And even then, I feel like he doesn't so much accept that this is a good thing as surrender to the inevitability of it remaining the status quo.

Yes, this - the thing about Mozzie is he is absolutely, one hundred percent convinced that the feds are eventually going to screw Neal over and break his heart and/or get him locked up or killed. It's something he knows, as sure as gravity or the sun going down. Happily ever after isn't for guys like them. And he thought this time he could make Neal see reason but no, once Neal has his heart set on something he will not be turned aside, and now he's decided Peter and the FBI are his happily ever after and by mid-S3 Mozzie has finally accepted that all he can do is hold on, and watch, and wait, and be there to help Neal pick up the pieces, again, when it all blows up in Neal's face again as Mozzie knows it will. Because everything in Mozzie's life experiences has taught him that this is the way the world works.

I would read the crap out of your Kate, because there's so much more depth there.

Thank you! :) I do wish canon had developed her more - there's a lot of potential for depth that didn't get explored as much as it could have. (Which is what fic is for, of course.) To be honest, I find Kate's journey toward the wrong side of the law, and the choices she makes and how she learns to live with them and how she tries to take control of her life, a lot more interesting than Neal's journey away from it, but then found families on the fringes of society are kind of a thing, for me. I have a lot of pre-series Neal&Kate&Mozzie plotbunnies:

Five hours ago she got the text: Got him he’s hurt need a car corner of 34th and Park NOW.

Now the light is fading outside, and in the silence she can hear tires squealing, cars sliding on ice in the motel parking lot. There’s a puddle in the tiled entryway, snow blown in through the crack under the door.

“An ‘89 Toyota. Seriously?” Mozzie shakes his head at her. “Baby’s first grand theft auto and you go for the ‘89 Toyota.”

“What, you think Neal would rather have been rescued in a Ferrari?”

“He’s Neal. What do you think?”

Kate chokes on a sharp bark of laughter. “It’s what was available.”

The driver had been a woman about her own age, dark hair in a hasty ponytail and a battered denim jacket that, like the car, had clearly seen better days; Kate watched her leave the engine running to duck into a convenience store; there were cheap coloring books piled in the back seat and a child’s coat that had obviously been mended by hand.

The back door stuck; the woman, whoever she was, clearly couldn’t afford to have it repaired. (Kate thinks she should care about this.) She’s stolen many things, in the last year, but that car is the first thing she can’t possibly convince herself the owner won’t miss.

(She should care, but right now all she can think of are those extra three seconds Moz spent wrestling the door open before they could get Neal into the back seat and away and safe.)

(This is the backstory of that first job with Wilkes that they talk about in Front Man, which will get finished someday.)

I do think that if Neal loved someone that much there would have been a good reason - they were together for almost seven years, I think, and Neal is too good at reading people to not know what sort of person she was for that long. I think his view of her is somewhat idealized, but he's exaggerating good qualities that she actually has, not making things up.

Yes, Neal does some incredibly stupid things because of her, certainly. But I don't agree with the common fandom perception that his trust in her or his faith in her loyalty to him is evidence that he's too blinded by love to think clearly. It's canon that she visited him "every week like clockwork" in prison for three and a half years. That's a long time to wait for somebody. And yes, her actions in S1 often are a little suspicious and confusing (largely, in part, because the writers just want to have Kate do something mysterious for the sake of adding mystery, or something) but I'd say she's earned the benefit of the doubt.

I totally buy Neal not being able to betray Mozzie's expectations in him but not being able to commit to the con, and thus dragging his feet because he doesn't want to burn either bridge and is hoping that if he doesn't look too hard at the predicament, it'll stop being able to see him, or something

I ... really don't. He's been refusing to go along with what Mozzie thinks is the sensible course of action ever since the first job, when he decides to give up his chance to steal billions of dollars from Adler to spend the evening on a park bench with Kate.

