all characters you recognize aren't mine, no infringement intended. Introspective 'on the run' fic with Red and Liz trying to learn how to live together and get to know each other. Part 1 of 3. For FallenAngel2210/Ashlene in the Lizzington Shippers Secret Hiatus fic swap, hope you like it!

The ride out from the city is long and cramped in the back of the panel van, but Liz isn't keeping track of time. She sits quietly and then she dozes, consciously choosing to lean her head against Red's inviting shoulder. She's had everything so backwards for so long. She'd been so afraid of his imaginary indifference that she had been blind to the very real devotion he'd been offering her.

She wonders if he thinks it was the recovered memory that changed her mind about him. Maybe it should have been but it wasn't. It was standing in that ballroom, listening to Connolly gloat, listing to him threaten all her teammates, listening to him promise to capture Red and bring him in for public arrest, humiliation, death. She'd stood and pictured that future, she'd seen Red taken into custody too many times for it to be hard for her to do, the trial he'd face, the bloodthirsty glee of the media circus that would descend. She could tell that Connolly wouldn't even allow Red the dignity of dying a free man, he would want the prestige of the takedown, the trial, the conviction. He would gorge himself on the power he stole from Red. He would take pleasure in Red's degradation and suffering. He would make political hay from it, he would grow even more fat and glossy and untouchable as a result.

She had pictured her own choking fear and humiliation in a courtroom. She had known that she couldn't allow Connolly to bring that future into being. She had known that Red was hers, that as often as she grew furious with him, as often as she wanted to make him bleed, the thought of anyone else putting a finger on him to cause him pain was unacceptable, let alone the kind of cruel, public destruction Connolly had in mind. She'd looked at Connolly's arrogant face, the proud smirk of a man assured of his victory and the powerlessness of anyone to oppose him. He wanted her fear. He wanted her to know he was going to take away the person most vital to her in the world and there was she could to to stop him. But Connolly had forgotten that he was just a man, who had threatened the very last thing she had left to lose, and that she was a woman with a gun.

She had wanted to stop him smirking. She had stood with her weapon aimed and only considered not firing because Harold Cooper still wanted to save her. She was going down either way, she'd known that, so the took Connolly with her. She regrets disappointing Cooper, disappointing Red, but she doesn't regret shooting to kill. She did what was necessary to protect them all. She just hopes she can stop Red from blaming himself after she tells him what happened. She can't put it off forever.

Somehow she falls more deeply asleep, her body lulled by the drive, by Red's warmth and nearness and protective strength. Her mind doesn't settle, it just sinks into half-lucid rambling of worry and despairing. She wakes with a jolt, not quite processing that she's slid down, her head pillowed in his lap, his arm heavy over her side to keep her safely in place. She's struggling to sit up as Red tries to keep her from falling from the narrow bench seat.

"Wait, we have to go back," she's mumbling, half in her dream, "All my things, I left all my things, I need…"

"Sweetheart, we can't go back. It's not safe. We can buy new things for you..."

"No, my box of Sam's things, the pictures… your music box… I don't have any of it," she says, eyes open at last, and she's more awake now, tugging on the front of his jacket like it will anchor her. She knows going back isn't an option, not for anything. She only had a few small remnants left of her old life, her old self. Now they are lost to her.

"I'm so sorry, Lizzie," he says.

He gathers her closer and she expects more reassurances, more words of comfort, but there's nothing, just the steady pressure of his arm around her waist and a gentle kiss pressed to the side of her head. There was nothing to say, nothing he can say that would ameliorate the present shattered and discarded state of her.

"They're going to be tearing apart my motel room, touching everything, cataloguing everything," she says, going taut. She's shipwrecked in this barren future and there's nothing she can do.

"But you are safe," he says, "I don't doubt knowing it helps just now, but you are safe and I will do everything possible to make sure it stays that way."

It's dark out. She has no idea where they are, though she assumes they headed South or West. She expected them to be headed to an airstrip to meet with his plane but if they haven't made the switch yet they probably won't.

"What happens next?" she asks when she's able to speak past her panic.

"A car, and then another and another. Sometime very late tonight or tomorrow morning we should reach our safehouse. It's off-grid, in the mountains of North Carolina but I think you'll still find it comfortable. We can stop there a few days and come up with a plan," he says, his voice just above a whisper, for her ears alone and she glances at the driver ahead of them with a sudden apprehension.

