The Fourth of July is around the corner, and many people will watch fireworks to celebrate. It brings to mind how we’ve used fireworks in our AU. They’ve appeared in their literal form as our characters attend fireworks shows, but have also appeared metaphorically to indicate sparks of romance.
Our younger version of Neal has many amazing skills, but doesn’t have a lot of romantic experience. After much fretting about where we wanted to take the romantic subplot – or if we even had the courage to attempt a romantic subplot – we kicked things off with a fireworks bang in Caffrey Disclosure.
Warning for spoilers for stories in the Caffrey Conversation AU.
When the AU opens in the story Caffrey Conversation, Neal still hopes to reunite with Kate. As mentioned in Silbrith’s post I let my own ambiguity about Kate play out in Caffrey Flashback, where characters keep trying to figure out whose side she's on as new clues emerge. By the end of that story Kate leaves the country and Neal realizes he needs to move on. That’s when he meets Sara Ellis, but he warns her that he’s nursing a broken heart and is just looking for a friend.
Then in Caffrey Disclosure, sparks start to fly in the chapters I titled Fireworks Part 1 and Part 2. As part of a con, Neal pretends to flirt with Sara. But is he really pretending? Things certainly got hot in the elevator scene. Sara tries to convince herself it’s all an act, and then they are interrupted by Graham Winslow, who takes them on his sailboat to watch the Fourth of July fireworks. Graham considers himself an expert matchmaker and thinks Neal and Sara make a good couple. For Sara this leads to panic. She’d been ready to accept the overtures of a fellow Sterling-Bosch employee, and was blindsided by suddenly seeing Neal in a romantic light. Neal’s too young, too immature, she tells herself, especially when she learns Neal is actually a few months younger than she is. Graham’s wife Julia picks up on these concerns and recommends that Sara needs to indulge her curiosity about Bryan before she can appreciate Neal.
Unfortunately for poor Neal, at the same time Sara decides he’s not what she needs, he’s realizing that those sparks with her were the real thing. When the fireworks show in Baltimore ends and they return home to New York, he’s determined to ask her out the next time they meet.
But first Neal confronts sparks that had fizzled in his past. Working the Masterson Music case, he has to contend with two former flames. First there's Yvette, a young woman who had a crush on Henry but when he didn't feel any sparks, she had temporarily turned to Neal, who soon realized he was a second choice. Ouch. She and Neal have to pretend to be engaged, convincing the bad guys that Neal is obsessed with her. To make matters even more complicated, he's pretending in front of Theresa, who had been his teenage crush in high school. Hoping that Theresa won't recognize him from his WITSEC days, he asks Henry to distract her by flirting with her, but it turns out the cousin Theresa really prefers is Angela.
When Caffrey Disclosure ends, Silbrith picks up the baton. She had the chore of writing Sara’s surprise and regrets in The Woman in Blue when Neal finally makes a move. It’s too late. Sara has already decided to relocate to London with Bryan. And we know from White Collar canon that Sara and Bryan were engaged. Neal moves on to date fellow student Fiona, and at last he’s getting experience in a romantic relationship with someone who truly likes him for himself with no ulterior motives. They move into the relationship slowly, as he was getting over the sting of Sara’s rejection, and Fiona had recently broken up with someone.
The literal fireworks appear again on New Year's Eve, as Neal and his family watch the show from a yacht in Honolulu. He goes out on that yacht again a few days later and hears about a new direction for Henry. There could finally be some romantic sparks coming for Henry in the new year, and of course younger cousin Angela and her boyfriend Michael had sparks from the moment they met in The Dreamer. The sparks between Mozzie and Janet are also fun to watch. And here's another set of crackling in the skies: Sara watched New Year's fireworks with Bryan in Paris.
The reason Neal and his family were watching fireworks in Hawaii was that Peter's brother Joe Burke encountered serious sparks with Noelle Caffrey Winslow, and although they almost broke up after watching Fourth of July fireworks together in Washington, D.C., they work through that and get married in Honolulu. They may have been inspired by seeing that there are still plenty of sparks between Peter and Elizabeth.
Speaking of which, in Silbrith's The Dreamer, Peter must pose as a ski instructor and pretend to feel sparks with a suspect's wife, with several team members instructing him on how to flirt. Neal even demonstrates faking sparks with a lamp, to show Peter how it's done. When Peter returns home to El, we see what real sparks are. Things get heated very quickly.
But what of Neal and Fiona, and Sara and Bryan?
Oh, the twists and turns that await you. There's always the possibility that Kate will return. We don’t know for sure if she was in the plane when it exploded in the skies over Argentina. Will she cause a new set of fireworks?
Caffrey Disclosure: Fireworks Part 1 on AO3
Caffrey Disclosure: Fireworks Part 1 on Fanfiction
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