I own nothing of The Blacklist. If I did, I wouldn't be obsessing over all the secrets in this show.

I know I'm super late in the updating department of my other Blacklist story, but I just can't get the dialogue to flow the way I want it to. So in the meantime, you can read this. Sorry for the wait, you guys.

I fell in love with the song 'Dust to Dust' by The Civil Wars. It's wonderful. Go listen to it. (Actually, you should just buy all of their songs. Poison & Wine is a great one too. And Falling. Fantastic music. Most of it is haunting, but beautiful.) It's what I was listening to when I got the idea for this. It gets you in the Red and Liz-for the love of mike tell us their history-mode. Consequently, all the lyrics in this fic are from that song.


It's not your eyes

It's not what you say

It's not your laughter

That gives you away

You're just lonely

You've been lonely, too long

"Run."

He never understood why people would run for fun. He still doesn't. In his life, the only time he ever ran was because something was hunting him, or he it. Death. Safety. Victory. Love. A second chance.

Run for fun...

How about run, so this soldier doesn't kill you? Run after that person so mercy won't come back to haunt you later. Run because hell is raining down on you. Run or the love of your life will get away. Run so your three-year old daughter won't fall down the stairs. Run because your family is waiting for you. Run because they think you did it. Run into the burning house; Run away from it. Run to the dream of your wife's arms. Run to home, to bed, to church, to a safe place. Then, run away from all those lovely, vulnerable things.

Run for your life.

Run.

But they didn't get to. The glass had long since shattered. Bullets stopped punching their way into the safe house. There were two waves. Despite his callings-out, Lizzie hadn't stirred. She just breathed as the initial assault became the second; wild shots, warning shots, damaging shots, shots to take out any other occupants in the house. They were all the same. Dembe.

He hadn't been able to breathe very well when they dragged him out. He hadn't fought hard enough, couldn't make his right arm cooperate with his desperate need to get Berlin's hands off of her.

They'd taken them two days ago.

Sessions had been sporadic.

Beatings.

Lizzie's screams.

Images of her.

Medical attention: they don't want him to die yet.

Finally, there was just the cell and the aching and the tricks.

Oh, you're acting your thin disguise

All your perfectly delivered lines

They don't fool me

You've been lonely, too long

"Do you have an escape plan, yet?"

Her voice is taut and strained from the opposite corner of their cell.

Hours had passed since they threw him back in here. Dread, regret, and longing sat tidy in the center of the floor.

Six-sided

Wrapped like Christmas

Tied off with a red bow

Someone tried to get creative

He'd opened it, of course. Handled it like a grenade about to go off; hands shaking, breath non-existent, suffocating on the fear. He found the bracelet she'd been wearing since the day Berlin crashed into their lives. A token of victory and hope made perverse by the man set to ruin him.

He had known what was coming next. Felt it draw closer and closer until the second gift arrived and his heart lurched up into his throat. There were very few things that could make him puke the way that box did. He left the gift where it had appeared, and after his body was done rebelling, he'd retreated to where he sat now; squeezing the life out of the little figures on the bracelet as if he could make them apart of his flesh.

They have her, Sir. The words that brought all of this mess into her life were the same ones that taunted him now. They have her. All of her. Pieces of her. And the first of those pieces sat leering at him; the perfect revenge.

All that had transpired since he'd dragged himself away was silence and bleeding. He was wasting away in to the wall at his back; becoming neither stone, nor inheriting any kind of impenetrable quality. She stayed in her corner, breathing and trembling and quiet enough to be dead. He dissolved into the nothing he knew he'd become. He figures he stared to long into the dark, because the dark had certainly stared longer into him.

The small box that sat on the floor between them sent nausea into his stomach with the occasional lurch. Oh, he wouldn't be sick again, wasn't strong enough, but the feeling would stay and stay and stay. His muscles would quake from time to time as he tried to hold himself together. There was not a word for what he felt. It was nothing like the horror he remembers feeling when he found his home bloodied and abandoned and everything like the time in Budapest when a vibrant but deranged client tried to saw him in half with her butter knife.

