondering if the man would try to shove the door open himself. Instead, he said threateningly, “You tell her to call me the second she steps through this door, you hear me?”
“I’ll tell her you came,” Danny said irritably, holding his breath until the guy’s steps retreated down the hallway. He exhaled and slumped against the door, finally catching sight of Diana. “...Diana?” he asked tentatively.
“Danny.”
“I thought I made you up,” he said thoughtfully. Then he looked back at the door. “That could’ve gone a lot worse. It has gone a lot worse. Are you sure you’re not my guardian angel?”
“If I was your guardian angel, I’d make men like that disappear,” she said viciously, glaring at the doorway, though she didn’t know if that was an actual power guardian angels would have.
Danny nodded his appreciation for the skill she didn’t have. “Thanks,” he mumbled. After a moment of silence, he said, “My mom used to have good taste, you know. In men.”
“Yeah?”
“My dad was a hero,” he continued. “I never knew him, not really. I can barely remember him. Apparently I have his eyes. But he was a police officer, and he died fighting bad guys. So my mom used to go for good guys, once upon a time. I guess I just don’t remember it.”
Diana didn’t know what to say to that. She wasn’t sure if there was anything she should say.
Maybe it was better just to listen.
“Ellen was a cop, too. I’m not supposed to tell people that. It’s one of those Top Secret Things,” he explained. Interesting. “But you only exist to me, so it can’t hurt to tell you. When I grow up, I’m going to be like Dad and Ellen.”
“A police officer?” Diana checked, remembering her theory that she was watching some guy’s criminal backstory. Maybe not, then. “But last time I saw you…”
Danny averted his eyes. “Sometimes I have to steal things. I don’t always have options. And I make fake things too. Again, I don’t have a lot of options. But one day I’ll fix it,” he said confidently. “I’ll help them put away so many bad guys that it won’t matter that I had to steal things when I was a kid.” He glanced towards the doorway again. “I think the world would be a better place if there were less bad people, and I want to make the world a better place for other people than it was for me. I bet that’s what my father would have wanted, right?”
Diana opened her mouth more than a few times, searching for something to say. Eventually she decided to ask, “What are the Top Secret Things?”
“Stuff like Ellen being a cop or Mom being a librarian. Stuff from the Other Life. I don’t remember very much about it, since I was a toddler when we left, but I think we were from Washington, D.C. They don’t talk about it a lot. Apparently it isn’t safe.” Danny shrugged. “I looked up Witness Protection because Ellen is super secretive about the situation, so I know what it is and theoretically why it isn’t safe to talk about Before, but I wish I at least knew who Mom or Ellen testified against. Maybe it was one of those guys who killed my dad. That would make sense, right?”
Diana tried to think back on everything the kid said, because her brain had stopped working at full capacity after she heard the words “Witness Protection.”
Was that somehow what this was about? Was Diana supposed to be learning some kind of lesson about kids whose families were placed into WITSEC? Were a bunch of FBI agents being catapulted back in time to meet such children, or was it just her?
“You’re in Witness Protection?”
“Yeah, it’s all mysterious.” He shrugged. “I don’t feel amazingly protected, but I guess if there’s some big crime organization out there who has it out for my family’s blood, it’s better that we’re in a crappy apartment in St. Louis with no money. Ellen teaches me how to keep myself safe too, though, so I won’t need protecting.”
“Keep yourself safe how?”
“Basic stuff, you know. Blending in. Seeming like you belong. Slipping a tail. She used to get my friends to follow me through the city, and if they lost me she’d buy me a candy bar or something. I’m learning a bunch of languages. Oh, and faking an accent. I can do a lot of accents. I can also do an ambiguous American accent that doesn’t give any hint as to my origins. That’s what I usually do.”
Diana had to admit, his accent definitely didn’t point towards any specific region. “What’s your real accent sound like?”
“I don’t have one,” Danny said. “I usually talk like this, but I can control what I sound like pretty well, so I don’t think I have a natural or ‘real’ setting.”
Somehow, that almost felt sad. Diana wasn’t fully sure why.
Maybe it was the concept of pre-teen having to learn how to erase his true identity and become whoever he needed to be to survive.
