Okay, Blacklist fam, I feel as though we are missing like...maybe an episode and a half, after everything that went down/didn't go down in that fall finale this last Thursday. I feel cheated and jipped out of necessary scenes. So, I decided to turn an idea I was ruminating on into something a little bigger to occupy my time during the hiatus. To those of you waiting on some of my other fics for updates, I'm just going where the muse takes me, at this point, so they will be finished, but this is distracting me. Thank you for your patience. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this.
Ressler hadn't even begun to put Kirk's van in park when Liz jumped out and sprinted for the garage ramp, bypassing several security cameras and exit doors, gun leading the way. It's the weapon Odette had held on her, and it feels justified sitting expertly in her grip. Distantly, she is aware of Ressler yelling for her, that he's telling her to slow down, but she can't seem to make herself take that necessary precaution. Nothing about this last year had been slow, why apply the brakes now?
The gate Kirk had been standing at earlier is rolled open, there are no vehicles to be seen, and she can just make out two figures down in the depths. As she enters the underground space, her eyes check the surrounding room, sweeping her gun from one blind spot to the other to secure her corners before her gaze locks on Kirk sitting, almost dumbfounded, before a subdued Reddington.
"Back away from him!" She raises her gun and her finger tightens just a smidge on the trigger. The man she thought to be her father looks over at her, gripping the table beside him as if to steady himself, shock still written across his face. There's a phone in his hand. He looks even more terrible than he did when she'd been taken away from this place.
"Masha?" She simultaneously feels a rush of warmth in her chest and an iciness in her veins as his voice cradles the contours of her birth name. A name she craved hearing in the oddest of ways, and a name he seemed to crave saying for as long as she had been in his presence. Masha, Masha, Masha. Daughter, daughter, daughter. Memories or not, she can no longer afford the compassion she's extended to him.
"I said, back away." She steps closer, watching him push his stool away from Red. Kirk takes a deep breath, his demeanor drawn and strained in the harsh light illuminating the area.
"Masha, he-" Something in Liz snaps at the placating sound of his voice, and she takes a threatening step forward. That's not gonna work this time.
"Shut up." Kirk's mouth slackens a little, his eyes studying her from where he sits, and a tension she hadn't noticed before leaves his shoulders. The moment draws her back to a time just before she shot Tom Connolly, to the moment before she triggered a flashback of her shooting her father to protect her mother. Anger and guilt flood her, a tidal wave of emotion that makes tears burn her eyes. If not Red, I should have believed myself. And maybe all of this wouldn't have happened. If she had done something more with her mother's journal, if she had double checked, if she had trusted Red, if Red had just explained this all to her, if she hadn't faked her death…
Red wouldn't have had to trade himself for me, again.
For the first time since arriving, Liz allows herself a good look at Red slumped in that chair. His breathing seems far too labored, tremors wrack his body intermittently, his eyes only half open, and she can see blood on his neck and in between his knuckles. What has he done to you? The closer she gets, the more she can smell the sweat in the air, how terribly it mixes with the dusty component of the garage itself.
Liz brings her attention up, peers at the table, at all the empty syringes scattered across its surface as well; a picture forming in her mind about what had gone on here. Taking a habitual step forward, her foot catches against a syringe on the floor, and she peers down for a moment to watch it spin away from her in a slow arch. Still pointing her gun at Kirk, she senses Ressler behind her, and then it's as though there are bands across all of her muscles, panic in her veins.
"Hands!" Ressler's commanding voice calls her attention back to Kirk, and the man seems to have been caught mid-act; reaching for a syringe filled with a yellow liquid. "Let me see your hands!" Kirk places his shaking hands flat on the steel table; his shoulders hunched, his lips pressed into a hard line. Ressler is on him in a second, wrenching his arms back and moving to cuff him. "Check Reddington." She stays for just a moment, trying to figure out what it was about her that felt trapped. Ressler meets her eye, "Liz, I've got this."
It's as though her former partner has unleashed her. Her arms drop, she flicks the safety back into place on Odette's gun, and shoves the weapon into the waistband of her jeans as she takes the extra few steps to Red's side. Looking at him up close, she's afraid of what she'll find. Liz reaches out and carefully seeks the artery at his neck, a movement not dissimilar to when she'd checked Red's pulse after the boiler room exploded and she'd found him unresponsive. The fast and unsteady beat beneath her fingers sends her own heart plunging into her stomach.
