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The chairs were a lie.
Instead of a couch, two plumb periwinkle arm chairs sat across from each other in a pseudo display of domestic luxury in the middle of a rather uneventful office. The chairs looked like they’d be the most comfortable a chair could possibly be, stuffed to the hems and inviting to anyone who came by, but they were a lie. What should’ve been a perfect cushion to sink into with maybe a glass of wine or hot tea, was a stiff polyester knit blend that slowly took the feeling out of your thighs after sitting too long.
Really they were a crime to all financially modest furniture everywhere.
A small unnoticeable coffee table served as a neutral ground between the two chairs but that was a lie as well. Because in the middle drawer was a variety of pamphlets that were somehow supposed to fix everything and the surface though wiped clean had probably had thousands and thousands of snotty used tissues dumped on it.
But there was one thing Dr. Malone had going for her. In all of the overly compensated office, where homeliness fought against the oppressing government state issue walls, was the rich enticing smell of real honest to God coffee. The scents and aromas wafted around Neal the moment he stepped in through the doors like Odysseus and his men on the lotus island. Vanilla circled his head, almost making him dizzy with delight, and Dr. Malone almost had him fooled when she placed the mug filled to the brim into his hands.
Almost.
“I don’t want to seem ungrateful, Dr. Malone,” Neal said with his best smile. “But how much longer are we supposed to be doing this?”
Dr. Malone was a beautiful woman trapped in the confining structure of bureaucracy. Neal could easily picture her in the twilight of Paris in the fall, her long auburn hair drifting over a curved shoulder and deep brown eyes a little hazy with good wine.
She, unlike Neal, was poised in her dishonest armchair.
“Why would that make you seem ungrateful?” She asked, tucking her ankles to the side.
“Well, because anyone who can get me out of a stack full of mortgage fraud deserves my gratitude.”
Neal was rewarded with a small smile. “You still didn’t answer my question, Neal.”
The wrong kind of reward it seemed. Neal fought against every urge deep in his muscles to keep from shifting in his seat to get feeling in his legs again.
“Dr. Malone---”
“You can call me Sawyer if you would like.”
Perfect.
“Sawyer,” Neal said, curling the name on his lips. “That’s a beautiful name.”
“Thank you. That still doesn’t answer my question.”
“You didn’t answer mine either.” Neal countered, feeling the beginning steps of a dance beginning to form.
Sawyer, nodded with an arch of her brow, and reclined to the side of the armchair. Neal shifted with her, allowing some feeling to press into his back after the numbness traveled up his legs and into his spine.
“I will be here as long as it takes. However long you need. I’m here for you.”
It was meant to be of comfort but Neal felt the thick shielding of his defenses slide into his mind. He’d been doing that a lot lately. Distrust to some comfort wasn’t new but distrust to all comfort was. It made his skin itch.
“You’re here to see if I’m still able to handle working for the bureau,” he said, calling a lie for what it was.
“In a way, yes.”
“And if not, I end up back in prison.”
“Does that bother you?” Sawyer asked with an arch of her brow.
“It’s prison.” Neal tried for another smile but the second one wasn’t as strong. It was weaker and pathetic and Sawyer didn’t seem the least bit fooled.
“That wasn’t my question.”
That seemed to be the winning phrase of Sawyer’s.
“Talk to her, Neal,” Peter had said, his face drawn despite the encouraging smile. “She’s tough but… just talk to her.”
Neal wouldn’t have even been sitting in front of Dr. Malone without Peter and the memory of his smile, his encouraging, pleading smile, was almost enough to draw another kind of guilt into Neal.
“I don’t want to go back to prison, no. I want to be able to keep working with Peter. I… I do good work here," he answered honestly.
He owed Peter at least that.
Sawyer nodded, a strand of her fall auburn hair dropping into her face.
“Indeed,” she said in a way Neal had heard before.
But her eyes sharpened and she tilted her head. “But that wasn’t my question.”
Neal's jaw tightened. “Then I’m afraid I don’t understand the question.”
If Sawyer was bothered by the obvious strained challenge in his voice she didn't show it. If anything she welcomed it with a small smile of her own.
“Let me rephrase then. Does it bother you that the threat of going back to prison is a possibility?”
“I knew the terms of the agreement I signed up for. It’s practically a joke now.”
“Neal,” she warned again and Neal could see her next response before she could even say it.
“Yes,” he admitted, hating the feeling of a brick being lifted off his chest. “It bothers me.”
“Why?” She pressed.
“I am not a thing!”
The tension in the conference room shattered with a raining bolt of electricity and Neal’s body was the lightning rod.
