bakerstreet | an anon suggested it so

an anon suggested it so

the ROOMMATES meme

SINGLE WHITE FEMALE - Wow, college is going to be so fun! My roommate and I get along really well, Mom, you should hear all about it! We like the same music and movies and celebrities and...well, she's a bit obsessive, she got her hair cut and dyed like mine and keeps going on and on about how she wants contacts the same color as my eyes, but she's really nice! She just got in, I'll call you later, bye Mom! (TL;DR - You have a roommate who wants to be you. Have fun)

I DON'T GIVE A DAMN WHAT YOU THINK - He could not be more aggravating. Blaring music you think is shit, never taking out the trash, pissing on the floor when he's drunk and not even cleaning it up, bringing over people you can't stand at all hours of the day and night and now what? You cleaned all the dishes in the house and he had to have a bowl of cereal. A bowl he didn't even bother to rinse out. Time for some conflict of the YELLING REALLY LOUDLY!!!! kind.

STAR-CROSSED LOVERS - Obligatory sex option. You've been roommates for a while, but recently those furtive glances have been returned, they put their hand over yours when reaching for the coffee pot, and if something doesn't happen soon, you're going to end up a crying mess or flouncing out to get some poon elsewhere in frustration. Are you going to mesh well, or are you going to find out there's condoms in the house and have to make a trip to the gas station at two in the morning and deal with the worker staring at you as you buy XXLarge condoms?

BURY ME WITH IT - Your roommate is dying. Maybe they came home with a fatal diagnosis and can't help but spill. Maybe you watched them rescue a child from getting hit by a car and heard the thunk of their back breaking beneath ridiculously large tires. Console, comfort, hear their last words, tears and sorrow and a whole bucket load of angst.

HAN SOLO IS GAY - Technology is fun. You roommate takes it too far. Fight to the death. Offender may bring up that he wouldn't be able to do it if his roomie wasn't dumbass enough to leave his laptop laying around in the first place. Offender may have stolen it for the evulz. You never sent this text...

WILDCARD - seriously do whatever you want anon suggested it HERE IT IS

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Their lives, while shared as a faux married couple, since coming to the space station had been relatively divergent. Neal wasn't entirely sure where Vala went half the time, but he suspected that she knew her place in this futuristic reality. Neal? He did not. That didn't stop him from trying to make his mark, albeit discreetly, on the space station.

While he was masquerading as a wealthy man, the truth was that Neal didn't have a dime to his name. In recent weeks he'd managed to shark space age pool halls, card tables, really anything and everything until he had enough credits amassed under his account that he felt he could be taken seriously.

From there, he'd gone and bought himself those trademark suits. No one seemed to have a particular fashion so looking dated only helped to fuel the belief that he was eccentric. And extremely wealthy.

Lucky for him, many women didn't mind sleeping with wealthy men who, on paper, were married.

Neal hadn't wanted Vala to know what he was getting up to that afternoon. They were friends, and tentatively at that, he thought. She was a nice girl from the future, and the only person he respected enough to not take advantage of. Bringing home the cute girl from the rations bar seemed like a far better choice in his oh-so-male thought process. And so, he'd done just that.

Right about then his hands were sliding up the toned, pale blue, thighs of a rather shapely alien. She was dressed, enough, but her skirt was hiked up and his jacket, shirt, and tie had long since been discarded.

Vala, of course, had taken to the future like a duck to water. When she wasn't prancing around the stars experiencing, eating and absorbing what she could, she was spending her time swindling rare items from unknowing traders and selling them so she could continue her habit of experiencing, eating, and absorbing.

And with a roommate proving to be as sweet and oblivious as Neal, it was proving to be way too easy. Vala liked him - far too much to take advantage of him, even though she knew he had enough money backing him to not notice a credit here or there when she was really desperate, but the truth of the matter was she was enjoying the chase far too much to settle for just siphoning his account.

