Chapter Text
-
Hearing the sound of the doorknob turn, Liz quickly ends the conversation she was having and stuffs her phone into her pocket.
When Red enters the room, back from some unspecified late-night errand that she probably doesn't want to know the specifics of, she's sitting on the couch and trying to look as normal as possible.
"Hey," she greets him. "Everything go okay?"
Red glances around the room—perfectly aware that no one else is there—and raises an eyebrow.
"Who were you talking to?"
Shit, shit, shit.
"No one."
Smooth, Keen. He'll definitely believe that.
"We're fugitives—we don't have phone calls with no one." His voice shifts from disbelieving to concerned, which in her opinion is far, far worse. "Lizzie, I can't keep us safe if I don't know what's going on."
Damn him.
"It was Tom," she blurts, thinking it won't be so bad if she just tells him—he might not even care all that much, "and I know you didn't want me to talk to him, but he just wants to help and I really think that if we just-"
She cuts herself off at the odd look on his face.
"You've been talking to Tom."
"I have."
He doesn't look angry when he says, soft, "You promised me that you wouldn't contact him."
Of all the things she expects him to say, to do, it is not this.
"Elizabeth, I thought…"
He looks like a little boy, all crumpled shoulders and downcast eyes.
This? This is bad.
She's a profiler, she should be able to figure out what's going on here, but it is so much harder when it's your own life, when it's a person that you know. Especially when the person in question is Raymond Reddington.
There's something there, something in his expression that she isn't able to place, and it itches beneath her skin.
She doesn't know what to do with this.
"You thought what?" she asks.
He searches her face, not another word passing between them, and she tries, she really does, to communicate whatever it is he's looking for.
The shutter behind his eyes goes down.
She's failed another test.
And how is this fair, that he's testing her without her knowledge first? He's recording answers without letting her know the questions, the jackass, and so what else is she supposed to do?
She's tired, damn it. Not in any way that sleep can fix, but in a way that comes from being on edge all the time, without reprieve. She doesn't have the energy reserves that it takes to decode his half-sentences and facial expressions. It would be nice—just once, since it's been so damn long—if something could just be easy.
"Never mind," he says. "It doesn't matter."
Whatever it is, it's clear that it does matter—that what he really wants is for whatever it is to matter to her, but she just can't do this right now. She's tired, and she's lonely, and she's a fugitive, and she can't.
"Okay." She lets him retreat, will play this game with him. This is familiar, she knows the steps, and so she can do this. "If you're sure."
She turns to move to her room, wishes him a good night.
"I'll see you in the morning?" she asks, and she doesn't know why it's phrased like that, like a question, but there's this weird, tiny part of her—the part still itching beneath her skin, the part that she can't quite grasp—that needs reassurance.
"Of course, Lizzie. Get some rest."
"You too."
In the privacy of her room, she stares at the burner phone in her hand for a long moment before tucking it back into the pocket of her jacket. Red didn't ask her to, and so she won't break off contact with Tom. Not yet, not when he could still help bring this whole mess to an end.
She just wants this all to stop, wants some control back over her own damn life.
Red will surely come around in time. She'll work on pulling information from him then, when she's not so tired and he's not so… whatever the hell he is right now.
They'll figure it all out later.
-
She will eventually understand that this is a mistake.
(It will be too late.)
-
He sets the meeting in an abandoned warehouse.
Lizzie is curious the whole way there, asking him a steady barrage of questions, but Red keeps the information to himself—he'll lose his nerve otherwise. As they exit the car, he tries to ignore the sharp finality in the sound of her door closing.
It's all for the best.
He should have known better, known that it would end this way, that he'd never measure up in her eyes. He'd thought they'd turned a corner—they've been getting along so well, been spending so much time together.
Sometimes she even smiles at him and he can almost believe that she-
Well.
He really should have known better.
"Come on, Red," she prods as they enter the building. "Who are we meeting?"
"Tom," he says, tries not to spit it like a curse.
Her eyes widen. "Really? You're willing to work with him on this?"
"No-" he will never work with that man again "-but you are."
He sees her trying to put the pieces together, wondering what sort of game he's playing here. He wishes it were a game—anything other than what it actually is.
"What does that even mean, Red?"
"It means that now you can figure out how to proceed—you said he has a plan." He shrugs like this isn't killing him. "I assume you two will see that plan through to completion."
"And what are you going to do?" she asks, clearly not missing his pointed use of you two.