Before she could think of a response, both the ground and her vision became shifty and ambiguous for a few moments, and when she rematerialized, she was walking next to Danny in the city once again. Danny walked with purpose, his expression like the time his face had dropped after he picked a man’s pocket when he was only eight or nine years old: no act, no friendly pull, absolutely nothing.
And, upon looking at his face, Diana almost stopped in her tracks.
She didn’t. She kept walking. But inside, she was reeling. He looked like he was fifteen or sixteen, so part of the way through high school, but he’d grown and matured enough to look considerably more like his adult self. And though he looked incredibly young to be the man she knew, he was unmistakable.
Neal Caffrey.
Danny, the kid she’d been sent back through time to observe, was Neal Caffrey.
Suddenly, she realized there was no need to look for a connection or a possible lesson. Whatever forces had caused her day to go so awry, the point was no longer a question. She was watching the childhood of Neal Caffrey. She was speaking to a young Neal Caffrey.
In a lot of ways, it made a lot of sense. The pocket picking, the forging, the art fascination, the survival skills that made him disappear or blend in easily… a lot of the pieces added up.
But some of the pieces didn’t fit—or rather, they were indicative that the puzzle of Neal Caffrey’s childhood looked nothing like what she would have expected.
Witness Protection. (He’d never liked the U.S. Marshals much.)
“I don’t like doing illegal things, you know.” (He thrived off the thrill of a heist or a con.)
“My dad was a hero.” (He used to think the police were heroes.)
“When I grow up, I’m going to be like Dad and Ellen.” (He wanted to be a police officer.)
“I’ll help them put away so many bad guys that it won’t matter that I had to steal things when I was a kid.” (What kind of guy counted as a bad guy, to him? Had that ever changed?)
“I want to make the world a better place for other people than it was for me.” (Instead, he exploited it right back.)
Something changed.
What changed?
“Diana?” Neal asked, pausing momentarily when he noticed her walking beside him. “Huh. I really didn’t make you up.”
“I was worried I was making all of this up,” Diana confessed. She wasn’t, though, she couldn’t be, because this wasn’t the story she would have told for Neal Caffrey.
“I was worried you were a hallucination,” Neal replied, “but if that was the case, other people would hear me when I talked to you, and they’d call me crazy. I’ve been trying to figure out the connection between the moments you appear. I can’t figure it out.”
“Me neither,” Diana admitted. “I don’t know if there is one. Where are we headed?”
“Silas’ billiard hall. Here.” He pushed open the squeaky doors, but they walked past the pool tables, the bar, and the many people. He pushed open yet another door near the back, one Diana hadn’t even initially noticed. Two other men, much older than Neal, were standing around a table that looked like it was about to collapse. Everything about the situation looked shady, and she was immediately set on edge.
“Danny, what are we doing here?” she asked, barely remembering to use his real name. She kept her voice low, though she knew the other men in the room could neither see nor hear her. “These don’t look like the kind of people you want to know.”
Neal ignored her, pulling something out of his pocket and slapping it on the table.
Stamps.
“From the last decade, so they wouldn’t be expected to have UV tagging,” Neal told the suspicious men. “All the silk, microprinting and perforations are perfect. If your materials were good, these are basically undetectable as counterfeits.”
Diana had seen and heard Neal on undercover operations enough to be familiar with his guarded, confident tone, as well as his manner of conducting himself in shady company. He was more confident and experienced when she knew him, but something about seeing him doing the same thing at such a young age broke her heart in a way seeing Neal fall into a criminal persona never had before.
Before, she’d just seen that as who Neal was, another reason to roll her eyes in the van.
Now, she was watching a kid make increasingly bad choices because he felt he had no other options, and it didn’t seem like a joke at all. It was nothing but sad.
When they left the place quickly, Diana asked him, “How did you manage to incorporate the silk and microprinting?” She understood how he might have pulled something like that off in the future, but as a high schooler living with an absent mother?
Neal shrugged. “It’s not as perfect as I made it sound,” he muttered, “but hopefully they don’t realize that until after I am far, far away with their money.”
“How did you tangle with them, anyway?”
