Author's Note: this is the first part of (I'm guessing) 3 or 4 parts in this story [EDIT: I guessed wildly wrong, I'm fairly certain there will be 10 chapters - 6/17/14]. I've had some of these ideas floating around in my head for a while, and I wanted to revive an old style of mine, which is completely different than that in Decline and Fall (which I am still working on I promise). I'm already working on the rest of this story. I hope to have the next chapter up within a week or so.

This fic is AU (most likely) as it will touch on Liz's origins, and veers from canon timeline after/during Anslo Garrick/1.10, but will have spoilers for the whole first season. This fic includes and focuses on Red/Liz pairing, and expect it to be more evident here than in my other story!

None of the characters you recognize are mine, nor is the Blacklist world. No infringement intended. Written purely for entertainment purposes.

are you mine?

my heart?

mine anymore?

stay with me for awhile,

that's an awfully real gun.

I know life will lay you down,

as the lightning has lately done.

failing this, failing this

follow me, my sweetest friend,

to see what you anointed in pointing your gun there.

- Only Skin, Joanna Newsom

There were boxes. There were a lot of boxes. It started because Tom told her he needed the boxes out of the living room because the parent group from the class play was going to be coming over that friday night. She hadn't touched them since they arrived by truck as packed up and sent by her Aunt Judy, but she hadn't forgotten about them, or what they represented - an impossible project, and terrible loss, a reality she didn't want to face. She'd begun to feel like the boxes were lying in wait.

First she moved them, one at a time, up the stairs to the room that had once been her office, and then partially made over into a nursery before that too had been dismantled. She stacked up the boxes into a maze between the door and her abandoned desk. She meant to leave them like that, dead and contained in the room at the end of the hall, where they couldn't assail her with pangs of loss, and obligation.

Red had been away for two weeks. He had called her once, on a staticy line and she had clutched at her phone and leaned into his voice, straining for every nuance, half sure the line was being tapped, half sure he was saying goodbye to her, that he had made the mistake of nearly sacrificing himself for her once and meant never to see her again.

"Where are you," she shot at him, rapid fire and alarmingly shrill, "Are you hurt? Are you safe? They're looking for you, I need to know what to tell them." She meant, don't you know how desperate I was to find you, don't you know how hard I tried?

"Tell them the truth, Lizzy," he told her, sounding distant and tired and strained, "I'm going to be away, for a while. You will be protected, you will be cared for, I want you to know that, and if you need me, I will find a way to you, but I won't be able to… be here for a time, do you understand?"

"No, Red, I don't understand, Garrick's dead, there's going to be an investigation, we'll find the mole - it'll all be cleared up soon, you'll see."

"I need you to be careful of your husband, I know you don't believe me, but you owe me that much, at least," he told her, ignoring her protests, "Keep a weather eye. I'll contact you again when the way is clear."

"Wait," she had called, feeling a desperation like somewhere a clock was ticking down, "How do i contact you if I need to get you a message?" How do i know you won't just disappear off the face of the earth?

"I believe you know the avenues open to you," he'd said, and the line had gone quiet then, but he hadn't hung up, they just listened to each other breathe for a long stretch of seconds until finally he'd said, "You'll be alright, Lizzy. After all I did a much better job keeping you safe from afar than I have from close by."

And she hadn't been able to form a response that encompassed the fact that he had kept her safe in the most ludicrously reckless way, and that she'd kept herself safe all these years, he could hardly take the credit and her outrage that he was vanishing just as suddenly and violently as he'd arrived - and the line had gone dead.

She'd kept the phone in her pocket the rest of the day, curling her fingers around it from time to time. And when Tom had tried to talk to her again about moving, she had shouted at him, wildly and incoherently, but thankfully briefly. She retreated to a scalding, scented bath, with a firmly locked door between her and the rest of the world, where she sat curled over her knees in the hot water, trying to figure out how to breath against the vice around her ribs, pressing her hands over and over again to her dry eyes.