"I'll go back to dismantling the cabal through my own methods."
He's leaving her, in other words. Something he'd never thought he would do.
"And you're just making this decision for me?" He can see the anger brewing, vibrating beneath her skin. "Like I'm a child?"
"You're the one who made this decision, Lizzie. You made it the second you invited him back into our lives-"
Our lives, ours, don't you see?
Why don't you see me?
"-and I have very good reasons for not wanting him involved."
"So this is it?" she asks, openly angry now. "All this time messing around in my life and you're just going to walk away because you're jealous that you don't know it all, that someone else might be able to help?"
"This isn't about that. It's about safety, for you and for myself, and about where you truly want to be." He wishes it were with him. He wishes so much that she could want to be with him. "This is about trust and about how that man isn't worthy of it."
"I can handle him, Red." She glares at him, growls, "And what about me? How about putting a little trust in me?"
"I did try," he says softly.
You promised, he almost cries. You looked me right in the eyes and you promised.
She sighs heavily and he spends a desperate, hopeful moment believing that she'll refuse to go, that she'll fight to stay at his side.
"How will I contact you? If something comes up?"
(He's always been a fool, him and his hopes.)
"You can't."
It's the only way he'll survive this. He can't spend the rest of his life waiting for that call, hoping that one day she'll change her mind. He can't keep doing this to himself.
He'd die for her, but if there's one thing he's finally sure will never change, it's this:
He is so, so in love,
and she doesn't want him at all.
"Goodbye, Elizabeth."
Somehow, he walks away. He never imagined the need to part from her like this, always figured a bullet would take him out of commission first, hopefully leaving him with just enough time to remember the light of her smile before he was gone for good.
He thinks he understands, on some level—Tom is familiar to her, a glimpse back to her old life. It's probably natural that she would want that familiarity back when the rest of her life now—when Red himself—is nothing but a reminder of all that she's lost.
But the ways that man has hurt her… Red can't watch her willfully ignore all the terrible things that have passed between them.
Tom dogging at their heels endangers them both—perhaps splitting up will diffuse some of that. It will divide the cabal's attention, increase the opportunities to weaken them. He can still clear her name, still try to keep her safe. They don't need to be in contact for that.
It was always going to be Red on one team and Tom on the other. At least this way she will be content.
He sticks around and watches from a distance long enough to see Tom arrive, see them greet each other with a hug.
It really is all for the best.
She's always been happiest when he's far away.
-
Liz is in a bit of a daze as she and Tom head out, and so she lets him babble away about this plan and that, about all the ways that he's going to fix everything. They get into his car and drive away, Tom still talking and her still trying to process what just happened.
Red just… left.
He left her.
What the hell is wrong with him? How can he do this, just walk away because not everything is under his control?
How can he not understand that this life she's been forced to lead for the past few weeks isn't the one that she wants? She knows it's not the one that he wants either, no matter how much he may try to convince himself and everyone else otherwise, so why can't he be a little more sympathetic to how difficult this has been for her?
"You okay?" Tom asks, interrupting her thoughts.
"Yeah, I'm fine."
Red didn't even ask if she wanted to leave or not. He just passed her off like some toy he was tired of playing with.
"You've been really quiet," Tom presses, his hands relaxed on the steering wheel.
"Just thinking. There's a lot to plan."
Red had looked so upset when he'd left her there—like it was the last thing he wanted to do.
She leans her head against the window with a sigh.
Maybe this is some misguided attempt to protect her. It's odd, he's more prone to not letting her out of his sight when there's a threat, but it isn't unprecedented for him to make a unilateral decision when trying to keep her safe.
Regardless, what's done is done now.
She makes an effort to engage Tom in conversation for the rest of the drive. It's another few hours before they pull up outside of a small motel.
"Will you get us a room?" Tom hands her a wad of bills. "I need to make a call."
"Sure."
She goes through the process of renting a room for the night, heads back to the car when she's done to find him leaning against it casually, seemingly not a care in the world.
Tom gives her a puzzled, hurt look when he discovers that she booked a room with two beds instead of one.
She sighs, knowing what's coming when she asks him, "What?"
"Is that how this is?"
"For now, yes."
"It's just, on the boat…" He trails off suggestively.
She wants to yell at him for being so selfish. Or maybe she was the one being selfish, back on the boat, taking what he was offering because she was lonely and scared, but that isn't what she wants now.