“I’m naturally good at forging things. They realized that. They do all the selling and stuff. They pay me for my talent and teach me what I don’t know. I got pretty good, but this last job I just didn’t have the right time or space or tools to make happen, so I made it good enough to hold up under initial inspection, and hopefully now I never have to see them again,” Neal explained. “Something I’ve learned? A good track record mixed with confidence builds a perfect lie.”
That isn’t something you ever should have had to learn.
“Last time I saw you, you told me you wanted to be a cop.”
“And I will be, in about four more years,” he said, looking at the ground as his now-familiar apartment building came into view. As they walked towards the doors, he added, “I’ll make up for everything. Maybe I’ll even get to arrest Silas or something.”
Diana wondered what present day Neal felt like about his work release job, considering this attitude and whatever had happened that changed it. Did he think about it often? His father? His childhood dreams? The bad patterns he’d fallen into since then? Did he really see his FBI as a chance to “make things right,” like young Neal did, or were things too different, too changed by then?
Before Neal was finished opening the door, Diana traveled through time once again. She wondered if she was finally about to return to NYC in 2012.
When she took in her surroundings, for a moment, she was hopeful. This did look like New York City. But it didn’t feel like her New York City, and it wasn’t long before she recognized Neal, now looking grown but still much younger than present day, walking alongside her.
“Danny?” she asked.
He looked over at her sharply, nervously, but then relaxed a smile dancing on his lips when he recognized her. “Diana. My guardian angel,” he said wryly. “It’s been a while.”
“It has,” Diana agreed, even though for her, it had only been a few seconds.
“My name isn’t Danny,” he said. “It’s Neal.”
“You changed it?”
He shook his head. “They changed it. The Marshals. I changed it back.”
Interesting. When she realized she was looking at Neal Caffrey, she assumed Danny was his real name and Neal Caffrey was simply an incredibly elaborate alias that would intentionally never trace back to his childhood. But of course, if he was in Witness Protection, they would have changed his name. “You left WITSEC?”
Neal looked down sheepishly. “I sort of ran away.”
Diana raised her eyebrows. That was less shocking than anything else she’d learned about Neal’s childhood by now. “You ran away from home?”
Neal mumbled something.
“What?”
“Two days ago,” he mumbled again, but slightly louder. “I ran away two days ago.”
Oh.
Oh, he’d just run away. This Neal Caffrey was fresh from his first cross-country escape, though certainly not his last.
She went through a number of questions she could ask before settling on, “Why?”
Neal opened and closed his mouth a few times, like he was searching for the right words and kept thinking he’d found them, only to change his mind at the last minute. Then he smiled ruefully. “I’m actually really glad you’re here, Diana, even if I still don’t know what you are. I think I need to talk, but I don’t exactly have a long lineup of people I can trust. Or any lineup.” He gestured for her to follow him.
He took her to a surprisingly nice hotel room for a teenager who’d just run away from home, especially when home was a run-down apartment and an absent mother. “How did you afford this?” she asked before she could stop herself.
His smile was somewhere between his signature Caffrey grin and a grimace. “If you’re supposed to be my conscience, I don’t think I should answer that.”
“Exactly how much money did you steal?”
“Not enough to justify spending it all on this place,” he admitted, “but it’s just for a few nights, mostly out of spite. I’ll figure out sustainable living arrangements eventually. Besides, I can always get more by scamming some tourist or something.”
Diana decided not to point out that he was currently just as new to the city as any tourist.
“So…” Diana sank slowly into a seat across from Neal. “You said you needed to talk.”
Neal sighed. “Yeah. A lot just happened.”
“I’d imagine.”
“Two days ago, I turned eighteen. At least, according to the birthday they gave me in WITSEC,” Neal said, almost to himself, “which probably isn’t my real one, but whatever. I turned eighteen and Ellen baked me cupcakes, and we were talking about the future with high school graduation coming up and—oh God, I’m not going to graduate high school.”
He really had just run away. It was all just now beginning to sink in for him, and he was young, not nearly as calculating as his older self. He really did need to talk: this seemed like the first time since he ran that he was really processing what had happened.
Neal shook his head. “It’s fine, I’m good at forging things. Anyway, I was talking to her about my plans to go to the police academy once I was old enough, and… we talked about my father.”
“Because he was a police officer,” Diana guessed.