Tom didn't let the idea of moving go. She'd go into work have to give statements, and be interviewed while hooked up to a polygraph, talk about Red, and the incursion, and the ambulance ride from hell, and then she'd go home and Tom would start talking about how dangerous her job was to both of them, how much stress she was under, if they just moved away everything would get back to normal. First he fixed on Nebraska, until she snapped at him.

"Don't you know how hard I worked to get away from the little town where I grew up?" she responded at last, out of patience, the third night of the inquest.

"What about New York, then? We were happy there, right?" he'd said, mulish and oblivious to her resolve.

Were they, she wondered, somehow she couldn't remember that at all.

"I'm not moving, Tom," she told him, when he still hadn't given up by the end of the week, "My life is here, my job is here. I've made commitments. I've got a career."

"What about us? What about our life, together - I thought you wanted a family, how is that supposed to work when you're getting yourself nearly killed every other week?" he'd demanded in return and there was a awful note in his voice, a whine like she was being so unreasonable and he was being so patient for putting up with her.

"My father died a month ago. My job has turned into trying to catch the worst possible monsters you can imagine, and I'm sorry but that is more important right now. I just don't have any room right now for new life, I don't have it in me. I'm sorry, Tom, but I can't move and I certainly can't see how we bring a child into this, not now, not how things are," she'd said with a grave surety she didn't often show him, and was surprised to realize that all of these things were true. That she meant them. That she couldn't hope for family, now that the world around her had turned hard and unsteady and alien.

He'd taken it better than he might have, she supposed. He'd walked out of the house without a word and slipped back in a couple hours later, smelling of cold, damp outside air and cigarettes rather than alcohol, the way some men might, and stalked upstairs to their bedroom, closing the door with a quiet but definite snap. She stayed downstairs pretending to work on case notes until she fell asleep in her chair.

A chilly silence settled into her house, between them then. Tom sulked and pretended that he wasn't sulking, either that or suddenly he didn't care at all. Liz found she was was avoiding looking at him, glancing at his profile, over his shoulder, ignoring the pinched look on her husband's face, the way he didn't talk about school at all, or try and cajole her into understanding, or offer to cook anymore. Not that she was ever home in time for dinner.

Eventually she was considered fully debriefed by her superiors, and she had finally managed to convince them that she had no earthly idea where Red might be, because as usual he hadn't really told her anything. She was sent home at the end of the week and told not come back for a while.

Compassionate leave they called it, because she'd only taken three days off between cases to go to her father's funeral. She was pretty sure it was 'we don't know what to do with you when Reddington's not here' leave. She tried not to take it personally, it was true she could use the break. It was just that what waited for her at home was a thick, suffocating tension that she couldn't seem to figure out how to fix or abate in way.

The first day off, she went to visit Ressler in the hospital, finally. She hadn't seen him since Garrick's men had led her away from the Box at gunpoint. She'd been at work far past visiting hours every day since then. It was surreal, seeing him that way, stranded in a hospital bed, his face pale and pinched with pain. She hovered by the doorway, unsure of her welcome, but he seemed happy enough to see her, which was a rarity in an of itself. She managed to perch awkwardly on the edge of the visitor's chair, realizing that she was there at least partly because she was working her way around to apologizing for Red pointing a gun at him to make him give up the code and spare her. She wasn't going to, though. It was nothing she had asked for, nothing he did deserved her guilt, and she had no allegiance to him that she should apologize in his stead.

"Glad to see you got out of it okay, Keen," he said, "Meera came to visit a couple days ago, she, ah, summarized what happened."

"She took your statement already?" She wasn't surprised, Agent Malik was very good at her job.

"Yep. Don't know if it will help you guys, they were giving me something top notch in my drip," he smiled broadly and lifted the hand that was still hooked up to an IV. Still on some pretty good stuff, she guessed, he didn't usually joke with her.

She tried for small talk for a while until it came down to what they both seemed to really wanted to talk about.

"Have you heard from Reddington," he asked at last, obviously expecting that she had.

