penance } { app

[alias_savant]

OOC Info
Name: Emily
Age: 32
Contact: iluvroadrunner6/iluvroadrunner6#1178
Current Characters: Josie Saltzman (polydeukes), Waverly Earp (stupetballs)


IC Info

Name: Neal Caffrey
Canon: White Collar
Age: 35
Appearance: Played by Matt Bomer
Canon Point: End of S4 + CRAU
Background: A wiki link
CRAU: paradisa + teleios

If anything, Neal regressed due to his time in Paradisa. At his first canon point, he had just attempted to shoot Fowler, and knew that he was fully on the outs with Peter. Arriving in the castle, with a loss that kept him on near permanent house arrest, Neal became more and more convinced that he’s never going to be able to change from the man he was. He would always been seen as a conman and someone would always be waiting for him to screw up. This was only more fully reinforced through his canonbump to the end of 316 and Peter giving him the signal to run. It’s because of this that he fell back on old habits. He places his trust in the wrong people, throws himself into things without thinking, and generally opens himself up for a whole lot of trouble.

While he did have a few stabilizing friends in the castle, they were more likely to come and go than actually stick around. Despite being stuck in one place, the transient nature of the castle meant that he was constantly waiting for the people in his life to disappear on him. The life that Neal’s wanted, he’s never going to have in Paradisa because he couldn’t count on the people staying. He also hasn’t seen Peter or anyone else from home in more than two years, so all of his normal safety blankets haven’t been present. Neal’s been forced to stand on his own two feet for once and he falters often but for the most part he is managing. He just needs to stop falling so easily for a pretty face.

Also, the constant pressure of being indoors all the time may have made him a little bit crazy. Constantly stuck in a maze of walls, repeatedly trying to con his way out, and forced to keep himself busy indoors. While having a two-mile radius back home helped ease the cabin fever some, but with the castle he was confined at all times. It was like being back in prison again, and prison never agreed well with Neal.

And then, Neal went to Teleios.

At first he still had his loss restricting his movement, but over time he was able to both earn that back as well as truly build a life for himself. Sure, he had a metaphysical debt he was trying to work off, but at the same time he was able to be productive. He started an art gallery, made friends and connections. Where Paradisa seemed to be a revolving door of people coming, leaving and forgetting, Teleios had people who stayed – and towards the canonpoint when he arrived here, Neal had Peter and Mozzie, cornerstones of his life who helped steady him in ways he hadn’t anticipated. And then, Neal wound up the adult chaperone on the field trip to Hell – though not literally in this case.

In this particular instance, Hell was the lost realm of Asgard, sealed off from access after the Leviathan had tried to take it for itself. Tempted by forces beyond their control, Neal and a small collection of the Indebted followed the clues that led them to the doors of Asgard without realizing that that was the door they were knocking on. This soon lead to a confrontation with the Levaithan, where Elena was killed, and Neal, upon arriving in Hell, will likely assume that he wasn’t far behind. This likely won’t change his outlook on being in Hell much—he feels a little robbed that he didn’t get to go to Valhalla considering he was in a Norse realm—but it will likely lead him to regress slightly and make some poor life choices, and that’s bound to be good for everyone.

Personality:

Neal Caffrey, at face value, is an exercise in contradictions. He’s a conman with a heart of gold, educated but unmatriculated (and yes that is now a word), impulsive but calculating. So much of what he does may seem selfish and out for himself, but most of the time he does it for other people. He’s done a lot of growth over the course of his three years working with Peter, and at his core, Neal is witty, charming, and cautiously friendly. He knows how to use people and get them to do what he wants, but he’s also capable of being the best of friends, putting you before himself and having your back when your neck is on the line. He’s intelligent enough to try and play the rules, and most of the time does his best to do just that, but he’s got good intentions if nothing else.

At his core, Neal is about people. He understands the nuances of the way society works and the way humans read behavior. His attention to detail is not only what makes him an excellent forger but also an excellent conman, allowing him to blend into any situation by knowing the little details that will make it seem genuine. He’s willing to work hard, to put the effort in to make things perfect, rather than taking the blunt approach. There’s an elegance to his work that stems from his need to get all the details right, and it’s the reason why he can do what he does and minimize the people that get hurt in the process. In fact, a lot of what he does is for people, proving that it’s not just about how he influences them, but also how they influence him.

