Thank you! I'm glad you're enjoying it. I do think that sometimes we think of Neal as just having been put on pause for four years, while he was in prison, but that kind of confinement can really change a person.

Neal is realising that most of his former associates are assholes, but I think he's also realising that he could be an asshole too -- not in the same greedy, grifting way they were, just in the fact that he never really figured out how people bond with each other. Not that he's not capable of it, but he assumes a default of "I am only as valuable as they say I am" until proven otherwise. It's a theme I played around with writing young Jack Harkness, too -- the idea that "we're screwing around" is the baseline, and "we're dating" is something you actually have to announce to someone.