Work Text:
i.
Ressler hates helicopters. It’s nothing traumatic or anything but he had a buddy in the Air Force who said something that stuck with him: “Fuck man, something goes wrong with the plane, at least I’ve got some fucking wings to help me land. Helos? Those fuckers just drop. Fuck, man.” Since Reddington walked into the FBI Ressler has had more cause to ride in helicopters than ever before. Ressler isn’t a petty man but he’s been keeping track and one day he’s going to pay Reddington back for all these fucking trips in helicopters – maybe with a prolonged stay at the seediest Motel 6 he can find. Or a month of breakfasts, lunches and dinners from Denny’s. Ressler’s not picky, either would do.
And now here he is, chained up, strangled and making small talk with one of Braxton’s boys. He spares a thought for Keen, he’s hoping she avoided the gunfire Samar didn’t. If Keen’s wounded that’s going to make rescuing Reddington (and them) less than likely. He already knows help from the Post Office isn’t coming and likely Samar does as well. It’s nothing personal; the United States does not negotiate with terrorists. Still, he’s not ready to die and he promises Braxton’s boy that his own turn to hang is coming.
When the explosion rocks the barge and jars Ressler free of the chain around his neck, he takes a moment to be grateful and then gets back to work. He’s not going to lie, beating that fuck isn’t nearly as satisfying as killing him would have been. His relief that he and Samar aren’t dead is short lived when they find Reddington without Keen.
“Reddington! Where’s Keen?”
Reddington looks up from the comm box he’s trying to rig, “Braxton took her.”
Saram points out the obvious when he asks if anything in the blown out room is still working. And Reddington’s life-affirming prediction of death by drowning is enough to put Donald into motion but that doesn’t mean he’s forgotten his partner.
“You said Braxton took Keen. Why?”
Reddington doesn’t answer but the expression on Reddington’s face tells him that this shit-show of a day isn’t even close to being over.
The Coast Guard makes record time and the medics have Samar’s leg numbed and wrapped with an expedience Ressler admires. He tries not to eye the painkillers they offer her. He needs his head clear if they’re going to find Braxton and Keen. But it’s been a shit day and god above, he could use some oblivion right about now. Then the medic’s sat phone rings and it’s Cooper wanting anything he can give him about the situation.
Ressler looks at Reddington as he reports in. The man looks stricken but focused. Ressler doesn’t know what Braxton expects to get out of Keen but this isn’t the first time that one of Reddington’s associates has focused on his partner because of secrets Reddington isn’t interested in sharing.
When he hangs up he looks at Reddington. “Why did Braxton take Keen?”
Reddington doesn’t answer. “Reddington – ”
“Donald, I realize that difficult as though it might be for you to imagine, I don’t actually know the innermost workings of Luther Braxton’s most intimate thoughts. He is a thief, a good one, but we’re not boyhood chums. I have no idea where he has taken Agent Keen. However I would start by looking for the helicopter he used as his escort, yes?”
Reddington sounds convincing. But that’s the beauty of mixing lies and truth. Stick enough truth in there to cover the lies and whoever’s listening won’t know the damn difference. Reddington probably doesn’t know where Braxton took Keen but that wasn’t what Donald asked. He asked why and Reddington neatly sidestepped answering that question.
When they find Keen it’s not a surprise that Reddington is already there. Ressler is willing to put money on it that Reddington knows what his partner had for breakfast, so it’s not a leap to imagine he has better resources for finding a missing Liz Keen than the Bureau.
What is a surprise is that Keen is lying on a gurney and Reddington hasn’t made any moves to wake her. Even as Donald blusters and yells for the doctor to wake her, he files away the methodical way Reddington watches Keen, careful, intent and almost…afraid. Donald vaguely remembers the way Reddington looked at him in the cell, demanding the code to open the door to Garrick’s men. Behind the haze of blood loss and the nightmare pain radiating from his leg, the fear and focus on Reddington’s face when Liz Keen had a gun to her head still stands out in Ressler’s memory.
“Wake her up now!”
The lady doctor pushes back, “Not now!”
“You do whatever you have to do to wake her up now!” Donald knows he’s not being particularly gentle with the doctor but there’s an IV Drip with god-only-knows mind altering drugs plugged into his partner and he knows exactly what those jugs of water in the corner were for.
“It’s not safe.” The doctor’s voice is urgent when she speaks, “If you wake her up, out of whatever memory she’s experiencing, the potential for damage to her memory and psyche is real. She needs to be allowed to follow the memory through before waking.” She’s looking at Ressler. “I understand your concern but waking to guns, your men and bright lights could cause her to have a panic attack. It would better to provide some kind of safety in this place. I promise I wouldn’t recommend this if it wasn’t for the best.”
Ressler’s instincts tell him to wake Keen the fuck up, not let Reddington ask her pointed questions while she’s still under. But Ressler knows fuck-all about memory regression or whatever the hell it was that Luther Braxton was attempting to do to his partner so he listens to the doctor, waves the tactical team back and radios for a ambulance. Reddington never takes his eyes off Keen.
Donald hears Keen yell “Don’t!” as he comes back from radioing for the bus and he hustles. She’s shoving off the gurney and has that shitty shock blanket around her shoulders when he gets to her. When she leans against him, he feels a little of the knot in his gut loosen. As he leads her up the stairs and out of the room, he feels (and he’s sure Keen does too) Reddington’s eyes on them the whole way.
ii.
“You in the doghouse?” Ressler means it as a joke but he can’t deny he’s a little curious. Keen might not want to admit that she’s soft on Reddington but the man’s done murder for her. Whatever kind of sick devotion Reddington has, it’s still devotion.