"He's perfectly trustworthy," Red assures her, even more quietly and if she weren't in such a state she would probably have an opinion of some kind about his mouth so close that she can feel his warm breath on her ear, "But it's a courtesy in my world not to burden your allies with secrets to keep when you don't have call to include them."

"Okay."

Her heart is beating so fast, not with the pleasure of being looked after but with animal fear. She wants to run, they are running but it doesn't feel fast enough. She thinks he can feel the predator gaze on the back of her neck, cold and deathly and ready to snatch them up and make them suffer. What has she done, she wonders, how can she possibly live the rest of her life this way? And then she wonders, how has Red lived this way so long, how is it that he hasn't broken or gone mad

"Shouldn't we get out of the country?"

"We're more noticeable on the move. I do have some experience in this arena, remember," he says, "Are you alright, Lizzie? You're shaking."

"I'm just cold," she says, and she is, so cold her fingers are numb but that isn't all of it. She feels like she's dissolving, like she's just a clattering assemblage of reactions and sensation, all of them wild and panicked, but that isn't something she's interested in talking about or paying attention to.

Red starts stroking her back, like he trying to chafe some warmth back in her and then slower, to sooth. She wants it to help so badly, she want's to gentle under his familiar hands and absorb comfort instead of resisting. She concentrates on the feeling. She tries.

"Slow breaths, Lizzie. Nothing's going to happen to you tonight, nothing but a lot of travel. I'm afraid that you're about to find out just how much tedium is involved in this lifestyle," he says.

"Tedium? I guess that sounds better than the last few days," she says, not really believing it possible that boredom or tediousness could have any place in fleeing for their lives.

Red hums an acknowledgement and slows his hand further still. "I can tell you're skeptical but it's true," he says, "Boredom is one of the greatest risks to the budding fugitive. Carefulness takes time and patience, avoiding notice often takes considerable periods of isolation. It's very easy to slip up under those conditions, not out of overconfidence, as you might suspect, but out of a need to make something happen or to have a real interaction with another person… Well. Those are worries for another day… but allow me to reassure you again, you are not alone in this."

"Okay," she says, and lays her head back on his shoulder — it's cozier this time, more like an embrace as they hold onto each other in the rattling dark of the van — the icy tautness of panic just beginning to ebb, leaving her limp and sleepy once more. "I trust you. Took me a while but I do."

They leave the van and it's driver, after Red spoke to him briefly and shook his hand, and walk a block to an SUV with another diver standing by. After another while they repeat this procedure, Red explaining that they need to keep to back seats and tinted windows to avoid accidental appearances on traffic cameras or notice from other drivers stopped at intersections.

Red is strangely forthcoming with the reasoning behind his set up and the details of his plan for the immediate future. By the third car she realizes that he's trying to keep her mind occupied in the present, but also trying to teach her how to be a fugitive. They're on the same side now, keeping his methods secret from her is no longer necessary, would probably even put them in more danger. She admitted at last to trusting him, but this narration of his is a bold statement of trust in her. She is being brought into the fold.

She dozes on and off as they travel, not at all deeply or restfully but still, she nods off over and over into trance-like drowsing as her mind cuts out between trauma and boredom. They travel over freeways, and then up into mountainous country side over more modest highways, but always passing by cities rather than through. She loses track, sleeping the small hours of the morning away and coming awake again to Red's hand on her arm and his voice telling her they're changing vehicles again.

It's so late it's early, with the first blue-grayness of dawn frosting the clouded sky, and as she steps away from the car the air is sweet with dew and the damp breathing greenness of country verdancy. They're stopped on a narrow road, hilled and well wooded, and the hectic noise of the bird's dawn chorus is beginning. She shuffles along by the overgrown verge on legs stiff from sitting and breaths the clean, chilly air as though it's the first time she's been out of the city in her life. Aside from the road, there are no visible signs of civilization.

Red speaks to the driver in low tones she doesn't try to make out and then comes to take her arm as the car they left turns and drives away. She feels a pang of apprehension like a hunger pang at their aloneness and vulnerability in the dark of morning in a strange wood. But Red's guiding grip is steady and calm and he pulls out a small flashlight to shine at the road in front of their feet.

