Hello! This is my first attempt at a Blacklist fic, probably brought on by the sad lack of Liz x Red moments in season 2 so far. T_T

I hope this is enjoyable to anyone out there. Not sure if this is one shot, or what. I'm sort of playing it by ear. Constructive criticism is not only welcome, it's better than coffee for keeping me going (and that's saying something).

Epiphany

It is late at night when she walks into the lavish hotel room that is serving as his current home. She's never paid him an unannounced visit at such an indecent hour, she realizes too late, as his reclining form comes into focus within the dimness. It's hard to know which rules of etiquette apply to Red and which do not.

He's leaning pensively into a sofa that probably costs more than her car, staring into a roaring fireplace and holding a tumbler of Scotch between his thumb and second finger. The idea that he might be asleep had never even occurred to her. Neither had the possibility of him entertaining some kind of company, or being otherwise indisposed.

And in this at least she was apparently correct – if Red is disgruntled by the interruption, he masks it masterfully. "Lizzie," he calls across the room, a shorthand greeting, nothing more than mild surprise in his gravelly tone. His voice is the kind of hoarse that comes from many hours of silence.

The woman hesitates one final time before closing the space between them, moves into the rough-hewn circle of warmth that is the room's only illumination. Liz chooses a chair across from him to perch on and doesn't meet his gaze right away. Instead she clasps her hands above her knees and stares at them. The scar.

She can't bear to look at it right now, so she reluctantly lifts her eyes, glassy in the firelight, to survey this man who has so effortlessly animated all of her dreams and nightmares. His expression is both guarded and open, somehow. It scares her how accustomed she is to these kinds of contradictions now, in both him and the world at large. Liz never considered herself to be an innocent, but the past two years have blown blinders off her sight that she never even imagined were there. Everything is now everything. Nothing will ever be black or white, right or wrong, or any one thing, ever, ever again.

Red cocks his head slightly, an unspoken invitation to discard their silence. Liz would rather keep the silence, but that's not really an option.

"Sorry for not calling first," she says at last, dismissively. Red smirks gamely and pours her a drink.

He still says nothing, waiting with the patience of the grave for her to organize her thoughts. She knows he's not able to read her in this moment, and is watching her for clues. Red has seen her mad – furious even – before, and he's seen her weak and broken. But tonight she is numb. He can't read her because she can't read herself.

Liz takes the drink he's poured her, raises the glass to her lips, but can't swallow. She knows it's the best liquor money can buy (or possibly better, considering his line of work) but she's not a Scotch drinker, and the hard alcohol will not agree with her head or her stomach.

Instead, she cradles the crystal tumbler in her hands and admires how the firelight turns the liquid into a cache of amber jewels. Fire.

Another thing Liz cannot stomach right now. She stands up agitatedly, rakes a hand absently through her newly-cut hair. She shouldn't have come here. She suddenly feels trapped by it all. Trapped by her life, by her job, by the warmth of the fire, by the criminal regarding her so serenely. She wants to go for a run outside, in the cold of the night. She imagines herself running faster and faster, tearing off her coat as her body temperature rises, and feeling the searing night winds on her face. She throws her wallet away too, and her badge. Lastly her phone. And she is free then, running until dawn, where she will find herself in a new town with new people. And she will start fresh.

A large log cracks in the grate, and the sudden noise brings her back. Liz crosses over to Red's sofa, sits down closer than she would normally. She wonders why she's doing this; why, if she wants freedom, she's moving inexorably closer to the person who is at the locus of her captivity. This question is still in her eyes when she finally makes herself look up at him.

"Lizzie, speak your mind," he breathes, his brow creased with worry.

"I know."

"You know."

"Not everything. But I know what happened to me that night."

Red is the only person in the world she can say 'that night' to, who will know exactly which night she means, no qualifiers needed.

"You remembered something." His face is impassive, but she can feel the energy shift in the room.

"No," Liz intones, and it sounds like a promise. She doesn't look away for even a moment.

