Disclaimer: I do not own The Blacklist and am not affiliated with them or NBC in any way.

Song lyrics courtesy of OneRepublic – Come Home

Title of Chapter Two provided by Tom Odell - Heal

A/N: So, here we go again! My projected posting date for this chapter was like a hella long time off since RL hasn't been treating me well, but I was finally able to get to it. Oh and just so no one becomes confused, this fic is AU after Season 2 Episode 7. I want to give a HUGE THANK YOU for all of the reviews/followers/favorites! You guys have completely blown me away! Special thanks to FrostyFingers, hestia-Prytaneum, and momonigiri! You gals are amazing, and have been absolutely wonderful in inspiring me to keep going! Your words of encouragement have meant everything to me and I could NOT have done it without ya'll! I am not the greatest at phrasing scientific terminology, so bare with me, those of you who see any mistakes I have made who are scientifically knowledgeable lol. I could kick my own tail for not paying more attention in science class, but that part of the story I had to leave in because it felt different and unexpected. I am going to give a fair warning here that there is a mention of violence to children in this chapter so if you would rather avoid reading such things, you may want to skip this one (also a few curse words). There isn't anything graphic in this chapter, just the reference of children dying, but nothing detailed, so I thought I would warn you first. Anyway, hopefully it's not too bad, but I don't think this chapter is my best work as it is. I hope you all can look past all of that and try to enjoy it anyway! Hope everyone has a wonderful Thanksgiving!

Rated T, will change to M in later chapters.


Chapter 2

Take My Mind, and Take My Pain

FLASHFORWARD (cont'd)

Baltimore, MD

December 2015

Hello world, hope you're listening,

Forgive me if I'm young, and speaking out of turn.

But there's someone I've been missing,

And I think that they could be, the better half of me.

They're in the wrong place, trying to make it right,

But I'm tired of justifying.

So I say to you, come home, come home,

Cause I've been waiting for you, for so long, for so long.

And right now there's a war between the vanities,

But all I see is you and me.

And the fight for you is all I've ever known,

So come home.

Everything I can't be, Is everything you should be

That's why I need you here.


"I cannot tell you everything Lizzie. Some of the details of what transpired that day I truly do hope you never come to find out. And you know that as far as your biological father is concerned, his identity must remain unknown. Even though I saw him die that night, his . . . devoted associates would more than likely locate you. I refuse to pull you further into the fray . . . into my side of things, because this? This could expose you, and put you in an even more precarious position with your colleagues at the FBI, and unquestionably, far more danger than you could possibly foresee." Lizzie nods a bit, still keeping a fierce grasp on her weapon. She opens her mouth in a false start, then slams it shut so tightly her teeth clash together. She wants to say that she understands, that it is logical to keep some of the details buried, particularly her father's identity. She doesn't. Because she cannot fathom the sort of man he could possibly be. If Red is disinclined to enlighten Lizzie of who he is after all of the mayhem she has witnessed and even been the focus of, then he must be a breed of beast she hopes to never encounter.

Red shuffles backward to place some space between them, still observing her indignant aura as he does it. Lizzie does not object, but keeps her gun shakily aimed at him all the same. She stays frozen in place, not daring to move or even shift her stance. He needs to give her a temporary break from his proximity, hoping that it would abate her fractured psyche. His calves bump into the large armchair, and he opts to sit as he tells the story. He stays suspended in silence when he feels sweat begin to speckle across his forehead, his chest tightening like an overfilled balloon.

"I cannot . . . lose . . . you, Lizzie." Red says as he blows out a gust of hot air. Shaking his head slowly while he ogles at the tiled floor, he looks as if he has witnessed something unexplainable. Batting his eyelashes profusely to withhold unshed tears, he attempts to drive the notion from his mind, but it refuses to depart. Merely visualizing his life void of her makes him experience a jagged pinch of heartache in his gullet, dread slicing through him like Excalibur's sword. He grips both arms of the chair firmly, afraid to let go, in fear of teetering over the precipice and barreling into the sea of anguish. He knows that he would become hollow. Barren. A shell. Soulless, if he ever lost her. He recognizes that she is responsible for the last shred of humanity that resides within him. Without Lizzie, he would just be the outline of a human being. One-dimensional.

Lizzie does not utter a word; she only affixes herself to the laden circumference of their current predicament. Hearing him say such things launches her frontal lobe into a tailspin as it sends shockwaves of warmth and pain into her chest; juxtaposing in the deep recesses of her heart.

She mentally glances into the rolodex of times Red has spoken tender words of endearment. She specifically recalls the day in the park when he said, "None of it is worse than losing you". She remembers standing there, confounded by his . . . confession? Plea? Ploy? She was unsure. His words baffled her at the time, and were as perplexing as the man himself was. In that moment, his poker face held fast, not allowing what he was experiencing on the inside to be discernible on the surface.