"That was different. We were saying goodbye."
He takes a step closer to her. "I wasn't saying goodbye, Liz."
"Well, I thought that we were." She takes a step back from him to even things out again, to try and make it very clear exactly what is and isn't on the table here. "This, you and me, I can't focus on that now."
"We can do both."
"I need to focus on getting out of this mess-"
"I'm here to help now, it will be easier on you," he insists. "Liz, I love you, you're my wife-"
"I'm not, though."
In a way, I never really was, she doesn't add.
"Right." He looks away. "Thanks for reminding me."
"I didn't say that to hurt you. But I can't just jump back in and pretend that everything that's happened recently didn't happen." She motions between them. "If this is going to work, it's going to be after everything else is all straightened out."
She tries to catch his eyes when he doesn't respond.
"Are you okay with that?" she presses. She needs some confirmation, here. She needs to be sure that there are rules. That is, was, the problem with Red—there's never any rules.
Tom makes an aborted sound, accompanied by a small facial tic she's never seen in him before, but it's gone as quickly as it came and when he looks up to meet her eyes, he's calm and accepting.
"Sure, of course," he agrees. "Whatever you need."
"Thanks."
He smiles, and she feels like maybe things will be okay. It's not the way it used to be—they're on the run and something horrible could happen at any moment—but there is familiarity here. It's in the cadence of their conversation, in they way they move around each other in a room.
This may eventually be salvageable.
For now though, it's time to get to work.
-
It turns out that Tom's plan doesn't amount to much more than hunting down Karakurt and attempting to weaken the cabal by incriminating crucial members.
The trail on Karakurt has gone cold—Tom suggests that they reach out to one of her old friends in the FBI, but she seriously doubts that they will help. Not with Ressler still so determined to bring her in.
He then suggests asking Cooper for help, which she flat-out refuses—she won't get him and his family involved in this. It's far too dangerous.
Tabling the Karakurt idea for the time being, they start with the first name on their list of accessible cabal members, though they don't have Red's reach. Tom makes an indignant face when she points that out.
"Look," he says, hunched over a laptop and researching their first target online, "I'm just saying, we don't need him to get this done. I don't know why you keep bringing him up."
"I was only pointing out that we should be realistic about our targets. We don't have his resources—that's not meant as an insult, it's just a fact."
"I'm perfectly capable of handling this."
"Did I say that you aren't?"
"You implied it."
She rolls her eyes behind his back. "Well, I'm sorry for implying it."
"Apology accepted." He then points to the screen. "There—that's our way in."
She reads over his shoulder, nodding as she goes. "Yeah, that will work. If we get the information behind that, release it to the public…"
"This guy will be finished." Tom smacks the table excitedly. "Fantastic. This is going to be a breeze."
She nods with him, smiles at the right times as he continues the conversation, and wishes she were more excited.
Mostly, she's still just tired.
-
Their first operation goes smoothly, followed by a successful second.
By the third, Liz wonders if she's ever going to feel more optimistic about this than she already does.
By the fifth, she decides that she probably won't.
Tom doesn't seem to notice. She's either gotten very good at faking her mood or he is just refusing to see what he doesn't want to.
After the sixth person that they take down where she can't summon much more genuine feeling than a sort of detached satisfaction that one less criminal is operating freely, she realizes something.
The familiarity that she was searching for, that she hoped would be comforting… it's gone.
Or, rather, it's still there, but whatever support she was looking for, whatever help she was hoping to gain from it—it's only there on the surface. It's shaped right and says all the right things, but it's taken on a strange hazy quality. Like if she looks too closely, it's all going to evaporate.
She doesn't think she'll like what's underneath.
This is the situation she was dealt though, isn't it? Not anything she can do about it now.
She resolves not to look too closely and gets back to work.
-
Alone, Liz doesn't hear the man creeping up on her, but she certainly feels the knife pressed threateningly into the small of her back.
"The Director would like to politely request that you stop interfering."
Just as panic starts to properly set in—panic and a sort of helpless anger at her own stupidity for being alone on this street so late—a shot rings out.
For a second she thinks that she misread the situation, that the knife is actually a gun and that shock is momentarily suspending the pain of a wound that will surely kill her. Instead, she turns and sees that the man is the one dead on the ground, bullet snug in his brain and a wicked-looking knife lax in his hand.
