A/N: I swear I was just sitting there, when this bunny...Anyway, this un-beta'd so mistakes are mine. And of course, disclaimed. So much.
The man in the box said his name was Raymond Reddington. He had been fingerprinted, strip-searched, photographed, and the evidence was conclusive. The man who surrendered himself in the lobby of the FBI building this morning was Raymond Reddington.
Things are not always as they seem.
Elizabeth Keen was a profiler. She briefly studied Red's criminal file before walking in to take her seat. Red smiled at her as though he could read her every thought. He was shackled to the chair, the chair bolted to the floor, restrained like a particularly dangerous animal. It seemed…excessive. Especially for a man who was every bit of fifty years old, losing his hair, and going a bit soft around the middle. But in all honesty, Lizzie was glad for those safeguards, because it had only taken a moment under the bright lights in the cavernous room to realize that Raymond Reddington was a predator.
She didn't like the sizzle of electricity under her skin as his gaze traveled over her. She didn't care for the slant and quirk of his lips as he stared her down from twenty feet away. He was the one locked into a chair, so why did it feel like she was the captive audience? There was not enough coffee in the world for days like this.
"Agent Keen, what a pleasure." His voice made her fingers want to tremble, so she laced them together in her lap, crossing her legs, almost mocking his inability to mirror her posture. The arch of a single brow was the only acknowledgement of her petty act.
Less than half an hour later, Agent Elizabeth Keen is shaking like a leaf in the wind, braced against a stall door in the ladies room. That man knew more about her life than she herself did. She didn't know him, had never seen him before and yet he looked at her so intimately, with such tenderness. It didn't make sense.
She wanted to call her husband Tom, but her fingers were trembling and she couldn't dial. He was at school anyway. Agent Ressler was pounding on the door to the ladies room; it was time to go save the girl. She had to pull it together. It was time to put aside the fact that nothing about this whole day was normal, or what she expected, and do her job.
Smoke and chlorine fumes burned Lizzie's eyes and nose as she stared at the wreckage on the bridge. She hadn't saved the girl. Zamani's men had taken her and she, Lizzie, had failed. She brushed off the EMTs and commandeered one of the SUVs to drive back to the Post Office.
He was still locked up in the bulletproof cage where she had left him. Sitting as though he had no worries, nowhere to be. They were going to agree to his immunity deal, Lizzie knew they would eventually. Cooper had already agreed to remove the restraints and let him out of the Post Office. Agent Ressler and two other men in FBI flak jackets were filing in now, to release him. Even though Lizzie knew there was no way he could see her here in this tiny room, she could still feel his eyes on her through the glass.
Blood was everywhere. Lizzie couldn't process it, couldn't look at it. She had come home from work to find her husband tied to a chair, bloodied and beaten, and Zamani, the very man they had been trying to find, with a knife at his throat.
Now she was at the hospital and Tom was on a ventilator. She couldn't shake some of the things Zamani had said to her. Lizzie left the room without a backwards glance and went to find the only person who could tell her what had happened to her life.
Her rage broke over her like a tidal wave of heat. Lizzie had always had a temper. It had been a very long time, however, since she had been so close to losing control of it. Reddington merely stared at her as she accused him of sending Zamani after her husband, only blinked when she cleared a table with a swipe of her arm.
"He said you were obsessed with me? Is that true?"
Again there was no answer.
"Why do you act as though you know me? You and I have never met. Never! And now my boss is looking at me suspiciously, my husband is in the hospital and my dining room is covered in blood, all because of you!"
"You're going to want to replace the carpet. You'll never get the blood stains out." The blasé response was far too much for Lizzie's shaky control. The metal pen was in her hand before she could think it through. And as she stabbed it into his carotid artery, felt his sharp gasp at the pain, she couldn't help considering the bizarre intimacy of the act. The way her hand gripped his shoulder, his hand over hers on his neck, her face close enough to his to smell his aftershave.
She stepped back and pulled the pen out, calling for medics immediately. As they swarmed the room, she slipped out, and went back to what had been her home.
It was midnight, and Reddington was correct. She couldn't scrub the blood out. So the sunrise saw her pulling up the carpet with the last of the pent-up rage. What kind of person was she that she almost killed a man in anger today? How had she let him pull her strings like that?
She couldn't let it happen again. She needed to know why he knew her, how he knew her. She stared at the hardwood floor of her dining room. Maybe they could just have the floors redone. They seemed in good enough shape, just needed cleaning really. There was a spot there in the corner, where it looked like some repair work was done recently. A closer examination revealed that it was a hole cut into the floor, cleverly covered up. As she pried up the lid, she wondered if this was wise. Whatever was in the box that she had pulled out was not going to be anything good. If she opened the lid, nothing could go back to the way it used to be.
Weapons. Cash. Passports. Tom's face on all of it.
Things were never as they seemed.