Friday: Free for All

[havenward.livejournal.com]

Happy weekend everyone! Today is Friday, which makes it the Free For All. All fandoms, pairings and prompts will be accepted.

Just please remember to follow our rules!

No more than 5 prompts in a row, no more than 3 per fandom. If someone answers a prompt, you may prompt again.

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Green Lantern, Hal, well aren't you just mister creative pants

Star Wars/Green Lantern, author's choices, from one set of galactic knights to another

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[ammcj062.livejournal.com]

White Collar, Peter, Mozzie is the one who is now working for the FBI after getting caught; Neal is his free-range cohort in crime.

Filled

[ammcj062.livejournal.com]

Peter knew what he was getting when he contracted Mozzie (real name: unknown and Peter sure as hell isn’t calling him the name he put on his booking forms) from jail. His paranoia made him predictable, and his love of good wine made him buyable. Peter knew he could handle Mozzie easily until his sentence ran out, and also knew any irritation would be worth the ability to mine the infamous Dentist for his extensive knowledge of the East Coast underworld.

What he hadn’t been expecting was Mozzie’s cohort in crime that materialized a month after Mozzie made his deal.

(Well, the first time Peter sees him is a month after Mozzie’s deal. Peter has always wondered at how quickly Mozzie had moved in with June, the nice rich old lady with a big empty house within Mozzie’s radius who just happened to be willing to lease to a felon. He has his suspicions.)

Where Mozzie is pale and squat and slightly rotund from his prison years, his friend is all lean limbs and sun-kissed skin, smiling and strutting around in suits too expensive to have been paid for any way but illegally. Moz calls him “Neal,” and his driver’s license says “Caffrey,” but Peter doubts if either name is real.

At the beginning, Neal is always leaving when Peter comes to check in on Mozzie, tipping his hat down over his eyes so the only thing Peter can see is his ironic tilted smile. He thinks that means ‘help’ is code for ‘Caffrey’ when Mozzie call in a favor or uses his extracurricular talents for whatever job they’re working; he knows that means he will have to investigate further into this Neal character.

The sundry items that go missing throughout the course of the investigations Mozzie gets ‘help’ on are too many to be coincidence. It’s always on the periphery, but Peter is good at putting together patterns.

Peter runs ‘Neal’ and ‘Caffrey’ through the database of unsolved frauds, and for good measure puts in the keywords ‘handsome,’ ‘charming,’ and ‘suave.’ He doesn’t get anything concrete in return: only a couple vaguely written reports, crimes with no evidence and no cause for arrest. He calls a couple witnesses whose contact information he can access, but it goes nowhere. Peter doesn’t even have a photo of Neal for them to identify.

It takes a couple months, but Peter finally engineers enough polite conversations, drops enough hints to Mozzie, and exaggerates a enough sticky situations that he is finally able to talk to Neal for a more extended period of time. It’s just the two of them in Mozzie’s apartment, the felon himself downstairs talking to June.

He’s dressed as immaculately as ever, suit pressed and hair coiffed, one leg sprawled open. Peter tries to dig for information, but it all slides off of Caffrey’s pearly white smile. He won’t say where he’s from. He won’t say where he’s been. He won’t say whose his favorite baseball team.

He does ask about Peter’s wedding ring, and before Peter knows it he’s talking about he and El met. It’s just so easy to answer, the story flowing naturally as Neal smiles engagingly and asks clarifying details. Mozzie comes back at some point and just sits there with a glass of wine, watching the two of them talk.

It isn’t until he’s gotten up to their first kiss that Peter finally realizes what’s happening. He snaps his mouth shut with a scowl and Mozzie laughs proudly. “Don’t worry, Suit. He does that to everyone.”

Peter wonders if Neal is supposed to be Mozzie 2.0: smarter, faster, invisible to law enforcement. He’s scared Neal is a whole new monster.