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There she laid on the street, crumpled and destroyed. Life slowly bleeding out of her. A shell of the woman she once was.
Eight years ago she was a naive, soft agent, who saw the best in people, she saw the best in the world, and did everything she could to fight the evil that remained. Where she lost herself in those eight years didn’t matter, what mattered was the abstinence of answers, that tore at and deteriorated her soul.
Here she was, at the end of a journey she never signed up for, with nothing to show for it, but her own monstrous transformation. No answers, no happy ending, nothing. She had lost everything and then gone on to sacrifice the little she had left, for a truth that was just out of reach. She had made it to the home stretch, only to reach and fall.
Her fall into the abyss was harsher than her plummet to the blood coated asphalt beneath her, yet both marked the end of her journey. She was left to die on the streets, as time stopped, prolonging the agony of what she knew to be her last breaths.
There was a shift in the air as Ressler and the Task Force arrived. Her last solace, interrupted by naive heroes, unaware of the ending they had walked into.
The man couldn’t bow to her side fast enough, crying out her name. His hands were numb to her as he shook her, praying his eyes were deceiving him, that the sight in front of him was merely a nightmare to be awoken from.
She lost the last of herself as she felt his touch, her time concluded. With every shake, she grew hazier, lighter, as she didn’t fight the tiredness, rather surrendering to the warm void.
As Aram and Cooper observed they struggled to realise the extent of what they were witnessing.
She wasn’t supposed to die, she was the complex hero, swaying between good and bad, but always with the best intentions. Her story wasn’t written to end here, she wasn’t finished with her life, she had a daughter, a team, a partner. Her story was only just beginning, chapters finally flourishing with the love and felicity she had always strived for, finally approaching the clarity Reddington teased her with.
It was as though turning to the final page of the book, where the happy ending lay, only to find it viciously torn out.
She was such a large part of their lives, she was Agent Keen, she was always there, despite the personal crisis she usually had going on. She had done so much for them, paving the way for their safety, the maintenance of their morals, the purpose of their lives. She blessed them, simply with herself. Bore the pain so they could sleep at night. She’d leave their lives leaving them better than they once were, leaving them to utilize their tragedy for their own strength.
The tragedy of Elizabeth Keen was written in the stars. Her sorrowful end became inevitable eight years ago, the very moment Elizabeth Keen met Raymond Reddington. He pulled the trigger that day. Sucking her into his world, a vortex of darkness and half-truths. It didn’t matter that he vowed to protect her, as it was that very vow that had tightened the noose around her neck.
The audience her exit had attracted silently laid down a mantra. Elizabeth Keen’s fingerprint on the world, the lives she’d touched, wouldn’t fade, but illuminate itself, revealing a piece of her heart left behind for all, a piece to lean on, to power one’s strive.
The greatness of her legacy wasn’t to be measured in the length of her life, but the depth of it, and what greater depth than to leave the world as a better, safer, love-filled place than it had been before her.
She could rest now, with her life forever living on.
Goodbye Elizabeth Keen.