"He called me that night, after…" she shrugged, she'd already told the investigation all about it, they'd made her go over and over it, so she was long past the tender feeling of divulging what felt personal, "He didn't tell me anything except that he would be away. I think he only called so I - so we wouldn't think he was dead in a ditch somewhere. No clues, nothing, the number he called from was a payphone."

"Meera said you were pretty determined to find Reddington, after you got away," he said, speculative, like he was prodding for a deeper answer, "That was quick thinking, by the way."

She nodded noncommittally, unwilling to clarify if she was admitting to the fervency of her search or assenting to his praise. She didn't owe Ressler explanations about that, after all he'd chased the man for five years. He must have scrambled just as hard at times, he must have taken it personally sometimes too.

"What did you talk about?" she found herself asking, and yes, this was probably why she'd come, "You were trapped together for a long time." And he likes to talk, she meant, he always talks at the worst possible moment, until you wanted to snap.

"It's kind of a blur to be honest. I lost a lot of blood. He said something about saving the person that's in front of you. He said something about sailing. He was Reddington, you know. Weird, reckless, not very sane. Surprisingly human."

Sailing, she thought, I'll look into that. Maybe he was somewhere by the sea.

"Don't do what I did, Keen," he told her suddenly, recognizing the hungry look in her face, "Don't throw your life away on this quest. If he's gone, don't keep chasing until you're gone too."

"I'm not," she said, "I won't. I'm on leave anyway."

What life, she thought, i think it's already gone.

She couldn't sleep next to Tom, his huffing sleep breaths that had always gotten on her nerves, his new, distant, watchfulness, not even with a wide margin of bed between them. She tried, for a while, to drift off, holdinging herself as close to the edge of the mattress as she could. Tom had snapped at her for that the other night, that he wasn't going to put a finger on her if she felt like that about it, that he wasn't a monster, for god's sake.

She gave up. She went instead to the room with the boxes.

Some things Judy had kept, things from their shared childhood. Some things, from her own childhood, she already stored, in the attic, in the basement, in the back of her closet. When she and Tom had been so excited about starting the process to adopt, she gone home for a time, to visit her dad, talk to him about what it was like raising her. She had wanted more of the things from when she was a little girl near by, in preparation, in hopes that she might share her early books and surviving toys with her own child.

Mostly they were full of books, and papers. Photo albums. A stunningly huge number of case files, the archives of the whole PI business, it seemed. She wondered why Vic hadn't taken any of it. Maybe he didn't care. Maybe he didn't have room. He'd retired years back and moved out into the woods somewhere in Oregon, where he had family. He sent her postcards sometimes, with pictures of mountains on them.

Of course, she realized some time in high school that it wasn't just a PI firm, or wasn't only one. She'd never told anyone about that, not even Malcolm, years ago, or Tom. Somehow Red knew though. Somehow Red knew everything, he was omniscient that way, inexorable. He'd been everywhere, all the time, and she hadn't even noticed.

In one carton, on top of a whole lot of old home made cassette tapes, was a stacks of her dad's notebooks, the ones that cops and reporters use, bundled together with big rubber bands. It all smelled old and dusty, faintly of damp, from the basement of the old house. She lifted out one of the bundles and unbound it. She couldn't even track what was written inside the first notebook, she couldn't see past the shock, horrible and wonderful and familiar, or seeing her father's handwriting again.

In another, on top of a stack of photo albums, was a long metal box, like a small toolbox, with chipped enamel and a little lock. It took her a moment to remember that her father's keys were now sitting in a little dish of knick-knacks and change on the hall table downstairs. She got them and brought them back, and tried the unidentified tiny yale key on the set in the lock. The thing opened with an easy twist. Inside was jumble of more papers, more pictures, more odds and ends from the business, a passport, and a tiny green matchbox car she almost remembered giving him from her set of them. She remembered playing with them at his desk at the office after he picked her up from school, suddenly and completely remembered, how it felt to be little and sitting on her father's lap and driving her tiny brightly coloured cars over up and over the obstacles of his stapler and rolodex. She put a finger on little green metal roof. Then she reached under the toy to excavated the stack of photos.

