Plot-bunny: White Collar / Highlander

[marbleglove]

So, I have been enjoying reading some very fun, very good, White Collar fanfics. Neal Caffrey is a con man who was caught and is now doing what amounts to community service with the FBI, Peter Burke is the FBI agent who caught him and now supervises him, and Elizabeth Burke is Peter's wife who watches it all with a certain amount of amusement and provides some much-needed advice to them both. Heists and cops-and-robbers and banter... it's great fun. 

One of the themes I've found in the fandom is that the three of them go off together in the end. (Yes, lots of hot threesome action there.) Anyway, in many of the stories, the Burkes manage to socialize Caffrey so that he doesn't go back to his life of crime after his four years are up. However, a couple of the stories have Caffrey corrupting the Burkes, that they all run off to a life of leisure. This one strikes me as just highly improbable. For one thing, you don't get to be a highly successful (and fairly obsessive) FBI team manager by being the type to crave lazy days doing nothing much on a beach. Plus, there's two against one on the "let's obey the law" concept,not to mention the entire rest of society which supports lawfulness.

It's very improbability made me think, what would make me believe this? 

I decided that Elizabeth Burke is an immortal of the Highlander tradition. She's lovely and law abiding and loves her husband, but she didn't tell him about her immortality. And she's getting older. Or rather, she's not getting older. When "Elizabeth" started college at 18, she looked old for her "age". Now that she's approaching 40, she's looking decidedly young. Soon, she's going to have to leave and start a new life.

So this story starts off with a bit of angst, as she's been putting off leaving for quite some time. She loves her current life. She really doesn't want to leave.

Maybe she can tell her two men about her immortality? And Neal at least is used to disappearing. Maybe they could come with her? It was a daydream, she knew, but it was a really tempting one.

Then Amanda arrives on the scene.

Elizabeth twitched and then started looking around the small cafe where they were having lunch. She was giving a fairly good appearance of casual interest but Peter knew her and Neal knew false-casual.  They exchanged a glance before turning to Elizabeth, but before either could ask, someone else called out, "Darling!"

Elizabeth winced and muttered "oh dear", before more loudly, "Amanda! Lovely to see you. Perhaps I should introduce my husband Peter and his partner Neal? They both work for the FBI tracking thieves of various sorts.”

Everyone at the table heard the warning in that. Amanda winced.

Peter looked consideringly. “Amanda? As in, The Amanda?” Whatever he saw on Elizabeth’s face confirmed his suspicion. “You know The Amanda and you never told me, Elle?”

Neal looks enlightened and entranced. He pulls out a chair for Amanda to join them, assuring her of his delight to meet such a notable personage. Peter and Elizabeth are still talking.

“Well, sort of. I didn’t tell you because it would just cause a conflict of interest.”

“As if I don’t already have a conflict of interest with Neal here.”

Neal looked unsure whether he should be offended or pleased. Amanda pats his arm, “Take it as a compliment.” Then turning to Peter, “don’t worry, I’ve gone straight for the moment. Alas, I have apparently fallen into the cliché of having been tamed by the love of a good man.”

Elizabeth looks surprised. “And where is this good man? Don’t tell me it’s MacLeod.”

“No, no. His name is Nick. And, well, he doesn’t like me much at the moment.”

“What happened?”

“He didn’t care for what he learned about me.”

Peter looked between the two women, knowing he was missing some subtext. “About you being a thief?”

“No, he knew about that from the start. It was something else.” Amanda was referring to Nick’s being immortal himself.

Elizabeth winced because she assumed it was just the immortality issue that had turned Nick away from Amanda. She couldn’t bear it if she told her two men about her immortality and they shunned her for it. She would have to confess to murder, after all, when she explained The Game, and murder was something they were both against.

While Neal and Peter can both see that there’s subtext, Amanda can read Elizabeth’s face and thinks to ask the question, “Elle,” she uses the name that she heard Peter use. “How old are you right now?”

“Nearly forty.”

“I’m sorry.” Amanda knows that this is time for Elizabeth to leave.

“Hey, the forties are going to be wonderful!” Peter leaps to defend his wife. Neal notices that something is off.

In the end, though, Amanda’s presence reminds Elizabeth that she can’t avoid other immortals forever, and her due date on this identity is really past due. She needs to leave.