"I arranged for a vehicle to be left for us before we left the city. It should be just up ahead. If we were dropped off we would be without transport, which is not convenient for our purposes," he says, his voice pitched soft so as not to carry on the moist, still air.

"And you didn't want anyone driving us to know the exact location," she guesses.

"That too. Look, there we are, in the underbrush at the foot of the hill," he says, aiming the flashlight ahead of them at a dark, sturdy old, dark Land Rover parked crookedly on the steep downward slope beside the road. She can see the tail light glint before he re-aims the light safely at the ground once more.

She wishes she'd worn differed shoes, an eon ago when she got dressed for protecting a senator, edging down that hill clotted with underbrush to the vehicle is going to be treacherous. She wishes she had clothes to change into because she already feels grubby with stress and travel and interrupted sleep. She worries that the heartiness of their transport bodes a long trek on rough roads. She's more exhausted than she's ever been in her life, it settles in her skin like a sunburn, and she doesn't know how her body will withstand a long ride on dirt roads, she worries her mind might very well snap.

"Aren't you worried that the people who left the car for you know where we are?" she asks.

"I trust Kate Kaplan's contacts as much as I trust anything in this world," he says, and moves away from her to poke around the car. He finds the keys taped in the wheel well and turns back to her, "Do you want a hand, Lizzie?"

"I'm fine," she says, and wades into the underbrush.

After that it's a drive through mountain roads as spring dawn comes over the countryside, the thick green woods in full leaf gone luminous and cavern-like at once with rising sunlight and deep shade. If she had come here any other way or any other time, she could find it beautiful. She does find it beautiful, but it's the beauty of a dream or a poem or a rich song in another language, she can't connect herself with it and it has no meaning to her.

They pass a small town or two and a handful of old-fashioned would-be small farms but mostly there are only trees and houses, and then even the houses peter out. By the time the morning is strong and bright, and her brain is buzzing with the white noise of long travel with few breaks, Red has turned off the narrow paved lane onto a long dirt track. He hasn't spoken to her since they started off on their own, the long travel wearing on him, maybe.

Or maybe he has no idea what to say. Everything is new and wrong and unprecedented and both of them are lost — even as Red navigates unmarked lanes without hesitation. She doesn't know how to approach the silent man at her side, he feels almost a stranger to her after all she's learned and all that's changed between them. She doesn't know face a day or week or a month alone with this man shut into a mountain cabin or on the run. As strange, as fraught and contentious as it's always been for her relating to Red, she's never been shy of him or been intimidated or hesitant around him. But now, for the first time, she feels an awkwardness creeping over her at the thought of being isolated and alone with Red for who knows how long.

When she left with him the day before she she felt closer to him, more cherished and understood than she'd ever been, but now not even twelve hours later she is worried. She doesn't doubt him, she doesn't doubt his intentions, but she's realized at last that she's assessed him wrongly for so long, grasped onto a picture of his character that was so backwards and clung to it. Red was a different man in her eyes now, not the figure of coldness and calculation as she'd come to believe after she found out about the fulcrum and her connection to it. She's more sure than ever the humanity, the warmth, the kindness she'd told herself she'd imagined in him are very real, as much a part of his makeup as the anger she's seen in him and his relentless sense of duty. It's a good discovery, it's such a profound relief, and yet it makes her so very aware she hardly know him at all. She knows, now, the broad gestures of him, and a few of his more pronounced quirks, if they aren't only part of his worldly persona, but she doesn't know him as she would know a friend or even a close coworker. She doesn't know him as a woman knows a man, as ordinary people from close up. What are they doing out here in the wilderness, how are they going to cope?

The safe house isn't nearly so small or primitive as she had feared. It's big enough that it probably can't even properly be called a cabin, though it's shapes are peaked and rugged and clad in cedar shingles. It's a pretty house tucked into a sheltered dish of mountainside, well disguised among tall pines and oak and leggy rhododendrons in gaudy red-pink bloom and any number of other trees and brush that weren't immediately familiar to her. Pollen floats like gold dust in the patches of sun but the air is cool, cold and moist with the piquant tang of green, growing things and earthy leaf mold.

She stands and looks and waits for the sensation of constant motion to subside in her, bolstered by the solidity of the car door at her back where she leans. Red is waking the house, as he says, getting the power on and checking that all is well and undisturbed and whatever else is necessary in a place like this. There is a well and running water he assures her, and a generators to supplement the solar panel system. They won't be roughing it, he has assured her.