Except this time, he was visibly distraught by the thought of losing her. A euphoric wave of an epiphany washes over her while her palms start to get sticky with moisture. She is bum rushed by a string of thoughts that begin to cloud her judgment of the present. Is he in love with me? And if so, why hasn't he ever just come out and confessed it to me? Perhaps it is because being willing to sacrifice your life for someone every waking moment was a declaration of the most selfless, wholesome, eternal love in and of itself.

He was also an infuriating, incorrigible, and an undeniably dubious species of man. She found him unacceptably irritating with his methods of deflection and his change of conversational pace. Red was also a walking-talking-breathing incongruence who could crawl beneath her skin and make her desperately want to slap him and kiss him instantaneously. She discerns that comparing him to the likes of a snake that was shedding its skin each season is an adequate assessment, a continuous evolutionary process. Spending as much time as they had together over the past few years, Lizzie has seen more and more of Raymond Reddington, the man, rather than Red, The Concierge of Crime.

Red places an apprehensive hand on the back of his head, stroking against the grain of the bristly blond hairs there, fluttering his eyes shut as he does it. The short length of his hair had been a necessity in recent years, since being a top-class criminal came with expectancies of a sharp image. It was also out of the convenience of not having to be bothered with any certain kind of hairstyle. He had begun balding considerably around six years ago, and felt that keeping it long would not be eye-catching to his meticulous variety of females. The texture alone appears to ease his mounting ruminations of how to advance his elucidation of the events. If only for a moment.

Lizzie's insides undergo a swirling sensation, feeling as if someone shook the hell out of a snow globe and she was unanchored inside of it. She looks at him like she has the ability to burn holes through solid matter. He leans back to sit upright in the chair, straightening the crinkles in his vest as he obtains a resonant lungful of air before he proceeds.

"However, I will tell you what I'm able. I have never lied to you, nor will I ever so I'm sure that you can and will fill in the blanks eventually."

Surrendering himself once more to Elizabeth Keen, Raymond Reddington commences his story of the events that transpired on a cold November night twenty-five years ago.

"After I had spent a fair amount of time in Naval Intelligence, I moved on to other . . . things. I was contacted by an associate of mine, who was attached to a government agency, and he offered me the chance to make a sizeable sum of money to collaborate with a few scientists involved in a genetic research project. It sounded alluring, and I just thought 'What the hell, I could always use more money'. They knew my, what some would classify as, 'talents', far exceeded the limitations of a typical human being. So, they thought I could shed some light on some of the responses of the test subjects. I was told that the types of stimuli used were irrelevant. They still wanted my contribution although I didn't have all of the necessary information in front of me. It was like filling out an extremely vague questionnaire. I had to gain their trust, you see, in order to be given any more info. The purpose of these experiments was to alter the normal genetic processes of the brain in order to create the ideal precision instrument of destruction in portable form; the perfect killer, as it were. I didn't discover what the tests entailed until after the trials had been going on for a few months. What I was also unaware of, was that children were being used in these experiments. It was the culmination of nightmares, Lizzie."

Lizzie's gaping maw made its presence known. The face she was making was one of disbelief. If it were not for such a dark moment, Red would have wittingly made sport of her under different circumstances. With every breath she took, less and less oxygen made its way to her brain in order to stay conscious. Her constricted panting reinforces the panic that settles into her nervous system.

Red took note of Lizzie's immediate physical changes, but knew he had to keep going.

"In order for them to gather reliable statistical data, they needed approximately ten "special" children so the samples would be large enough to reach a conclusion as to which ones were susceptible. They believed this would yield them more sufficient answers. There were only two children being used in a control group. You were one of those children. The results were-" He trails off, looking down at his hands, fiddling with a small hangnail that has been aggravating him for days. Twitching his lips and jutting out his jaw, he proceeds with the word for which he was searching.

"Catastrophic."

"Catastrophic for whom?"

"For all of us."

She already knows the fate of the researchers. Why it was never documented, reported, or historically noted in any form. They all met the wrath of a man that was of biblical proportions.

"Upon learning this information, realizing the sort of tests and trials they were facing, something inside me cracked. It was like my conscience buckled on the spot. They were children, Lizzie. Innocent babies. Some as young as two and three years old, as you have probably pieced together, since your sister was also a part of the experiment", he affirms while lifting his eyes to her watery, bloodshot sockets. His tone drops into the lowest of octaves as he grinds his teeth together in anger.

Lizzie puts substantial force on the trigger this time, nearly releasing the bullet from the barrel. Her shaking becomes uncontrollable as her eyes dilate to the nearly the size of quarters, her muscles contracting and shuddering involuntarily. She fights to manage her body's outburst, trying to exude strength rather than weakness. Her ire was becoming more than she could handle, but she still makes an effort to show Red that she will not cave at the mention of her little sister.

He continues, "This place was set up similar to Dr. James Covington's laboratory. It had bedrooms, sitting areas, and a kitchen. It was a two-level bunker buried in the ground. The top level was the lab, and the bottom was reminiscent of a college dorm. These children were going to live down there until the trials were completed."

