Work Text:
There are few better places to be an art lover than Paris, Neal thinks. A studio apartment on a sunny afternoon, windows opened wide and linen curtains blowing in the wind, is as picturesque as it could be. His walls are all but plastered with paintings, studies and sketches, near-perfect imitations of the masters. He’s visited every art gallery he can reach by foot, train, boat, or plane — some for work, to offer services as a security consultant, and some just to visit, to revel in the history of beauty and creation. From each trip he’s brought back something, a notebook full of sketched studies, a painting from those places permissive enough to let him in with an easel and brushes.
To date, he is the only person to have set foot in this apartment since he moved in, the space all his own. Neal isn’t a person who does well with loneliness, honestly. He develops infatuations frequently, lets those infatuations turn to adoration and love far too quickly, and the number of times that it’s broken his heart hasn’t ever broken him of the habit. It’s different this time, though.
Neal had spent the last six years of his life in a prison of some variety or another, at first very literally, and then trapped in the agonizing liminal space where he alternately adored his captors and flailed frantically against the teeth of the trap closing around him. He loved New York, he loved the people he left behind. There had still been no other choice but to go.
An easel stands in the cleared center of the room, shining white and empty: a possibility, a challenge, an impossibility. He’d been circling it, staring at it, contemplating it, for far too long. Days. Maybe even a week. It wouldn’t normally be so difficult, he creates art almost as a passive consequence of being alive, but once, just once, he wants to make something that is his. His father, in the few sun-drenched days when they had been something like father and son, had asked him why he had no original works, and Neal hadn’t had a good answer for him, other than that an artist has to know who they are to create. There’s nothing in Neal Caffrey, nothing at the heart of him. Nothing that can produce the kind of artwork that’s really worth creating, the kind that gleams with beauty and purpose and perspective.
The truth of the matter is that Neal Caffrey is a forgery, the greatest con he ever pulled. A con he’s so deep into he doesn’t know how to extricate himself. Neal had grown up trying to be the father he lost, trying to fill the gaping hole in their family, the one that his mother filled with alcohol and pills and late nights out. Always trying to excel a little better, to shine a little brighter, loud and happy and charming, brilliant and high-achieving, all in the hopes that she’d look at him, that he’d finally be enough to fill in the loss they both felt so keenly. And then he’d found out at 18 that the man he’d modeled himself after was a fiction, a fantasy constructed to protect him from a crueler world. His father was a murderer, and his name wasn’t even his name. Suddenly, the fact that he had never quite been able to fill the empty space left in his life made perfect sense. He’d been set up to fail from the start, a playing piece in a game he didn’t even know was being played. All he’d ever wanted was to be his father, and he could no longer even picture the shape of his father, the hollow outline he had tried so hard to grow into. The future he thought he’d built himself for had gone up in smoke that night, sitting at Ellen’s dining room table. Everything he thought he was had been immaterial, a lovely facade over a rotting foundation, and when it was gone, he had nothing left to stay for.
Danny Brooks had died that night, and Neal Caffrey had come into being. A picture-perfect charmer, expert at everything he tried, never unsure, never faltering. A marble statue, a work of art, sanded smooth and flawless. Neal had borrowed bits and pieces of the men he admired; Adler was the first and the worst, the source of Neal’s tastes for tailoring and the classics, but he was far from the last. There was also Mozzie’s know-how and wariness, Keller’s dogged determination and efficiency. Any time someone had something he lacked, Neal would simply grow to imitate whatever it was. Neal Caffrey was a master study of the men in his life who excelled. A forgery of the highest degree. The Vitruvian Man, David cast in gleaming marble, Neal’s first and only masterpiece.
Michelangelo’s David is a masterpiece of technique and pose, considered one of the grandest achievements in marble of the Renaissance. It’s beautiful, captivating, but if one looks closely, it becomes clear that for all his beauty, the representation of David is not an actual man. He’s constructed out of proportion, hands and head too large, arms too long, made as such to look most beautiful viewed from a distance. When viewed from the ground, gazing up at the pedestal, David appears perfect. Divine. It’s only when you come closer that the flaws become clear. Not even flaws, simply the quirks of something created in the shape of a man, to be beautiful, but not real.
Neal Caffrey is something beautiful, and not real. He creates himself to most please the people around him, the people he loves and wants to love him back. As it turns out, the people he loves all wanted something different to love. For Mozzie he was a slick, ever-adaptable face man and source of impeccable forgeries, a steadfast friend, always ready to make the next impossible job possible. For Peter (and wasn’t it a surprise, to learn just how much he loves Peter), he had tried to force himself into the shape of an honorable partner, someone honest and kind and good, but still with enough criminality to be useful on cases. June dreamed up something like a surrogate son, the shadow of her late husband animated; El asked for an eye for art and a willing ear, and the flexibility to do anything for her husband, legality be damned. The longer he stayed there in New York, forming connections, finding companions, loving and loving and loving , the more different directions he was yanked in.