He starts out wanting to become a cop to live up to the memory of his dead hero of a father, and then runs in the opposite direction when he learns that wasn’t the truth, that he is the son of a dirty cop, and that his mother had lied to him. To an extent, he still has a respect for the law itself, and the spirit of the law, but not so much the letter of it. He sees the law as a line to work around, and the rules more as guidelines, and he tries to be a good person in his own way. While he is a conman who regularly breaks the law, he’s an art thief and in a sense, chose a victimless crime. He stole from people who could afford to lose, he doesn’t aim to physically harm anyone—he doesn’t even like to use a gun. He doesn’t want to hurt people, and in fact, he probably wouldn’t have made the moves as a conman that he did if it wasn’t for two people: Mozzie and Kate Moreau.

Mozzie is Neal’s best friend, and probably the second person that Neal is the most loyal to (the first being Peter). Mozzie and Neal are two people cut from the same cloth, which you wouldn’t really consider when looking at the two of them, but they both have the same kind of intentions. The only difference being that Mozzie is the one who’s usually looking for the big score. He’s the one who truly wants to subvert the law, while Neal enjoys the rush of the con. In the sense, they’re the perfect team, and they work well off each other—Neal is the smile and Mozzie is the brain. In the same vein, however, this also makes Mozzie the devil on his shoulder. He tries to get Neal to return to the life that he wants them to live, tries to sell him on the romance of it, which is one of Neal’s weaknesses. Mozzie is the one person who could sway Neal back to the darkside again, but at the same time respects Neal’s desire for his building a life and finding a family, something they both aspire to.

Aside from being charming as sin, Neal is a romantic, if that wasn’t inherently obvious by his appreciation of poetry and art. He has a thing for grand romantic gestures, and ninety-five percent of the time it’s the thing that gets him into trouble. Ninety-nine percent of the time, those gestures were the result of a woman named Kate Moreau. Kate was Neal’s first love, the woman he couldn’t save and one of the few people he’s willing to do anything for, even escape prison when he has months left on his sentence. Trying to save Kate led to a lot of reckless behavior on Neal’s part, and he made his name as a thief trying to win her back. When it came to protecting her, it could almost be said that Neal had tunnel vision, where she was the only thing that mattered, and since her death, Neal has been trying to figure out who he was outside of her. That was what really allowed him to grow and ground himself as a person. He could realign the center of his world to focus on more than one person, and see that being on the run wasn’t entirely worth it if you were going to be alone. That was really what allowed him to let Peter show him the benefits of settling down and building a life on more than just romance and that’s when Neal really begins to change.

Peter becomes the new cardinal North, so to speak, in Neal’s life. He’s the person that Neal looks to for approval, and one of the few law enforcement officials that Neal actually trusts. He is a father figure to Neal, almost in replacement of the one that Neal lost, and it’s because of that relationship that Neal can still find a way to appreciate the law, even if his real father didn’t respect it. He loves Peter’s love of the law, and his life is the one that Neal wants. He sees how happy Peter is with Elizabeth, and it’s the ideal that he wants his world to become. It has a stability to it that Neal never had with Kate or any of his other relationships. His expectations of people, and the pedestals that he place them on always seem to exceed who they actually are, but Peter is the one person who hasn’t let him down yet, and for that reason, Neal trusts him more than he would anyone else. Peter is truly honest, and while Neal knows that he’ll never be him—the rush of the con is still a large part of his life—it’s something that he can try to balance as best he can to make himself a better person. It won’t stop him from pushing those lines, however. He’s a bit like a child who’s starting to push his boundaries, trying to see how far Peter will let him go, and while Peter is always quick to reign him back in at first, there’s an extent to which he trusts Neal, which is also something Neal has never had, and has no reason to believe he deserves. Peter gives it to him, however, and he wants to continue to have it, so he does the best he can to stay in his good graces.

Weaknesses/Temptations:

If something valuable is afoot, Neal is always thinking about how to steal it

He can often lead heart first, which gets him into trouble more often than not

He doesn’t know what rock bottom is in how he can try to bend the rules.

He cares a great deal for his chosen family, and if one of them is in harms way he will do Very Dumb Things.

He has very poor impulse control.

Sins:

Lots and lots of theft

Really so much theft

He steals all the things

Lying liar who lies

Betraying your best friend

Lying to a priest

Conspiracy to commit fraud

Forgery

Escaping Custody

Property Damage

Impersonating a Federal Agent

Being a terrible influence on your case agent’s wife

Evading Arrest

Powers/Abilities:

Neal is a conman and a thief. He knows how to break into just about anything, can con you out of your last dime, and is a pretty proficient forger, if he does say so himself. Which he won’t. Well … he won’t use words.

Items:

His lockpick kit

A nice suit

A shard of glass from the mirror in Ereipio

Sketchpad and charcoal

SAMPLES

Network: One | Two
Log: One | Two