lonetread | Fic: WC, "Self-Portrait, In Skin" (FTM!Neal)

For

lgbtfest (fest post, with detailed header, here). Thanks, flist, couldn't have done it without you. Enjoy.

Self-Portrait, In Skin

3.

Neal can’t help staring. To think he’d thought the road trip to Baltimore with Mozzie would be the strangest part of this.

At the same time, Neal’s somehow not surprised that these are the kinds of people Mozzie’s friends with.

He keeps the thought to himself. They’ve agreed to help him, after all. And as much as he’s loath to admit it, he certainly needs the help on this one. He’s much better with his hands than with this kind of technology, and he can’t afford to have anything go wrong.

All told, though, the three make it look easy, Langly infiltrating the website of the Ohio Office of Vital Stats and adding the death certificate Frohike had forged (amazingly, Neal was grudgingly forced to admit), all while cracking jokes. Then doing it again with New York, the guys all happy to spend an afternoon stealing him an identity.

As Mozzie’d promised, they ask no questions. Neal expects they don’t have to, knows they’re smart enough to put two and two together.

When they’re done, he gets pats on the back, congratulations, and the feeling that maybe they didn’t do it just for the challenge, or the favor, after all.

1.

In his middle-school art class, they’re made to copy paintings, as practice. Everyone else finds it boring, unoriginal, a waste of time; he considers it a challenge.

And he finds he’s good at it, too.

High school Art is more of the same, except that he makes a friend. “Wow, LeAnn,” Lizzie is forever saying to him, the first few weeks, when they’re reproducing paintings, “you’re really good at this. Are you gonna be an artist when you grow up?”

He just shrugs, truthfully not sure he can see a future for himself at all. (Besides, he thinks, he’s not creative enough to be an artist, just to copy other people, and what kind of career can you make out of that? But he likes Lizzie, so all he says is, “Maybe, I dunno. How about you?” and lets her change the subject.)

He draws a picture of Lizzie over Christmas vacation, gives it to her for her birthday. She’s suitably impressed. He wonders, but doesn’t ask, whether she recognizes it from last year’s yearbook.

(He wishes he could sign it, but – even by the time he drops out, when Lizzie’s going by Elizabeth instead – he doesn’t know his name.)

4.

Roberts was a hell of a conman, if the stories he tells Neal are even half true. But he’s getting on in years, age is taking its toll, and arthritis has made him slow (slow to slip cuffs, to pick a lock, to escape a con gone south, even to use a paintbrush). The risk was too high, he’d decided, that he’d spend his last years in prison – so he hung up that life, left it to fresh blood. He’s settled nicely into effective retirement running his art gallery (which is perfectly above-board, he likes to joke to Neal – the near-annual audits caused by the eyes the FBI left on him see to that).

Retired, maybe, Neal thinks. But he’s still a hell of a conman.

He was observant, and it was easy to trust him (not that Neal had had much choice), and so eventually, inevitably, Roberts had found out about Neal’s need for money – you can’t fake surgery.

All he’d done was smile and say, offhand, as if to himself, “You know, I’ve been meaning to replace the Bonnard.”

A month later – with the help of Neal; Mozz; the local fence, Alex; and the insurance money – he had.

2.

He doesn’t have much of a plan when he leaves Ohio, he just needs to leave, so he does. Brings his clothes, his paints, his meager funds, and his dreams.

He moves to New York City to reinvent himself. It’s not as hard as he expected.

He spends much of his days in art galleries – for the paintings and the people – and lies and steals his way into hotel rooms at night.

It turns out you can meet a lot of interesting people, striking up conversations in art galleries.

And you can meet even more when the owner sees you in there every day and offers you a job.

(He likes the independence and the ease of pick-pocketing, but job security is admittedly nice, too.

And so is networking, he finds when his new boss, Roberts, introduces him to an old friend.)

“Neal,” he says, sticking out a hand, the name coming easier to him now than when he’d finally decided on it a few weeks before.

The other man shakes his hand warily; Neal gets the impression that’s his default state. “Mozzie,” he says. Neal wonders if that’s his real name, but decides it would be hypocritical to ask.

5.

Neal knows it could be worse. He knows how lucky he is that the prison nurse looked the other way about his forged documents, and that she went to bat for him so he could continue his hormone regimen (the prescription for which was also forged, but what she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her).

And he knows, intellectually, that the relative privacy afforded in federal prison is a good thing.

But here, now, the loneliness is killing him one day at a time.

Most of his friends, busy and paranoid, don’t come by all that often. (It surprises him how much he misses them.) He sees Kate regularly (always worried for him, though she tries to hide it).

He starts daydreaming about escape in earnest the day she tells him Roberts is dead. Natural causes, she assures him, peaceful and quick, and something is twisting so badly in his chest that he can’t meet her eyes long enough to be able to tell if she’s lying.

She leaves, and he feels lonelier than ever.

He starts planning his escape when she doesn’t come back.

He earned this life, his life, and he’s not wasting any more of it in here.

ETA: You can find four more drabbles in this universe here.

Current Mood: creative
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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

dime-for-12.livejournal.com

Wow. I absolutely adore your writing, and this is just another masterful piece!

It's amazing how you can set up a scene and a mood with just a few words. In places, the fic is saturated with this quiet, distant desperation, and I caught myself reading a bit faster in reponse (my breath even quickened, I was so caught up in it).

Very, very nice work!

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Fic: WC, "Self-Portrait, In Skin" (FTM!Neal)

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