He loves it when she calls him Red.
To most, he is Reddington: a curse hissed through gritted teeth or spat in anger.
To his friends, he is Raymond. It's an awkward and old-fashioned name that gets caught on your tongue, one he never liked much. But he was after all an old-fashioned man. A criminal with a moral code. A three-piece suit sipping expensive scotch. A vintage soul charred and scarred by decades of corruption but filled with a zeal for the good life. He supposes it fits him.
One woman called him Ray once. A stop was put to that at once.
But Red. The way his nickname rolls off her tongue is natural, casual, intimate. The way you would address a most trusted confidante, an inseparable brother, a lover.
He doesn't remember when he shifted from Reddington to Red in her mind, or why.
He thinks it might have been when her guard began to lower of its own accord. When the possibility that he had an ulterior motive for a meeting became less important than the meeting itself. When her expression and her jaw and her body softened and began to move with grace and poise, rather than the stiff and stifled movements of a wary profiler. When she began to remind him achingly, beautifully, of Katarina Rostova.
"Red."
He doesn't know how long he'd been standing there, hat in hand, paying no attention to the outside world. He clears his throat. "Yes, my dear?" His voice is rougher than he would like.
The corner of her lips quirk up, part smirk and part smile. "Are you coming?"
Somehow, despite the mistrust and the fear and the literal lifetime of lies, he says yes. Yes, he's coming. He'll come with her to the ends of the earth.