“Yeah,” Neal scoffed. “He was.”
That was a very different attitude than the last one she’d seen.
Diana had a feeling she was about to figure out exactly what had changed Neal from the kid she’d met into the con man she knew.
“He…” Neal blinked a few times and looked away, his jaw set. “He wasn’t a hero, like my mom told me. He was corrupt. We were in WITSEC because he turned state’s evidence against some crime family he was working for. I don’t know the whole story, but I know he confessed to murder.” He looked back up at Diana, meeting her eyes. What she saw there almost knocked the wind out of her. It wasn’t often Neal Caffrey was emotionally vulnerable, and the only other time she could remember seeing this much raw pain in his eyes, he’d been aiming a gun at Fowler, muttering about how he’d killed Kate. “He was a murderer, Diana. This whole time I’ve wanted to be like him, so I could make the world a ‘better place,’ and the whole time he was a murderer.”
And now the pieces were clicking into place, both the ones that already made sense and the ones that had thrown Diana for a loop. A kid who turned to crime to keep himself afloat while internally vowing he’d make up for it in law enforcement as an adult, only for his romanticization of law enforcement to be thoroughly shattered on his eighteenth birthday.
That’s why he and Peter are attached at the hip, she realized. That’s how he came to actually care. Peter proved to him that good cops exist, or at least, good FBI agents. That must have meant the world to him.
Because right now, he was a frustrated, angry, reckless kid whose skills lent themselves to crime and who had recently lost all his faith in the law.
“I’m so sorry, Neal,” she whispered.
“Ellen told me my real name was Neal Bennett,” he said, and Diana suddenly felt like she knew something she wasn’t supposed to know. Of course, she knew a lot of things she wasn’t supposed to know. If present day Neal Caffrey knew she knew any of this stuff, about Danny or WITSEC or his father, he would probably bolt to an airport and be halfway around the world by dawn. But hearing with absolute certainty his real real name, the one he was born with, felt sacred in a way she wasn’t sure she was ready for.
The strange happenings of the day seemed to have no purpose other than to unwrap Neal Caffrey, layer by layer, and show Diana the truth behind the man of many masks that she knew.
“Bennett was my father’s name, though, and I couldn’t take his name. I couldn’t. So I asked Ellen what Mom’s name was before she married Dad, and it was Caffrey, so that’s what I’m going with. Neal Caffrey.” He shrugged, resting his head on his hands. “I kind of like it. I can build an identity on that.”
“You shouldn’t try to be anyone other than who you really are,” Diana told him.
“Really?” he said skeptically, meeting her eyes once again. “And who’s that?”
Before Diana could even begin to think of how to answer that, the world around her was blurring and shifting and spinning until she was standing in a lightly furnished apartment. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught sight of Neal, and when she turned to see him, he was immersed in his painting, working on a canvas.
He didn’t notice her right away, and she didn’t call attention to her presence. She was aware that this was the Neal Caffrey personality she knew, or at least a former version of it. This was no longer a kid trying to figure out his life, but the con man she was familiar with. The thought made her sadder than it had any right to.
She liked Neal Caffrey, the one she knew, even if she’d never admit it to his face. But there was something about having seen behind his well crafted masks that made the thought of seeing him so carefully guarded, under the disguise of charm and friendliness, hurt more than it should.
He was completely absorbed in his work, putting oil to canvas, watching his brushwork closely, and Diana realized she’d never actually seen him paint. She knew he painted; it was a common factor in many of his (alleged) crimes, after all. But watching him care so much about his work was almost entrancing.
He was wearing a t-shirt and jeans, very different attire from what she was used to seeing him wear in the office daily. She truly believed that when in the office, he was at his most comfortable looking as put together as possible. He relied heavily on image, even when he didn’t need to, because it brought him comfort and assurance. Here, though, alone, he seemed to be most in his element with a paintbrush in his hand.
“Beautiful work,” Diana commented, finally alerting him to her presence. “You’re very talented.”
To his credit, he managed to keep his surprised reaction at her appearance to a minimum. “Diana,” he greeted. “Good to see you again.”
“What are you painting?”
“Dinner at the Ball, Edgar Degas, 1879,” he stated, never looking away from his work. “I’ve always been fond of impressionist paintings, the idea of capturing the ambience of a moment.”
