Work Text:
The act of sketching, of creating art from a blank canvas, has always fascinated Neal. He felt powerful when wielding a pencil or brush, giving birth to the images in his mind. He can't remember a time when he was without some way to make art, to express himself. His father had encouraged it, especially in the wake of his mother's death. It was always, "Go play quietly in your room" or "Sit here and be quiet while I..."
Neal may have had a dearth of affection in his childhood, but he never wanted for art supplies.
From his earliest memories, Neal has drawn images of his Mother. His fascination, fixation really, on drawing her hands started when he was ten. He had drawn a fair likeness of the photo his father had burned earlier that year, as a replacement, but when his father saw it, he had taken it from him, too. It was a violation; Neal was as protective at ten of his sketchbook as he is at thirty-three. That's when Neal begun drawing his mother's hands.
Neal doesn't have any memories of his mother's face. He has seen photographs of her at his grandmothers, he knows that she looked a bit like him, same eyes, same long lashes and curly dark hair. But he doesn't know what her face looked like in motion; how her smile would have looked as her lips crooked up, or how her eyes had revealed her emotions.
What he does remember are her hands.
He remembers them outstretched towards him, young and slender. He can hear her voice in his mind, how she'd call his name and sing him silly songs when she would catch his hands and dance around the room. His most distinct memory was how they looked grasping his own pudgy, small fingers.
Holding onto him tightly as she swung him around in the yard, green grass beneath their bare feet. He had laughed and squealed in delight, her own laughter mixing with his. Perhaps the memory is so clear because it was the last one he has of being with her. Of how safe and loved he felt when she held him.
As Neal fought to grow up amidst the oppressive silence of his father, he would draw his mother's hands over and over. It seemed his safest recourse, a way to have her near but not an image his father would recognize and react to. So he drew her hands, as realistically as possible from his own memory, and also in different artist's styles as he learned more about art. It was when Neal was almost twelve that he met John.
John opened up whole new worlds to Neal. He showed him around the museums in Paris on weekend trips when his dad was stationed in Belgium. Those escapes were like rain and sunlight to Neal's fertile imagination. He saw his own artwork come alive under John's careful tutoring. He finally had someone to help him figure out the mysteries of form so that his pictures started to truly look three dimensional, how to improve his brush work to get the kind of results he was looking for, and elementary sculpture which was something Neal had failed to learn from research alone.
Neal's father was all too happy to have someone else take care of his son. Neal bitterly thought that it gave his dad an excuse to drink the whole time he was away with John. Though he had seen the many sketches of Neal's mother's hands in Neal's sketchbooks, John never actually asked Neal who or what they represented. He did compliment Neal on how good the drawings were, how he'd mastered the basics of drawing such a difficult piece of anatomy. He seemed to understand it was personal ,and Neal was always grateful for his discretion. They had a great friendship, and Neal credits much of his artistic knowledge and talents to John's careful tutoring.
The following year, he cried when his father told him they were moving to southern Italy.
When he was sixteen and living with his grandmother, Neal had drawn his mother's hands over and over, obsessively trying to perfect them. He tried to get every proportion accurate, to perfect the aspect ratio. As if his successful accomplishment of the task would have let him keep her with him a few months longer. Or that it could have spared her a measure of suffering from the cancer that waged war on her wasted body.
Neal kept drawing though, and held her hand when she roused enough to know someone was in the room with her. When she called him by his grandfather's name, Neal responded without hesitation. She would be with him all to shortly, leaving Neal behind.
At eighteen, Neal was finding his place in his new partnership with Mozzie. They were on their own, having abandoned a sinking ship of a group operation. On the run, they were sleeping in storage units and abandoned buildings; it was almost more frightening than Neal's first few days living on the street.
During that time, Neal obsessively drew his mother's hands. Especially if he couldn't sleep. Sitting up all night, listening to the junkies and homeless people rummaging on the streets around them. He was still young enough to be afraid and to know there were certain messes he couldn't talk himself out of.
Mozzie had brought it up with him once, when they had moved up in the world and had a nice apartment in a little Parisian backwater when Neal was nearly twenty. Neal was trying to work out the logistics of how they'd steal a painting from an heiress' loosely guarded home.
Mozzie'd leaned over and stopped Neal's hand from his sketching and asked. "So whose hands are those?"
Neal had cut his eyes to the side, tried to hide his tells. "No one's."
"I think they are a woman's. You draw the same pair in different poses over and over when you're plotting or stressed."
"It's just an art exercise, Mozzie." Neal flashed him his sincerest con man smile. He was still working on it. "I have to keep honing my skills."
"Bullshit. I know that's no art exercise. Don't try to con a con, kid. I already told you that." Mozzie squinted at Neal through his thick glasses.
Neal dropped the act and frowned. "What's the meaning of the little wooden dreidel that has gimel rubbed off of it?"
Mozzie frowned, but he was too good a con man to reach for his pocket where he always kept it.
After a few minutes of staring at one another Neal tilted his pad back up and resumed sketching. Mozzie never asked him about it again.
Kate's interest in Neal's art was limited to her delight at his representations of her and the luxuries his forgeries afforded them. She never asked Neal about his past and she kept her own counsel as to her own. Neal didn't often show his sketchbooks to Kate or anyone else. When she found them laying about, Neal surmises that she didn't care enough to notice the repeating pattern. She hadn't made the same connection that Mozzie had years earlier.