When Red first showed up in her life, really showed up, when her first day at a new job started with a helicopter ride, he'd made some comments indicating he knew her family. She could never figure out if he meant he knew Sam or he knew her biological family.

After the day in Wujing's underground bunker, where Red had coldly shot a man just to protect her identity, he had sat beside her in the back of that plush car. He had looked at her with such intensity, with such knowingness. He warned her that the answers were far from simple, the look on his face telling her that she should expect them to hurt, when she found them.

He told her that he would do anything to keep her alive. Alive, he'd said, not safe, not as though he cared, but as though she was valuable. It chilled to think of, she couldn't fathom what her value might be to a man like Red, and that was the first piece that fell away, the first crack as the ground began to fall away underfoot.

And yet, that's how it always began of course, and yet. He wouldn't stay in the neatly partitioned place marked Dangerous Criminal, he defied classification, he slithered out of even the profile she had pinned him with at that restaurant that had made him freeze and deflect. Persistence and caring were terrible, insidious tools, and he wielded them well. It wasn't as though she forgot, that he was a liar and a traitor and could not mean her well in the end, it was just that she'd acclimated to the idea. It was just that, as everything else around her began to dissolve, there he was, capricious and commanding as a creature from another world, setting a path out before of her, promising her protection if she would only follow him into the wild wood.

She was a grown thing though, unloving and unmoved, she would not be led as a child by the hand. (Oh but he had held her hand so sweetly that day, when her love for her husband had been overmastered by her doubt, even after, she could not forget that.) She would not blindly surrender to her gruesome fate, she would tear away the fine tissue of her ignorance and stare it down.

One of the photographs, buried in the middle of the stack, was an old polaroid, colour shifted with age, and small and curled. It was a snapshot taken in someone's back yard, with part of a blue house in the background, an unpainted picnic table in foreground. There was Sam, grinning for the camera, young and vibrant and alive. His arm slung around the shoulders of another young man, of a height, with short fluffy, lightish hair, who looked off to the side rather than at the camera, squinting slightly in the sun. Leaning against the legs of the man-who-was-not Sam was a small pixyish child, hardly out of toddlerhood, barefoot, wearing a tutu and brandishing a glittery gold wand like a sword, a wide, sly smile gracing her girlish face.

It took her a minute, to recognize him. At first she was ready to dismiss this man and this girl-child as strangers who passed out of Sam's life before she became a part of it. But there was some nagging thing about shape of his nose, his chin, the line of his shoulders where they hunched just slightly under the weight of Sam's arm. It was the early or mid eighties, she guessed by the clothes, not so long before she would be Sam's daughter. And there was her father, standing beside an impossibly young and boyish Raymond Reddington.

She stared at the picture for a long, long time, sitting crosslegged on the floor in the midst of the mess she'd made of the partially unpacked cartons. Her father's young face and Red's even younger one, both of them hale and strong and somehow terrifically vulnerable - and lost to her, separated by a great wasteland of time. The image was too small to give her much real information, their faces so small she could eclipse them with her thumb. All of the horrors that were to come had yet to visit them when this picture was taken, she could tell that even if she didn't quite know what those horrors were.

Young Red looked boyish, fine featured, supple and vibrant and lovely the way some young men are. Of course, she thought, of course, no wonder he had such meteoric success on both sides of the law, and at such an age, people want to give you things when you look like that. But this pretty creature was not the man she knew. Time would strengthen him, give him power, and grief, make him into a force of nature as much as a man.

And the girl, she thought, what would become of the girl?

She put the picture back into the middle of the stack, tucked the lot back into the box, and locked it back up tight. She worked the little key off the ring, and this took some time because her fingers were clumsy with lack of sleep, and tucked it into the pocket of her sweatshirt. It wasn't as though hiding the key would stop anyone interested from picking the lock, it was just a sign of old habits kicking in.