Tiny little one-shot set after S2E1.
Dembe carried the particleboard box across the room to Red's chair and in that moment, the moment that existed between the knocking on the door and the placement of the package in his hands, Red knew what it contained.
He hadn't heard from her in days.
At first he hadn't worried – Cooper, due in no small part to Red's own meddling, was back in the Post Office and back in command. The days of Red and Liz and Liz and Red were finished, at least such as they had been after Berlin's arrival.
Vigilantly Red checked his phone, instructing Dembe to do the same in the rare moments when Red slept, but her number had not come up nor had any other calls come in that might have pertained to her.
He told himself that what he was doing was something entirely different from what he actually did – checking to see if she had called. Checking to see if she was ok. Needing, no, wanting, no…and through the past decades of honing his craft – the development of the character of Red Reddington, the seamless, effortless deception – he almost convinced himself.
That it didn't mean anything – that it didn't matter that she hadn't called.
But it did.
The four corners of the ochre box were angular, unusual in that they had not been bent or sullied during the process of packing the box or during the transportation or delivery of the object. Such were Red's observations as he stared down at the four precise corners and felt his grip on his painstakingly practiced control let go.
He had seen a box like this before. Eerily similar. He remembered the contents. The impact. What it meant. The piece by piece delivery of a macabre puzzle.
And this had to be the same. This had to be her. An eye for an eye.
The air he didn't realize he was holding in his expanded lungs began to burn and he saw the package fall to the floor and roll, catawampus and uneven, over to the place where Dembe's black leather boot depressed the carpet.
The other man looked at Red and then looked at the box and then returned his gaze to his employer, unease or pity or sympathy, some emotion Red could not decipher playing in Dembe's eyes as he leaned down and reached out his hand, fingers stretching to their full length, to retrieve the parcel before straightening.
"Lizzie." The hiss of his own voice, the exhale of her name into the absolutely still room, the turquoise room done up with dark antiques and plush bedding, and all the extravagant, the modern amenities any luxury hotel would offer, and he made out the sound of each letter. The L, the Z, the ending, as if they came from someone else. Some other person entirely.
And maybe they did. Raymond the man so long repressed or possessed inside the meticulously groomed Red Reddington that any true reaction, any true emotion, might as well have come from a stranger down the hall.
Dembe stepped forward, closing the small distance between the chesterfield and Red's chair and held the box back out into the unfilled space between them.
Without acknowledgement of the name that had just left his lips Red extended his hand, leaned forward and grasped the box. Bringing it back to his side, gently, with care, he felt the onslaught of so much – of happiness and sadness and loss, and a dominant fear that swelled and ebbed around him. And there seemed so much significance in the moment that he couldn't quite stay anchored in reality. That this was really happening.
That she was gone.
With fingers that must have belonged to someone else but looked a lot like his own, Red untied the parcel packaging and let the coarse string fall to the floor. The absurdity of what he was about to uncover, wrapped up in a box more suited for a scarf, or a tie, or a package of thumbtacks, unable to allow the moment to really register.
Peeling back one top flap and then the other Red felt his pulse quicken and his body react to arctic cold. Deep, deep cold and he felt the hair on his arms stand up on end despite the clothing layered on top of his skin.
Slowly he opened the box the remainder of the way and looked inside, the contents illuminated by the light pouring in through the mahogany plantation shutters, and saw a fingernail, covered in deep burgundy enamel and he fell back into the chair.
Careful to control his façade but unable to control his actions.
"It's not her." He said and the relief he felt was so overwhelming, so blanketing in its heaviness that he had trouble expelling the words from his lips.
Dembe, Red's reaction not lost on him, retrieved the box from Red's hands and looked inside.
"Your wife." He said. More of a statement than a question but he looked over at Red nonetheless for confirmation. "Naomi."
"Yes." The man in the chair replied and it was then, only then, that the significance of what had just transpired began to creep into the space around his relieved thoughts and he felt fear.
Dark fear, tremulous and creeping, entering every miniscule area of his thoughts, his mind.
When it had all gone down. After all these years of systematically pushing away any regret, any loss, any prior feelings of home and family and, dare he say, love. After all of these years.
It wasn't his wife that caused his blood to still.
Nor his daughter.
Nor an enemy from his dreams or thoughts or travels.
It had been her.
Lizzie.
And that was never supposed to happen.