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[abrightboy]

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[abrightboy]

“What do you want to do about those feelings?” Malcolm asks.

[conning]

“Nothing.” Not totally true. The sickly pressure of emotions makes Neal’s scalp prickle, but it’s not totally unpleasant. It’s like eating too much candy, almost—he’s unsatisfied but craving the flavor even with the nausea underneath.

Neal reaches for Malcolm’s hand, lacing their fingers together. “I want to make people feel more. But none of the emotions are good ones.”

[abrightboy]

“That impulse is the voice,” Malcolm tells him.

[conning]

“It would be nice if it was an actual voice.”

He’d be able to ignore it so much more comfortably.

[abrightboy]

“Sometimes it might be. I can even see him sometimes. But sometimes I just feel the… the pull,” Malcolm explains.

[conning]

“Okay I kind of hope it’s not an actual voice ever.” The thought makes his skin crawl on slightly closer examination. “And I… hate being able to feel that you’re upset like this. I hate that it doesn’t feel completely awful.”

[abrightboy]

“I’m upset by a lot of things. Is…” He doesn’t even want to ask the question; it makes his stomach knot up. “Is being around me going to be too difficult?”

[conning]

“What? No. Of course not.” He presses his hands to Malcolm’s face. “Of course not.”

He feels it acutely, the wash of fear that precedes the question. It’s a particular flavor, particular type. It’s exactly what he needs.

No, it’s exactly what that thing wants. Neal squeezes his eyes shut, breathing deeply. “I am not leaving you. Not now. Not ever.”

[abrightboy]

Malcolm watches him carefully.

“I can help you,” he promises, that fear subsiding, and it sounds like a vow.

[conning]

It’s a relief to hear it. It feels like Malcolm deserves something in response. And there are some big things sitting between them right now.

“The woman you met… the women. Rachel and Rebecca. She was both, when I knew her. I met Rebecca. I met the woman she designed for me to fall in love with, and I did. God, I did.”

He bites his lip, takes a deep breath. “She wanted me to find something for her. She wanted to use our relationship to get close to me, to make sure the blackmail she had someone else using against me worked. That I was toeing the line. But she fell in love with me, too. I think. I don’t know. She said she did. It all came out. I helped the FBI catch her.”

[abrightboy]

“But you still want her fantasy persona to be real,” Malcolm tells him. “You still want… that… ideal person.” Which definitely does not describe him.

[conning]

“It’s not that simple.” He draws Malcolm down next to him on the bed. Touches his face, his cheek, trails a hand down to his neck, his bare shoulder. Cementing the realness of it. Reassuring himself through the contact. “She was real. I thought she was real. Even at the end, when I looked at her, I saw the woman I fell for. I couldn’t…”

He swallows a knot in his throat. “I got conned. That’s all.”

[abrightboy]

The touch is reassuring for Malcolm too.

“But you know better now.”

He can’t really condemn, though. He forgave in that situation, though Eve wasn’t trying to murder him or anyone else.

[conning]

“She wanted to be Rebecca.” He can’t explain it in a way that makes sense. “By the end, she wanted… She was going to give it all up, stay the person she made up, but we’d already found out it was a lie.”

He lets out a long, heavy breath. “She said she loved me. Everyone said she loved me.”

[abrightboy]

“You were a con artist. If that’s true, does it make it better or worse? Or does it even matter?” Malcolm asks.

[conning]

“I don’t know, Malcolm,” Neal admits quietly. “I have no idea. I just know what happened, and that I was supposed to get released for helping to catch her, and then the FBI went back on it, she died, and I was neck-deep in another investigation that I went into cover on so far I had to fake my own death to get out of it. That’s why I’m in Paris, why I was in Paris. No one who was part of my life in New York even knows I’m alive.”

[abrightboy]

“Is it mean if I say that sounds better for you?” Malcolm asks.

[conning]

Neal gives him a blank look. “Better how?”

[abrightboy]

“Being away from the lies and the people who told them to you,” Malcolm says softly.

[conning]

He runs his hand down Malcolm’s arm until he can lace their fingers together. “Rebecca was long gone by the time I left New York.”

[abrightboy]

“You said the FBI was supposed to release you after that case but they went back on it,” Malcolm points out.

[conning]

Neal lets out a breathy laugh at his own omission of that from consideration. "It wasn't the first time. I guess I didn't count them."

[abrightboy]

"Sounds like you should count them more than once," Malcolm points out.

[conning]

Neal shrugs. "They're the FBI."

He's pretty sure he doesn't have to explain that to Malcolm--Neal has always had a very loose degree of concern when it comes to the people who lie to him and the ones who tell him the truth. He's forgiving of it, for the most part. And with some people--some groups--the lie is too expected to be a factor.

That's what he's told himself for the past year, anyway. The past two. It's not a betrayal if you were expecting it. It's how he's hidden that particular injury from himself.

[abrightboy]

"That should hold them to a higher standard, not a lower one," Malcolm tells him.