info。

[suitable]

Name: Peter Burke
Canon: White Collar
Canon Point: just prior to running in on Alex and Neal in episode 2.07 Point Blank

Appearance:

Blurb.

Age: 40ish. Tim DeKay looks good for pushing 50, okay. Plus the FBI enforces retirement at a certain age, and it's not been brought up in canon so. Fudging it a bit.

History:

Jumping from the fact that Peter's father worked in construction as a bricklayer [Copycat Caffrey, What Happens in Burma...], we can assume he was born into either an upper lower-class or a lower middle-class Catholic family. Money was always an issue, so Peter basically kept his nose to the grindstone for the entirety of his scholastic career. He probably went to public grade school since he mentions Sunday school [Book of Hours] and Catholic high school - hence his knowledge of Latin [Company Man]. He managed to get some sports in (probably basketball due to his sheer height and continued interest [Home Invasion]), but school always came first. His work paid off when he won himself a full ride to college on an advanced mathematics scholarship, where he continued to work his butt off in order to graduate and then continue on with two years of accountancy school. After graduating and earning his CPA [Copycat Caffrey], he went straight to Quantico to begin training to join the FBI despite having been scouted by several Fortune 500 companies [Company Man]. With his background in mathematics and accounting, he was immediately assigned to the "boring" caseload of mortgage fraud, Medicare/Medicaid scams, forgeries, all those financial crimes that look really damned boring at first glance. One of the very first cases where he was lead investigator was looking into a heist at an art gallery downtown in 1998. While interviewing the various employees, he met and instantly fell for an assistant manager named Elizabeth. During the course of the investigation, he ended up "borrowing" various resources in order to put her under extra surveillance to see if she had a boyfriend. Various failed conversations and flirtation attempts on Peter's part finally prompted Elizabeth to take the lead and ask him out for Italian. They spent the next two years dating before marrying in early 2000.

He worked his way up the chain, slowly floating around the idea of a task force, one specifically geared toward catching white collar criminals. In 2002, Peter was put on the case of a new blip on the Bureau's radar: Neal Caffrey, a forgery expert and art thief whose list of suspected crimes just longer and longer as Peter kept investigating. He spent three years getting into Caffrey's head with nothing to show for it but annual birthday cards, champagne sent to the surveillance teams, and a goddamn lollipop. Peter was always just a step or two behind until a tip from a very junior agent - Diana Berrigan, his soon to be probie - led him to stop chasing Caffrey and instead head him off at the pass, as it were. He went after one Kate Moreau, Neal's old flame and a petty forger in her own right, and once he found her, he leaked the information onto the street via his various informants. Sure enough, Neal raced to meet her at a storage facility and sure enough, Peter was waiting for him. But Caffrey wasn't angry at himself, Kate, or Peter - all he was was grateful to Peter for helping him find her, and shook his hand before being taken away. [Forging Bonds]

After a pretty lengthy trial lasting about a year, during which Peter himself testified [Unfinished Business], the only thing Caffrey ended up convicted of was bond forgery and he was sentenced to four years in a super-maximum security prison facility. Finally done with the case, Peter put it away and went back to his usual work, eventually earning his commemorative ten-year service pin. His proposal for a specialized, white collar unit was bolstered by his newfound reputation after catching Caffrey, and soon enough, Peter had the funding and the office space. He searched out Hughes Reese, a stellar agent in retirement, and found a loophole to allow him back to work as the head of the unit.

Life was nice, quiet, and simple for a while. ...It didn't last.

Three years and nine months later, Peter was pulled away from another investigation with news that Neal had broken out. Being the only one to ever catch him, he was again assigned to bring him in. The chase was much shorter this time - only a few days - as Neal wasn't so much running as he was looking for someone, again. Yep, back to Kate, who'd definitively dumped his ass a month or so earlier. Faced with the prospect of another four years on the inside, Neal approached Peter with a deal: to be let out under Peter's supervision, acting as a consultant to help the Bureau catch other white collar criminals. After a brief deliberation, some insight from El, and a hell of a tip from Caffrey which led to a major breakthrough on his current case, Peter managed to convince his superiors to accept Neal's proposal and let him out, albeit with a GPS tracking anklet to keep track of him. He warned him against chasing after Kate despite Neal's unshakable conviction that she was in some kind of trouble (not that Peter actually expected Neal to listen to him - still, hope springs eternal).