Peter waited a moment and then two as the pieces fell into place and Neal became all too aware of the stares. The bullpen was the most silent it had ever been as agents stared at the shattering aftermath.
“No, Neal,” Peter said, his hands falling onto his hips. “No, you’re not.”
“Does it make you think about the vault?” Sawyer asked when Neal was quiet for too long.
Every muscle in Neal’s body tensed and the room with its fake coziness felt stifling and too close together. Dr. Malone no longer looked beautiful in the Parisian backdrop. She was a siren blurred by the brush strokes of Davies’s romantic fantasy. She was ready to drown him in a direction he had no intention of ever going.
Sawyer waited for a moment before she reached over for the small coffee pot, still steaming hot, and topped off Neal’s cup.
“Why don’t you tell me what happened in the vault, Neal?” She asked, prompting him.
Neal shrugged away and took the coffee into his hands, biding his time by sipping on the drink that was too hot and burnt his tongue. The bitter taste of the coffee mixed with the sweetness of the vanilla was enough, though, to buy him a little grace and he felt the corners of his lips twitch upward.
“I’m sure you’ve read the file.”
Sawyer nodded, her hand smoothing on top of the file she had yet to open, resting it on her leg instead.
“Well, my statement is in there so---”
“There’s a lot of things in the file,” Sawyer said with a tilt of her head.
Neal shrugged and bent over to place his mug on the coaster by the Christmas cactus to his left. “Lot of things tend to happen in this city.”
“Yes. And a lot of things tend to happen to you.”
Neal wanted to blame the coffee for his involuntary twitch but even he couldn’t fool himself.
“I’m just an exciting guy.” Even to his own ears it sounded weak but Sawyer remained as patient and as unflappable as she had been when they’d started over two hours earlier.
“Maybe. On paper at least.”
“Ouch.” The mock hurt gave him a chance to shift in his seat again, feeling the numbness settle at the base of his spine and spread up his flank. “Some people in this building would tell you my file is all you need.”
“I tend to disagree,” Sawyer said, with a press of her lips. “I prefer to judge people the old fashion way.”
Neal nodded. “In person. I agree.”
“So,” Sawyer drew out, trading the file for her own cup of coffee and looking criminally comfortable in her chair that Neal could attest was not as comfortable as she made it seem.
“So,” Neal repeated.
He tried not to think of Jones or Peter ever having to sit in one of the stupid chairs. It would’ve been highly inappropriate to start laughing in the middle of a psych eval.
“How about you tell me something that wasn’t in my file,” Sawyer said after a beat.
Neal’s brow arched. “I’m sorry?”
“I’ve read your file, Neal. I know you’ve read mine.”
He had but if Peter ever found out he’d give Neal one of those looks. It was funny how Peter could be so fleeting with his trust but if Neal showed the same caution he got a lecture.
Sawyer’s smile was kind and her posture was as relaxed as one could be in a pencil skirt and blouse. “What’s something you’ve learned from me in the last couple of hours we’ve been together.”
He could’ve tried so many different angles. Flattery could get him out of the whole thing if he pressed hard. But other than taking his usual charm with compassionate smile, Dr. Sawyer Malone seemed immune to that tactic. He could be overtly harsh, try to insult her. But she dealt with FBI agents for a living and even Neal couldn’t be creative enough to come up with something she probably hadn’t already heard before in her line of work.
So, he settled with the truth.
He leaned forward, stretching out the muscles in his back, and rested his elbows on his knees. “You’re relentless and direct but you try to hide it through gentleness.”
Sawyer seemed genuinely impressed and Neal hated her a little for it.
“And that is something you don’t approve of?” She guessed.
“I just don’t like being forced into doing something I don’t want to do by being tricked with kindness.” And she had been kind. Everyone had been so kind. It was grating on every single exposed nerve in his body how kind everyone had been. Like he was glass that’d already shattered.
“Is that what you think this session is about?” Sawyer asked, carefully.
“Oh, I know what it’s about. But it’s a con with a different name. Please, Dr. Malone, you don’t think I don’t know when I’m being emotional manipulated into trusting someone?” Neal could feel something sharp tug at the corner of his lips into his smile. Something that wasn’t at all like him. Like the jagged piece of glass everyone was so worried about.
Sawyer blinked. “And do you trust someone?”
“Sure.” Neal shrugged, reclining back into the stupid uncomfortable chair.
“Who?”
“Peter,” he answered without hesitation.
“Anyone else?” Sawyer was asking another leading question.
“Myself.”
“Do you?”
Neal reeled back at her response and from her expression, unreadable as it was, he could see that she’d been expecting it too.
“What?” He gaped.
“Do you trust yourself?”
