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The first time Neal takes Peter's wallet goes way back before Peter even knew him beyond a name and a picture in a file he'd been assigned to. He hadn't caught Neal, the young guy with a list of suspected forgeries and thefts and aliases pages long, and he'd gone home to El both disheartened and determined.
They had ordered takeout, Peter too tired to help in the kitchen and Elizabeth wanting to be around to just rub his neck, tell him he'd catch this Neal guy next time.
When Peter went to pay the delivery guy, he'd folded open his wallet and nestled in-between 20s was a little note on a piece of torn paper.
'Better luck next time!' it said, 'You look smarter than the rest. - NC'
Peter had counted the money in his wallet ten times over and canceled his credit cards and froze his bank accounts, but nothing was touched.
--
It became a thing, then; Peter would find little notes tucked into his wallet every time he got close enough to catching the illustrious Neal Caffrey, always signed with his initials, always in the same handwriting.
Usually they were about the day, or Peter's clothes, That tie is the best one yet, Peter, the color is much nicer than the red or I hate when it rains in the city, everyone is in such a hurry, including you. If you'd only slowed down a bit.
It's all like a one-sided conversation that Peter feels a part of, but doesn't tell anyone about. He knows that based on the paper and where it's from, the notes might add to the case, but he never submits them as evidence. He tells himself it's because it would be embarrassing to admit that Neal keeps coming within an arms reach of him every time they are on his trail, staying for long enough to write a note and stick it in Peter's wallet without him noticing.
Mostly, though, it's because Peter enjoys the notes a little. He always wants to know what Neal has to say, what he's going to comment on. Twice, the notes have sketches on them -- one of Peter sitting at a cafe table, hands around a cup of coffee, looking pensive and the other of a nondescript table with a hat, sketchbook, and an apple on it.
El, who knew about the notes and sometimes tried to make stories out of them when they were both lying in bed awake late at night, had put those two sketches in small frames in their room, next to the closet door.
("As a reminder," she had said when she nailed them up, and Peter wasn't sure what they were supposed to remind him of, exactly, but he liked to look at them in the morning, anyway.)
--
The notes get progressively further apart once Peter and the team start getting more and more leads on Neal.
Peter has the last note from that period in his wallet to this day, in it's neat and slanty handwriting, this one without initials. 'I'll miss this' it says, on a piece of torn yellow legal pad paper. When Peter first read it, sitting slouched on his couch, the paperwork to process Neal through the legal system the next day spread out on the couch before him, he'd read it as 'I'll miss you' instead and irrationally thought, yeah, me too.
Neal had looked at him, their first time face to face when Peter had turned him around after getting cuffs on him.
"Hey," Neal had said, casually, even though his face was tired and his eyes were hard, "It's nice to finally meet you."
The team had been watching them; someone had laughed -- others were talking into their FBI-issued cells and radios, 'we got him, we got him' -- so Peter had just nodded.
"Yeah," he had said, in absence of being able to say anything else.
El framed that note, too, because even though she usually knew, this time she didn't, and Peter took it down and stuck it in the sock drawer the next day.
--
When Neal joined the team under his custody, Peter felt out of his game for the first week. He'd spent the years chasing Neal feeling like they'd built up some weird one-sided relationship on both their parts, and then the years Neal was in jail Peter had spent deconstructing that relationship and pretending he didn't wish he still had someone as interesting as Neal to chase after, to think about all the time.
On their second case, Peter came home for lunch and El ordered from the new Thai place a few blocks away, so Peter didn't have to get up from being a deadweight on the couch.
("What's with you?" El asked when he had come in the door, watching Peter sink right down into the cushions. She'd massaged his neck, thumbs digging in and he'd let it relax him.
"Not sleeping well," he'd said, which was true, and she'd kissed his forehead and gone for the delivery boy with his wallet when the food came to the door.)
El comes back with the bags of hot food, a little bit of oil staining the bottom, and sets them on the coffee table. Instead of taking the food out, she hands Peter his wallet back with a smile on her face.
"Open it," she says, sitting straight against the couch pillows.
Peter raises an eyebrow at her, but opens his wallet anyway. A little white piece of folded paper slips out, and Peter unfolds it slowly to find the FBI letterhead at the top.
'Fullcircle' it says, and, 'Your tie matched Elizabeth's dress today, did she dress you? It's cute.
Peter stares at it for a second, the handwriting the same as it was years ago. He likes the way Neal writes Elizabeth's name, the letters flowing like he'd taken care writing them.
El wraps an arm around him and squeezes, pressing a smile into his neck. "I like him," she says, softly, "still do."
Peter rolls his eyes and leans in to kiss her cheek, "I know," he says, but doesn't think about what it means.
"Can we frame it?" El asks, taking the note and smoothing out the edges with careful fingers.
Peter hums, not agreeing or disagreeing, and reaches for the food, suddenly hungry and not tired at all.
--
Neal starts up his notes again, little things not only in Peter's wallet, but in his pockets and the holster of his gun and the drawers of his desk, tucked into the lid of his coffee. Once, in his sock -- while he's wearing it -- and Peter really has no idea how Neal managed that, and doesn't actually want to know, for the sake of his own sanity.
Peter wishes he was as good as Neal at pickpocketing, that he could maybe leave some sneaky notes in inventive places. He wouldn't know what to write -- he doesn't write back to Neal even now, although he's looked up from reading a note to find Neal staring at him intently, all bright eyed and smiling with just one side of his lip curled up.
He saves the new notes in a box on the top of his and El's closet, where he'd kept the originals and tried not to dwell on them. He likes the way the bits of paper rustle with fullness when he takes the box down to add another note, all mixed up like Peter could reach in and pick one and not know what it was going to be, but still know exactly when he got it.