So it was against a backdrop of successfully closing a number of high-profile cases and way more not-so-high that Neal recruited Mozzie, an old fence friend, to help him find where Kate had gotten to. Slowly they began to piece together various clues that she'd left behind and found that she was being held under the thumb of someone known only as The Man With The Ring (TMWTR, derived from a lone ATM security photo of a hand on Kate's shoulder) as leverage against Neal. Apparently TMWTR wanted one of the many pieces Neal had stolen and squirreled away over the years, but Kate couldn't (or wouldn't) say which. Following an operation in Chinatown, a contact Neal had developed in Interpol shared the fact that the man holding Kate was with the FBI, and almost directly after getting that lead, Neal discovered a picture of Peter and El in their home - with Peter wearing a ring identical to the one in the ATM photo.

Convinced that Peter had betrayed him, Neal confronted him with this information in the middle of a boiler room con while they were both undercover in the Hamptons (yeah, Neal's timing is fabulous like that :|). After salvaging the op, Peter brought Neal back to his home to explain that the ring was his commemorative ten-year service pin and that most agents who received it? Had it made into a ring. Peter then revealed that he'd also been looking into Kate and whoever had her (who was most definitely with the Bureau) and both he and Neal had come to the same suspect: Garrett Fowler, an agent from OPR - think FBI's version of Internal Affairs - who had already attempted to frame Neal for a diamond heist and bugged Peter's house and phone. After Neal put his life in Peter's hands to show his trust in him, he told Neal that he'd met with Kate. He came away with two bits of information from that meeting: one, that the piece TMWTR wanted was an amber music box owned by Catherine the Great that Neal had allegedly stolen; and two, Kate didn't give a damn about Neal. Unfortunately, this was one "allegedly" that Neal was actually innocent of and, despite Peter's repeated warnings not to wreck his new life for someone who couldn't even bring herself to say she'd ever loved Neal, he began searching for the box in order to "save" Kate. Meanwhile, Peter began to dig deeper into the box, Fowler's apparent corruption, and what the hell he wanted Caffrey for - and in that process, he discovered a top-secret OPR operation codenamed Mentor.

Neal reconnected with a former lover/colleague named Alex Hunter, who'd spent most of her criminal career chasing after the box. After convincing her of his intent, she finally agreed to come in on the job and told him where the box actually was: hidden in a safe in the Italian Consulate in Manhattan. The three of them - Neal, Alex, and Mozzie - began planning the heist but everyone knew the deal was off before it even started as long as Neal's tracking anklet stayed on. So Neal went and contacted Fowler (pretty much right after he'd unsuccessfully tried to get Peter booted from the Bureau with another frame job) in order to get the anklet disabled. But he did Neal one better: he went to Elizabeth's event planning company to arrest her on a bogus charge, thus enraging Peter to the point of socking Fowler in the mouth and earning himself a two week suspension. Now with the anklet broadcasting him as being in his apartment and Peter unable to even arrest a little old lady for petty jaywalking, Neal had the all-clear to get the box back. Peter, stinging from being played by both Neal and Fowler, gave his partner one last shot to do the right thing, the smart thing: "you can either go back to prison, pining for the girl that got away, or you can actually stay out here and do some good with your life" - it was Neal's choice.

Neal chose Kate.

If you're surprised by this, Peter would like to inform you there's a bridge for sale.

Together with Alex and Mozzie, Neal managed to get the box - only to be double-crossed by Alex at the last minute; she got away with the box while the other two barely managed to get away, period. But shortly into Neal's initial moping over it all, Alex came back and returned the box - telling Neal that if Kate didn't turn out to be the girl of his dreams, she didn't want to burn any bridges. So Neal packed his bags and handed over the box to Fowler with the assurance that he and Kate would never see him again, then said his goodbyes to El and Mozzie. Meanwhile, even though he was still suspended, Peter continued to look into Fowler and Mentor, calling back Diana (now an experienced agent in her own right) back in from the D.C. office to help him. The two of them managed to recover the box from Fowler just in time and discovered that Mentor was created specifically for Caffrey - that OPR had created two completely untraceable, government-sanctioned identities for both him and Kate to disappear. Oh, and somewhere in all this? Peter got to shoot Fowler. It was pretty awesome, except where he was wearing Kevlar. Major bummer.