She scans the rooftops, the windows, any available line of sight—none reveal the mystery sniper. Feeling completely out-of-sorts, she hurries back to a more populated area of the city.
She finds a note tucked in her jacket pocket the next day—it must have been slipped there on a brush pass because she never felt a thing.
It should probably make her angry. It's been months—he left her, stranded her completely without his assistance and without any consideration for her opinion on the matter. He has no right to have her followed. He never had a right to have her followed.
But it's such an annoyingly Red thing to do that this little bit of contact succeeds in making her smile.
She really hasn't had much cause to smile recently.
After she reads it, she folds the note back up and tucks it into the lining of her shoe to keep it safe and close.
She doesn't tell Tom anything about the incident. He'd get petulant if he knew and she doesn't have the energy to deal with his whining about it. It's not like they'll be able to stop whatever tail Red has on them anyway—neither of them had even noticed it until now.
Life continues on, darting from place to place and digging up some of the worst of humanity, people who have done their best to ruin her life and and the lives of countless others.
She takes the note out to read on bad days, gains a little warmth from the simple words.
It helps.
-
She has discovered a crucial piece.
(The rest still comes too slowly.)
-
Remember- still, always:
Wherever I am, whatever I'm doing—if you are in need, I will be there.
This will all be over soon. I promise you'll make it home.
-R
-
She sees him, weeks later, in a crowded ballroom where she and Tom are trying to gain the upper hand on some cabal associate or another—she's losing track of the list, thinks they're on the ninth or maybe the tenth, one endless lead after another, faces and names and dates and she's still so damn tired and then he's there.
In a small circle of people he's animated as ever, always the crowd-pleaser, but she thinks he looks tired too. He's lost weight, the kind you lose from too much stress combined with not enough sleep.
The urge to go to him is overwhelming—a startling, desperate wave of just missing him.
She could go over, just for a minute. Just to hear his voice.
There wouldn't be any harm in it, would there? He'll probably think it's fun, conversing and trying to outdo each others lies, both of them under their respective aliases and fooling everyone. They've always had fun playing together and then-
Red looks over, and their eyes meet.
She's completely unprepared for the expression that passes over his face.
He recovers quickly, but she knows what she saw and it keeps her rooted where she stands as he excuses himself from his group and hurries away.
Away from her.
He hurries away from her.
He's never-
And he looked…
When Liz was a little girl, Sam kept a photograph tucked in the back of his wallet. She was always confused and a little frightened when he would take the photo out, because why would he want to keep something that always made him look so terribly sad? She asked him once who it was, remembers the quiet way he told her that he'd once had a girlfriend that had died in a car accident.
They were only twenty years old.
They'd been planning to get married.
Sam said she was the love of his life. Liz remembers that specifically, the exact sound of his voice as he said it, because it was the first time she'd ever heard that phrase and it had all seemed so huge and important and sad.
It's that night in the ballroom when she realizes it wasn't wounded pride or professional jealousy or distrust that ultimately made Red leave her behind. It's all so much simpler than that.
He just looked at her the way Sam used to look at that old photograph.
Like every single thing he ever wanted was right in front of him but for an impenetrable wall of glass, and only the faintest, most fragile thread of control was keeping him from just collapsing to his knees and crying out against the barrier.
She knows now.
She broke his heart.
And it's not fair—she didn't even know she was responsible for his heart, how was she supposed to know that she could break it? How could he not tell her, warn her, something?
How could he not know that, reciprocated feelings or no, she would never treat him so carelessly?
She realizes that it doesn't really matter what she knew then. All that matters is what she knows now, and what she knows now is that she is not okay with having caused him so much pain—stubborn, non-communicative idiot though he may be.
It's not because she owes him anything.
It's not about whether he deserves it or not.
It's just…
God, she broke his heart.
How can she live with hurting him like that?
And maybe he broke hers a little too, leaving like he did. Maybe this is why they're always such a damn mess around each other, and maybe this is why now—ever since finding that note in her pocket, really—she misses him like a severed limb.
There have always been so many things in the way that she's never really entertained the possibility of any of this before, but hell—it's not like she's ever really going back to her old life. Not the way it was. She's not going to be able to rejoin the FBI.
But maybe… maybe, this.
She lets herself think about it. Gives herself one solid, honest moment to consider the fantasy she wouldn't tell the djinn—goes that extra step and lets her partner in the fantasy have a face, a smile, a hand holding the child between them just as adoringly as Liz herself...
