Neal Caffrey || Log || September/October Catch-All

[conning]

Who: Neal and OTA/some for existing CR
When: September/October Catch-All (with one backdated August thing)
Where: ALL OVER ZE PLACE
Summary: SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER CATCH-ALL. Neal being bovvered by the sleep stuff and rescuing people/needing rescue, Evil Twin TDM prompts, sleepwalking after his murdered adoptive aunt, painting at Bonnie's, a couple of SOL prompts, DEATH BREAAAD both lead-up and hypersensitivity, some talk about mental health.
Warnings: HORROR STUFF.... Awful deaths, possibly drowning, murder of loved ones, gun violence, suicidal ideation, some ableism might crop up in the mental health threads. Toplevels will be labeled with likely subjects.

Prompts TBA below as they're finished! Feel free to PM me or message me at researchboner on plurk for specific prompts or with questions.

Comments

AUGUST YELLOW SUBMARINE PROMPT - CLOSED TO MALCOLM

[conning]

Neal has kept things as low-key as possible finding that crying head on the beach and narrowly escaping the puppet-zombies that followed, slashing the cords attached to the hooks embedded in the dead victims' skin. Between that and the waves, he couldn't bring himself to volunteer when Katrina brought up her mission, even after Malcolm decided to go with.

He hasn't been sleeping well. He's been avoiding the calls from the psych people at ADI. He's been trying to hide it, but there's only so much he can do to be fine when nothing is, and after Bruno disappears, he decides to tell Malcolm and call mental health services.

Which is, of course, what he's preparing himself to do when his phone starts blaring an unfamiliar sound, and he has a chance to meet Malcolm's eyes in surprise in their apartment before... they're not in the apartment any more.

Neal promptly drops his phone on the bottom of the tiny submarine. "Oh no, no no no--"

It's a mix of anger and helplessness, and he pounds against the sealed top of their little prison until the heels of his palms start to ache.

[abrightboy]

Malcolm doesn’t try to restrain him. He knows panic. He knows what it doesn’t need. He picks up Neal’s phone and when the pounding slows, he quietly, carefully, evenly says “Neal. Neal, I’m here. It’s okay. We’ll figure it out.”

He’s very, very carefully moderating his own breath. There are stress responses he can’t hide; his hand is shaking, for one. But Neal doesn’t seem in much condition to pick up on them and it’s helpful to focus on someone else’s panic instead of the gnaw of his own as it threatens to crawl up his throat.

[conning]

The shaking hand is, ironically enough, what starts to calm him down. Or rather what shifts his focus from panic to Malcolm. What shifts him from freaking out in general to realizing Malcolm has reasons of his own to be freaked out. Neal lifts his hands to Malcolm's cheeks, brushing his thumbs across the other man's skin.

"Okay. Yes." Deep breaths of his own. "Yeah. We're okay. We'll be fine."

[abrightboy]

Malcolm looks up at him as his hands frame his face, focusing on his eyes, his expression, his breath.

"I think we're underwater," he says, his voice still carefully controlled. "So breaking right out of here is probably ill advised. We don't know how deep we are. We should figure out how to control it," he suggests, his voice only shaking a little on the last sentence.

[conning]

Neal makes a noise that sounds embarrassingly like a whimper and cringes a little at his own reaction. He nods slowly, now stroking Malcolm's cheeks with borderline neuroticism, and it takes effort to lower his hands and investigate their space.

"Do you think we're dreaming?"

[abrightboy]

“I never know the answer to that with any certainty,” Malcolm says, turning to examine the control panel.

[conning]

“Me neither any more,” Neal mutters, watching over Malcolm’s shoulder to see what he’s doing. It doesn’t take long to figure out the instructions-they’re simple, the kind of assignment ADI might give, though in very different circumstances.

Neal looks at Malcolm’s trembling hand, then takes it in one of his own. “Maybe I should steer?”

[abrightboy]

Malcolm nods, shifting so Neal can reach the control panel.

"I wonder where we're supposed to go."

[conning]

"Follow the coordinates," he says softly. "Just... follow the coordinates for now, I think."

He takes a few minutes to familiarize himself with the controls, switches things on--and glances toward the window as the exterior lights turn on. And then the metal door slides shut across the window, to his annoyance, but... "Sunset?"

It's an uncertain question, directed at Malcolm with the hope that he caught a glimpse of the water outside. It seemed... red.

[abrightboy]

Malcolm shakes his head faintly.

"Are there sharks in this water?" he asks in a small voice.

He wraps his arms around his middle and glances around the space. "Is there a button to open the... shades?" Or whatever the nautical term is for metal window covers.