“I think I know if I do,” Neal said, finally giving into the temptation to shift in his seat as the numb stiffness settled deep into the muscles of his back and thighs.
“That doesn’t answer my question.” There was Sawyer’s favorite catch phrase again.
Neal pressed his lips together and stared at the cheap lakeside watercolor painting on the wall beside her desk. If he had his paints with him he could’ve fixed it in under an hour. The colors were too muted to capture what was supposed to be a stunning setting and the water had been too thin against the heavy parchment paper.
“What about me?” Neal asked, tearing his gaze away to zero in on Sawyer again.
“I’m sorry?” She asked over the brim of her coffee mug.
“You asked me if I knew anything on you that wasn’t on paper. My file is pretty thorough thanks to Peter. What do you know about me that isn’t there.”
Sawyer assessed him in that quiet, classic twilight evening kind of way. The gentleness he had accused her of earlier settled in her gaze but something of a challenge finally appeared. A challenge he could deal with. A challenge was something he could use. He didn’t have any reason to resent gentleness. Sawyer uncurled herself from her seat and set down the coffee on the table, rolling her shoulders back as she settled back.
“Well, for one thing you have a fear of confrontation.”
Neal actually felt a laugh escape from his lips. “Excuse me?”
He immediately thought about a hundred times he never had a problem with confrontation only… to realize how those examples all turned out.
Mozzie pressuring him to run with the treasure.
Peter pressuring him to go see the Bureau shrink.
Kate getting upset whenever he mentioned Alex.
Alex trying to pin him between choosing a life with her or pretending a life with Kate.
But that wasn't an avoidance to the confrontation itself. There was just always another way. Most times in life there was an Option A and an Option B. Neal always looked for Option C when no one else was.
“You do everything in your power, Neal, to avoid it," Sawyer said. "You misdirect when asked a question. You smile when you don’t want people to see you are in pain---”
The inside of Neal’s mouth dried and he stiffened again.
“Pain?”
The gentleness was back and Neal had to look away again.
“Yes, Neal,” Sawyer said. “Physical, emotional, mental pain.”
Everything was numb. Every ragged uneven breath he took in rattled around the shell of his body and whistled out of his lips as he stared at the seeping puddle of cooling red blood under him.
“I’m the last person in this mess who is in pain.” The harshness in his voice was foreign even to his own ears but the words hurt his throat all the same.
“You’re in a world of pain,” Sawyer argued, her tone ever so compassionate. “And you don’t want anyone to notice.”
Neal shook his head. “I’m not---”
“Neal---”
“I’m not!”
“You are, Neal. I noticed. Agents Jones and Berrigan noticed---”
His butt was cold and numb from the mixture of marble and blood seeping into his pants. He couldn’t remember how long it’d been. It couldn’t have been more than thirty minutes but it felt like ages. Ages where he couldn’t breathe and he couldn’t feel and he didn’t do anything.
“You don’t know---”
“Peter noticed,” Sawyer interrupted him and Neal’s mouth closed shut, stifling the sound of his own breathing. “You noticed too. But you are doing everything in your power to ignore it and I’m here to tell you that it is not working.”
“No,” Neal had called, weak and panicked. “Stop. Please just---”
But the door slammed shut and the locks spun in a series of clicks before leaving him to the sound of his own silence.
Neal’s whole body flinched but the chair did nothing to swallow the blow.
“Tell me what happened in the vault, Neal.” Sawyer pressed, that challenged edge leaking into her face.
Neal inhaled and held his breath, shaking his head.
“Can’t you just sign the form saying I can get back to work?” He couldn’t even muster a smile then. He didn’t want to be there anymore. He didn’t want to be stuck in Dr. Malone’s office. The natural sunlight of the city from the windows exposed the room for what it was and he should’ve known the kindness was all an act.
“No, I can’t,” Sawyer said, actually sounding a little apologetic.
“Can’t or won’t,” Neal said, accusations slipping into his tone.
“Both.” The apology was gone and so was Neal’s chances. “What happened in the vault, Neal?”
“Nothing happened.” He grounded out the two words from between his teeth like they were being ripped out of him with her fingers.
“I don’t think that’s true.” Sawyer leaned forward on her knees, her face earnest in a way Neal was starting to hate. “How about a compromise for now? What happened that made you shout at Peter in the office?”
The numbness seeped up his back like a ship taking on water and spread into the lengths of his arms on hands. His lungs contracted, drowning, and forced him to take in a deep wet inhalation that did nothing to ease the pain in his chest.
“Is that was this is about?” Neal choked out a bitter laugh because of course that was what it was all about.
“It’s part of it,” Sawyer answered truthfully.
