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

Entry tags:

zz_neal caffrey (white collar)

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

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.

Threaded | Flat

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.

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.]

Edited 2022-10-14 01:32 (UTC)

(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.

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.

Edited 2022-10-14 01:23 (UTC)

(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."

Edited 2022-10-14 01:09 (UTC)

(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.

Edited 2022-10-14 01:22 (UTC)

Threaded | Flat

AUGUST YELLOW SUBMARINE PROMPT - CLOSED TO MALCOLM

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

(October TDM Prompt/OTA) - Kill Your Double