[conning]

"Actually, shark populations have been moving north with the rising water temperatures for years. There's something like fifteen to twenty species regularly sighted in the Northeastern United States, and the increase in seal population..." He trails off, catching himself. Neal holds one hand out in the tiny space, brushing against Malcolm, inviting him to tuck himself close. "Come here. I can follow the map on the console for the coordinates. The topography is there. I should be able to navigate even if I can't get the shutters open."

He sounds more confident than he feels.

(September Summary/OTA) - TO SLEEP, PERCHANCE TO DREAM

[conning]

It's been a year. He's been here a year. He's not sure how to feel about that. He keeps himself busy fixing up Bonnie's, discovering in the process that Macaroni the cat seems to have gone with Jeff, wherever Jeff went. Working his shifts, investigating the injuries coming from Dogtown, learning about the strange path that's so easy to lose and not chancing the risk of finding it himself. Cooking for the homeless, keeping up the rounds he started with Kugrash in the months after he arrived.

He's been here a year.

When the rumors of music start to circulate, Neal at first keeps his distance from the graveyards. He doesn't want a repeat of last year. He warns everyone he knows wasn't present, shares everything up to and including his own dream-based deaths, though not the details thereof. He's on high alert for any sleepwalkers, yanking people out of danger and shaking them awake whenever he spots trouble.

But eventually, inevitably, the music catches him, too.

And god, he's tired.

He's so tired.

He's tired to his bones, to his soul.

He's tired enough start drifting in the middle of the day, putting himself in harm's way. Eventually, near the end of the month, he finds a bench near one of the graveyards, sits down, and then lies down, closing his eyes onto nightmares.

[Feel free to either save him, find him falling asleep, or have him save one of your folks! Or hit me with something else entirely--he'll be working on the wiring at Bonnie's in-between doing his ADI stuff.]

(October TDM Prompt/OTA) - Kill Your Double

[conning]

(cw: unintentional gaslighting, potential violence, general belittlement and verbal abuse)

I. First-Meeting Aftermath
Neal has never met you before.

Unfortunately, you've met him. Maybe you caught him stealing from someone who really couldn't afford to lose their wallet, swapping suspect sugar packets with others at the local coffee shop's condiment stand, or just being downright nasty to some of the more vulnerable locals or service workers around. Maybe he turned his unpleasant attentions on you, with bright blue eyes and a winning smile and a scathing attitude that left you feeling like something more suited to the bottom of a shoe than polite society. Maybe he stole something you value, or dropped a little something nasty in your food.

Regardless, you just spotted that asshole again, and it's your chance to give him a piece of your mind. ...That guy leaving a twenty in the barista's tip jar is the same dude, right?

II. Existing-CR Aftermath
Neal doesn't have a lot of close friends left in Gloucester these days. He doesn't even have that many casual friendships left. So why on earth would he have done whatever particularly mean, unpleasant, targeted bit of nastiness he did to you? Why would he go out of his way to personalize something so simply rude or cruel?

What does he mean, he doesn't know what you're talking about??

III. Face-to-Face Encounter
It's Neal, all right. Dark curls, smiling blue eyes, a grin that invites the sun to come out on a gray October day. Either on ADI grounds or about town. In a graveyard? In a local shop? Answering the door to his apartment? Maybe he approaches you or you approach him--either way, he greets you warmly and with a toast from his perpetual cup of coffee.

[abrightboy]

“You don’t usually drink coffee at dinner time,” Malcolm muses as he wander into the kitchen area. There’s no frown to accompany it, though part of him worries his own sleep problems are starting to affect Neal adversely.

[conning]

Neal flashes him a smile that’s all warmth and affection and, for the most fleeting of moments, an excitement that sparks wrong in his eyes. He sets the coffee aside and presses a kiss against Malcolm’s forehead, one arm going automatically around the other man’s waist.

Automatically, because this is his apartment now. His apartment, his life. This man is his too, his to ruin in a thousand small ways until ruin is all that’s left. The first Neal did so much good work to lay these foundations.

“Just tired. Feeling the music a little more than I’d like, if you know what I mean.” He draws away to take the pan full of dinner off the stove. “Trying to keep the fat lady at bay. Or the little girl in this case.”

A pause, and he laughs with a little bit of gentle irony. “It’s harder than it was last year.”

[abrightboy]

Oh, right. The music. It’s a little bit of a relief.

He smiles in sympathy.

“Maybe she got stronger while she was away.”

[conning]

“Yeah. That’s true. I figured it was because of the nightmares—” He cuts himself off, wide-eyed, earnest, the kind of face Neal makes when he’s misstepped and tries to backtrack. “Mine. I mean. My nightmares, since I’ve got so many these days.”

He clears his throat and moves to the cupboard to grab plates. “Hungry?”

[abrightboy]

Malcolm blinks at the backpedal, then frowns faintly at the question.