The numbness hummed into oblivion beneath his skin.
“I didn’t---” He started but ran out of air so quickly.
“You did, Neal. You got out of that vault and you’ve been cooking ever since. Everyone who was paying attention would’ve been expecting a blow out.” Sawyer’s voice was just so gentle and Neal hated her for it and the numbness felt like electricity in his hands and it was consuming his whole body and---
“Neal,” Sawyer’s voice broke through again, firm and gentle. “Tell me what’s happening.”
“I---” Again the air seemed to rush past his lips mid-sentence and there was nothing that could be done and he was paralyzed.
“Neal?” Sawyer asked, the smell of her tea tree oil soap mixing with the smell of coffee. “Neal, tell me what’s happening. You’ve felt it before.”
He had. In the office when he’d yelled at Peter. In the vault. At his apartment. In the middle of the night. Everywhere.
“My… my hands are numb.” He pushed out past his lips.
“That’s okay,” Sawyer soothed.
Something warm pressed into his hands and Sawyer’s thin fingers curled around his holding them steady.
“Take a deep breath, Neal,” Sawyer said in the haze. “And release. Keep doing that.”
Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale.
It was all just mechanics so why wasn’t it working.
“It’s because you’re going too fast. Slow it down.”
Pounding started at the base of his skull behind his ears and Neal wasn’t all too sure where the strangled gasping sound was coming from but he was pretty sure it was him.
Blood. He was sitting in cooling blood. He could feel it seeping through his pants.
Neal squeezed his eyes shut as he shuddered and something wet splashed onto his hand.
“It’s okay, Neal,” Sawyer said again. “It’s just the coffee.”
It should’ve been scolding but it felt so cold on his skin and Sawyer was probably burned but she didn’t move and a practice thumb wiped the wetness away from his hand.
“I want you to focus on the heat of the ceramic,” Sawyer instructed, her voice somehow breaking through the pounding in his ears.
Silence. So much silence. Suffocating silence like all the sound had been vacuumed out.
“I can’t---” He said, starting to pull away but Sawyer held on.
“Yes, you can Neal,” she insisted. “Smell the vanilla. Smell the blend. Feel the heat from the cup. Your hands are cold because you’re in the middle of a panic attack. Take a deep breath in and let your senses feel everything.”
Neal inhaled.
The cup was warm even in the little dimples of the polka dot design.
The coffee still smelled like vanilla. Like a blonde roast that was a little more expensive but easier to blend.
He could still taste the lasting touches of the flavor on his tongue from his last sip.
Sawyer’s hands were soft if not a bit dry.
The back of the overstuffed chair cushioned his sides with every shiver.
He… couldn’t see…He couldn’t look over. It felt like gravity was trying to force his head to the side but he fought with everything he had to zone out straight in front of him because he couldn’t look forward…
“Exhale, Neal,” Sawyer said.
Neal released everything he had in him and slumped back.
“Good, Neal, good.” Sawyer’s hand left his but returned quickly and pressed a tissue into his hand. “Here.”
He didn’t even realize he need it until the stiff government issue paper scratched against his palm. Then he felt the wetness on his face and scrubbed hard against the tears. Sawyer relieved him of the coffee mug, putting it away within easy reach, giving him some space to pull himself together. At some point during his freak out she must have moved because she was sitting on the coffee table in front of him, there to catch him in case he teetered forward in some dramatic embarrassing swoon from hyperventilating.
“I’m sorry,” he said after a while, rubbing a little too hard at his face.
“You don’t need to apologize.” Sawyer got up and went back to her chair, folding in it like nothing had happened. “Like I said, that was already simmering beneath the exterior for a while now. I was expecting it.”
None of that made Neal feel any better but it eased up the humiliation a little bit knowing that it wasn’t something Sawyer hadn’t seen before and in some weird satisfying way it felt good to know that she’d probably seen some of the big guys in Organize Crime breakdown in the exact same way.
“I’m... not trying to be difficult---” Neal started, pulling himself away and straightening his tie.
“But you are, Neal,” Sawyer pressed. “You’re doing everything you can to avoid having to confront yourself and the reason your body is reacting the way it is, is because not confronting what happened in the vault isn’t stopping you from reliving it.”
There was something so intense in Sawyer’s gaze. Something so familiar that it took him a second to realize what it was. It was the same look Sara always had when he’d tripped up and said something he didn’t want to talk about. The look where she wanted to press and poke and prod until she got her answers. But unlike Sara, Sawyer didn’t peel that look away with a shake of her head in a duty to respect his privacy. It was there and not going away. It was the same look Peter couldn’t bring to his own eyes out of guilt and pity. Neal wanted to close up just to be a little spiteful while he could. He didn’t have to tell her anything. He could talk Peter into thinking everything was fine. He could come back the next day and the next day, after he’d gone home and pulled himself together, and keep insisting that he was fine until eventually some bureaucratic figure head would make the argument that it wasn’t worth spending resources on a convict.