Anyway. Peter managed to catch up with Neal at an airstrip on the Hudson right before he was about to board the plane where Kate was waiting for them to fly off to their new lives. He begged Neal to think about what he was doing, to consider what he was giving up the minute he stepped on that plane, to think about all the people who cared about him that he was just going to leave behind. Neal hesitated on the tarmac, and explained that this was the reason he'd said goodbye to everyone except Peter - because Peter was the only one who could possibly change his mind. Whether he actually managed to change it or not, he managed to make Neal hesitate long enough to avoid getting on the plane before it exploded, and he was there to make sure Neal didn't run headlong into the fire to save someone who obviously couldn't be saved.

Yeah, shit got real there.

Neal was shipped back off to prison for attempting to escape while Peter was left to face the huge political and bureaucratic fallout that tends to happen when a foreign consulate is robbed, major Bureau resources are misappropriated for a career criminal, and a plane goes and blows up. It took two months, endless administrative inquiries and disciplinary hearings, and a ridiculous amount of pull on Peter's part, but he finally managed to get Neal out of prison again and the deal reinstated, this time with a new and improved anklet for Neal - improved in that this one didn't chafe quite so much and was even more tamper-proof than the last one. Again, as soon as Neal was out, Peter warned him against looking into the box or Kate's death on his own, instead swearing to Neal that he would find the ones responsible for everything and bring them in... So of course Neal went and dove right into his own investigation with Mozzie.

Again. If you're surprised at this? That bridge is still on the market.

With Diana's now-permanent transfer to the Manhattan team, Peter once again began attempting to distract Neal from the massive trauma of losing Kate (as well as the investigation he knew Neal was conducting behind his back) with new and exciting cases. All the while, he and Diana continued to unofficially probe into Fowler, Mentor, OPR, and the people who were higher up on the conspiracy chain - but they continued to hit dead end after dead end. Fowler had been summarily dismissed from OPR, completely disavowed, and quietly swept under the rug without a trace. To avoid the same thing happening to the box while it was in some evidence locker, Peter had Diana swap it out for a lookalike and then keep the real one in a location known only to her. Despite his utter distaste for keeping secrets, Peter decided to keep all of this from Neal, knowing he was way too close to this to handle himself without blowing the entire thing before they got to the bottom of it all. Not to mention he was justifiably afraid that the people who blew up the plane to get to Neal? Might try to get rid of him again, and Peter was not going to let that happen.

In the process of inspecting the wreckage of the plane and obtaining the cockpit recording of the last few minutes aboard the plane, Neal was forced to involve Sara Ellis, an insurance investigator - think the highest-end repo woman ever - who was still after Neal for various insured pieces he'd stolen (most prominently a Raphael painting that he'd "allegedly" stolen shortly before Peter had caught him the first time). After softening a bit towards Neal - then hardening and softening again (Neal's people skills are kind of fail like that) - Sara gave him the tape, on which could be heard Kate's last phone call to an unknown person. Mozzie began analyzing the sound and eventually declared that Kate had dialed to a burner phone, voicing her concern over Peter's unexpected appearance on the runway. Mozzie also told Neal that the person on the other end of the line? Was the FBI agent who had set up the entire deal for Neal and Kate - Garrett Fowler. Vengeance on the mind, Neal decided the way to get to Fowler was through the music box and so began to follow its trail again. He and Mozzie quickly discovered the fake box, and easily traced the real one back to Diana and Peter.

Of course, even with all the conspiracies and intrigues going on, the White Collar team still managed to do their jobs - taking down primo bank robbers, corrupt politicians, a scheming criminology professor and his student crew, a Colombian mob boss, assassins and identity-stealing millionaires, dirty US Marshals, and treasonous CEOs. Shortly after one such case where Peter almost died from being poisoned, Neal told Peter he knew Peter had the box (again, fabulous timing), and - even though he was still worried and unsure if Neal could handle it - he agreed to share everything he had with Neal, promising him "no more secrets". Peter brought the music box to Neal's apartment and told him that there was nothing out of the ordinary about it except for a small hole on the top where one of four golden cherubs was missing, and which Peter suspected wasn't so much a defect as a keyhole. Neal then revealed that the missing cherub was in his possession (since Alex had given it to him before leaving after the nonsense with the professor, with her having gotten it a few years into her obsession with the box), and so they put the pieces together to find out what was worth all of this hassle.