Even though he was blatantly forging a famous artist’s work, she found herself viewing even Neal’s affinity for forgery in a new light. She’d always thought of it as a con with paint, imagining that he’d paint them with his little devious grin on his face as he thought of how he might fool an authenticator when he swapped it out for the original painting or sold it to an unsuspecting wealthy buyer. Instead, he seemed to look at his own work with both pride in his own skill and admiration for the work he was mimicking, as though he were paying homage to the original artist rather than ripping them off.
Even though he was objectively ripping them off.
Neal must have finished some small section or task of the painting, because he wiped off his brush and turned to face her. “So… I’d ask how you’ve been, but I don’t know exactly what it is that guardian angels do during their downtime.”
She was pretty sure she’d long missed her window for saying I’m an FBI agent from the future, so instead she said, “For me, no time passes between the times when I see you.” She wondered what would happen when he met the younger version of herself. It was bound to happen soon.
The door to the apartment opened, and a familiar bald, bespectacled man walked into the room. “Neal, I was checking out the layout of the Musee d'Orsay, and—”
“Not now, Moz,” Neal interrupted. “I’m conferring with my guardian angel.”
Mozzie immediately paused. “Ah, yes,” he said, nodding emphatically. “You know, you really should consider the possibility that she’s the result of an implanted chip in your mind by the government. Especially if she attempts to steer you back onto a more law-abiding path.”
“I’ll keep that in mind, Moz,” Neal said wryly. “Now could I have a minute alone with her?”
“Of course, of course. Take your time with your government-planted hallucination,” Mozzie said seriously, leaving the two of them alone.
Neal chuckled, and Diana did the same, though she wondered if she really was being implanted in his mind by the government. There weren’t a lot of logical reasons for this to be happening, and when you had to consider illogical reasons, well… Mozzie was the master of those.
“Are you planning to rob the Musee d'Orsay?” Diana asked, raising an eyebrow.
“I feel like I shouldn’t answer that, Jiminy Cricket,” he said, bringing out one of his very familiar grins.
“So that’s a yes,” she said flatly. Both of them laughed, though Diana couldn’t help the disappointment she felt, despite knowing that this was the route Neal’s life had taken.
She couldn’t help but feel like the real difference between Neal and the others at the White Collar division wasn’t his sense of right and wrong, but life circumstances that were entirely out of his control.
You play the hand you’re dealt, and when Neal Caffrey saw his cards, he decided he had no good options other than to cheat.
“You’ve seen what I’m painting,” he replied somewhat evasively, gesturing to the canvas. “It’s not done yet, but what do you think?”
“I think you’re terrifyingly talented,” she said, probably the most genuine response she could give while staring at his work in both awe and discontent.
Maybe, in a better world, Neal Bennett was an artist. A legitimate artist.
Diana thinks that world might have been a truly better place.
It’s then that the world glazes over for a few moments, shifting and spinning until she was standing in a federal detention center—not the prison where Neal was eventually sentenced to spend four years, but the place he’d been held in custody while awaiting his trial.
“Hi Neal,” she said helplessly, hating her own position. This had already happened, and it had needed to happen, and he’d definitely earned it, and yet after watching him grow up in slight flashes, she couldn’t help but realize her heart was with Neal in the cell, despite believing he deserved the sentence he got and more.
No. That wasn’t right. His crimes deserved the sentence he got and more. He deserved better than the life he’d lived.
Neal Caffrey was more than the sum of every law he’d ever broken.
“Special Agent Diana Berrigan,” he muttered, not looking up at her.
Yeah… she’d wondered when that would happen. “So you’ve met me.”
“In passing. I hear it was your idea to use Kate to trap me. Clever,” he said, his eyes still on the floor.
“That makes it sound colder than I meant it,” Diana said, wondering why she felt the need to defend herself for doing her job. “Peter had been chasing you for three years. He asked me how he could catch me if I were you, or something, and I answered honestly—that my girlfriend would be the easiest way to find me. Peter figured out that you didn’t know where Kate was, and…” She shrugged.
“It was well played,” he said. Then he looked up at her for the first time since saying her full title. “How did you become my guardian angel, or whatever the hell you are?”