But Sawyer was right.
And maybe he did have confrontation issues. Because telling her what happened seemed like less of a fight than any of his other options.
“Neal,” Sawyer said, waiting until Neal met her gaze. “Tell me what happened that day.”
Neal inhaled the soft scent of vanilla.
“Someone broke into a series of safety deposit boxes at Liberty Savings Bank but they didn't find what they wanted. We later figured out that they were looking for a flash drive that had the access codes to all of the software and hard drives to every major computer on Wall Street.” Neal exhaled.
It was rare for Peter to let Neal wander around a crime scene without his or Diana's or Jones’ supervision. But they’re already scavenged every inch of the bank vault that morning. The whole robbery was a lazy messy smash and dash job but the problem turned out to be in the pudding of unsophisticated nature of the robbery. It was all done so poorly that they didn’t have any idea who they were looking for. There was no signature, no familiar planning, nothing that they could link to anyone who had been on the FBI radar. It was the perfect amount of chaos to be considered a masterpiece.
And the whole thing was pissing Peter off.
Neal had almost second guessed himself before asking Peter if they could return to the bank before going home so that he could take a look at the ventilation shaft. Peter had stared at him for a full thirty seconds before he shook his head and barked for Agent Ryan to escort Neal to the crime scene and then directly home, muttering something under his breath as he tore through another box of evidence with an equally frustrated Jones.
Neal liked Agent Ryan even though they rarely worked together. But Agent Ryan played jazz in the car and didn’t give Neal the stink eye any time he revealed one of his trade secrets.
“You find anything up there?” Ryan had asked after Neal dropped back down onto the desk from the ventilation shaft in the manager’s office.
Neal shook his hair free of any linger dust and shrugged.
“Nothing.” Neal brushed a cobweb from his shirt. “But there’s something off with the building’s airway system itself. This building predates World War II so it wouldn’t be that unlikely that there’s maybe a false wall somewhere in the building.”
Ryan handed back Neal his coat and pulled out his phone with a short nod. “I’ll let Agent Burke know. The blue prints the building manager brought to us might have something. Did you have somewhere else you wanted to look?”
Neal shrugged his coat on and turned towards the back of the bank. “Let me just look in the vault one last time.”
“Don’t steal anything, Caffrey,” Ryan joked. “I’m going to call the office real fast.”
“Neal,” Sawyer said even though it sounded like more of a question.
Neal’s head snapped up at her voice but no sound came out of his mouth.
The numbness clawed at his legs again.
“Put your hands on the arms of the chair,” Sawyer instructed. “Feel the fabric.”
Neal did as he was told and rubbed the fabric with short aborted jerks of his fingers.
The knitted periwinkle crisscrossed beneath his fingertips into tiny unseen squared stitches. Rough like cotton with the sickly smoothness of polyester.
The numbness eased away but the nausea was still lingering in the pit of his stomach.
“Good,” Sawyer praised. “Let’s try to keep going. When you got to the vault were you alone?”
The nausea bubbled up in his stomach.
“No,” Neal said after a minute.
“You all done in there, Caffrey? There’s a game I want to try---”
Agent Ryan froze when he walked into the vault and saw Neal with a gun pressed to his temple.
“Don’t even think about it,” the gunman said, stopping Ryan from pulling his gun with one simple shake of Neal’s collar.
“You’ve got a squad car outside with two cops and a police station three blocks away, okay?” Ryan held out his hands to the side. “Let him go and I won’t bring all that heat down on you.”
“I don’t really care what’s happening out there. Right now, I’ve got two problems in here.”
Click.
“Hey! Listen to me!” Ryan shouted, probably trying to get the officers that were outside to hear him. “You shoot my guy and you have the entire FBI breathing down your neck.”
“Put your gun on the desk. Slowly!” The gunman insisted giving Neal another shaking and shoving the gun so hard into his temple he flinched away.
Ryan did as he said.
Neal blinked hard against the burning behind his eyes. He didn’t want to cry anymore. It honestly felt like that’s all he had been doing for the last two weeks that he didn’t want to do it anymore. He pushed the heels of his hands hard into his eyes and waited for Sawyer to push him along but for once she remained silent, waiting for him.