“I’m never hungry.”

[conning]

Neal shoots him a look that’s a mix of annoyed and pitying, still at the cupboard. “Willing to eat?”

[abrightboy]

Malcolm nods, stepping backwards to give Neal space to manoeuvre the meal.

“What are we having?”

[conning]

He dishes up the food and carries two plates over to the table, one portion average-sized and one Malcolm-sized. The latter is dished up with somewhat exaggerated care. Enough to be noticeable.

“Something I haven’t tried cooking in a while. I think you’ll like it. I hope you will.”

[abrightboy]

It smells… heavy, but Neal knows what he’s doing. It looks inoffensive. He sits at the table and looks at Neal, then picks up his fork.

“Did you learn it in France?”

(October SOL and Improvements at Bonnie's/OTA)

[conning]

Even as he gets more paranoid about the music wending its way through Gloucester, Neal tries to keep up his routines. He visits the local coffee houses, he makes his rounds leaving supplies and food in the bins he's set up around town for the homeless, he visits the parks and the beach both for the air in and neurotic inspection of what might be lurking there waiting for those not in the know.

He works his ADI security shifts and investigations. He putters around the apartments taking care of the scut work of daily living. He spends hours in the city library researching his own leads and trying to find signs of people who have disappeared.

At one point, he appears in the ADI offices with a life-sized Barbie doll, carrying it toward the research floors for evaluation.

...Later, he carries it back out, looking a mix of guilty and miffed. If an article pops up about the disappearance and return of the local toy store's anniversary event giveaway prize, well. Now you know what happened.

He also spends a fair amount of time at Bonnie's, helping finalize the repairs to the building. He paints inviting murals of fantastically bright New England landscapes on singular walls in the common spaces, instructing other volunteers to paint the adjoining walls in single, simple shades so the space isn't visually overwhelming. He also brings in paintings that look shockingly like famous classical paintings and pop art pieces (and in some cases works on finishing them at Bonnie's) to mount on the walls in the unoccupied bedrooms. When he's not painting or helping with decoration, he'll be making sure everyone volunteering gets fed.

It fills the hours that he'd otherwise spend overthinking the horror of the past year.

(October TDM Prompt/OTA/two people max please) - Out Of Touch

[conning]

(cw: unnatural sleep, altered mental states, being trapped in nightmares)

When the music finally catches Neal for real, he's in the middle of dropping off some perishables in one of his little homeless care stations.

They slip through his fingers as he straightens up, food splattering into the alley as his attention fixes half-way down the block on a woman who can't be there.

His waking expression is slack, empty, as he starts toward the figure of the woman who helped raise him. The woman he knew as his aunt Ellen until he found out on his eighteenth birthday that she wasn't his aunt and her name wasn't Ellen. She didn't die then--she died much later, shot by an old enemy only weeks after coming back into Neal's life.

He picks up the pace as she moves further away, the street of Gloucester in his head shifting until it looks like St. Louis. In the dream he shouts Wait!

Out loud, he mumbles, "Please, please don't go."

(October TDM prompt/OTA) - Already Ended

[conning]

(cw: burning, death, hallucination, physical hypersensitivity, thanatophobia, unknown and debilitating illnesses)

Neal is a nerd. Anyone who knows him for more than a day will discover this. So the whole concept of Deathbed Bread, morbid though it is and likely to go awry though it may be, delights his history nerd heart. It takes him a few tries to get a loaf of his own, but he manages pretty early on.

He's eating a piece of it happily, rambling about the history of the practice to Malcolm, when he turns the bread over to show him the epitaph... and it's his own. It's his own, and it's informing him of his impending death on October 20th.

The dream that night isn't surprising--he never sleeps well any more--but when he wakes up he has those marks on his arm. He tries to hide them, but he checks them with such frequent paranoia that it's not hard to catch him staring at them.

Seven days, six days, five days, four. Three days out, he starts going to the people he knows best and telling them all the things he's ever liked about them. Everything he can think of that he admires. Two days out, he doesn't show up at work, which is wildly unlike him. He's fastidious with his schedule. Instead, he's walking the streets of Gloucester, and he can be found at the bus station near the end of the day looking at tickets to New York City.

The day, though... the day... He goes out to blow his budget on a ingredients for a last meal. Part-way through his shopping list, his head starts to ache. The lights are so bright. They buzz so loudly.

God, why are all these people talking so much? Are they talking? Or is he hearing what's going on inside their heads? It feels like he can hear everything. Someone bumps against him and it feels like a blow, and he's so distracted by the colors on the shelves that he doesn't even register their face to be irritated.

This is it. This is it, isn't it, and he's not even around anyone he knows. Or if he is, he can't tell they're there.