Which was exactly why she was back to their place earlier than usual, exciting at having concocted a complex plan that involved using Neal - unknowingly, of course - as a distraction so she could lift a rather valuable artifact right out from a certain stubborn curator's nose. So that was why she swept in and threw his door open without knocking.

"Neal, I have found the perfect excursion for such a lovely da-" and then the pause, when she saw that he wasn't alone, her mouth falling agape. "Oops."

Vala barging in might as well have been the equivalent of a 'honey I'm home' for the alien in his lap. Neal had made no attempts to hide that he was married, lest that cause their con to go far more awry than it already had. So, with his wife on the scene and looking quite shocked, propriety practically launched the young woman out of his bed. Grabbing up her things, there was the most awkward of silences before she pushed past Vala and escaped into the main corridors of the station.

Yes, she was going to make sure she was at least a dozen levels away from Neal Caffrey for the rest of time. That had been embarrassing and while many folks in the future were extremely open minded, something about that whole thing just put her off. Neal groaned before the door to the station had finished closing.

"You're back early," Neal tried.

Damnit. He felt like the biggest con and an even bigger dirtbag for disappointing the woman he found to be the kindest heart in the distant future.

Vala stood in the doorway, her mouth still agape even as the alien woman who wasn't nearly as good looking as her tore past and out the door.

She knew she should feel guilty for ruining Neal's scandalous rendezvous, but, in fact, she was party amused by it. Nothing made her happier than ruining a questionable sex romp between someone she was peripherally interested in and the skeezy alien they picked up at a bar.

That thought, however, threw for her a loop. Sure, she and Neal had certainly developed a friendship, but Vala wasn't sure when her feelings of friendship had moved even slightly beyond that. As a woman who was used to using sex as a tool and emotion as an end to achieve her means, the idea of even hinting at more with someone she was just pretending to be married to startled her.

She crossed her arms, forcing a smirk. "Sorry for interrupting. I had no idea you had afternoon plans."

"Plans? What plans?" Eh heh, heh, heh. Weakest laugh ever.

Neal wasn't sure what compelled him to feel guilty. Granted he was, indeed, just egotistical enough to think that Vala might fall for him. The problem was he didn't know, he'd been being dishonest with her for weeks, and now he'd done something that clearly brought about disappoint. What he couldn't decide was whether the disappointment was radiating in greater waves from her, or himself.

And yes, the alien wasn't nearly so cute as Vala. But that's because Neal felt that there hadn't been anyone as good looking as his exotic friend. Biased and colored by repressed feelings? Almost certainly.

"And, um, you didn't interrupt. I mean, what kind of husband would I be if I told you when you couldn't be in your own home?"

Buttoning his pants, yes it had gotten that far, Neal stood. He rubbed the back of his head awkwardly and had to force himself to continue making eye contact. This was ridiculous. All that compounded guilt was piling up and exacerbating the situation to a point that he was going to have to lie (again) to explain away his actions if he wasn't prepared to be honest.

Neal was never prepared to be honest.

And, Vala had seen him lie. So far, all his lies had been wrapped up in their lie together. He was not keen on directly lying to her. Honest people always had a way of figuring him out. Moreover, seeing as she wasn't honest, she was so going to see his tells and then he was double screwed. Not that he knew it yet.

Vala just stared at him. In so many ways, Neal reminded her of Daniel. That fresh-faced innocence, that fascination with a universe that she had long ago begun to take for granted; maybe not that, so much, as the fact that she had become so bitter towards it that she no longer could be enchanted by its draws.

Maybe that was where this strange feeling truly originated. Perhaps it was her desperate yearning for Daniel and the home he represented that drew her closer to Neal. Even though their entire relationship was built one lie upon another, he was the only constant in a universe that even she didn't truly understand.

And that worried her. Because doubt was exactly what had made Daniel see so easily through her - see her for what she was, a lair and a thief, even if he was kindhearted enough to believe she was capable of more. But she couldn't put the same stock in Neal. If she doubted herself, she would slip, and he would discover the truth. And if he left her, she would be alone again.