Neal and Agent Ryan’s hands were zip tied high and tight behind them, forcing their elbows to awkwardly bounce against their ears. The marble floor was cold and already numbing Neal’s butt but he kept dutifully quiet as the gunman rifled through their pockets. His flexing technique was easily discovered when he’d been zip tied and after a heavy smack to the head and an even tighter pull on the zip ties, his hands were starting to turn cold with the loss of feeling in his fingers.
“What the hell is this?”
Neal clenched his teeth together as the gunman grabbed his ankle and pulled, dragging his weight down against his wrists. The familiar green blinking light was almost mocking in its steadiness.
“It’s a tracking anklet,” Neal answered, trying to ease off the hard pull on his hands.
“A tracking anklet?”
“Yeah,” Neal drawled, hoping Ryan would get where he was going. “I’m a con. The FBI’s got me on a leash doing their dirty work for them.”
“Is that so?” The man asked, a sneer pulling on his lips from what Neal could see through the holes of his mask.
“If you untie me I’ll help you find what you’re looking for?”
“You do that and you’ll be back to prison in a heartbeat, Caffrey,” Ryan added, playing along.
“Whatever, Ryan. You and Burke get me in more trouble out here than in prison.” Neal rolled his eyes and turned back to their captor, giving his wrists a little tug.
“What do you say? Untie me and I’ll get what you want.”
“What’s in it for you?” The gunman asked.
“I can run the moment you have what you want. It’s not like he’ll be able to stop me,” Neal said with a shrug.
“You son of a bitch, Caffrey,” Ryan fumed.
“Uh huh.” The gunman nodded and then taped the anklet that he was still holding. “What about this?”
Something cold froze at the base of Neal’s spine. “I can worry about that.”
“Or I can just take care of it right now for you,” the gunman said, pointing the gun directly at the anklet and Neal’s ankle.
Neal’s breath hitched in his chest as panic washed over him a flash flood of terror. A bullet from that range was going to damage his ankle permanently. He wouldn’t be able to walk the same ever again. That’s not even taking into consideration the damage the anklet fragments would do.
“No!” Ryan shouted, shattering any illusion they’d created. “Stop. Just stop. Take what you want and go.”
The gunman looked at Ryan and then at Neal before he dropped Neal’s foot to the ground.
Neal exhaled a shaky breath, pulling his ankle close to his body and curling it under him.
Then the gunman pointed the gun at Ryan’s head and fired.
“I was…” Neal stopped, tasting bile in his throat.
At some point Sawyer had given him a glass of water but it did nothing to help.
“He locked me… us… in the vault.” Neal forced out before he could puke all over Sawyer’s ugly chairs.
“You were in there with Agent Ryan’s body for five hours?” Sawyer asked it like she didn’t already know but Neal nodded anyway.
“That’s what they told me.”
Sawyer dipped her head.
“Neal!” Somewhere in Neal’s brain he registered Peter’s voice. Registered Peter’s hands on his face, his skin tacky with Ryan’s blood. “Neal?”
“Agent Burke said in his file you were almost catatonic?” Again with a question that wasn’t a question.
“Shock,” Neal corrected and Sawyer nodded.
“Come on, Neal,” Diana said, her gruff directive softened by something in her voice that Neal couldn’t pick up.
She never used to call him Neal. Always Caffrey.
“Come on,” she said again, her hand curling around his until his fingers reflexively copied hers.
“Have paramedics take a look at his wrists,” Peter said, standing over Ryan’s body. “I’ll… I’ll be right there.”
Neal absently looked down at his wrists and frowned. They were red and bruised and swollen but they were numb and his legs were numb and...
“We’ve got it taken care of, Boss,” Diana said, curling an arm around Neal’s back and propping him up and forward.
“I did nothing,” Neal said after a long uncomfortable heavy silence that felt like a freight truck on his chest.
But instead of a kind remark or encouraging discouragement, Sawyer clicked her tongue and shook her head.
“Neal,” she said, pushing her hair over her shoulder. “Despite being a very talented convicted felon, you are still a civilian who had a gun pointed at your face.”
“I’ve had a gun to my head before,” Neal interjected, his voice sounding a lot harder than it had earlier. “That’s not an excuse.”
“So, what would you have done?” Sawyer asked, crossing her arms over one another and resting them on her knees.
There was a challenge there. Another confrontation he was supposedly so scared of.
“If I’d been able to get loose---”
Sawyer arched a brow. “But you weren’t.”
“But if I had!” Neal snapped. “I could’ve cracked that vault. I know I could’ve.”
“It wouldn’t have made a difference,” Sawyer said, something matter of fact settling on her face.
“You don’t know that!”
“Yes, I do. Agent Ryan was already dead by the time the gunman turned around.”