Eventually he comes back out on the front porch, looking at her with a reassuring smile but even from that distance she can tell it's a gesture to mask his worry. He's shed his coat and rolled up his sleeves and there's leaf detritus still stuck to one of his knees — from getting the generator on she guesses — and she can tell he still holds himself a little carefully on his right side. But suddenly there seems to be a difference in him, a looseness, a sharp-eyed artlessness, as though the cultured man about town has been put aside as unnecessary for the present.

She goes to join him, stepping from the brightness of the morning to the strong shade of the deep porch. And then, following the shape of Red's shoulders more than any real sense of her surroundings, into the house for what is likely supposed to be a tour. She gets a vague sense of a cozy, modern timber framed house trying to look rustic. Inside the front door is an enormous open room with a kitchen tucked behind a long stairway to a loft and hallways leading off at either side of the kitchen. She stops him after a quick glance around, the solid, level floor feeling as unsteady as a ship's deck in her tiredness and disorientation.

"I think I need to lie down for a while," she says.

"Of course," Red says and puts a gently guiding hand on her back as he'd done the day before, leading her down one of the very dark hallways. He opens a door for her into a large, dim bedroom — she wonders with a swallowed laugh if he means to tuck her into bed, too — but to her dismay the mattress on the big bedstead is bare and Red draws up short beside her.

"Right. Of course, I forgot. Make yourself at home and I'll get the linens," he says and leaves her alone again.

There are windows on two of the walls with their heavy curtains drawn shut and she goes immediately to open them. First the thick, grey drapes that give off a little puff of dust as she shoves them aside, and then swings open the casements as well, dispelling the mustiness of disused room with a waft of sweetness. It's an act of rebellion against the instinct to hide in the dark, she will breath fresh air, she will sleep with the sun on her face, she won't make a tomb of this expensively built vacation home belonging to god knew who, she won't wallow in fear.

She can't, anyway, fear takes energy and she had none. Instead she leans on the window sill with her elbows and admires the shaggy bit of meadow-like yard between her room and the woods, dappled and dazzling as a postage-stamp patch of golden sea.

"You might want to pull down the screens before you settle in," Red says, startling her, silent as a cat she thinks to herself as she turns to see him in the doorway, "Or you'll be eaten alive by mosquitos, hard winter this year or no."

She can't help smiling at the sight of Red loaded down with an armload pillows and blankets. "I can do it myself, if you just leave that stuff on the bed," she says.

"You think I've never made up a bed, Lizzie?" he teases, raising an eyebrow at her.

"Sure, but aren't you supposed to still be recovering from… you know," she says, skating delicately around the memory of the shooting, "That was only a few weeks ago."

"I'm hardly an invalid," he says and dumps all the bedding on the big padded bench at the foot of the bed.

"And I'm hardly incapable, either," she counters, her voice getting harder in spite of herself.

"And if you're angling for a fight, Lizzie I'm not going to give you one, certainly not over bed linens," Red says lightly, "Come on, we'll both pitch in."

So, in the softly spilling sunlight and the cool breeze wafting in, they work together to make up her bed. Red makes crisp, perfect hospital corners with the bottom sheet, with a deftness she truly is surprised by — he really is an ordinary man who can do ordinary things. They work wordlessly until, in a moment of remove, she scrutinized the mental image of herself and Raymond Reddington, international criminal extraordinaire, as they are, stretching a pale cambric sheet across her bed and making it billow like a bellied sail before laying it down smooth, in concert like it was a solemn operation, and realizes it's truly bizarre. Then she starts giggling helplessly, giddy with relieved nerves and a sudden profound sense that her her life hadn't so much crumbled into ruination but instead tipped over sideways into the deeply absurd.

"Lizzie?" Red asks, sounding concerned as she continues to pat the silk-smooth sheet free of non-existent wrinkles with a kind of fondness, as though it's responsible for her levity, and laughing to herself.

She shakes her head and looks at him, and he looks so handsome and familiar and adorably confused that she laughs again, fondly. "You and I, doing this… It's just that this is nothing like anything I pictured," she says at last, "Like nothing I ever pictured, my whole life."

Red nods, his face going soft and warm, "I know what you mean, Lizzie," he says.