A/N: Yes I know this deviates from canon. Think of it as a post-s3 AU.
There was an unassuming little house at the end of the road. Brown, not painted. The porch needed some touching to, but there was a porch swing, a few potted outdoor plants. To the left there was a greenhouse with cajoling plants, a leafy mess. The only sound came from the cooling engine, ticking, and the sound of the wind rustling the trees. The pine trees had swept down debris from their branches. Yellow specks of pollen covered the roof and the windows. At the bottom of the valley the house and its surroundings grew cauldron-hot. The sun tried to scorch the man's skin. He pulled his hat down, having stopped in front of the small steps to the porch. A thin screen door protected what was inside from the outside.
He had grieved.
He had grieved her. When she died-
His life.
Not the same. Not ever. There was a before and an after. The entirety of his life, of the span of years, a before, when he was alive, alive with her. And an after. A dark, grueling fireball that hammered knives into his chest, moment after moment, an unending cutting, a thrashing of his insides that left him bleeding on the floor like no bullet could have done.
And the baby. Her baby. He'd gotten her back, through more atrocities than he could account for. Hell could wait. What mattered was that that piece of her was safe. That there was a remnant of her left in this world. That there was a person that could, through her sheer being, prove that Liz had existed. Once. In a better place, and a world that had been better for it.
Life. He'd extracted it from Kirk, shooting him point blank with a hollow point, watching guts spray out over the wall behind them. A moment of solace, paired with disconcerting quiet. Then sirens. He ran from the police with less vigor than usual, tiredly pulling out his handkerchief to wipe the blood off of his face.
Life. He didn't want any of it.
Then Kaplan disappeared. His formerly trusted, most trusted, went missing. There was always chatter in the criminal world, even about people like Kaplan. But there was none. Her disappearance was a stone dropped beneath the surface of a lake, leaving no rings on the water. She wasn't dead. She wasn't anywhere.
It started then. The aching suspicion that something, somewhere, wasn't right. A bolt that hadn't been screwed on properly, causing the whole machine to tremble. Somewhere there was a gap. A lapse. Raymond Reddington set out to find it.
If Kaplan had disappeared, it had been because of him. Just as he could never fully bring himself to hurt her, punch her, punish her, she couldn't bring herself to lie to him. It came abundantly clear that she was escaping him. Out of a fear for what she would tell him? What could it be, for her to go to such great lengths?
They had been drinking when she said it, the thing about a cabin. Years ago. A decade, even. Kaplan was sitting in a leather chair in the corner, the dim light from the fire flickering over her face. "I always wanted a cabin. A cottage, something small." Raymond was looking for it now. Every small road, every intersection. From the backseat, he frowned at all the possibilities, at all the endless, dusty shitholes that could harbor Kaplan's location. One of those roads, over the potholes and around the bends, she'd ventured...
Aram had handed him a quizzical note with a location. "This is as far as I managed to track her car." He closed his mouth, a wrinkle on his forehead. "...I'm sorry."
The note. The note had led him there. Across the fickle mountain roads, to the sour gas station attendants whose game of poker he'd interrupted and away from them again, past half a dozen of signs profiting off of the good name of a ski resort that wasn't set to open for another five months.
The thin patch of stomped out dirt where he'd left the car was the only road for miles. It was a no man's land, this biting, unforgiving country side. From behind the corner of the house, Dembe returned from his reconnaissance. He'd put his gun away. "Raymond." He held his hand out, as if to stop him, slow him down.
Reddington was still holding onto his gun, "What is it?"
Still holding his hands out, Dembe nodded towards the screen door.
He went up the stairs then, Dembe remaining at the stairs. Slowly opening the screen door, he peeked inside. It was clean. White curtains, some magazines on the coffee table. A dirty plate on the kitchen counter. A glass, see-through. It smelled like food from the kitchen, a remaining drift. The old floors creaked as he walked across them. The living room with a TV, an old clunky thing. To the left was the bedroom, with light blue walls and a soft-looking bed cover. The door in the living room led him out into the garden. There was a slight breeze that made the trees shimmer, and small waves were brought to life in the lake, and it made her dark brown hair sway, gathering over her shoulders. She stroked some of the strands back.
"Raymond."
"Lizzy."