elrhiarhodan

Title: The Sounds of the City (sifting through trees)
Author: elrhiarhodan
Rating: G
Fandom: White Collar
Characters/Pairings:  Mozzie & Neal Caffrey (gen - friendship)
Spoilers: None
Warnings/Enticements/Triggers: None
Word Count: ~ 700
Summary: Mozzie lets Neal write the story of how they met, but he knows the truth.

Written for Promptfest IV, for photoash  for her prompt, Mozzie – Neal – How They Met. This references Promote the General Welfare, another Mozzie story from my Paladin ‘verse. Title is from the Simon and Garfunkel classic, “Old Friends.”

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There are many versions of how Neal and Mozzie met, depending on the time of day and the type of wine, and when Neal is the one telling the tale.

Neal will, when prompted with a bottle of Chardonnay, relay a story involving a failed attempt at rappelling down the side of the Guggenheim. If he's working through a bottle of Barolo, Neal talks about a caper in Barcelona (and he'll properly elide the "rc" to a "th") involving a Picasso, two Swedish college students “working” their way through their senior year, and a trio of yapping toy poodles. When it’s burgundy in the glass, the story is that Neal met Mozzie in London, when they both just happened to be casing an antiquities dealer in the Burlington Arcade.

Basically, depending on what Neal's drinking, he's "how I met Mozzie story" changes. But at least he's consistent, and Moz wonders if he's got the liquors and the stories written down somewhere. Mozzie knows the real story, and it's nowhere nearly as glamorous as Neal makes it out to be.

Truth is, Moz and Neal met during one of the perpetual Monday snowstorms in the hellacious winter of 1995-1996.

Mozzie had gone to ground about ten years earlier, jettisoning a sort of promising career as a patent attorney, because – well, the less said about that, the better. When he fell off the grid, Moz first lived in a series of abandoned buildings and storage units, and then he started playing with the system, transferring ownership, creating false trails and real deeds and a byzantine series of shell corporations that hid his real identity. By the time that Bill Clinton had been elected for the second time, Moz - or rather shell companies under the rubric of Paran-Hoya, Inc. owned more than twenty residential, commercial and industrial properties in Manhattan and at least two dozen more in the outer Boroughs. Moz didn't particularly enjoy being a landlord, and he let others more interested in collecting rents and paying taxes take care of those things.

What Moz liked to do was to was pick out the best and most obscure properties, rehab them and live in them for a while. He always abandoned them after a time – usually because he got bored, or he felt his security was compromised, but he never sold them. Sometimes he went back, sometimes they became safe houses for others, and sometimes he just let them go, back into the ruined condition he had found them. That appealed to him and his circle of life philosophy.

But this is a digression from our story. Or from Mozzie's story.

In the winter of 1996, Moz lived in seven different properties, depending on the day of the week and the phase of the moon. His current favorite was at the end of the M4 bus route, near Fort Tryon. just a short walk from the Cloisters. It was Monday and it was snowing. The forecast said sleet and rain, but the forecast was wrong - deadly wrong. By 1 pm, there was already two feet of snow on the ground. Moz was safely ensconced in the the sixth floor apartment of a pre-War building on Cabrini Boulevard, with a view of the park and the George Washington Bridge. He just happened to be looking out when the snow had stopped swirling and he saw a person, a young man gathering wet newspapers and trying to make a shelter for himself. The man - really more a boy - just happened to look up. Even with the distance, Moz could see the despair in his face, the look of someone who never expected to have fallen so far, so fast.

Moz knew that feeling, and he knew that he'd never be able to live with himself if he didn't do something. He shrugged into the oversized parka, heavy boots, gloves and hat, wrapped a scarf around his neck and went to fetch the stray.

He only hoped that he had all his shots. Moz didn't particularly care for doctors. Or germs.

FIN