All they found was a secret compartment containing a second comb that when inserted into the box's gears, played a slightly off-key version of one of Mozart's sonatas. Figuring there had to be something to it, Peter and Neal put Mozzie on the task of deciphering whatever was hidden. Of course, Neal realized right away that Alex had had both pieces of the box the night they took it from the consulate and would of course have put it together, and thus would also have found the code. So he and Mozzie began looking into a series of cat burglar heists around town, each take including a separate piece of a silver set that Alex had fenced years ago. Neal then conned the Bureau into taking up the case by slipping a file he and Mozzie had created into the active pool, since Neal knew Peter looked for good ones (but was completely unaware that Peter chose such cases for the sole purpose of keeping Neal focused on the job and not on cons - the irony here requires Heimlich procedures x|). Of course Peter latched onto the thefts and started the team working on it. Thus using the FBI's resources, Neal was able to find Alex and confront her about the box and the code therein.

Upon finding she was unable to crack it and she was now under some serious heat from those interested in the box, he offered her a way out: steal the box from where Diana had hidden it in her apartment and then simply return it to the Russians. It seemed a foolproof plan, really - Diana and Peter were going to be staking out Alex's next intended target waiting for her to show, and once the Russians had the box they'd make a big show of it, thus taking the bulls-eye off her back. So Alex agreed and went off to do her thing while Neal went back to the surveillance van... Only to find Peter was about to send Diana to work on something from home since nothing seemed to be happening at the moment. He tried to stop her from leaving, but Peter shooed her off so he could share something he'd just found with Neal. After months of searching, he'd finally caught a ping off of Fowler, who'd gone to ground after the explosion and resultant fallout. Peter had found Fowler hiding out at a motel under an alias, an alias which had also been used before Kate's death to purchase semtex. Plastic explosives. Now again, he wasn't sure if Neal could handle it, but he'd made a promise not to keep things from Neal and he was going to keep it. ...Yeah, probably not the smart move to make there, which Peter figured out pretty quickly since right after sharing this? Diana called to tell him that someone had just broken into her apartment and stolen the box. And then the very next day, by some strange coincidence, the Russian Embassy announced it would be displaying a recently recovered artifact at the Russian Heritage Museum - an amber music box taken from Catherine the Great's amber room during WWII - before sending it back to the motherland.

Incensed that Neal would go and jeopardize everything like this, especially after he'd gone and trusted him again, Peter benched him from the entire case and put him under house arrest, knowing that Neal had planned all of this to draw Fowler out into the open. What Peter didn't know? Was that Neal had lifted one of the keys to his tracking anklet from a dirty US Marshal a while ago. He also didn't know that on the spur of the moment, Neal had stolen a gun from the antique shop run by a friend of Mozzie's that they'd gone to for help with the code. So while Diana and Peter staked out the museum to catch Fowler, Neal was loading up his six-shooter and heading towards the event with a forged invitation.

Peter followed Fowler inside the museum once he showed up and chased him into an upstairs room where Fowler proceeded to barricade himself inside. Mozzie, discovering what Neal had done when he'd gone to inform him of an update re: the code at the apartment, immediately called Peter to warn him about what was happening. Peter then in turn called Diana and told her to watch out for Caffrey just before Neal walked inside the museum. He spotted Fowler through a window, dashed up the stairs, and proceeded to slice a large banner free of a balcony and pull a Tarzan from said balcony through the window of Fowler's hideyhole. With Peter trying to bash through the door from the outside, Neal fired one warning shot before pointing the gun at Fowler's head and demanding he explain why he killed Kate.