“I honestly don’t know,” she admitted. “I’m from the future, around 2012. Today I just started visiting you at various times in your life without any warning. The first two times, I didn’t realize I was talking to Neal Caffrey. By the third time, I recognized you.”
“So the current Diana doesn’t know all the stuff I’ve told you about,” he realized, looking slightly relieved.
“You were worried about that?”
“That an FBI agent who worked for the man who dedicated years to locking me up knew my whole life story? Stuff I’ve never told anybody? Yeah, I was worried,” he deadpanned. “I didn’t even think you were a real person when I told you that stuff. When I asked what you were, whether it was my guardian angel or my conscience or whatever, I definitely didn’t expect the real answer to be ‘FBI agent from the future who helps Peter Burke arrest me.’”
“The real answer is your friend from the future,” Diana corrected, unable to help herself, even though she didn’t want to mess with the timeline and start telling him what happened in his future.
Neal raised an eyebrow. “Right. My friend. Let me guess, you think you’re doing me a service by helping them put me in prison?”
“That’s not what I meant,” Diana insisted, even though she had no intention of telling him what she did mean. “You really are my friend. And for what it’s worth, I’m really glad you opened up to me, even if you didn’t realize who I was. I hope one day, the version of you from my present day trusts me enough to tell me those things.” She wondered if, whenever she finally did get back to her present time, she would meet the same Neal she knew before she’d time traveled through his life, or if she’d meet a version of Neal who had grown up seeing her appear and talk to him every few years.
“How do we become friends?” Neal asked skeptically.
“I think you should live that story yourself,” Diana said gently. “But it’s real. And I want you to know that I believe in you, and that you’re a good person, and that despite everything you’ve done that I don’t approve of, I’m glad the universe or whatever caused this gave me the opportunity to better understand you.”
He still looked skeptical, but he let it go, averting his eyes. Then he asked, “Can you at least tell me how the trial goes?
Diana hesitated. “I’m not super familiar with time travel, but I don’t think I’m supposed to tell you anything about the future.”
“My defense lawyer thinks I should try to take some kind of plea bargain,” Neal said. “I’m not doing it. I don’t think they have good enough evidence for half the charges they’re bringing against me. I’m gonna make them prove it. Can you at least tell me what I go down for? I mean, I don’t get off completely, do I? Or do I?” he asked, suddenly perking up slightly.
“No, you don’t,” Diana said, shutting down that thought fast. “It’s…” She sighed. “You get four years in prison for counterfeiting.”
Neal nodded thoughtfully. “Could be worse,” he admitted. “The Atlantic bonds?”
“Yep.”
He sighed. “Not my best work. I’ve gotten a lot more careful since then. I probably deserve to get busted for those.”
“‘Not your best work,’” Diana muttered. “That’s scary. Now I’m not even sure I want to know what else you’ve done that we don’t know about. Those bonds were impeccable. I hear Peter was pretty impressed when they first came across his desk.”
Neal perked up again, like a puppy being promised a treat, or…
…or like a child receiving praise from their father.
Ouch.
This was above Diana’s paygrade.
“He was?”
“He was,” Diana confirmed. Then, because she was unable to help herself, she asked, “Why do you like him so much?”
That was one thing she hadn’t been able to understand about Peter Burke and Neal Caffrey before Peter had caught him and sent him to prison. Peter seemed to genuinely like him, and here she was getting proof that Neal was the exact same way. She understood, to some degree, how they became friends after Peter let Neal out of prison, but right now they were objectively adversaries. So why did they seem to like each other?
Neal shrugged. “I don’t know. He’s a good guy. By which I mean an actual good person, and not one of those shady law enforcement officers who consider themselves part of the ‘good guys,’” he said, putting the last two words in air quotes.
Like your father, Diana didn’t say.
“Don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you’re thinking about my dad but don’t want to say anything so you don’t upset me,” Neal said, giving her a pointed look. “I get it, I’m not that complicated.”
“That’s not true,” Diana said instinctively. “No human is simple.”
“Some people think criminals are,” Neal mumbled.
“Well, they’re wrong.”