"We're not actually married, remember?" she chided, trying to remain playful, as if the image of him groping another woman hadn't already been burned into her mind. A brand, an eternal reminder of the only thing she wanted that she couldn't steal.

"I didn't realize there was a pool of such remarkable alien women for you to draw from out here," she added, just to be mean.

That last part was mean, and, for just a moment, that pretty and pristine image he's had of Vala is skewed. For quite a while, there had been a nagging. Something at the back of his mind prodded him to consider that it shouldn't have been easier to find dupes in the future, but rather, much harder. He's distracted from considering this unexpected bit of Vala as the jab settles exactly where she'd aimed it. Somewhere uncomfortably in his chest.

"I wouldn't say the pool of remarkable, good-looking women is especially big." Yes, he's trying to compliment his way back into good graces. It's a sincere compliment though. For once, his pretty blue eyes don't lie. "Just the pool of ones pretty enough to suffice as a distraction."

Okay, that might have given away more than he intended. By his standards, he needed to pull back, not move forward. Once he started to care, it was going to be Sara all over again. Before long he'd be showing her the CCTV he'd managed to get his hands on (and subsequently destroy all copies of), showing how well he'd conned at least half of the ship's criminal underworld. Neal dragged his hand over his face, peeking at her discreetly between split fingers.

Once he was looking proper, he did his best to keep that ashamed look from being overwritten by even more intense feelings of guilt that shouldn't have been appropriate for some play boy 'along for the ride.'

Fuck, how did he always let things get so messed up?

Crossing her arms, she tried not to give him a hurtful look that said what she was thinking - mainly, "Do you really expect me to buy that line of crap?"

"You can have all the distractions you want, Neal," she told him, truthfully, even if she was still irritated. She knew she really didn't have any right to be. After all, it wasn't as if he belonged to her, or if their sham of a marriage had any reflection on their actually association with each other. What had begun as an adventure had turned into a marriage of convenience, a concept that Vala was far from unfamiliar with.

However, Neal wouldn't be the first person she had married for convenience and then grew to love. The difference was that Tomin had felt for her long before she had ever even entertained the idea of returning his affections, and Neal hadn't shown even the slightest sign of his interest heading in that direction.

At some point, her upset at finding him with another woman had overshadowed her initial reasoning for having even returned home early in the process. But she now felt strangely exposed, and worried that letting this throw her off kilter would completely undermine the con she had so carefully constructed in her mind as she had come to find him.

"I guess I could go," she finally said. Maybe it would be easier to run away while she had the chance and redesign her con sans Neal. She didn't want to risk slipping up in front of him if she could avoid it.

Again, that nagging was overwhelming his senses. Most women wouldn't want to turn and run during a conversation like this. Moreover, there had been that overly jovial way she'd mentioned wanting to do whatever it had been when she first barged in. Vala Mal Doran was suddenly, in sharp contrast, enigmatic beyond belief. There was someone, a few someones even, that her behavior reminded him of. That glancing away, that using eye contact but only for pointed statements.

Neal suddenly got the distinct impression that Vala was trying to lie to him. What wasn't sitting well with him? How good her efforts were, in spite of the clear emotional distress she was feeling. Really, they were both feeling it but Neal was a master of appearing neutral. Now though, his gaze was shifting to one of guilt to one of accusation.

No words passed for a few minutes between them, as all the pieces in his mind slid into place. The ship, their arrival, the way she'd laid on the lie and continued to live it for the past months. Rubbing his temples, Neal finally allowed himself to look at her. Really, he was staring. The moment Vala shifted under his gaze again, he knew. There it was. That tell she had every time. Her eyes went wide, then they shifted to sweetness that was accompanied by the most innocent of smiles or pouts.

All of it was bullshit.

"Son of a--" Neal looked like he considered himself the biggest fool on Earth... or well the station anyways. "You. YOU."