Peter and Diana finally broke the door down and he barely managed to talk Neal down and take the gun from him before he did anything he couldn't take back. But there was at least one good thing to come out of all the craziness and potential international incidents - once Peter got them all back at the Bureau offices, Fowler spilled everything he knew... Which to everyone's surprise, wasn't that much. Fowler was just another pawn on a board that just kept getting bigger and bigger the more they looked into it. Fowler was being blackmailed by an anonymous caller for killing the man who'd murdered his wife, something which he'd only been able to do with a tip from said caller. Everything he'd done up to that point had been orders passed down from above - the frame jobs, Mentor, all of it. He didn't know what was in the box, or who was pulling the strings, and what was more? Didn't care. All he wanted was to get back whatever shattered pieces of his life he could and get free of The Guy Pulling the Strings (TGPtS).

Neal then told him that they had proof of Kate calling Fowler from the plane, and the receipt from Fowler's purchase of the semtex. Fowler said the semtex was Kate's idea - to have the plane blow after she and Neal had bailed out over water to avoid anyone tracking them (...Kate liked the classics :|). Furthermore, he told Neal that he'd never received any phone call from Kate.

Which was when Neal realized that Mozzie had been the one to tell him that Fowler was the voice on the other end of the line, because Mozzie was the technical guy who handled all the gadgets and audio analyzers and doodads. That Mozzie had told him it was Fowler's voice, even though Mozzie had never once met Fowler or heard his voice - either in person or on a recording.

It was at this point that Peter - who assumed Neal had gotten the info from listening to the tape himself and thus didn't make the connection - reset Neal's anklet to leave the key he had useless and sent him back to the apartment to cool off while he and Diana continued talking with Fowler. Apparently, the only thing he'd managed to do in a year of chasing Caffrey and the box was schedule a meeting with the intermediary for TGPTS - a meeting which Peter and Diana had been able to figure out from various OPR files they'd filched from Fowler's office, but when they'd shown up, the contact spooked and ran before either agent or any security cameras could get a good look at him. However, they did manage to make a composite of all the small snatches the cameras had gotten and Fowler was able to identify him as Julian Larssen, a veteran of the Navy SEALs' Special Forces who had served with Fowler back in the day.

Peter and Fowler were about to start to track him down when Diana interrupted them with news that NYPD had responded to a murder in an antique shop. The same one where Neal had gotten his gun, and where Mozzie had gone for help with the code. When Peter and Diana arrived, they found nothing was taken, but the music box's off-kilter tune was playing, and the security footage was queued up to Neal's earlier exit. Sure that Neal was the next target, Peter and Diana raced across town to get to him before the shooter did, and took the stairs three at a time, guns drawn as they heard two voices speaking from the apartment....

Personality:

When you get right down to it, Peter's a simple man. He enjoys the little things in life - kicking his feet up on the coffee table with a cold beer, snuggling with his girl, filling out the daily crossword, playing a game of basketball, or just watching the game on his big ol' television at home. He's worked pretty damn hard to be where he is now, and he's happy to continue working hard to keep it because that's simply how it goes in the world. Could he have done other things with his life? Sure. He's got the brains, the skills, and the technical know-how - right out of college he had several lucrative offers from Fortune 500 companies, and in the years since working with the FBI, he's only expanded on that skill set (in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if he continued to get job offers in the private sector right up to present day in canon). And yeah, sometimes he thinks it'd be nice to have the fancy mansion and the expensive suits, but... He has absolutely no regrets. He likes the man he is, and knows that he is the way he is because of the choices he's made, and because of the people he's known and surrounded himself with.

Now, Peter may act like a simple, salt of the earth kind of guy, but don't let that fool you for a minute. The guy's got a damned fine intellect buzzing up in that head of his. It's not something that came naturally for him - he had to study and scrape for every bit of knowledge he's gotten, and it's all paid off quite well, thank you very much. He's not only got his mathlete-accounting skills, but he's also well-versed in world history, cars, famous and obscure quotes, Latin, religion, art history as well as art itself, wines (though he much prefers beer), folklore, criminology, economics, psychological profiling, fashion (ask him what he knows about Prada sometimes), forensics, firearms, sports, technology - seriously, the list goes on and on. He doesn't go around flaunting this knowledge (thus surprising strangers and friends alike when he does whips that brain out), and in fact does quite the opposite. He downplays his know-how, only pulling it out when it's necessary for the work at hand. Sometimes, he will even go so far as to play dumb - thus lulling people into slipping up around "a bumbling FBI agent". Peter also has an innate insight into people and situations, able to read intentions and predict outcomes, as well as a hunger for puzzle-solving that simply makes him unable to stop until he figures out whatever he's decided to put his mind to. Combine all of this with a keen tactical mind and a natural head for strategy, and you've got a pretty sharp tack.