Reddington doesn’t give him a straight answer and that’s not really a surprise. If there’s anything consistent about the last two years it’s the lack of fucking straight answers.
Ressler isn’t so honorable that he wouldn’t find a way to engineer a DNA test and find out exactly it is that makes Reddington so damn interested in Liz Keen but fuck if he actually wants to deal with whatever the results would be. If Keen really is Reddington’s daughter that’s going to throw the whole unit into a clusterfuck and if she’s not? Then the question still remains, why is Liz Keen so damn important to Raymond Reddington? Considering the lack of judgment Keen expressed over his pill-popping coping, Donald mostly feels obliged to keep his questions to himself.
Still, he doesn’t mind seeing Reddington sitting pretty in the doghouse. Reddington seems ill at ease when he can’t charm his way out of Keen’s ill graces. And Reddington ill at ease? That’s more than worth a fucking trip to Uzbekistan.
iii.
Being dragged behind an ATV is enough to seriously make Ressler reconsider his stance on sobriety. Honestly if Reddington’s tips are going to keep panning out with him getting shot, beaten on, dragged through the woods, Ressler’s going to put in for hazard pay. Enough is enough.
He can hear Keen demanding to know where he is and at once he’s grateful and pissed off. It’s nice to have company but these men don’t strike him as being more tolerant of a female badge. When he lands on the floor and sees Keen working at the ropes, he’s reminded that whatever her past, Keen’s got good hands. Maybe they’re not dead in the water after all.
Donald manages to overhear Reddington offering Keen an apartment. The part of him that’s Keen’s partner knows he should walk away, listening to Reddington talk about living without hope makes Ressler uncomfortable. But the other part of him that knows Reddington could take off in the wind any time makes him stick around because any insight into Reddington could be useful.
And, Jesus, Reddington isn’t joking about the motel room. Keen needs to get over cluster that was her husband and her marriage and that isn’t going to happen living in an efficiency. Ressler’s not real clear on what Keen is hoping to accomplish by staying there, whether it’s some kind of penance or whatever-the-hell but he’s not Keen either and, god knows, he hasn’t got any room to say shit. Whatever kind of self-flagellation Keen gets out of living in the motel room, she hasn’t slammed her car door on her hand.
Later though, as he stands with a beer and looks at his own view of the Potomac, he thinks Reddington might have a point. Hope is a necessity and he’s not so far away from his craving for painkillers that he can scoff. He has hope that tomorrow will be a good day. He has hope that he won’t always want something that numbs. He has hope and he thinks maybe that was Reddington’s point. Ressler tips his beer bottle up. He has no idea what Keen’s hoping for. Answers, maybe. If he were Keen, he’d want some fucking answers. And maybe that’s the problem: if she’s hoping for answers and she keeps not getting any that would teach anybody to scorn hope. Or, worse, fear it.
iv.
The sight of Keen hoisted in that winch strangling Solobotkin is one he won’t forget any time soon. Donald holsters his weapon and lets the uniforms take Solobotkin while he gets his partner down. She fumbles for her balance and though she grips his forearms, she won’t look at him. Whatever place she went to while she squeezed the life out of the Tracy Solobotkin, Keen’s still there. As he walks her toward the medics, Ressler wishes, for the first time in his live, that Reddington had been the one to do the rescuing. Keen feels small under his arm and the wild look in her eyes has faded to something between resigned and broken – Ressler doesn’t have a pep talk for that. Shit, he had pills for that feeling and look where that got him.
Ressler can see the defeat in Keen from ten feet away as he stands talking to a uniform. The blankness in the eyes, the slope of the shoulders. Keen is waiting for beating and even before she opens her mouth, he knows where she’s going to go to get it.
He isn’t interested in her platitudes or her guilt. The only thing Liz Keen is guilty of is being fucked over, overly secretive and looking for answers that aren’t coming. Ressler isn’t unsympathetic but Tom Keen is the one guilty of murder and for the first time in the last five years, Ressler’s been closing all the cases he’s opened. He knows Keen sees him as an ends-justify-the-means man and she’s not wrong. He feels sorry that the harbormaster is dead, he does but Keen didn’t kill him and being a martyr isn’t going to bring him back.
“No. It’s never gonna be right. See, the only question is the body count. So, you go ahead and you nail yourself to a cross, and while you’re up there feeling sanctified, you consider how many people are gonna die because this task force gets shut down and the rest of those animals on Reddington’s list are still out there feeding. No. Don’t. Don’t ask me to feel your pain, Liz. I got more than enough of my own.”
As he walks away he half expects to hear her call for him. She doesn’t and part of him hopes she might accept the truth he spit so harshly at her and let this whole fucking thing go.
He’s not sure if he’s surprised or not when she texts him the next morning with her preferred corner for pick-up. He knows he’s relieved. Going to jail for her ex’s crime isn’t going to solve shit – for anyone.
When he pulls up to the corner, he’s got two coffees and the morning’s paper. He let go of telling her she’s paranoid; he lends a bit more credence to her paranoia now that her ex is actually in the wind somewhere. Keen gets in with a murmured thank you for the coffee just as she has every morning since he started picking her up. And that’s fine. Fine. She wants to ignore what happened yesterday, he can do that.
Same as he can stop a little too abruptly and make the folded up paper on the dash fall into her lap. It’s folded to the apartment ads and when she looks down at it and doesn’t immediately toss it back onto the dash, Ressler feels relief. He knows she won’t call any of those places. He’s not an idiot. But she’ll be thinking about calling them. She’ll think about one room, two rooms, hardwood versus carpet. She think about moving on and thinking about moving on is a kind of hope all on its own. And he’ll be damned if he lets the one person who keeps standing next him live without hope.