In prison, Neal felt uncharacteristically conflicted about drawing his mother's hands. As they had always brought him a measure of solace, he wanted to continue drawing them there. If he had ever needed reassurance it was while he was confined. But then again, it felt like he was betraying her, besmirching her memory by drawing her hands in the midst of his greatest failure.
He compromised with himself (he was an expert on compromises by twenty-nine). He drew her hands if he was out in the yard, because that wasn't quite so bleak. When he was in solitary he traced them on the walls with his fingers, imagining the lines in his head just like he pictured his grandmother's piano keyboard. Otherwise, he kept her out of that filthy place. And as Neal lay on this thin mattress in his cell at night, he fervently hoped that both his mother and grandmother couldn't see how far he'd fallen.
Luckily, he managed to land in a mansion after escaping prison. Staying with June was a reminder of all he'd had with Kate and Mozzie before, down to the feeling of impermanence. Her loft apartment was yet another stop in his quest to find a home.
June snoops through his things. He knows that's part of the price of living there, so he never mentions it despite his dislike of people touching his belongings. He has Mozzie assist in him moving anything that is dangerous for June to see to a safe deposit box that is out of Neal's radius. It all appears to be going tolerably well until she writes him a note in his sketchbook.
Neal is horrified when he sees She must have been an amazing woman written above the pastel sketch of both his mother's hands and his own tiny arms. Neal felt completely violated. Like someone had stolen his secret from him. Neal has Mozzie move all his sketchbooks out of the apartment and he can't help but be a bit frosty at breakfast for the next few days.
June doesn't leave him anymore notes and Neal takes care to only draw his mother's hands in the sketchbooks he hides in the secret compartment by the fireplace.
Peter is the first person that Neal finds himself trusting in a terribly long time. If he casts his thoughts back, Peter may be the first person he's really put all his faith in since his grandmother's death. But Neal tries not to think about the past that closely. It's like Peter has wormed his way past Neal's defenses, against Neal's will.
After a bust gone wrong, Neal finds himself waking up to the antiseptic smell and white walls of a hospital room. Peter is there, as always, asleep in an uncomfortable looking slouch. Neal sits up and feels the pull of a padded shackle on his left ankle. He isn't surprised, but he is a bit affronted since his right arm is encased in plaster within a sling and his head and neck feel like someone tried to wrench them from his shoulders.
Last thing Neal can remember, he had been scaling the side of a building in pursuit of their latest suspect when he'd felt the brick ledge crumble. If a concussion and broken arm were the worst he got out of that, then he considers himself lucky. After swallowing the pills the nurse brings him, Neal quietly charms her into giving him a notepad and pen from Peter's bag.
After making quick work of the lock on his shackle, Neal sits up and balances the pad on his knees. He sketches as the medications begin to take hold of him. Drawing with his right hand isn't as easy as with his left, but he's practiced long hours as a kid to make sure he was ambidextrous.
"What are you doing?" Peter asks, suddenly not only awake but nearly on top of Neal as he crowds against the bed.
Neal starts; he'd been pleasantly floating on the medication and sketching without really looking at the page. "Waiting for you to wake up?"
Peter looks at the empty shackle and just gives Neal a glare. "Plotting an escape?," he asks. He reaches for the pad, "Let me see that," before gently taking it from Neal.
Neal does an aborted shrug, his arm and back complaining at the movement before plastering on his most genuine con smile. "They're just sketches." He hadn't been thinking about escaping at that moment anymore than any other. Without more information about Kate and Mentor, there isn't anywhere that he would know to run to.
Peter scrutinizes the drawing, and Neal has an uncomfortable moment where he isn't sure what is actually on the paper. He'd been drawing in a haze.
"I used to see drawings like this around places I thought you'd been. On napkins or scrap paper. Over and over again in the few sketchbooks we confiscated. What's the fascination with these hands?"
Neal keeps himself from flinching, but it's a near thing with the drugs addling his brain. He had always hoped that Peter hadn't found his sketchbooks in the raids, that maybe Peter hadn't looked too closely at the bits of paper Neal sometimes left behind.
"It's an art exercise." Neal tries to look uninterested and calm, but he knows it's hard to fool Peter and doubly so when he's injured and medicated.
Peter doesn't look up as he runs his finger over the lines on the paper. "This is really good, especially with your non-dominant hand. You must have been drawing this set of hands for a long time to be able to do it so well."
Neal doesn't reply. He hopes that his silence will encourage Peter to drop it. When Peter looks up, curiosity brimming in his eyes, Neal knows he won't be so lucky this time.
"This isn't an art exercise. You've been drawing the same pair of hands since I started chasing you. What do they mean, Neal?"
Neal feels uncomfortably exposed. It's like June's note but much more personal. He shifts in the bed, betraying his anxiety. "It helps me relax. I like drawing hands." A half truth is often more effective than a lie and Neal hopes that this time Peter will buy it and back off.
Peter raises a brow, but he mercifully drops it. "Well, if you're feeling well enough to pick locks and draw then I guess we can see about getting you discharged."
Neal smiles in reply, one of his small genuine ones that he gives only to Peter. Then Peter is out the door, actions following his words. As Neal lets himself relax against his pillows, he tries not to focus on the fact that he's only been granted a reprieve, not a full pardon.
Neal imagines himself telling Peter the truth; that it's his mother's hands. But then he thinks about all the other truths that would be required for him to explain their meaning. The mere thought of tearing down all of his defenses to expose himself that much is more than Neal thinks he could ever bear, even for Peter.