However, all that intelligence? Makes Peter insanely sensitive to mistakes. He simply cannot stand it when stupid or easily preventable screw-ups muck up his plans and when they do? He has a bad tendency to start snapping at people who may not exactly be to blame, and to overreact over not only the stupid mistakes, but things that aren't really anyone's fault. This isn't to say that he thinks himself incapable of such mistakes, far from it. The amount of ass-kicking Peter tends to do when things don't go according to plan is nothing compared to how hard he kicks himself - he should have planned better, covered more angles, or figured it out faster. He also can't stand people who act above others for whatever reason - you have to prove to him you're worth that extra step (and it'd better be some pretty spectacular proof) for him to give you the exalted respect you think you deserve. Otherwise he'll just write you off as a pompous jackass and be all the smugger when he gets the chance to smack you down. But once you get in his good book, you're there forever. Or until you do something incredibly, amazingly stupid to fuck it up (for example, Neal is still in that book despite the crap he's pulled - and the list of that crap is effing long).

Now, moving on to his job. Peter is an agent through and through - he loves working for the Bureau, and can't imagine being anywhere else, even when the hours suck and the cases get dangerous. He believes in the system, but still acknowledges its various flaws, and tries to go as close to the book as he can (or at least stick to the lighter gray areas when he absolutely has to - Neal's been a horrible influence on him like that). Here, he can see that he's making a difference every single day he comes into the office while being challenged with new and exciting problems. He also loves figuring the crime and the criminals out, but not nearly as much as he loves bringing the bad guys in. He's a natural leader in the office and in the field, and it shows in the absolute dedication and loyalty his team displays toward him. It's not simply because he's brilliant and knows how to use that brilliance, though that's certainly no small part of it. In fact, Peter has one hell of a reputation around the Bureau despite his continued effort to stay out of the papers and the spotlight, and there's usually a sizeable stack of transfer requests of agents who want to work with his team - filled out by rookies and veterans alike. No, the real reason why Peter inspires such devotion in his team is that he cares about them. He never asks anyone to do something he himself wouldn't, he does his best to protect each of them and keep them out of harm's way, and he takes full responsibility (and blame) for whatever they end up doing - they're his people, his family, and nobody's going to hurt them as long as he's able to do something about it.

Of course, there's a downside to all of this - Peter doesn't exactly make all that many friends. It's a combination of a number of factors: a natural awkwardness that was only exacerbated by being too busy in school to really have time for deep, lasting friendship; his far-above-par intelligence which just separates him from people not on his level; and his inherent agent-ness. He's one of the best there is at his job, but he simply can't turn off the agent in him so his subordinates remain just that no matter how much he treats them as equals. Sure he'll go the gym with a few people now and again, and there's a semi-regular pickup game of basketball, but he never gets invited out for drinks after work. He never gets invited over for barbecues or to watch the game. Because on and off the clock, he's still The Boss. He doesn't mind this per se - he managed to get Elizabeth, though even he doesn't get why she still puts up with him. But whatever, it's enough for him.

In fact, it's safe to say that Neal is basically the only real friend he's ever had. Sure, Caffrey started off as just being a name in a file that Burke got assigned, but he ended up spending three years just getting into his head in order to catch him. In that time, Peter gained an immeasurable amount of respect and no small amount of awe for him, if only for Neal's sheer genius and raw talent. He's literally the smartest person Peter's ever met (even Elizabeth pales in comparison and she's more than smart enough to keep up with her husband), and the fact it all seems to come to Neal so easily yet he doesn't act like an insufferable jackass? Leaves Peter staggering. He's ridiculously proud of himself for just being able to match wits with the guy, and even more so that he was the only one able to bring him in and make the charges stick. And it doesn't hurt any that Neal's just so damn charming and funny on top of everything else. Of course, through all this, Neal spent just as much time reading up on and figuring out Peter as Peter did on Neal, so by the time the trial was over and Neal was shipped of to supermax, they were able to part with a generally amicable handshake and Neal still sent him birthday cards. They only got closer after Neal proposed their deal, because then the niggling frustration of all Neal's ridiculous potential being wasted as a criminal or in prison came to the fore. Now, after everything they've been through together, they've grown to be one part brothers, one part best friends, and one part old married couple.