She arranges to die a reasonably documented death that doesn’t leave a body and disappears. At least Peter and Neal will have each other.

Of course, she didn’t consider the fact that they are both extremely good about identifying con jobs and tracking them down. And her death necessarily couldn’t leave a body behind, so there are definite suspicions.

Much high jinx ensue as Elizabeth tries to disappear into a new identify, Peter and Neal are increasingly suspicious of the whole situation, the rest of the FBI think they’re crazy with grief, and Amanda and Kate are both running around being red herrings.

It’s possible that Moz has Watcher ties. Or possibly June does.

Anyway, high jinx!

Comments

[bookchan.livejournal.com]

You have amazing plot bunnies! I really hope you write this one because it's so different from the crossovers I've seen so far from White Collar and because Elizabeth is awesome and needs to pull more over Peter and Neal.

[marbleglove.livejournal.com]

Thanks! Elizabeth is awesome. However, I'm hoping that as the White Collar fandom increases, more and more really good fanfiction will be written so I won't feel quite so driven to write it myself. Too many ideas, too little time.

[mountainelement.livejournal.com]

I wonder how Neal and Peter will finally figure it out. Maybe when they see her from a distance as a student at a college, they'll remember the emphasis Amanda put on Elle's age and realize she's not aging?

[marbleglove.livejournal.com]

Ooh. Nice thought. Maybe they'll see her from a distance and wonder if it's possible that she had a daughter before ever meeting Peter, but no, the ages don't work out quite right... After all, she's not quite forty, but she looked younger, and Amanda did say...

And I'll bet they'll try to figure out how she managed her escape and realize that she should have been hurt in it but obviously wasn't, and what does that mean?

And I wonder how many fake IDs Neal has created for various other immortals without ever realizing it. "It's odd how many people came to me asking for IDs for themselves twenty years younger."

"Why is that? They couldn't actually live like that."

"I never asked. But it's weird. Think about it, though, could Elizabeth pass as a college student?"

"Huh. Well, maybe."

"And don't you feel like a dirty old man now?"

Warningly: "Neal."

"Sorry, sorry!"

[mountainelement.livejournal.com]

Yay! Dialogue! I can never come up with dialogue- just vague ideas. I wonder how Peter and Neal make that final leap to realizing about Immortals. The easiest ways are for them to see Elizabeth revive, heal, or win a fight with another Immortal, but those ideas are also pretty cliche. I do wonder what they'd make of Elizabeth winning a fight after this scene though. They probably wouldn't see the actual fight, but they'd see her getting rid of the body (if there is one- I'm never sure if Immortal bodies turn into dust or stick around after decapitation).

[marbleglove.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I occasionally get dialogue and I definitely get vague ideas, it's descriptions that I find awkward.

What about if there's no explanation given and no sudden revelation. Elizabeth isn't saying anything and Peter and Neal have to put everything together simply by the evidence of her everyday life: She looks young, she disappeared and started a new life, and she carries a sword. (How did they not notice the sword?) They can harass each other about that as they come up with different possible explanations. By the end of the story, they should have a working theory of Elizabeth's situation that fits all of the available evidence. Whether it's true or not, well, that's something else entirely. (I grin evil-ly.)

[mountainelement.livejournal.com]

That sounds really interesting. I don't really have any ideas of what they'd come up with. She's out in the sun so she can't be a vampire. Maybe a fairy, but I don't know if the sword fits. Oh maybe they'd avoid anything supernatural?

I suspect that Elizabeth is part of the majority of Immortals that doesn't know about Watchers. So Peter and Neal could notice a suspicious person who seems to be stalking her. Cue arguments about how what they is doing is completely different from what this other person is doing. :)

[marbleglove.livejournal.com]

That's a good point re: the watchers. If Elizabeth doesn't know but Peter and Neal notice, they might just decide to corner this suspicious stalker and see what he has to say. I wonder whether they'd manage to break him in an interrogation and get the real story of Immortals, or whether they'd just hear whatever it is that Watchers tell people when they've been caught. Oh, the possibilities! Hee.

And I bet they'd studiously avoid thinking about the fact that they are stalking her as well. Probably giving each other a few looks but Not Saying Anything. Heh.