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The passport behind the painting had always been unusable as far as he was concerned.
It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with it. The printing was flawless, the stamps aged just enough, the paper trail stitched together with the kind of patience only Mozzie ever found romantic. Victor Moreau could walk into any city in the world and be welcomed without question. He could rent apartments, open accounts, cross borders with the kind of anonymity Neal had once dreamed of. The name carried the right amount of weight, syllabically. It was cultured without tipping into caricature. It was elegant without being remarkable. It should have fit. Instead, it constricted his range of motion like a too-tight suit coat, like the irremovable government-issued jewelry around his ankle.
When Mozzie whined about another delay of their escape, he blamed it on Sara. He didn’t hesitate when he said it, which almost convinced himself. Sara was a reasonable answer. She was real, present, complicated in a way Mozzie could at least pretend to understand. Mozzie accepted this, albeit exasperatedly, and a murmured comment about attachments and liabilities, but was already filing the explanation away as sufficient. Sara wasn’t a lie, exactly. She had seen the passport, even if he had bluffed his way through her confrontation, and Neal’s feelings for her were real and deep. Sara wasn’t a lie, but she was an incomplete truth. The truth was that Victor Moreau came with a moniker that echoed too loudly in his chest.
Kate Moreau’s death still existed in him as a kind of gravity. It didn’t flare or rage anymore; it simply pressed down, constant and undeniable.
OPR had convinced her that reinvention was a kind of freedom. Here he was, standing over a passport that was trying to convince him of the exact same thing. To wear the same name she bore honestly across continents and years, to let it follow him everywhere like a shadow he’d earned. It would be a karmic twist of fate to be haunted by Kate’s last name forever. To sign it into checks and leases, to hear it spoken politely by strangers who had no idea what it had already cost. Every time Neal imagined it, his chest tightened.
Responsibility was an ugly word, for a man who dressed himself in alledgedlies, but he wore the weight of it anyway. He felt it in the spaces between his thoughts, in the way his mind always circled back to that moment, no matter how far he tried to run from it. Kate hadn’t just died. She had died because he had believed he was smarter than the world. She died because he had loved her enough to drag her into his orbit and was arrogant enough to think he could keep her safe there.
Beneath the guilt, because there was always something beneath it, was a quieter devastation that hurt more to acknowledge. The part of him that still believed in gestures and promises; the part of him that still believed in hopeless romance.
He would never give her his last name.
The possibility had vanished with her, leaving behind a hollow ache that never quite dulled. Neal had loved her with the kind of intensity that made marriage feel inevitable, not symbolic, much to Mozzie’s chagrin. Now, the notion of sharing her last name felt like a betrayal of something sacred and ephemerally unfinished.
The thought lingered restlessly. It would be foolish to think that he could have ever given any woman his last name. The assumption came unbidden, unwelcome. He rolled it over slowly, as if examining a forgery for flaws. His last name. Not an alias. Not a convenient fiction. Something real enough to bind someone else to him in a way he couldn’t undo on a whim.
Beyond the threat that defining anything permanently posed to his vagabond nature, beyond the increasingly hopelessness of fitting long-term romance into his transient fate, there was the small matter of whether or not Neal had a last name to give. The question was impractical and more or less irrelevant, but when staring down his closet full of aliases he wore like Byron’s borrowed suits, Neal wondered if any of them were really him. The problem was that every time Neal tried on a name, he felt the ghost of another one pressing against his ribs.
Danny Brooks, as he had once known himself to be, had been nothing but a blank page and a lesson; sometimes the easiest way to survive was to erase yourself completely. Caffrey was his mother’s name, hastily donned on his 18th birthday after Ellen shattered the carefully curated illusion that he called his childhood. These days, that name Neal Caffrey came with an ankle monitor and strings attached. It came with Jones’ incredulity, Diana’s sharp attention, June’s kindness, Elizabeth’s advocacy, and Sara’s guarded heart. It came with Peter’s distrust and disappointment, and Mozzie’s unrelenting belief that somehow, he could still be the greatest con known to man. Neal Caffrey existed in the open, where consequences could find him. He was young, though, when he adopted his name, and naive to what the world had in store for him, and desperately grasping at any semblance of a real identity he had left. At least Neal Caffrey tethered him to reality. Reality, inconveniently, was that he needed to surrender the name that fit him best.
He wasn’t sure he wanted to run. That realization made his stomach twist. Once, escape had been the goal. Sweet freedom had been defined by distance and anonymity. Now, it tasted bitter. Escape meant leaving conversations unfinished, abandoning the fragile structure he’d built out of honesty and effort. Running felt less like independence and more like confirmation of something he’d been avoiding.
The extremes came easily when he thought about his father. As a child, he’d dreamed of being just like him: brave, honorable. The veracity of the kind of man his father was brought his dreams crashing down around him, and sent Neal hard in the opposite direction, determined to be nothing like James Bennett at all. Now, stranded between those two poles, Neal was forced to confront the possibility that neither had ever been true.
He used to hide in the minutiae. Neal Caffrey, for all his alleged criminal dealings, was non-violent. That line mattered to him; it always would. But the larger picture was harder to ignore. James Bennett had lived under names that weren’t his. So did Neal. Aliases layered on top of pseudonyms until identity became a tool instead of a truth. They both curated personas, believing intelligence made deception acceptable, even artful. They were more alike than Neal was comfortable admitting.
The thought drifted, unsolicited, to his father’s time in witness protection. To the life James Bennett had to abandon, to the name he must have worn like an ill-fitting suit himself. Neal wondered what it had been. Something forgettable, perhaps. Something safe. Or, something stubbornly dignified. Neither Neal nor James would ever be a Bennett again, not really. That door had closed forever, sealed by grief and time.
He stared at the wall where the painting hung, Victor Moreau hidden behind it, flawless and waiting. No alias would absolve him. No name would make Kate’s death weigh less. No reinvention would erase the fact that he still felt responsible for the love he’d inspired, for the risks he’d encouraged, and for the consequences that followed. Neal closed his eyes, breathing through the familiar ache. He swallowed and let the silence stretch.
He turned his attention to the mirror. He was his father’s son whether he denied it or not. James would suit him; the thought cut through the wave of grief. The name settled heavily in his chest, unadorned. James would be an honest inheritance stripped of sentimentality; it wasn’t a legacy to be proud of, but an admittance that he could never fully outrun his blood. He could take his father’s name, but it would still be Kate’s death that followed him out the door. No name could outpace the fact that she had died believing in the man he was still afraid to be.
The name hardly mattered, he settled. No matter what he chose, he would still recognize himself in the act of leaving.