(However, it's something to note here that while they may be friends, Peter never thinks of himself on the same plane as Neal and considers himself incredibly lucky that Neal even counts him as a friend. He always sees the younger man as being a step ahead deductively, a level above him intellectually, and it shows in the subtle compliments he pays Neal. For instance, in Home Invasion, while investigating the crime scene Neal tells Peter to "walk [him] through it, Sherlock". Later in the episode, Peter is cajoling Neal through dealing with an annoying millionaire and he calls him "Moriarty" - the only person to best Holmes. Peter also gets ridiculously pleased when Neal compliments him - as can be seen in the smile he gets when Neal says he's impressed Peter does the crossword in pen [Need to Know]. It's not that he sees himself as a dumb schmuck or anything like that, of course - he knows he's pretty damn smart - he just feels like he doesn't hold much of a candle to Neal's intelligence and would probably say that the only reason he managed to catch him in the first place? Is by spending three years learning how to think like Neal. Peter is just so used to Caffrey being capable and knowledgeable about so many things that it comes as a legit surprise when proven otherwise [Prisoner's Dilemma]. ...This also tends to backfire sometimes as it leads Peter to believe Neal can always bounce back and be okay and have a good handle on the situation when the going gets rough, thus leading him to leave Neal on his own when it'd probably be a lot smarter to keep him close at hand - the entirety of Point Blank showcases this rather spectacularly.)

The fact that Peter was able to get such a notorious felon out for this deal, especially right after said felon made the Department of Corrections look like a collection of dumb schmucks, shows that he has enough trust in Neal to vouch for him several times over. He's literally put his job on the line - multiple times - to back Neal's plays, and he's taken a hell of a lot of political shrapnel when those plays hit a snag. Why does he do it? Because he wants to trust Neal so damn badly. He tries to keep him on the straight and narrow, to get him to see that this new life is the best shot he's got at actual happiness while staying on the right side of the law and still being able to use all the myriad skills he's learned over the years, even though time and again he goes and falls (no, that's not the right word for it - dives headfirst) off the wagon and right back into his old life. Peter does his absolute best to do what's right by Neal, and if he said it didn't hurt every time Neal goes and treats him like nothing more than a common mark - using him and the FBI or trying to go around him - he'd be lying. Yet every time Neal goes and does something incredibly stupid or illegal, you barely have to blink before Peter runs after him, not only helping as much as he can but bringing to bear all the considerable resources he has access to. Peter wishes Neal would see that he can trust him, if only so that Neal would tell him things before they end up exploding in both their faces - like real partners should do.

All of this just makes Neal's fanatical obsession with Kate all the more infuriating for him. Peter simply cannot fathom how Neal - who's just so damned smart - can get so amazingly stupid and tunnel-visioned when it comes to her. As far as Peter sees it, she doesn't give a damn about Neal and is just out to use him to get to his hidden stash of art and money and whatever else he has squirreled away somewhere. The fact that this is so obvious, that she abuses the utter and complete trust Neal puts in her and apparently does nothing to earn it but twist his heart around? Just. Ugh. Unfortunately, as much as he'd like to believe otherwise, Peter has sullenly accepted that whenever Kate enters the equation, no matter how tangentially, Neal will always, always, always pick her over him no matter what Peter does to prove himself as a real friend. The only thing he can do (and has tried to do on multiple occasions with almost no success) is keep Neal as far away from anything Kate-related as possible to remove the temptation to screw over his chance for a better life. He'd like to believe what Neal said while drugged in Vital Signs - that deep down, on some level, Neal knows Kate isn't any good for him, and that he really does trust Peter but... Yeah. He's dealt with Neal for so long, he doesn't really believe it. Sigh.