It is Red's turn to falter. He takes a meaningful sip of his poison. "I'm only going to ask this once. Are you sure you can trust your source for this information? There are too many people who would like to steer you in the wrong direction, Lizzie. You can't even imagine-"

Her hand is at his temple suddenly. Considering that the last time she deliberately touched him, it was to pierce his carotid artery with a pen, he is remarkably calm at this sudden intrusion of his personal space. But she only touches him gently. Elizabeth Keen is not well-versed in the art of physical demonstration; growing up with only Sam, who was loving but highly pragmatic, she learned how to take care of people in the ways that really count, through action, through loyalty, through sacrifice. That's almost certainly why Tom was able to woo her so completely, with his flowers and hugs and kisses. She doesn't know how to comfort someone physically, let alone Raymond Reddington.

But she ghosts her thumb and forefinger down his cheek bone, his jaw. He closes his eyes at the contact, lets out a deep, rumbling sigh, like Atlas putting down the world.

"It wasn't my father who pulled me out of the fire." Her words are barely a whisper, but the declaration seems to reverberate between them in the darkness.

Red reaches up and cups the hand that is at his face, brings her fingers to his lips for a kiss that lasts just a fraction of a second too long.

"You didn't want to tell me. You didn't want to take away my only memory of my father."

His eyes find her and the depth of emotion she sees there knocks the wind from her lungs. "Yes," he says simply. The word is jagged, as though torn from the very fabric of his soul.

Elizabeth's brain suddenly kicks into gear, and the sensation is uncomfortable. After hours of stillness and numbness, of emptiness and fog, ever since her "secret Santa" dropped the classified documents into her P.O. Box, her profiler's mind has come back online. Red's world-weary face loses its resolution as she scans unwritten words in the darkness beyond the marble hearth.

Raymond Reddington let her believe something he knew wasn't true. Not a first. But he did this only for her own happiness. He had nothing to gain by demurring from the credit of a heroic act. An act of emotional altruism. Empathy. Sociopaths don't feel empathy. Ergo –

"Talk to me." He's squeezing her hand, peering at her vacant face with a concern Liz now knows beyond all doubt is unfeigned.

Her profiler subroutine is still running, overclocked, chasing down some shadowy sum that she knows is there. It doesn't make sense. If Raymond Reddington is not a sociopath, how can he leave a path of carnage in his wake with no remorse? Answer: he can't. Which means her initial assessment of him was wrong, her equation was unbalanced. There is a motivation for his actions beyond material gain. She flits through the paltry pieces she has of his past, his present. She rearranges them like tangrams, tries to make a shape that is coherent. The beauty of her work as a profiler is that she doesn't need to have all these pieces to complete that puzzle. Like calculus, she can delve into the unknown variables, solve, check, try again, until an answer emerges.

And there it is.

With an almost audible click, all the pieces lock into place. Everything goes still. When she locks eyes with him again she is visibly shaking.

"Lizzie." It's not a question or an entreaty. It is a reassurance. He is there with her on the cliffs of epiphany. He will jump with her, or walk back with her to the safe plains from whence they came.

Suddenly she is crashing into him. It is not her own volition that brings her to his embrace, it is a force of nature. Her arms lock around his torso, her hands travel the length of his shoulders, the back of his neck. As though to make up for years of enmity, as though her animosity were a physical item that could be swept away like dust. He's been waiting for her to get here for years, and yet he never rushed her.

'If anyone will give me a second chance, it's you.' The words he had spoken to her at the very beginning. And now she understands their meaning – he was dropping her clues all along. Red needed her to know him, needed her to look beyond the indolent labels others had haphazardly tagged him with. It wasn't something he could tell her, because she would never believe him. She had to come to this conclusion on her own.

She is almost in his lap now, she is leaning so far into him; and she idly wonders if she's knocked the Scotch out of his hand. This thought causes laughter to bubble inside her, which turns into a nearly hysterical hybrid of a giggle and a sob. Tears stream down her face freely and she can only hold on to him.

"Shhh," he sooths, rubbing soft circles into the small of her back. "It's ok, sweetheart. It's ok."

And for the first time in long while, it is.