Neal reeled back like he’d been slapped. She didn’t know. She hadn’t been there. She hadn’t felt the way Ryan’s blood turned from body temperature warm to ice cold on the marble ground.
Sawyer stared at Neal for another hard second before she sighed and relaxed into her shoulders.
“Neal,” she said, softer. “Time is one of the few things in this life we can’t control.”
Neal snorted and shook his head. This whole thing had been a mistake. He needed to tell Peter that the bureau shrink was about helpful as the title suggested.
“Are you trying to tell me it was Agent Ryan’s time to die?” He felt his face twist into a sneer as he glared at her, no longer seeing the beauty he’d admired earlier. “Really?”
“I’m telling you that there was nothing you could’ve done to stop it.”
Neal stopped.
“Agent Ryan only had one killer and it wasn’t you.” Neal shook his head but Sawyer pressed harder, like a bruise she dug her thumb into. “It wasn’t you, Neal.”
It wasn’t true. It wasn’t. There was so many things Neal could’ve done. He could’ve warned Ryan before he even stepped foot into the vault. He could’ve just been quiet and not even mentioned the ventilation shafts. He could’ve pushed Ryan over somehow. Neal knew it. Peter knew it. Sawyer knew it. Just like Kate. It was supposed to have been him. The gun had been pointed at him.
Soon, someone in the bureau was going to realize that and he’d be sent back to prison because no one would want to work with a convict who got their fellow agent shot and killed for trying to protect him.
“When you were shouting at Peter in the bullpen,” Sawyer said, pulling open her file and knocking Neal out of his cruel hamster wheel of a thought process. “Were you numb?”
“I don’t… really remember.”
“Think.”
“I’m not a thing!” His shout had been like a lightning strike in the room but the cold seeped in through his fingers and down into his stomach the moment he realized everyone had stopped to look at him.
“No, Neal. No, you’re not.”
But even Peter’s reassurance couldn’t bring feeling back into the black hole of the numbness that had settled into his legs and hands, dragging him down until it felt natural for the earth to just swallow him whole.
“Yeah,” Neal finally said, looking down at his hands while he rubbed them together.
“When you were left alone in the dark with Agent Ryan’s body, you were numb then too. Correct?”
Don’t look. Don’t look. Don’t look.
“Yes,” Neal said, his voice cracking.
“The numbing is your body’s coping with the adrenaline triggered by stress. Your brain is trying to lessen the emotional response to the trauma it’s experiencing at the time. But that’s not healthy. That’s not what our bodies are supposed to do. So, it’s causing your panic attacks.”
Panic attacks. That sounded right. He’d only ever experience one when he was eighteen and had been told his whole world was one big massive lie. He couldn’t remember much of what it had been like because the moment he could move his feet he was running but the spiraling suffocation was like a reminder of time. One he didn’t really understand how to turn off.
“I can’t make it stop. I don’t… I don’t notice it until it’s too late,” he said, remembering how moments earlier he hadn’t even realized what had been going on until Sawyer had to step in and talk him off a cliff.
“You can in time. With the help of those exercises we practiced during the one you had today. It’s very common to feel like it’s a struggle to fit back into your life after event such as the one you experienced.”
“Do you get a lot of people who were trapped with dead bodies?” Neal quipped, feeling like an exposed nerve and wanting nothing more than for Sawyer to stop trying to make eye contact.
She didn’t. Instead, she waited until Neal, unable to move on with his life until their conversation concluded, gathered himself enough to meet her gaze. There was something of an apology again, smothered with a thick layer of compassion that was hard to swallow. Neal braced himself for another blow.
“Neal, I’m going to tell you my diagnosis and it’s going to sound a lot scarier than it is.”
She waited again. The way a kind person knew to do as if it would soften the projectile.
Neal’s mouth dried again and he nodded. “I’m listening.”
“Post-traumatic stress disorder.”
Neal went very still.
Sawyer maintained her eye contact.
“I think you had it after your girlfriend, Kate, was murdered. I think you managed to deal with it on your own in your own way. I think these series of circumstances has reignited some old anxieties and brought out some new ones. I think the fact that Agent Ryan was an FBI agent and you being surrounded by FBI agents daily is triggering these anxieties and leading to panic attacks and flashbacks.”
Neal looked away. Post-traumatic stress disorder. That didn’t sound like something the bureau would have a lot of patience towards. Not for a CI at least.
“So, you’re saying I’m no longer useful to the FBI,” he said with an air of finality that would’ve made Mozzie in a doomsday mood proud.
For once, Sawyer looked confused and shook her head.
“No. Why would you think that?”
“You just said that the sight of an FBI agent sends me into a downward spiral. It’s kind of hard to work for the FBI without interacting with at least a couple of agents.”