And now, ever since Neal went ahead for the box and nearly got himself blown up (all for Kate, of course), Peter's concern and drive to keep Neal safe have gone through the roof. He's done his best to keep Neal distracted with interesting cases that he picks out especially for him (canon has shown he literally pans the caseload, skipping past relatively boring copyright infringements and mortgage frauds to find the extraordinary ones that'll really push Neal's talents) and to try and get him to move on with his life. He knows the people behind Mentor are still after the music box and the code hidden within it, and that Neal is a definite loose end to these people. He's also damnably aware of how very badly Neal wants to get these bastards, and so he's (again) trying to keep him as far away from the investigation as possible (and having just about the same amount of success with it - ie: none). This whole nasty business forced Peter to keep a lot of things from Neal, not to mention going around the Bureau since it's OPR people who look to be responsible, and he absolutely hates it. The good guys aren't supposed to have to slink around under the radar and he shouldn't have to lie to his partner, but he knows that Neal is way, way, way too invested to this whole nastiness to think clearly (with good reason, of course, but that doesn't change anything), and that this is the only way to get this done right.

Still, when Neal confronts him with what he's been holding back? Peter chooses to preserve the trust Neal apparently has in him and lays almost every one of his cards out on the table even though he knows Neal might not be able to handle it (spoiler alert: he's not :|). He's deeply shaken by what happened at the Russian Heritage Museum, and how badly Neal broke down there because really? All the trauma and bullshit aside? He thought Neal was dealing with it so much better. Hell, Peter blames himself for not prepping Neal better, for not seeing how badly he was taking everything, for not supporting him enough through all the crap that's been thrown his way, and for not being able to stop it all before Neal went totally batshit. So that drive to keep Neal safe? Yeah, this whole complex of guilt is making it increase exponentially. But there's some bright side to take away from all this, or at least a relatively brighter side. All this? Has taught Peter that he needs to hammer at Neal even harder to get him to open up about things because if Neal keeps going the way the he's going? He won't end up back in prison. He'll get sent to the loony bin.

Finally, there's Peter's wife, Elizabeth. They've been together twelve years, and Peter knows this is due more to her being incredibly understanding and patient rather than anything he's gone and done. She gets him on every single level, complements him intellectually, and knows him better than he knows Neal (which is saying a whole hell of a lot). Even after ten years of marriage, they're still amazingly happy with each other, often having lunch together (either at home or around Manhattan), calling each other constantly, arranging "date nights" with each other, even using Skype when Peter's forced to be away by the job. Peter even takes his wedding ring and a framed picture of El with him when he goes undercover, never minding the fact that it could blow his cover and screw up the entire operation. It's simply not enough to say that Peter adores El because there are just no words that could accurately describe just how strongly he feels about her. He doesn't sleep at all well when she's not there, and just slowly frays the longer they're apart. She's his rock, and he's all too aware of how very, very, very lucky he is to have her as he doesn't come close to deserving her.

Just looking at Peter and El's relationship says volumes on how totally inept Peter is when it comes to women in general. He started off by stalking her using a spare FBI surveillance team (she still has the photos), and when he's not sure what to get her for a birthday/anniversary, he pulls her credit card bills and eBay receipts (okay, he's a bit of a stalker-chan, no one's denying that); on one occasion where she learned that he'd had to flirt with a receptionist during the course of an investigation, she began laughing hysterically. Yeah, Peter is an abysmal failure at flirting and general interaction with women (unless he's established them as being a colleague or a part of his team) - it's an extension of the social awkward from school that never really went away. The only way he can fail more is if they start crying on him. He literally squirms and flails until he manages to find a way to get the hell out of there. This same ineptitude applies to kids, which is why he often has Neal run interference for him whenever they have to deal with them. It's not that he dislikes children (in fact, he's shown to have a heck of a soft spot for them), he just.... Fails at them.

TL;DR: Peter Burke is a massively dorky cowboy-wannabe agent-man who's got a wife who's too damn good for him, a lil' bro who needs to be shaken by a British nanny, and a ridiculous love affair involving deviled ham.

Abilities:

◦ speed, strength, and endurance of a normal guy his age who engages in moderate daily exercise
◦ exceptionally good shot with a handgun
◦ qualified accountant
◦ insane deductive skills
◦ Neal-sense - an innate ability to tell when Neal Caffrey is up to something, attempting to pull something over someone, or otherwise lying. ...Seriously, it's eerie.
◦ intimate knowledge of horses, including care and riding - ...it's canon. :|.

Weaknesses:

◦ usual human frailties