An extension of 2x19 "Leonard Caul" because I'm still reeling from that ep and needed some corrective fanfic. I was supposed to be finishing The Graveyard Shift's next chapter but woops, I wrote this instead.

Title comes from Kyla La Grange's "Vampire Smile," which is such a 'Liz Keen and her feelings toward Red' song that it already pained me before the most recent ep, but now it's so perfect it hurts.

Cooper calls her late in the night to tell her, in the strained, clipped voice of a man at the end of his patience, that Reddington has removed himself from the hospital. He apologizes for waking her.

She doesn't correct his assumption; she's been awake and pacing her cheap motel room for hours. All this time, she has wanted the truth from him, and when he gives it to her, even when he knows it will hurt her, she snaps at him and she's kicking herself for it.

Liz knows her actions and behavior are barely in unison; her decisions are erratic and reactive at best. She's gone from the woman who was called 'sir' by her coworkers to this person she is now, wild and fierce and so much more cunning but emotional, more emotional and feeling than she's allowed herself in the past.

He's not blameless, and her reactions could be seen as understandable, but this can't continue.

The need to see him, to talk to him, propels her out of her room.

She still has the key from Dembe, after everything, and she knows he's warned her well enough, but still, the night is pressing on her, the events continue to replay on an endless loop behind her eyelids, and her pursuit of sleep is futile. She texts Dembe that she is coming so he doesn't shoot her when she lets herself in.

"I told you he wasn't to-"

"You took him out of the secure hospital room; I'm obligated to check on him," she lies. "I need to see him," Liz says firmly, refusing to step back despite Dembe's attempt to crowd her towards the door. He finally admits defeat when she remains resolved and brushes past him.

There is a young man sitting in a chair and nursing a cup of coffee. Scrubs. Sneakers. That 13th hour-haggard expression. Must be the person overseeing him medically. He takes her presence in with little curiosity.

The cat darts by.

When Dembe shows her into the bedroom - she'd avoided the room before - it's dark, lit by a dim lamp by the bed. The room is small, filled with a lifetime of collected items, all soft colors in the yellowing light.

She is suddenly struck by the random thought that these are not all his own things, that they belonged to someone else before him. The blankets on the bed are well loved and pilled, knit long ago.

"Raymond," the bodyguard calls quietly.

The only thing new in the room is the screen beside the bed, displaying the resting man's vitals. They're steady. That's good.

The injured man stirs slightly, grimacing, and opens his eyes. When his gaze falls on her in the doorway, he blinks several times, sleepily, and all of her bravery and bluster dissolve. The bullet and his apartment and this day have ripped away any illusions left that she has about him. He's a man in a bed.

Her eyes fall on the wires and bandages on his chest, on the faint glint of goldish hair as his chest rises and falls.

"What are you doing here, Lizzie?" She's never heard him sound so weary and she hates it.

She licks her lips and watches the vitals on the screen, composing herself.

"We needed - I needed to talk to you."

His eyes flicker from her to the man behind her in the doorway. "You shouldn't even know this flat exists," he declares, with a false-calm that could mean trouble for Dembe.

Liz sways on her feet, drawing his attention away from his friend who had given up the information. "There's a lot I know about you now."

A tiny dip of Red's head and Dembe exits the room, leaving the two alone. The door clicks shut behind her.

"You read what was on the Fulcrum. About me."

She struggles to keep her voice even. "Did you think I wouldn't?"

There's nothing in the room's silence for a moment but the steady beep of the monitor.

In his depleted capacity, his response - a truth that is not really an answer, his usual defense - is a little delayed. "Knowing those things makes you dangerous and in turn puts your life in danger. That is a terribly precarious position to put yourself in."

She holds her back a little straighter. "I've managed so far," she responds wrily, a crooked smile stealing over her lips.

Red gives a little laugh; it pains him and she rushes forward, alarmed, but he holds up a hand to wave off her concern. There's a rickety chair with a thin cushion beside the bed, and she perches on it, waits for him to steady his breathing.

"There is nothing to discuss, Lizzie. You made your feelings perfectly clear."

"I said some things earlier," she says, looking to the side, looking back on the moment with regret, "horrible things."

"They were true," Reddington says, not unkindly.

She shakes her head, giving a bitter laugh and has to take an involuntary sniff. The chair creaks under her as she shifts, blinking tears away. "For once you and I were both telling each other the truth."

He frowns at her, and in the room's dimness, his eyes glitter. "I told you I don't li-"

"Not you," she cuts him off, harshly. "I do. I...I lie," she admits and draws her shoulders up. "I lie all the time. To you. To Cooper. To Ressler and the others and to Tom and," she pauses to shake her head, "to myself."

Liz looks over at him, watches him with some sort of effort to remain semi-detached, but it's feeble and fails. For his part, he seems too tired to come up with something to say, instead waits for her to continue speaking.

"You almost died today."

"But I didn't," he says simply, like it erases those hours, her phone calls and the people she bargained and begged with. Like it takes away the things she did, was willing to do.