He knew he sounded like a petulant child just then but he didn’t care. What was he supposed to do? He couldn’t con his way around the fact that every time he went out into the field with Peter or Jones or Diana or anyone else, his skin felt like it was crawling off his bones with hyper alertness that was exhausting to maintain. He couldn’t hide from the growing nightmares that kept him up at night with images of the White Collar team dead at his feet. He couldn’t explain away a panic attack like it was nothing.
He couldn’t con a con and he certainly couldn’t con himself.
Sawyer stretched across to the coffee table again and Neal wondered if he seemed like he was going to collapse again. It was the only thing that could explain the almost desperate expression on her face.
“Neal, you aren’t being sent back to prison because of this. You are having a perfectly reasonable response to a situation even trained agents don’t know how to handle. You’re not here as punishment. You’re here because there are some people up there who care about you. Who are worried about you. Who understand, at least a little bit, what you are going through. You’re here so I can help you.”
Oh.
Neal hadn’t realized how much he had been worried about that until she said it. He wasn’t going back to prison. It was still a little hard to believe that no one was mad at him but Peter wouldn’t have insisted he come to Sawyer unless… unless he cared? Peter was many things. He was a good man which was both a quality and a flaw of his personality. But they were partners and that meant on some level he had to care.
“Neal?” Peter’s hands were the only warm thing Neal’s face could feel. “He’s got blood on him. Neal? Neal, are you hurt? Come on, buddy, answer me.”
Neal sank into his seat with a rushed sigh and rubbed a hand over his eyes again, feeling more exhausted than he had all month.
“I think we should be done today.” Sawyer stood and glided her way around the furniture to her desk, flipping open a file and writing hurriedly on the sheet of paper before giving him her full attention again. “I’m going to recommend that you see me twice a week for a while. Just to talk and check in and I can work with you on some techniques to help you cope with your triggers a little better. After a while, if we start to see some improvements, we can talk about spreading our visits out. Okay?”
His instinct was to say no. To insist that he was fine. But then he remembered the slow building panic in his chest at remembering his hands going numb.
“Okay.” Neal nodded and stood on a pair of shaky legs.
Sawyer walked him to the office door and grabbed his hat for him. “You can always call if you need me. My line is open to you.”
“Thank you,” Neal said honestly.
Sawyer nodded and gave his arm a short squeeze. “Go home and get some sleep, Neal. You need it.”
Neal almost whispered his goodbyes and tried not to look like he was making a break for it out of Sawyer’s office. Even if he had he wouldn’t have gotten far.
Peter was flipping through an old case file, leaning against the wall like he’d been there for a while and found a spot to make anchor. But hear Neal’s footsteps, he looked up and lifted a small smile onto his lips.
“You came to get me?” Neal asked, glancing at his watch. It was almost six o’clock. Peter should’ve been on his way home already.
“Of course.”
Peter’s hand was a welcome source of warmth on Neal’s shoulder and he allowed the agent to guide him through the empty halls of the FBI building.
“So, how’d it go?” Peter eventually asked when they made it to the elevator.
Neal shrugged. “Better than imagined.”
Peter’s smile turned into a kind of wistful grin that one would almost considered smug. He usually only had it when Diana kicked ass or Neal showed up some arrogant suspect.
“Sawyer’s good like that,” Peter said.
Neal arched a brow. “Sawyer?”
Everyone had called her Dr. Malone when Neal had mentioned his appointment.
Peter shrugged. “I had to see her the first time I had to fire my weapon at a suspect. Bureau policy. She really helped.”
It was hard to imagine Peter sitting in one of those overstuffed ugly, uncomfortable chairs. Even when he’d been picturing Peter’s awful suits blending into the periwinkle polyester it had been more like a watercolor of a fantasy and nothing like the actual image he was picturing now.
“Oh. I didn’t know that,” Neal said, suddenly feeling like Peter had given him something precious to hold on to for him.
The elevator dinged as the doors slid open and they hurried inside. Silence settled between the two of them as the elevator dropped down the several floors to the lobby.
“Did she do that whole ‘that doesn’t answer my question’ mind trick on you too?” Peter asked.
“Yes.” Neal groaned and Peter chuckled, leading Neal out the doors into the cool New York fall air.
Numbness tingled base of his spine and Neal inhaled.
His nostrils filled with crisp evening air.
His ears flooded with the heavy drums of city life.
Peter’s hand pressed into the small of his back as they headed towards the car and the heat his palm banished away the cold tingling sensation from his skin.
Neal exhaled and started to believe that everything was going to be okay for the first time in a long time.