[for Lipton]

[notgoingtorun]

Neal had thought that his great tour of island apologies was done and over with. He hadn't accounted for the fact that significant portions of the island had lost great chunks of their memories. It didn't make sense to tell people who didn't even remember him.

And, of course, one of the people who had no idea who Neal was just happened to be Lipton. Jane might have dealt with his lies with a quiet, sad resignation, but he doubted that her husband would be quite so non-confrontational about it.

He'd already moved his belongings out of New Pemberley, but once he'd realized that everyone had their memories back, he thought it was time to find Lipton and tell him the truth, too.

"Afternoon," he said, approaching the other man once he'd tracked him down. "Have a minute? I've got something I need to talk to you about."

Comments

[niceofyoutoask]

With his memory back, Lipton found himself plenty busy in helping to get everything back on track. He hadn't been up to date at the Boarding House, he had missed several training sessions with the ITF, and Jane, well, Jane was pregnant. That had been the main news to greet him with his memory fully back, and he could almost forgive the Island for the embarrassment of weeks of confusion for bringing him his family.

"Hey there, Victor." Lipton said, leaning back in his chair in the office of the Boarding House, offering the man a welcoming smile. "Noticed you weren't at the house this morning. What can I help you with?"

[notgoingtorun]

"Yeah, about that," Neal said, rocking back on his heels. Even after having so many of these conversations, Neal still didn't find them any easier to endure. "I moved out the other week. You ... you weren't yourself, I didn't want to bother you with it until, well, until whatever was going on last month was over. But." He hooked his thumbs in the pockets of his trousers and took a deep breath.

"I really appreciate you and Jane taking me in and giving me a place to stay when I first got here, it means a whole lot to me. But I wasn't entirely truthful with you all when I first got here, and I need to fix that now. My name isn't really Victor Moreau. It's Neal Caffrey. I was afraid when I first got here, I thought I was being chased and --" He lifted one hand, waving it at his side, then dropped it back down to his side. "I said a lot of things that weren't true, and I need to own up to them now."

[niceofyoutoask]

Lipton had nodded reflexively when Victor thanked them - they had the room, after all, and helping out a new friend wasn't too far out of their way. He'd helped his mother run a Boarding House, before the Island and before the war, he knew how these things went.

But then he said he hadn't been telling the truth, and Lipton's expression closed off immediately. The name, well, a lot of people had a few of those around here. But it was the lie part that grabbed Lipton, made something cold drag down through his chest. "Why were you being chased?" He asked, honest and straightforward, giving the man the chance to set himself straight.

But Lipton was an observant sort of man. And the way Victor - Neal - was going about this made it seem like far more than just a change of preferred name.

[notgoingtorun]

Neal's instincts said to lie, to bend the truth, because it was easier, but he also knew that he'd be letting a whole hell of a lot of people down that way. So, as frustrating as it was, he went for the truth, or as close to it as he was willing to get.

"Right before I got here, there was an FBI agent after me. He wanted to put me away again, for mistakes that I made a long time ago that I'd been trying to fix. What he wanted from me was worse than prison, so I was running, and I ended up here. I didn't know where I was or how I got here, I just knew that I couldn't let him find me."

[niceofyoutoask]

"Did you hurt anyone?" Lipton asked, direct and pointed. He'd had a fugitive staying with his family, and it was made all the worse by Lipton being off his memory for the past weeks. If Jane, Liddy and the baby had been in danger in their own home because they'd opened their doors to this man...

[notgoingtorun]

"No," Neal said emphatically. "No, I was never violent, I always hated that. I -- I used to steal art, forge paintings, that's all." That's all was relative, of course, but if he was going to give a list of all of his crimes to anyone, it would be Peter, no one else. "I would never hurt anyone, I swear it." Not that it meant much coming from someone who was an admitted liar, but still.

[niceofyoutoask]

Lipton nodded curtly, because thievery and forgery was better than murder, but both spoke of crimes that were more than just making ends meet. Lipton had grown up during the Great Depression; he'd seen people driven into certain crimes out of necessity. That he could understand. Stealing art, and forging paintings, that was foreign to him. "By running here, by staying at New Pemberley, did you put Jane and the kids in danger? Would the man after you have hurt them?"

[notgoingtorun]

"Absolutely not," Neal said, shaking his head. He treated this conversation with utter seriousness, a rarity for him, but he meant it when he told Peter that he was going to make this right, even if it included a lot of difficult conversations. "He might have had a grudge against me, might have been playing outside of the lines expected of a senior agent, but he never would have put anyone else in danger. He wasn't violent, just ... very single minded."

Kramer was never after anyone else. Just Neal, and his freedom.

[niceofyoutoask]

"Okay," Lipton said, exhaling slowly, the anger still hot and tight in his chest. His first reaction, had he been less rational and more prone to acting without thought, would have been to grab Neal by the collar and shake the answers out of him, a fist near his face. It'd been a long time since he'd gotten into a fist fight - and had spent most of his adult life breaking them up, to be honest - but if anything could bring that out of him now it was anything endangering Jane, Lydia, and Richard.

But Neal - according to Neal's word, which Lipton didn't know how much to honour, now, but he had come forward with this on his own, and seemed sincere - Neal had said that he wasn't violent, and nobody after him would hurt his family. "Thanks for being honest about it now." It came out stilted, still, because that was better than letting his simmering anger show. They'd trusted him in their home, near their children, and he was a theif and a liar.

[notgoingtorun]

"And thank you for hearing me out," Neal said. "I know how important family is, and if I ever would have thought for a moment that me being here would have put any of you at risk, I would have left immediately." Neal hated seeing anyone else in the line of fire -- literally or metaphorically -- for things he'd done. Maybe he'd grown a conscience over the years, but the last thing he wanted was to see anyone hurt ... who didn't deserve it, at least.

"I'll leave you to your business here, but, listen, I know all this sounds real dubious coming from me, so if you ever need reassurance that ... well, I'm not just saying things to keep people happy, there's a man here on the island, his name's Peter Burke. He's an FBI agent, one of the good guys. He's been a ... mentor to me, over the past couple of years, and he knows my whole story. If you can't believe me, at least hear him out."