Neal practically wanted to flail his arms about. Play it cool Caffrey. Just because you're on to her doesn't mean you need to give yourself away. Pulling his shirt back on, Neal was standing in an instant. Now, he realized he had no idea who he'd been sharing a space with and how dangerous they might or might not be.

"All of this was by your design. From the very start! Who are you Vala Mal Doran?"

Shit.

Vala's first instinct was to run. She hated being found out - but, usually, she could keep herself one step ahead, just far enough to duck and cover seconds before the fallout and thus keep herself from harm.

But this time, she hadn't. She'd let herself become too comfortable, too convinced that Neal was buying ever line so easily that there was no way he could ever think anything ill of her. She had let her guard down and she had screwed up.

"I didn't mean for us to wind up here," she argued, quickly. Trying to keep him at a distance while she formed a line of escape. Unfortunately, there were a couple problems. The first one being, of course, that they were on a space station with no means of escape besides the ship they had brought with him; and the second being that even she didn't have the heart to abandon him and take the ship. A few years ago, yes, she could have been that person. But she wasn't anymore.

"Yes, I lied. Yes I stole the ship and yes, maybe I'm not exactly who I claimed to be. But I didn't do anything to hurt you or strand us here deliberately. I wanted off of that stupid little planet just as much as you did..."

It was in that moment that it clicked. The ease in which he had taken to being in space. The bright eyed innocence and fancy clothes and the number of credits in his bank account. And his realization was not rooted in a sixth sense of betrayal, no. It was rooted in familiarity with the game.

"You! You set me up!"

Shit.

Neal's first instinct was, indeed, also to run. However he knew nothing about the future, had built up a swath of bad favor throughout the station as the man who never lost a game, and... he had some bizarre sense of loyalty and affection for Vala. True to Neal's frustrating tendency to have questionable taste in women, his feelings weren't fading in spite of the lies he'd outed her on.

Actually, a part of him was really impressed.

Instead though, he considered trying to keep up his end of the con. She might have been emotional enough to lose it, but he wasn't going to be. At least, not at first. Instead of lining up lines of defense, he was preparing to sink his teeth into her admittances. Anything to relieve the guilt he was feeling. If she'd been lying too, at least he didn't have to feel bad for just being better at it.

"You didn't hurt me? I 'magically' went unconscious when we left orbit. How do I know that wasn't some part of your con from the beginning?"

Then he saw the gears turning. That initial feeling of shit suddenly amplified ten fold.

"Set you up? Please, tell me how I set you up."

Hopefully Vala... couldn't do that. Even though she could if she was half as good as he was beginning to suspect. His lie wasn't going to last very long and a part of him didn't it want to.

Vala simply gaped, offended beyond words at the fact that he honestly thought she had something to do with him losing consciousness. After all, she was only doing what she knew how to do best - survive. He was the one who had used that to his advantage.

"You used me to further yourself here! To acquire vast monetary funds to supply yourself with your fancy clothes but I really have to wonder to what end. Once you were found out, were you planning on abandoning me here to be punished for your indiscretions while you continued to tromp about the universe swindling whatever you wanted out of any unsuspecting alien you could find?"

Gritting her teeth, Vala pulled back her waving finger and swallowed heavily. She didn't want to believe he would be that kind of person, but why wouldn't he be? He hadn't seemed to have a problem lying to her or going along with any of her other cons. Setting her up to take the fall for them would have been the only natural end to such a clever, quietly formed plot.

"I didn't have anything to do with you losing consciousness and I'm offended by the insinuation," she added quickly, narrowing her eyes defiantly at him.

"I used you to get off that planet. I did not use you to further myself here. I did that so you wouldn't wonder why I didn't have a dime to my name but managed to claim affluence."

