Growth in Reverse, White Collar, G

Title: Growth in Reverse
Prompt:Evidence
Author: veronicasleeps
Rating: G
Characters/Pairings: Neal
Word count: 300.
Contains: Contains implies Spoilers for the season finale.
Summery: Neal thinks about past choices.
A/NSomebody advised me to do something different - I did.



Secrets hidden in between
wispy memories and half-forgotten fantasies
are enough to drive him away
when there’s nobody shielding him
from his own thoughts
and nobody leading him away
from the roads already walked
when he was eighteen/twenty/twenty-five.

He leaves New York on one of them
walks the path of his younger self backwards.
Thinks ‘Goodbye Peter, It was fun while it lasted’,
says ‘Hello world, you’ve got me back again!’.
And feels the promises he made in the last two years crumble
like ash where they still linger unforgotten on his tongue.

He follows the invisible evidence
of weeks/months/years spent redeeming himself
and watches his growth in reverse:

a law abiding citizen playing
by the rules set by
the one person able
to enforce them
turns step for step
into the convict
into the conman
into just the man
without a goal.

And he sees the possibilities
for the first time.

A thousand alternate universes press close to his life,
to this walkway of his choices,
and when he comes home a week later
(a roundtrip through memory lane,
from the end to the beginning to the end
in a circle that won't ever stop)
he sits on the bottom of a dry dock
so big.
But still not big enough that he couldn’t fill it
with postcards from his dream-travels
three times over.

And ponders and wonders
and thinks of what he could have done
different.

He comes up with a lot of maybe
and with a lot of could, but
not with any ‘should’
and he realizes then
that he wouldn’t be there,
in this moment,
in this place that was
the starting point of his journey
to retrace his past and to find his future
if it were any other way.