Before Diana could hear Neal’s response to that, she was gone, feeling the ground shift beneath her feet and watching the world go wonky before her eyes. Suddenly, she found herself in Neal’s apartment at June’s, the one she was more familiar with, and realized she must be getting very close to present day, since Neal was out on his deal.
This time, Neal spotted Diana before she spotted him. “Given the fact that you just materialized,” he said wryly, “I’m going to assume you’re my government implanted guardian angel and not my new coworker.”
“I don’t think I was ever a guardian angel,” Diana pointed out. “I didn’t exactly help you very much.”
“I don’t know,” he said, shoving his hands in his pockets, not in a relaxed way, but in a nervous gesture she didn’t often see on the version of Neal Caffrey she knew. Neal was a master of illusion and confidence, so if he was showing vulnerability, it was because he’d decided it was okay. He’d decided she was safe. “I mean, I think my life took the same twists and turns it would have taken anyway, but even though I only saw you a few times throughout my life, you talked to me when I needed to talk and didn’t trust anyone. You let me have conversations I never would have had otherwise, and I think it was good for me. So… thank you.”
This open, honest version of Neal Caffrey, willing to acknowledge that having someone to trust and talk to had been good for him, was nothing like the Neal she knew. And perhaps that was because the Neal she knew didn’t consider her his mythical guardian angel, but she would like to think she’d allowed Neal to learn a skill he never would have learned otherwise. Maybe it would be better for their real friendship.
Maybe it would be better for him and Peter’s friendship.
Maybe Neal really would be better for it.
“I would say you’re welcome,” Diana said, “but I didn’t choose to do any of this.”
Neal grinned. “Fair enough.” He cleared his throat. “So… I guess I see how we end up being friends now.”
“Makes a little more sense, now that you’re working for the FBI, doesn’t it?”
“I made the deal with the intention of eventually running,” he said bluntly. “But judging from what you said about us having a relationship, I’m guessing I don’t do that.”
“It’s complicated.”
“I do that?”
“Not what I said.”
Neal raised an eyebrow, and Diana shrugged. “The next few years don’t go completely seamlessly for you, I’ll tell you that much. But you stick around, and you change, and you form friendships and relationships. You have a life and a family here,” she said, not worrying about whether she was spoiling his future for him. This was something she felt it would be good for him to know. Of that much, she was sure. “I know your family situation wasn’t what it should have been. I know you didn’t end up where you are because you felt like breaking the law and didn’t care how your actions impacted others, at least not initially. And I’ll keep those things completely silent, no matter what. But because I know that, I realize how important it must be to you that you find people and stability here, and I want you to know that all of that is real.” It isn’t just another illusion.
Neal drew a shaky breath, and when he exhaled, Diana realized he was blinking hard. This was a strange day, indeed, watching Neal let her see behind all of his masks to his true emotions. Today, Neal seemed completely human in a way he never really had before.
She supposed she may have gained something from that, too.
Neal surged forward and wrapped his arms around her, another display of affection she’d never seen him genuinely give. “Thank you, fake Diana,” he whispered. “For what it’s worth, I think I might have been better off if you were my conscience.”
“I agree, though I’m surprised you think that,” Diana said.
“Oh, I’ll deny it if you ever tell anyone,” Neal said, pulling back. A small, genuine smile danced on his face. “And how would you even explain it? ‘I time traveled and got to see different parts of Neal’s childhood, I swear!’”
“You’re right, they’d never believe me,” she laughed. Then, more seriously, she said, “Thank you for being genuine with me. I know it’s not generally your first instinct.”
“Yeah, well, we’ll see what happens when I catch up to this version of you in the timeline and you become a real person,” Neal said. “No promises I’ll be in a mood to talk through all my problems.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to be.”
“But I wouldn’t mind having a guardian angel around every now and then,” he said with a sincere smile.
Diana almost saw the moment coming, the way the ground shifted beneath her feet and her vision blurred until she stood in her own room, exactly where and when she’d been before she’d been pulled back in time.
Smiling, she pulled out her cell phone and selected Neal’s contact. She texted, It’s guardian angel day, figuring he’d know what she meant. And well, if he didn’t, she’d make up some office tradition and get the division in on the prank.
You were right, Neal replied, making her smile widen. This is my family.