(I've always wondered if he told Kate about that, later, after she'd joined their life of crime and started robbing banks with him. And how she reacted. I can imagine she'd be rather touched and utterly exasperated at the same time, like, dude, that's really sweet but I wasn't being serious you could have come up with some excuse and then we'd have a bazillion dollars right now or something.)

But this sudden inability to stand up to Mozzie and say this is not what I want makes no sense. He was willing to say goodbye to Mozzie at the end of S1. And Mozzie certainly doesn't approve of Neal running around trying to shoot people, and Neal isn't discouraged in the slightest. Maybe if the show had emphasized a bit more that Kate was the center of Neal's life for eight years and with her and her killer both dead Neal is flailing because he doesn't have a clue what he really wants anymore, it might have been more convincing. But Mozzie is really not very good at standing up to Neal when Neal digs his heels in about something, so I don't understand why Neal doesn't just tell Mozzie they're not doing this.

(I suppose one could make the argument that this only proves that he'll stand up to Mozzie and/or give up the chance to have a lot of money when Kate is involved, thus proving that Neal loves Kate more than he loves Peter or anyone else in his life, and my little shipper heart would be perfectly happy with that, but I really doubt that's what the writers intended to convey.)

And I've ranted at length about this elsewhere, but I feel like S3 is primarily plot-driven, not character-driven - Neal won't stand up to Mozzie because the plot won't work if he does. Neal wants to run off with the treasure because, well, the plot requires him to want it. But we get no other explanation. I don't understand why he wants the treasure. I honestly don't believe he does want it. (If they'd introduced some of the S4 backstory in S3 it might have made more sense, maybe? Neal's relationship with money is a fascinating and complicated subject all on its own, and S4 suggests he grew up with some pretty severe financial uncertainty, but that's never addressed in S3.)

And then the writers hope that if they throw in enough "Neal is shiny! Wheeeeee!" capers the viewers won't notice that his motivations don't actually make any sense.

(I feel like in S3 and parts of S4 the show veers wildly back and forth between "crime is fun and sexy and exciting and isn't Neal shiny wheeeeeeeeeee!" and anvilicious moralizing along the lines of "Neal is a very bad person who must learn the error of his ways and stealing and lying are bad and wrong and will totally screw up your life" ... with no acknowledgement of any shades of grey in between. This is incredibly frustrating, because the shades of grey in between is where all the interesting stuff is, IMO. *sigh* I keep wanting this show to be more morally complex than it is. But I guess that is what fic is for.)

To me, the version of Neal we get in S3 and parts of S4 feels like a fundamentally different person from the S1-2 version. And not in a logical character growth and evolution sort of way, either - the two Neals are similar, certainly, but I don't see how the 3-4 version grew out of the 1-2 version. I spent most of S3 going ... "who are you and what have you done with Neal?" because that was not him.

(Except now I have to figure out a way to reconcile the two versions of him in a way that makes sense if I'm going to write the epic S4-in-DC AU fic. This is frustrating.)

(Every time I watch the sequence in Family Business where Neal says "One way or another, we're going to make sure he goes down for murder," I have this gut reaction of Oh god Neal hopefully in a way which does not involve YOU GETTING MURDERED, YOURSELF!", because Neal with his gloves off does not have the limits on his behavior that normal people do.)

I just... wish that the danger came across more palpably, but that's not really the tone of the show.

THIS. Yes. Neal is ... not very good at dealing with strong emotions. At all. And he's learned to keep himself under such tight control, most of the time, that when he breaks he really breaks, and it gets ugly. And yeah, everyone who knows him well can see this, and it scares the hell out of them.

I find that when I really engage with something, I tend to rip it into little pieces, which may make me come across as more critical ... I completely adore so many aspects of canon that the parts that don't work for me stick out.

... yeah, I know the feeling, and I hope I'm not coming across as too critical here, either. There's so much stuff that is so very awesome, which makes me notice the things that aren't, too.