He gets the vague feeling that Neal knows he keeps them, but it's not until a night, months into Neal's working with him, when Neal is having dinner with them, that he knows for sure. El put out homemade mac and cheese and a platter with cheeses and their favorite vintage wine, like it was a special dinner, even though Neal had had lunch with them plenty of times.
Peter's been trying -- in between work and sleep and everything his day entails -- to renovate the downstairs bathroom. El had picked out some really nice new marble slabs after a successful party and Peter had wanted to put them in without a contractor, but it's kept their bathroom out of order for going on two weeks now.
"Where is the --" Neal asks, halfway through dinner, waving vaguely up at the ceiling.
El, somehow catching on quicker than Peter, sets down her fork with a grin. "Upstairs, second door to the right," she says.
Peter feels like Neal probably has their floorplan memorized, but finds himself amused by Neal's asking, anyway. Neal's eyes are bright when he gets up, like he's up to something, and Peter just tries to figure out the right way to swallow what's on his fork while he watches Neal walk out of the dining room.
"What?" El asks, "you've got that look."
"What look?" Peter asks, turning his head.
El laughs, takes a sip from her wine that empties her glass. "That was either your annoyed look or the look you get when you're checking out my ass in a dress," she says, grinning quick.
Peter opens his mouth and then closes it and shrugs. She knows him, and Peter can't be bothered with an excuse, too warm from the dinner and the atmosphere. El's eyes crinkle at the corners in amusement.
Neal comes down a few minutes later, a shoebox tucked under his arm.
"Snoop," El accuses, light and laughing, mouth still set in a grin from before.
Neal shrugs nonchalantly, agreeing. "Always," he says, nodding at her. He sets the box on the table, sitting down and facing Peter.
"I didn't know you kept them all," he says after a pause, voice less teasing than Peter expects. "I knew about the ones on the wall, the sketches, and the one in your sock drawer, but. Not about them all."
"Well," Peter starts, but finds he doesn't know how to address the box of notes.
Neal smiles at him, soft with his head down. He pulls a note from the box while El gets up and pours them all more wine, topping the glasses to the rim.
"'How do you like your eggs?'," Neal reads from the note he picks, a slightly torn note from a hotel with a Spanish letterhead, "'We would have so much to discuss over breakfast.'"
(Peter got used to the pacing of Neal's voice in his notes, before he knew him, but he writes differently than he speaks. Sometimes Peter picks up the differences, or the similarities, and it makes him think about too much, about all the intricacies of their relationship together throughout the years.)
Neal pauses and smiles, first down at the note and then up at Peter. "I never knew what to write," he says, "but once I started I kept doing it. Where was this one from?"
"Really?" Peter asks, surprised -- he always thought the notes were thought out, meant to mean something he couldn't figure out. When he'd looked back on them while Neal was in jail he thought maybe they'd just been on a whim, but never thought Neal would've done something so un-calculated. But, that was back then.
Neal nods, and as much as he can, he almost looks a little unsettled.
"That one was -- Barcelona," Peter says, feeling himself smile at the memory, the rain in the streets, rivulets of it running down cobble stone as he'd watched someone in a white shirt, sticky against their skin with the rain, run down the street. He'd thought it could have been Neal, and didn't bother running after him to check, a new note tucked between his credit cards in his wallet.
"It was Barcelona," Neal agrees, face lighting up, "I ran right past you in the rain and you didn't run after me."
Peter closes his eyes briefly, laughing. "So it was you," he says.
Neal laughs, too. El comes around and wraps her arms around Peter's neck from behind his chair, resting her head on his shoulder.
"If you'd known it really was me --" Neal starts, but trails off.
"I --" Peter hesitates. "Right then? I probably would've let you run," he says, honestly.
Neal grins again, and El leans down to press a kiss below Peter's ear before she takes his plate, walking around to take Neal's plate too and squeezing his shoulder before she does, hand lingering just a second.
Neal stands and stretches, tucking the box under his arm. "Have anything to do tonight, Burke?" he asks, rolling up his white sleeves in a few simple motions. He extends a hand out to Peter and Peter takes it, warm and soft, letting Neal pull him up on his feet.
"Nothing on the books," Peter says, and Neal doesn't let his hand go, pulls him closer and then walks him out to the living room. They pass the kitchen, where Peter catches El's eyes and lets her grin at him, at where Neal is walking him forward, fingers tight around his own.
--
They go through all the notes, remembering where they are from, Neal adding his insight into what he was doing at the time, laughing about a street vendor in New York and falling down some steps in San Francisco in front of Peter, how he thought about that being be the stupidest way for Peter to have caught him.
They draw alternately, and Peter gets the last note. It's written on a napkin that Peter takes a moment to place -- the floral patterned ones they'd set out with dinner.
He looks up at Neal before he unfolds the napkin, and Neal has his face carefully blank.
'The dinner was excellent,' the note reads at the top. 'You had cheese on your bottom lip and I couldn't stop staring' -- the last few words are spaced apart like Neal wrote them in a hurry, or didn't know what he was writing.
"Peter," Neal says, when Peter carefully folds the note and puts it back in the box.
Peter looks up at him, subconsciously running his tongue over his own bottom lip.
"Peter," Neal says again, this time lower. Peter can see El sleepily watching them from her chair, "Peter, that meant kiss me," Neal says.
"Kiss him," El agrees, voice low and tired, smiling slow.
"Please?" Peter teases, low, a little like his breath is stuck in his chest, like he felt the first time El let him wrap his hands in her hair and pull her close.
"Please," Neal agrees, and they meet halfway across the box of notes so that they can kiss, dry and quiet and both meeting with a smile, Neal breathing out "Finally," into Peter's parted lips.