But meanwhile, back to the songfic prompts. Here's for ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kivrin, who wanted a Peter-centric "White Collar" thing, and happened to pick song #11, which was Florence + The Machine, Never Let Me Go, which struck me immediately as one of the least Peter Burke-like songs I could think of. I did manage to work out how to approach the challenge - I mean, all the water imagery made it rather obvious, really, but it did turn out as Peter thinking about Neal.
Anyway. *flails* Spoilers for early part of current season.
*
Peter Burke is not an imaginative man.
Which doesn't mean he has no imagination. He's able to liberate his mind from the expected and the run-of-the-mill for professional purposes; he wouldn't be good at his work if he couldn't spy out of the corners of his eyes and make solid the phantoms glimpsed there, every now and then. He's curious, and he occasionally achieves whimsy. It's perhaps better to say that he's not a fanciful man, or that he doesn't seek out illusion for its own sake. And that one thing he's learned, in his years doing an often dangerous job, is that you try not to dwell on what may happen, what might have happened; that to do so is to risk both lives and sanity.
Of course there are exceptions (El's kidnapping, for example, where all his training couldn't stop his brain running in the horror-house hamster wheel of imagined pain and fear and violation; funny how his concurrent faith in her strength and competence failed to predict the ordeal's actual outcome). And it's not only the more, um, nonprofessional aspects of the Cape Verde escapade that prompt repeated worries about Neal's welfare.
What he can't understand is why he keeps seeing Neal drowning. It starts as they're flying away, and Peter looks down to watch the pale aquamarine blue surrounding the island as it gives way quickly to the cobalt ocean depths, and suddenly his breath is coming shallow and fast and he presses his forehead to the cold window of the plane and feels sick. And then the panic is past: just a delayed reaction to the tension plus uncertainty about its resolution, nothing he hasn't felt before after an op. But then another wave hits him, and he goes under. Or no. He watches Neal go under. Falling from a yacht riddled with bullet wounds; pushed out of a plane in a last bit of trickery; walking into the sea. The waves breaking over the dark head; the body sinking, helpless, unresisting, tossed by the uncaring water's drift and sway.
Fight; swim, he urges Neal, striking out himself, a mental battling crawl. Don't give up. And there's a flashing smile and… Not giving up. Just giving in. No come on in, the water's fine and no rescue me. Just the grin and the fatalism and the sense of utter peace he's never known from Neal before, and then he's shocked back into the moment, leaning on the window feeling not a little ridiculous. Because despite having escaped to a scrap of land surrounded by water, despite having attached himself immediately to the most unreliable, most criminal, most wanted man he could manage to home in on, despite having been too proud to call on Peter for help, Neal probably would have managed to survive on his own; he certainly wouldn't have gone down without a fight, and anyway, no matter how suggestive the aquatic atmosphere, drowning had never been his most likely fate. And they fly on, and the plane doesn't fall into the sea, and all of them come home to New York alive.
Then that night Peter dreams Neal under the waves again. Over and over, he sees the body settling into bright sand or vanishing into midnight murk, forever washed with that same horrible aura of deliverance. Not by Peter. From Peter. But I saved you. Didn't I? he calls out, his own lungs filling with water; he's a glass half-full, tipping and spilling from the bar as Mozzie looks on in disapproval, crashing and shattering into Neal's hard silence and stone-like peace, the fragments of imagination flying like mirrors, sharp and fierce, into his heart.
kivrin, who wanted a Peter-centric "White Collar" thing, and happened to pick song #11, which was Florence + The Machine, Never Let Me Go, which struck me immediately as one of the least Peter Burke-like songs I could think of. I did manage to work out how to approach the challenge - I mean, all the water imagery made it rather obvious, really, but it did turn out as Peter thinking about Neal.Anyway. *flails* Spoilers for early part of current season.
*
Peter Burke is not an imaginative man.
Which doesn't mean he has no imagination. He's able to liberate his mind from the expected and the run-of-the-mill for professional purposes; he wouldn't be good at his work if he couldn't spy out of the corners of his eyes and make solid the phantoms glimpsed there, every now and then. He's curious, and he occasionally achieves whimsy. It's perhaps better to say that he's not a fanciful man, or that he doesn't seek out illusion for its own sake. And that one thing he's learned, in his years doing an often dangerous job, is that you try not to dwell on what may happen, what might have happened; that to do so is to risk both lives and sanity.
Of course there are exceptions (El's kidnapping, for example, where all his training couldn't stop his brain running in the horror-house hamster wheel of imagined pain and fear and violation; funny how his concurrent faith in her strength and competence failed to predict the ordeal's actual outcome). And it's not only the more, um, nonprofessional aspects of the Cape Verde escapade that prompt repeated worries about Neal's welfare.
What he can't understand is why he keeps seeing Neal drowning. It starts as they're flying away, and Peter looks down to watch the pale aquamarine blue surrounding the island as it gives way quickly to the cobalt ocean depths, and suddenly his breath is coming shallow and fast and he presses his forehead to the cold window of the plane and feels sick. And then the panic is past: just a delayed reaction to the tension plus uncertainty about its resolution, nothing he hasn't felt before after an op. But then another wave hits him, and he goes under. Or no. He watches Neal go under. Falling from a yacht riddled with bullet wounds; pushed out of a plane in a last bit of trickery; walking into the sea. The waves breaking over the dark head; the body sinking, helpless, unresisting, tossed by the uncaring water's drift and sway.
Fight; swim, he urges Neal, striking out himself, a mental battling crawl. Don't give up. And there's a flashing smile and… Not giving up. Just giving in. No come on in, the water's fine and no rescue me. Just the grin and the fatalism and the sense of utter peace he's never known from Neal before, and then he's shocked back into the moment, leaning on the window feeling not a little ridiculous. Because despite having escaped to a scrap of land surrounded by water, despite having attached himself immediately to the most unreliable, most criminal, most wanted man he could manage to home in on, despite having been too proud to call on Peter for help, Neal probably would have managed to survive on his own; he certainly wouldn't have gone down without a fight, and anyway, no matter how suggestive the aquatic atmosphere, drowning had never been his most likely fate. And they fly on, and the plane doesn't fall into the sea, and all of them come home to New York alive.
Then that night Peter dreams Neal under the waves again. Over and over, he sees the body settling into bright sand or vanishing into midnight murk, forever washed with that same horrible aura of deliverance. Not by Peter. From Peter. But I saved you. Didn't I? he calls out, his own lungs filling with water; he's a glass half-full, tipping and spilling from the bar as Mozzie looks on in disapproval, crashing and shattering into Neal's hard silence and stone-like peace, the fragments of imagination flying like mirrors, sharp and fierce, into his heart.