But Lizzie…she would not move. She would not touch him or come to his aid. Nor, would she let him come to hers. The small box was a barrier, an awful, agonizing barrier.

"No." He didn't have an escape plan. Why would he? She wasn't real after all. She was a dream. A fantastic dream. He knew he wasn't getting out of this one. He knew...he knew that he was slipping into a foggy stage of delirium. Knew that he was slowly bleeding his way into the cement at his back. Knew that breathing was becoming harder, that his vision wavered in and out and in and out.

His consciousness was much like the times he found himself floating out at sea. So many of his stories happened amid perilous surges of water. It's both poetic and cruel that life has led him, repeatedly, to one shore or another; life, death, the sordid land in between the two where he felt neither mortal nor eternal. Where every action had more than one cause and the ripples were too many to count. Those were the waves he lost himself to now as he watches her shift in the shadows and draw nearer.

He didn't want to look at her. Shame and defeat, guilt and agony, tore into him with each step she sent echoing between the walls. He had learned a long time ago to avoid that which seemed too devastating. So often had he reminded himself of how vulnerable he'd been that it became an obsessive need to prevent anything from breaching the interior he had built his vault around. They could make him bleed. Wrench his heart in half and beat it into the dust, but this thing he lived in...this scarred, burned, shot-up vessel was only another layer to the walls around his soul and mind.

The memory of Guantanamo, the first time he saw it, comes to mind; but it is the inverted and distended version. All that appeared salvageable, righteous, and true was locked away; left under the heavy security of the world's underbelly. The Concierge of Crime. What good did all those names do him now, what use was a mind full of the lives of everyone he's ever met, when the phantom of the last good thing in his life was stepping out of the shadows to stand before him?

His eyes hover near her boots, travel up to her calf, and notice the dust clinging to her pant leg where she'd been resting it against the floor. Funny, how his imagination added that minute detail. His eyes stutter over everything else and freeze on the stub that juts out a little from her elbow.

She stands so casually, as if she's ignorant to the fact that this is a scene to topple the strength he has left; half in the dark, half in the light. You did this to her, Red. The drip...drip...drip of blood smacking the ground near her feet is a special kind of torture that riddles his soul with a million unbearable wounds. No matter the bullet that struck him, the ribs that are broken, and the bruises he's suffered. He'd rather his lungs be on fire than see this. You lose. Those crimson beads flash against the cement and he does his best to avoid them like he avoids the voice in the shadows that surround her.

Reluctant to look at them, they're just faces he sees every now and then when sleep is more tiring than staying awake. But he doesn't want to add her to them yet. Greedy and possessive, his thoughts eat away at the light she'd bathed into his life; the promise and hope of the future she represented unwilling to die out completely. I love how the light comes in through the-

He blinks, wonders how long his eyes were closed, when next he opens them, she's crouched before him. Her eyes are dry and resolute, burning and searching for detail, nothing like the watery stare he expected. She does the most awful thing after that: she touches her fingers to the pulse under the raise of the scar she gave him and he holds his breath.

"It's weak, but it's there." She sounds muddled; her voice deeper, her scowl unfamiliar. Confusion and dizziness washes over him when he tries to get his eyes to focus on her own. "Reddington." Fingers bite into the wound in his chest and a sound claws its way out of his throat.

"Lizzie," a protest, a warning, an admonition grumbles out of him like a rock rolling down some mossy hill; soft and unstoppable.

"We have her, Dearie." Mr. Kaplan's voice reaches out to him and draws him back. The world gets a little louder, starts to move a little faster, and when he looks up, his longtime savior kneels before him. Business is the face she wears right now, and next to her is the grim face Ressler shows off these days. Less the Boy Scout and more the undercover agent he dealt with in Brussels.

"Not all of her." The two in front of him must share a look because his voice has wavered and cracked too much and the silence spans for too long afterward. There's more noise beyond them. His team. He knows their voices and their methods; the exhalation of silenced bullets and grounded noises of confirmations. He can practically feel their expertise permeate the area as though they were setting him in chains.

