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Sometimes Neal thought about everything that had happened and just sobbed for hours—at first, silently, only under cover of the dark of midnight, because prison was not a safe place to mourn; then, back under Peter's protection, once again the beneficiary of June’s boundless hospitality and generosity, in waves of uncontrollable, undignified weeping—until his body had no tears left to shed, and his heart felt like stone in his chest.
Sometimes it felt like a black ball of hurt, feeding off him, almost tangible, like he would look to the side to find the growing abyss eating the world in which he was forced to still reside and be left to wonder how no one else seemed to see it, how everyone else could walk through it, unharmed, when it was consuming the very ground they were all walking on, when every time it touched him, it shot a searing pang from his chest, directly through his heart, down to his gut.
Sometimes he tried to think about everything that had happened and found he almost couldn't—like he could merely think about thinking about the memories, or could only see their shadow, or like he could see them through a window in his brain but his mind kept a firm barrier between him and them, refusing to let him touch, refusing to let him feel. He couldn't be certain he even had a chest in these moments, uncertain if he was anything but a floating, drifting wisp of what was once a man.
Sometimes—most times—he successfully thought about everything that happened but still couldn't feel anything, positive his chest was hollow as could be, yet his blood somehow kept pumping anyway. He would focus inward, searching for any evidence of the heart that was once there, the fiery passion that once drove him, and every time, all he would find was a freezing cavern. He imagined if he dropped dead, the medical examiner would open him up to find nothing, the truest form of a chest cavity, and wonder why they had been asked to waste their time performing an autopsy on a puppet when there were surely deaths of real humans to investigate.
Sometimes, the knowledge that he wouldn't simply drop dead was enough alone to bring him to tears.
He knew that in theory, he could die at any time. Even if he weren't Neal Caffrey, criminal and FBI informant, even if he didn't face heightened danger on a regular basis, a freak accident could befall him in an instant, or his body could simply betray him. But if he were honest with himself, he knew that deep down within him rested the belief that at the end of the day, he would be fine—he would not get cancer, he would not get shot, he would not get hit by a car or stabbed in an alley or caught in a fire or anything—at least, until a few more decades passed. And that was more terrifying than anything any enemies of his or the FBI could throw at him.
He knew, also, that one day he would die, and sometimes, that—the knowledge that suffering was invariably terminable—was the only thing making it bearable to keep living.
As much comfort as he found in the fact that it must end eventually, he recognized that it was just another installment in the long saga of him running—running away from his problems, and toward people.
For years, he tried desperately clinging to Kate, doing everything to win her attention and affection, unwilling to let go, and now he'd lost her anyway. His only hope was to be reunited in death, but even that prospect offered little light; if there was, in fact, an afterlife—and at his core, he didn’t think he believed there was, or else he wouldn't view death as an escape—either she was in heaven, in which case he would truly never see her again, or they were both in hell, in which case Neal was responsible for the eternal damnation of the woman he loved more than anything.
The only way to know was to finally take that step.
Unfortunately, leaving now would mean leaving Mozzie, and Peter, and El, and June, and though he knew they would get over it soon enough, and it would free Mozzie and Peter to live their lives without him dragging them down, could he really be so selfish as to force them to go through even a fraction of what he was experiencing now?
Except…that wasn't the reason he couldn't bring himself to do it, was it? No, the truth was, he was just afraid. Afraid of the process of dying, afraid of the unknown, afraid of ceasing to exist, afraid of existing forever, afraid of the possibility of failing and having to face the consequences afterwards, afraid of the possibility of succeeding and facing those consequences. If he truly believed in hell, death wouldn't call to him as it did, but everlasting fire and brimstone was still quite the gamble.
It was pathetic. He wanted to die to run from his problems in life, and he kept living to run from the problem of dying.
Four years in prison, stuck in a literal cage, and he had never felt so trapped as he did now, forced to continue in a world without Kate.
But continue he did.
For the foreseeable future, continue he would.
It was all he could do at the moment.
Eventually, though, it would come to an end—one way or another.