It was so easy, before he wanted to be good. Before he wanted Peter to look at him with something other than suspicion. Sometimes Peter had. Sometimes he looked at Neal with pride and joy and affection, everything he could ever have wanted, but Neal couldn’t help but feel like Peter was looking right through him, looking at some funhouse-mirror version of Neal that he could convince himself to care about, because it never seemed to last. The instant any hint of Neal’s life before prison came to light, any reminder of his friendships with criminals, his thefts and art and achievements, and the mistrust would return. Peter asked him to be good, to be honest, to help him solve cases with all of the skills that a man who had lived his life could acquire, and then, in the end, Peter would remember exactly who Neal was, and why he could help. Neal could either be good, or he could be honest.
To betray one or the other, or to betray himself: a catch-22 in its cruelest form.
That’s why his only option had been to die. To disappear, to kill every version of him that was crumbling under its own weight. He needed reinvention. A blank canvas, an opportunity to be himself, free of tethers, free of the choice between captivity and tearing himself to shreds breaking free. He can be someone, now. If only he knew who that was.
The blank canvas haunts him for a long, long time after he sets it up. It gets moved around, placed off to the side when he has a new study to work on. Turned to face the wall, when its glaring emptiness is a little too much to think about. He doesn’t touch it, can’t seem to make himself, and a month in, Neal starts to wonder if even trying is just an exercise in self-punishment. In the end, he doesn’t start with the canvas. He starts with an untouched notebook of thick, creamy paper, and a few glasses of nice Bordeaux.
Neal’s not often a maudlin drinker, but sitting alone at one’s own dinner table with a bottle and a single glass, refilled a few too many times, does start to ache after too many months. He knows the names of every employee at his favored coffee shop, he’s all but memorized the docent rotation in his favorite museum, his conversational French is the best it’s ever been. They all smile, they greet him as Victor Moreau, as charmed as anyone else he’s ever smiled at, and none of it does anything other than cast his solitary existence into stark relief. Sitting alone with a glass of wine only reminds him of when he had someone to share it with. Mozzie, sitting at his dinner table, draining his collection gleefully and explaining whatever contraption it is he’s come up with this time. El, leaning over the kitchen island in the Burke house to refill his glass, already asking him if it’s good enough for her next event. Peter, looking at him with pride over a completed case. Peter, with a case of beer, watching Neal slowly drain a bottle of screw-top wine and spill more truths in one sitting than he ever had before in his life, offering it up like an arterial flow from an open wound, the only thing he had to give. He tips the dark liquid to the left, then to the right, and thinks about the past, and thinks about doors he can no longer step through.
He can’t go back. He can’t be the man he was, he can’t be everything that they asked of him. He can’t bear the weight of the falsehoods and contradictions, and it’s been long enough that he understands that burden for the cruelty it was. But— But the love was there. There’s no harm in remembering the love that was there.
He sits down, halfway to drunk and still drinking, and collects his charcoals from where they lay scattered, the empty notebook an unusual sort of lure, and he begins to draw. The lines are imperfect, the composition clumsy, the style amateur, but the sketch pours out of him so easily, something unstoppering inside of him, just a little. Twenty minutes later, he sits in possession of a sketch of Mozzie, leaning over June’s table in a familiar pose, gesticulating with the last third of a glass of wine. Company, he thinks wryly.
After that, it comes a little easier. He draws portraits, always from memory, always loose in their lines and just a little clumsy, a little bit hazy. It’s hard, sometimes. He’s a forger, far more than he is an artist, and the thing about forgery is that you already know that what you’re making is beautiful. It already has value, it’s already been seen and assessed and judged valuable, judged worth the effort to make, to look at. Original art comes with no such guarantee. A Degas will always be seen as beautiful. Millions of people visit Michelangelo’s David every day, to bask in the accomplishment and beauty and polish. Neal’s silly, private little portraits, created most often when he’s halfway to drunk and far more sad than anything else, don’t come with the same guarantee.
He fills the notebook. The people he loves look back at him from the pages, a poor replacement for their voices and smiles. Mozzie and his wine glasses and trinkets first, then June singing under a spotlight. Peter leaning over a spread of files, El distracted at a gallery opening. The two of them curled on a couch with Satchmo by their feet. Sara and Jones and Diana and Alex all feature, crowding in, keeping each other company between the pages. He starts with the ones who are easiest to love, but Neal’s loved a lot in his life, much of it ill-advised, and soon enough more faces join the ranks in his sketchbook. Keller, half-smiling at him over a chessboard. Adler, adjusting his cufflinks. James Bennett, half-turned away from him. Kate. Kate and a bottle of Bordeaux that only he knows is filled with box wine. Kate with an emerald heavy on her ring finger.
He doesn’t frame the portraits, keeps them sequestered away, preserved carefully in sketchbooks and tucked out of sight, but he keeps making them. He fills one notebook and then another, the volumes piling up as the months go on. One evening he fills in the last page of his most recent sketchbook, and even though he’s dragging with weariness, his hands still itch with restless energy.
Neal finds himself regarding that blank canvas again. Sketches are all well and good, but painting is his truest love. Painting feels so much more real than his easily hidden, often-smudged charcoal sketches. Neal Caffrey was fake, a pastiche done up in marble and paint and smiles, but the love was real. So Neal makes himself a strong cup of coffee, and he pulls out his oil paints.
The next morning, he buys two bottles of wine. One is shipped to New York, and that evening he pops open the cork on the second, a toast to things to come.