"God, Red," It's a worried little thing that comes from the back of her throat, as she takes his face in her hands and tilts his head up to get a good look at him. His skin is warm but pale, sweat soaking his face and the back of his neck where she supports it with the tips of her fingers. He is lax and pliable in her hands. She notices that his eyes seem to be rolled back, mouth askew.
Beneath both her little fingers, she can feel the erratic beat of his heart. Shaking her hair away from her face, terrified of the image before her, she tries to wake him up. Liz rubs her thumbs across his cheeks gently, and tilts her head to the side a little as his eyelids slide open a fraction. Beneath her thumbs, she feels his cheeks twitch, and suddenly there is weak smile on his face.
"Lizzie," The mere sound of his voice is enough to make her throat clench and she nods a little too emphatically; attempting not to let the semblance of control that she has over her emotions vanish. "You-," Liz feels and watches his jaw clench when a spasm wracks his body, as though every muscle is contracting, and he's left gasping, struggling to get the words out. "You came back." The shaky quality of his voice and the slurring of his speech accompanies a seemingly uncontrollable wince, and Liz attempts to hush him by smoothing her thumbs slowly over his cheeks again.
"I told you I would." He shivers again, the wince still in place as he leans into her right hand.
"Shouldn't have." He mumbles the words beyond whatever sensation is sweeping through him. She watches his eyes slip closed again, the furrow across his brow softening. He swallows thickly.
"Hey, stay with me, alright? You're gonna be okay." After a beat, he gives her a small nod, and that's all that matters to her: his confirmation. She doesn't care how panicked her voice sounds reverberating around this mostly empty garage. She doesn't care that Kirk's eyes likely bore into her back. Liz gently releases Red's head and she lets it dip towards his left shoulder again.
She glances at the screens behind Red, and then down at the pressure cuff around his bicep. She doesn't know what any of the screens mean, but the doctors that Kirk had hanging around must have been monitoring Red's condition while they tortured him. Liz turns her head over her shoulder to look at Ressler, who has a hand on Kirk's arm to keep the dying man in place on the stool. Their eyes meet for a moment, and Ressler looks back at the doors on the opposite side of the garage as though he's expecting trouble.
She feels it too, this anxious waiting. A quiet space in the company of two dying men. The look on Kirk's face can only be described as devastated, and Liz has to wonder what it was that he managed to squeeze out of Red while he had him. The thought makes her glance at the table with all the syringes again and she looks at the one Kirk had tried to pick up earlier. They had to call for help, they had to get paramedics here, they had to-
"We induced an adrenergic storm." Kirk's rough voice makes her look back at Red, as if to make sense of what he was saying. Red manages to blink his eyes open at the statement. "It was inevitable, I suppose."
"What is that? What does that mean?" Ressler yanks Kirk back a little, the wheels on the stool dragging across the cement floor.
"It's what I was trying to remedy before you cuffed me." Liz looks back, and finds his attention elsewhere, and he murmurs something she doesn't catch, or maybe it was just another, garbled exhale. She's about to ask him, about to try to keep his focus on her, when Kirk says her name again. "Masha, his men are already on their way." A note of confidence sits in his tone as he sits there under Ressler's arrest, a quality to his cadence that reminds her of conversations that she'd heard him have with Red when they'd been at her family's summer palace. He's a step ahead of us. "He'll likely die if you don't give him that antidote."
"What did you give him?" She stares at Kirk with what she hopes is far more flinty look than she suspects it to be. No need to show him your panic.
"This and that." He shrugs as if Red isn't rapidly descending into a somnolence that he might not ever get out of, as if what he'd done was perfectly reasonable. "It was the only way to get the truth from him." Kirk speaks as if the it's the most obvious thing in the world, but to Liz, it feels like he's daring her. Ask him, go on. I've prepped him for you. The temptation rocks through her, tugging at the bitterness in her heart and all the suspicion that might be vindicated with the right question.
"Why should we believe anything you say?" Ressler heatedly pulls at the collar of Kirk's shirt and then casts a worried glance in Reddington's direction before meeting Liz's eye in silent reassurance. There really isn't time to think about how much she's missed being his partner, but God has she missed it.
"It's true." Liz turns and sees Red staring at Kirk around her, and notices the heavy way his chest rises and falls. The two men have come to an accord, in their absence, and Liz feels that familiar sensation of being kept out of the loop stir in her gut once more.