Chains to hold him down.

Chains to secure him.

Chains to help him sink into the abyss.

His awareness falters, but a hand on his catches him.

"Keep strong, Dear. We're not out of this yet." Kaplan's fingers seek his pulse again and Ressler is waving someone over. The fist he has around the tiny bracelet tightens. They make quick work of the IV. Someone keeps a steady pressure on the hole in his chest. He doesn't know who, he's closed his eyes again, retreating to that interior no one can touch, but he's fairly certain it's Ressler. Payment for past services rendered. He doubts he'll ever be repaid for killing Audrey's murderer, but they're making leaps and bounds if the agent is working with Kaplan. Maybe Berlin's head will be in a box by the end of the day.

"Targets secured. We gotta go." Red finds himself on his feet faster than he can breathe. The pain throughout his body catches up to him like dynamite set to level a building. His legs crumple underneath him, but there are hands to hold him up, and they're moving.

After an indeterminable amount of time, ambient light from a street lamp makes his eyes water, and then, there are strips of fluorescent bulbs above his head to wash out everything until it's pale and diluted. Spending hours in the din and gloom of the place they held him, Red feels like a blind man.

"Bullet went through. Looks like it clipped his collar bone. Maybe a rib. It's hard to say with the bruising and swelling." Cold air washes over him, wakes his mind a little more, and he wonders when they laid him down and how long ago. Semantics, he craves them as he begins to discern the people talking. The front of his shirt is open; exposing much of the damage Berlin left in his wake and the ghosts of other painful endeavors. The smack of rubber gloves being adorned makes him flinch and the fuzzy figures around him seem to press in on all sides. An oxygen mask is placed over his face and obstructs the darker figure at his feet. Dembe. There's something crooked to the way the Sudanese man holds himself. The events of that morning come back to him and he wonders where his friend got caught in the ambush.

His eyes move from body to body; searching for one in particular. He is surrounded by eyes and voices and faceless people. Kaplan, he's sure that's her on the right, fiddles with his index finger. A moment or two later, the hollow, mechanical sound of his heartbeat reaches his ears. "Most of the damage seems to be concentrated on the right side. It appears they tried to clot the wound." The vehicle lurches and a hand grabs his ankle.

"You're sure you can fix all this?" There she is, the unfocused body near his head. Hair in a ponytail, a patch of white on her forehead. Dark clothing. Something holds her left arm aloft. He blinks a few times.

"I'm sure. We've done this before." A disapproving sound floats down to him and he thinks he disagrees with Lizzie's assessment of the information given to her. Kaplan and his team will offer him the unfettered security that the FBI can't. She's done this before. Dozens of times. Rescued him from the brink of death and flames and hell. He must be reacting. He must have moved or made a small noise. Or that shrill chirping he has for a heartbeat has caused some alarm, because she's there, leaning down over him and all he can do is breath in the proximity, relish the warmth he imagines he can feel, and marvel up at the sight of her.

"Hey," There's something else in the thumb he feels rubbing the top of his skull where she thinks no one can see, in the tears sitting in her eyes when her face comes into focus, in the tremble of her bottom lip. "It's going to be okay." By the look she gives him next, he knows that's not what she wanted to say. He knows her position beside him is still as uncertain as it has been from day one. That this, this moment, right now, will forever change the way she looks at him.

He doesn't care. It's her voice…her voice, so close and real. It sends itself blissfully throughout his body; a warmth that reminds him of French wine settling in his belly, of the kiss of sunlight after a freezing night, the familiarity of the home he lost so long ago. But there's a stitch in it; unraveling the strength she's trying to show, and it worries its way into the muscles of his left arm. A reserve of energy saved for the action he must take.

When he draws it up toward her, the hand she was soothing him with takes his own. His thumb brushes the raised skin at the base of her palm, and he holds the bracelet between them. Through the mask on his face comes a relieved exhalation; all mercy and thanksgiving and grief.

It's there: her arm, her scar, all of her.

Whole.


The other half of this will be up tomorrow ^^ enjoy for now!