Oh.
Oh, she's been such a fool.
-
She finally understands.
(It is still too late.)
-
"I'm leaving," she tells Tom shortly after the ballroom realization and almost six months after she and Red parted ways.
He doesn't look up from the laptop he's bent over. "Going for a run? I think it's supposed to rain later."
"No, Tom, I'm leaving."
It would have been easier to sneak out and leave a note. She should have just done that and-
No. She needs to end this for good. She needs to get back to Red, see what she can do about fixing what's broken.
Tom shuts the laptop, rubs his eyes once as he stands to face her.
"What are you saying, Liz?"
"I don't want to do this anymore—I'm exhausted. This isn't working. I want out."
Something flashes in his eyes, crawls over his face.
And he doesn't look like Tom anymore.
"Do you really think I'm going to let that happen?" he asks quietly. "You really think I'm going to let you go back to him?"
She doesn't ask how he knows she's going back to Red—of course she's going back to Red.
"You're not letting me do anything—I'm making a decision."
She's made far too few of those for herself recently, allowed herself to get into the habit of letting others decide, but no more. She is making this decision, and her decision is to go find Red.
She's going home.
"Oh, Liz." Tom shakes his head like she's a particularly dumb child. "You really don't get it, do you? You don't get to decide this."
She pulls out her gun, points it at him with steady hands—apparently this is who they are, now.
"And how are you going to stop me?"
"You're not listening." He smiles, slow and easy, and it rolls her stomach. "I'm not going to stop you from leaving—leave if you want. But what's that old movie cliche?" He taps his chin, mocking. "Oh, that's right—if I can't have you, no one can."
She's never been afraid of him before.
"What the hell are you talking about?"
"Exactly what I've already said: you are not going back to him. He'll be long dead by the time you reach him."
She shakes her head at the threat, scoffs. "You're never going to find him."
"You think I haven't noticed you figuring out how to contact him? All those little glances at the newspaper and the visits to those weird chatrooms online?"
Shit. "He'll know better than to fall for some stupid trap of yours."
"You think so? Because I think, were he to believe the message came from you, he'd walk right into a trap—hell, he'll run into that trap. And I'm very good at pretending to be other people, Liz." He takes a step toward her. "So what do you think? Think he'll come running for you?"
Oh, god.
Red will. Of course he will.
"Tom, don't."
"Oh, I already did," he says breezily, the same way he used to tell her he'd already completed some chore around the house. Silly you for not noticing. "I saw you gathering your stuff before and called up an old friend of mine—hell of a shot, this guy. He and Reddington will be meeting very soon."
No.
She grips the gun tighter, steadies the hand pointing it at him.
"Tell me where you set the meeting."
He laughs. "Why the hell would I-"
She shoots out his kneecap.
"Tell me where you set the meeting," she repeats as he drops to the ground with a howl of pain.
He's screaming, clutching at his knee, and she kicks his foot to jar the leg painfully.
"Focus."
He's shaking his head, screaming and laughing and it's awful. He's awful. "You won't make it in time. He's as good as dead."
"Give me the meeting location."
"You really fucked this one up, didn't you, Liz?"
She lifts her foot and stomps down hard on his busted knee.
"Tell me where he is!"
Around the screaming and cursing she hears him grit out, "The warehouse!"
"What warehouse?"
"The one where he dumped you with me."
She stares dispassionately down at him, writhing on the floor. "There, that wasn't so hard, was it?"
"You know, I told my guy to shoot to kill but to make sure it doesn't happen too quickly. No headshots—I want him to bleed out, I want him to know."
He smiles again, asks, "Do you think he's going to cry for you, Liz?" That awful, ugly smile. "I hope you get to watch him die."
And so as it turns out, in the end, it's really not difficult at all to put a bullet between Tom Keen's eyes.
She tucks the gun into the waistband of her jeans, quickly darts around the room to pick up anything she may need, wipes the surfaces of prints. She'll leave the body—this shouldn't trace back to her. Not in any way that can be proven, at least. There are more important things to worry about right now.
That warehouse is close, she's close, she can make it.
Three hours and she can be there.
Red could have been anywhere in the world when he got the message, it could take him days—she'll probably beat him there. She'll take out the assassin and just wait for him. If she hurries she can shave some time off the trip, maybe be there in even less than three hours.
She'll be able to see him soon.
Just three more hours and she can see him again.
-
She doesn't get there in time.
-