Well there you go Caffrey, letting a woman run your con right into the ground. With his insistence, genuinely, that he hadn't tried to con her he'd managed to admit to conning her. Funny how the truth works when you spend most of the time lying. His hurt was quickly overshadowed though, at the insinuation that he was about to do something worse than what he was pretty sure she too was planning.

"Swindling whatever I wanted? Tell me Vala, just what were your plans for this afternoon? Did it involve any kind of conniving? I bet it did."

Neal crossed his arms indignantly, narrowing his eyes right back.

"My plan involved making sure that the woman I'd grown fond of was taken care of when we eventually parted ways because that woman was kind enough to deserve better than a con like me."

"... Fond of?"

Yes. That was the part Vala was stuck on. She didn't know whether or not to believe he had, honestly, been thinking of her. He was a professional lair, just like her, so how could she risk putting stock into anything he had to say?

Except she wanted to believe he was telling the truth. With all her heart, she wanted to think that he had thought of her. No one, at least not before Daniel and her home at the SGC, had ever thought about her. And the idea that Neal might have broke her heart a little.

"I'm not going to apologize for the very small con I had planned for the day," she said quietly. "I have to make due somehow and I don't exactly have a falsified history of wealth to support me out here."

"Well... actually, you do."

Neal ignored the repeated 'fond of' in favor of proving his intent. Walking over to the side panel, he did a series of taps to bring up their digital identities. In just a few short months, he'd gotten to using the screens like a professional. From time to time he had rather asinine troubles he had to get Vala to fix, like when he'd changed the suite's language to that of the planet Klom. Otherwise though, he was pretty savvy.

Blinking on the wall was a perfect image of her from their day of arrival. Her name read Vala Caffrey, per the lie about her being his wife. Their combined assets, to which she had full access, were that of at least the equivalent of upper middle class. Their ship? Sometime in the last few weeks it had been sorted so that it appeared (and actually was by now) fully, completely, legally hers.

Turning back then, Neal looked at her very directly. He was a lot of things, but heartless wasn't one of them. Feelings weren't his favorite topic for discussion, he often let wild, sweeping romantic gestures do that for him, and for a con man on the run? The best he could have offered her was something better than himself.

"I did intend to lie to you. I never intended to let you take the fall for me."

For the first time in a long time - possibly in forever - Vala was completely speechless.

She took a hesitant step forward, and then another, staring at the screen and the evidence that was right before her of what he had done.

For her. For someone he had barely known and couldn't trust, and even as he plotted how to get off the space station and head out on his own, he had done everything in his power to make sure she hadn't been completely abandoned.

"Neal..." She couldn't look at him. She could barely bring herself to speak. She wanted to tell him everything; explain to him everything she had been through, and how abandoned and alone she had spent most of her life feeling. How things had gotten better at the SGC, for a bit anyway, until they had got worse again. And how, when she had ended up at the castle, she had lost the only thing that came even close to a family that she ever thought she would have. Just the small, tender gesture to make sure that she would be okay was almost too much for her to bear in the face of all that she had lost.

But she couldn't find the words. So instead she just turned her head, finally, to look at him. "Thank you," she whispered.

Now that was something he hadn't expected. Gratitude. Mozzie, Alex, all his con artist friends were different from Vala. They had never reformed. Neal, he'd reformed and it had changed the way he looked at things, whether he wanted to or not. The pair, trapped on a space station a million light years from home, were kindred spirits. Perhaps some of the only individuals in the cosmos that could intimately related. When he heard her thanks, Neal took a moment's pause to study her.

As much as either of them may have wanted to, they wouldn't have skipped town on the other. While Neal knew he could count on Mozzie, there was a part of his friend that would always be the con before the man. Meanwhile, Neal was realizing that even out in the deepest reaches of space, 'the suit' had gotten to him. All those encouraging words, coupled with Neal's natural ability to be a good and loving man, had shaped him.

"You're welcome," came his quiet response.