"But you nearly did. More than once. You nearly died and there were so many times…" she trails off, wipes at her face and discovers that her hands are shaking, and she uses her palms against her cheeks due to her diminished dexterity. "You almost died today," she repeats, to both of them.

His hand reaches out in the darkness, lands on her knee, and gives it a quick, chaste squeeze of comfort. Liz latches on as she had done earlier, happy there isn't blood to slick their contact. She cages his hand and holds it captive against her torso.

And then she's bending over at the waist, contorting, and the tears are coming unchecked now as her forehead touches the mattress and she clings to his hand, curls around it, traps it and refuses to let it go.

She can't let him go: that's what today has proven to her. As much as she snaps and snarls and tries to push him away he can't do a damn thing because she refuses to let him go. And she'll do just about anything to keep it that way. She was ready to shake every skeleton out of her closet today, to sift through the bones for hope of something to save him. To trade or sacrifice whatever it took to keep him.

She's admitted to her possessive feelings for him to Samar- to herself, she will admit that maybe she is obsessed. She has accused him of the same.

She's not sure how long her tears continue, but she becomes aware of the comforting weight of his hand on her head, of his thumb following the fall of her hair, and he removes it momentarily when she turns her face to the side.

"I told him earlier that I think this is going to devour me."

He knows who she means, of course. She watches his face carefully to see what his reaction is to that.

Something like pain and regret flickers over his features. His lips thin as he presses them together and his features contort into a grimace.

He won't lie to her, but he looks away then. Part of her wonders at this point if she'd even care if he lied to her, or had lied in the past, if it would make a difference to her, if she'd feel any different, and it shakes her. She studies him in profile to distract herself.

His voice is still rough, but it's mostly composed. "Do you want this to stop?"

Liz considers it before she answers. If she compared the time it takes her to answer him, it would probably about the same amount of time it took for him to respond that night on the payphone.

And her answer is similar as well. "No," she tells him as firmly as she can, knowing full well that it shreds most of the walls she's kept up, and then asks "Do you?"

His answer is more immediate, and she knows the taste of self-loathing in his tone, because she feels it on her own tongue, knows how it sounds. "No."

This is their percussion cap, embedded in both of them and there it is, detonated, devouring both of them. The silence rings with it. Her chest hurts, stings with it. She sits up so she can watch his face and expressions more closely.

"Those pictures...you have pictures of me, Red. Years worth of pictures."

"Sam sent them. He," he pauses to swallow, they both seem tense with the subject of the dead man aired between them, as if they both are afraid he will suddenly appear, as if they fear what he would think of this, of them. What he would think of what they are to one another, or are becoming.

"They started as his form of a reminder to me, that even in my darkest moment, after all of the hideous, monstrous things I have done, you were alive. That my choices, my actions meant something in the grand scheme of what we were entangled in. After a time I...I will admit I latched onto the idea, became consumed by it, the concept that somehow, you were...absolution for my deeds, for what I had become. By saving you I had saved myself, regardless of what would unfold.

"In a removed way, I objectified you, coveted you, as the years went by...Meeting you eradicated every preconceived notion I had ever entertained." He shakes his head, a jerking twitch unlike the smooth mannerisms of the man she's grown accustomed to. "You are no more that child than I am the man I was that night of the fire."

Her memories of the event aren't complete and they are altered; the Fulcrum was created before that and offered her no clues. She still needs answers, but here is another piece of her past falling into place. She stares at him.

They save one another and damn one another and still here they are.

Liz moves their knotted hands to rest on the mattress.

"So what do we do now?"

He chuckles weakly, leans back into the pillows and stares at his master plans beyond the walls before him, as if he can't make sense of his own writing. "I don't have a clue," he admits with a brittle sigh.

Her throat is dry and she swallows again, offers a humorless smile. "Raymond Reddington doesn't have a plan? That's terrifying," she teases him.

The corner of his lip twitches upward. "You seem to have managed incredibly well thus far on the split-second decision making front - I happen to recall a pen in my neck to that effect," he assures her, warmly. "That was the closest someone had gotten to killing me in a very long time."

Her eyebrows rise upward. "Am I supposed to take that as a compliment?" she asks, incredulous, then answers her own question. "You would mean that as a compliment."

Red smiles at her broadly and it feels like the fucking sun.

The future is uncertain, a dark and terrifying thing, but that is also what they both are, or can be if it is needed, and they will confront it. If they can hold on to one another, if they can work together, now that she knows more, she believes they might both come out of this alive.

For now, there is a small apartment filled with evidence of their overlapping past, and the blessed and steady chirp of a heart monitor. There is the warmth of his hand between hers, the feel of his strong pulse in his wrist below her fingers. There is the sound of his breathing as he slips back into an easier sleep, her name a sigh on his lips.

She watches him fall asleep and her heart is in her throat as she realizes she is falling.

It isn't enough, but it's enough for now.