"It's the yellow one, Masha." Liz looks up at Ressler again and he shrugs. There was only one way to find out. It seemed like it was always this way with Red: either he would die, or he wouldn't. Those odds never sat well with her, and the only thing making anything Kirk had just admitted was that Red said it was true.
Ressler leans over the table and picks the antidote up, extending his arm to her. Liz draws in a breath and takes it from his hand. She pulls the protective cover off the needle, and approaches Red with a mounting urgency racing through her. His head has lolled to the left again, baring the bloodier side of his neck to her. Her eyes trace the small scar she'd given him when this strange trip started three years prior and feels her a sweat break out across her top lip. This is all my fault. Liz looks at his still and exhausted features once more, for what she isn't sure, and inserts the needle into the side of his neck; apologizing even though Red doesn't seem to have noticed the needle going into his skin.
"He's going to need more of that." Kirk's words are lost on her as she focuses on Red for a reaction from the dosage, wondering if this kind of thing even works as fast as she expects it to. In the movies, antidotes seemed to work in the blink of an eye, and while she wasn't about compare her very real and very dangerous life to a movie, it did seem like one at times. But this antidote does nothing but making Red appear to lose consciousness, and Liz immediately feels for his pulse: still rapid, still off-kilter. "I told you," Kirk's voice infiltrates the garage again and Liz, leaving her fingers there to monitor his pulse as though it will give her a different result, only turns to glance at him when his pause becomes an irritation. "He's going to need more."
"What's the catch?" Kirk opens his mouth to answer her but there are tires screeching with the approach of two, black SUV's, and Ressler has drawn his weapon again to point in the direction of the doors as they open. Liz has begun to move too, abandoning her position next to Red in favor of standing in front of him, gun trained on the people exiting, as well.
Baz doesn't seem to appear armed when he hops out of the passenger seat of the second vehicle, followed by men from Red's team. He looks concerned when he sees her, his eyes roving over her and the situation around them. She gives Baz a slight nod before a commotion from Ressler grabs her attention. A handful of who she can only assume to be Kirk's men exit the first vehicle with guns raised in Ressler's direction, and Liz swivels to take aim at a blonde young man who is busy ushering Dr. Reifler from the vehicle. Upon seeing the him, Kirk gives a tired order in Russian that makes his goons drop their weapons. In response, Liz feels her arm drop as well; suddenly exhausted by the fact that she's, once again, stuck in the middle between two deadly forces.
"Miss Keen," She's looking at Ressler to make sure he doesn't try anything when Kirk's doctor approaches him and she finds herself gripping the gun in her hand a little tighter, no matter how relieving Baz's voice is to her ears. Help is here, everything's gonna be fine. She turns around to find the man crouched next to Red, taking stock of his boss's critical state with a practiced eye. "Did he tell you what they administered?" The question is almost an afterthought as Baz reaches to feel Red's pulse, a deeper frown forming on his face than before when he'd looked at her. And if she knew the man better, she'd say the question was for her benefit, and that he had a pretty good idea of what they'd given Red to make him talk.
"No, he-" She looks back at Kirk for a moment, watches Dr. Reifler examine Kirk's now unshackled wrists as Ressler stands disapprovingly off to the side, before she glances down at Red's neck where she'd given him the antidote. "I gave him a dose of an antidote just before you all arrived, but," She shakes her head and shrugs, resisting the urge to fold her arms across her chest as she thinks of Kirk's warning. "Kirk said he's going to need more, that they created an adrenergic storm or something, I don't know."
"Okay," Baz purses his lips, and looks to one of Red's men beyond her, a young, dark-haired gentleman that she remembers Baz cradling when the CIA tried to finish the job after he was shot. The look seems to be enough, because the man moves off immediately to the back of the vehicle. "And did he say where more was?"
"You'll get more when I get to Dr. Shaw." Kirk's voice rises up from behind them, and Liz glances at him with a renewed helplessness bubbling up inside of her. You can see your daughter when you're free of Reddington. You will help me, Masha. One way or another. You'll get what you want when I get what I want. "That's the deal: a life for a life."
So that's the first chapter! I hope you guys liked it. I have half of the next chapter written already, so that should be coming up by this weekend. Thanks for reading! Let me know what you guys think :)