For all his pretty words, Neal was feeling awkward then. Not for getting caught with an alien and not for having his con busted at large... no, he was awkward because this was one of those what to do next scenarios. Planning was only his strong point until the aftermath. Aftermath was supposed to be Peter's department. Neal usually just ran away from messy remains.

So, true to form, he was going to be completely lame and run. Not far but far enough to try and gather his thoughts.

"I should do damage control and make sure our cover isn't blown."

Vala had been really good at running away. She'd spent a long time not having to deal with the fallout of her choices because of that; but being with the SGC had changed that. It had forced her to stay in one place, and influences like Daniel had made her learn what it was to clean up her own messes. It was the price she payed for having a home, and the only thing that had made it tolerable was that she had people there to help her.

"There's no cover to have blown, besides you trying to cheat on your wife," Vala chided. "Maybe we should look into couple's therapy, I hear that is quite helpful."

At least, that was what Maury had told her.

"Vala Mal Doran is my real name, if that is any consolation." She paused then, as the realization that he planned to leave her continued to sink in. It wasn't that she wasn't used to being alone; when she was a conwoman, there wasn't really any other option. But she'd been spoiled by having a family, and even if whatever she and Neal had was built on a lie, it still was the only thing she still had to call her own. The idea of leaving him hadn't even occurred to her, strangely enough. She hadn't felt that way since she met Daniel.

But maybe it was because Neal was the only person she'd ever met besides Daniel who, when she was around him, made her feel like who she wanted to be instead of who she actually was.

She bit her lip and just stared at him. "I really want you to stay, Neal."

For as knowledgable as Vala seemed about space, every now and then she used an idiom or referenced something that left Neal tilting his head. The mention of couples therapy brought, at least momentarily, that same expression of amused bewilderment for but a moment. Perhaps that was something they had in the future but he doubted it was quite like what his head was going towards. Which, naturally, was images of terrible daytime television.

"My name really is Neal Caffrey," he said honestly.

Damn hitting his head that first day they'd met. He was still in his mode of FBI consultant. That included telling his real name and when he'd first woken up after the accident, the last few weeks of relative imprisonment had escaped his memory for at least an hour or two.

Sighing, he plopped down gracelessly on the edge of the bed. He could hear Peter's vocie in the back of his head, lecturing him and going on about the value of being a good man. Being a good man was just really hard when you didn't know how to get by on anything else.

"I... don't know what to say Vala. I didn't mean for, this..." he gestured randomly in front of himself, "...to happen."

Groan.

She should probably mention to him, sometime, that she's not actually from the future and just another planet. But considering with the amount of bombshells that have been dropped, it's probably better to save that for later.

She moved to the bed and sat down next him, glancing at him out of corner of her eye and trying not to be too obvious about it. Vala wasn't sure exactly what was going on or even exactly what he was apologizing for. But at the same time, it felt kind of nice to hear it.

No one had ever really apologized to her for anything. Not that, to be fair, she really deserved a whole lot of apologies in her time, but that didn't negate the fact that this was a first for her. And even though she didn't quite grasp what that meant, she wasn't naive enough to just let it slip by.

"I think we both have to take a little responsibility for what's happened," she offered. "I mean, I lied to you too and you certainly had no idea. But, well..." She paused, then, because for Vala, honesty was something difficult to grasp. It left her exposed and vulnerable, and especially now, she knew she didn't have any reason at all to trust him. He had lied to her; but the fact of the matter still remained that, in his own way, her well being had been important to him. That was something she was totally unfamiliar with, outside of SG-1. "I've never really had a home, or a family. And just when I found a place I felt like I belonged, I ended up at the castle. And I suppose I just sort of gave up on ever finding that belonging feeling anywhere else." She glanced over at him, not quite at the point where she could admit that she had grown accustomed to him. Not even accustomed, but... attached. "I'm not exactly in a rush to lose that again." There, that sounded... non-committal.

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an anon suggested it so

Vala Mal Doran | Stargate SG-1

STAR-CROSSED LOVERS - Neal Caffrey | White Collar

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