"I don't understand."

"Lizzie, I'm getting there." He does not say it to be sardonic, but rather to reassure her that she is going to get the explanation she came here for.

"The day I discovered the truth, I was in the laboratory. I was able to find a set of filing cabinets containing patient histories and that's when I saw it. The DOB's of each patient's file I opened. I realized then what I was dealing with. I stormed out, confronted the lead scientist in charge of the trials. All hell broke loose. I shoved him into a glass container filled with vials of chemicals. The container. . . fell. . . on top of him. Chemicals mixed. The fire erupted. I ran around like a wild dog, trying to find an extinguisher. I learned later that they had been taken out of the lab the day before to have them replaced with a new type of extinguishing agent. The irony. To this day, I still do not understand why the researchers had such flammable chemical agents in their possession."

"The fire must have made its way down into the lower level, because the next thing I heard . . . was . . . uh . . . screaming. Children . . . screaming."

He places his elbows on his knees and presses his palms into his face, trying to wipe away the flashing of memories with each stroke.

Red was unraveling.

Unhinged.

A man apart.

Combating the ever-growing lump in her throat, Lizzie yearns to comfort him. She thinks about the countless lonesome nights that Red has likely had disturbing nightmares. Restless nights. Consuming Scotch whiskey until he thought he was on a planet that had been torn from its orbit, spinning out of control. Crying until his tear ducts held no more fluid and were as dry as the Sahara. The suffering he must have endured and still endures is unimaginable, but she is hurting, too. And right now, she is not concerned with anything apart from Red chronicling the happenings of such a serendipitous night of her youth. The hours of darkness that followed, she believes defines every facet of her identity.

"I covered myself as best as I could, and made my way down. All I could see were flames, and smoke. I ran into the bedroom closest to the stairwell."

Red appears as if he is going to be sick, turning pale as cold sweat creases in the lines of his forehead.

"The first thing I noticed was the decor. It was a child's bedroom, no doubt. A young girls'. There were these porcelain dolls throughout with their faces half melted away from the flames that had already made its way into the bedroom. I looked into the corner of the room and . . . there was this—" Girl, he means to say. However, he and Lizzie are both painstakingly aware of the actuality that the little girl was indeed her.

He cannot go on. Red begins sobbing faintly, liquid plummeting down his cheek from his exhausted eyes. He glances down at his large palms, and begins to push himself aloft from the armchair, warily stepping toward Lizzie. Her extremities are beginning to tire from clasping the gun so long, but she maintains her denial to lower it. He comes in such close propinquity of her that Lizzie is forced to curve the firearm inward to direct it at his head. This is the moment Lizzie has been waiting for; what she has been needing to hear.

"—you. Clutching your stuffed rabbit for dear life, screaming at the top of your lungs. I picked you up to carry you out, and as I got to the stairs, I heard screams coming from every direction." He pauses, feeling so perturbed by the effect of recalling these memories, his gut clenches as bile gathers in the base of his throat. "I didn't know what to do. By the time I looked behind me, the ceiling had begun to collapse into the hallway. I couldn't get to any of the other children." His voice is so hushed that Lizzie has to strain her ears to hear him, revolving her head a few degrees. She sees how effected he is by what happened decades ago, but she still has many more questions. She cannot think appositely; reality, dreams, and memories all colliding.

Despite it all, Red stretches his gentle hand to tuck a strand of loose brown hair behind Lizzie's ear, then cups the left side of her tear-blotched face. "I took you out to safety, and then ran back in. I was nearly killed trying to reach the other kids. I was willing to do whatever it took, but in the end . . . they were . . . gone." Lizzie reaches up with her free hand in an attempt to remove his palm from her face. She hesitates, then thinks better of it and leaves it there.

"A ceiling joist fell on top of me on the way back out, trapping me underneath for what seemed like innumerable minutes, but it was only seconds. I managed to crawl out from under it, but not without catching myself on fire." Wait, Red doesn't have any scars . . . does he? she contemplates. As if Red was not frustratingly ambiguous enough, his next action impresses upon Lizzie, that he has suddenly implemented extrasensory perception into his ever-growing list of puzzling characteristics. Red backs away from her somewhat, drifting his fingers up to a button on his vest. He unfastens each button swiftly. He gazes into her striking blue orbs, watching her thoughts play out over her facial expressions.

"Wha—"

She cannot even articulate words at the display of Red coming out of his clothes. She moves her lips incessantly, but not one trifling noise leaves the orifice of her face.

Lizzie quirks both eyebrows in befuddlement, wondering what in the hell he is doing. He disrobes from his cotton dress shirt next, then his undershirt. Lizzie swallows hard, uncertain about what she should do. Red just twists up the corners of his mouth in a frown, and turns around to have his back facing her. Lizzie gasps audibly, tilting her head to the side, unconsciously placing her free hand over her mouth in shock. An atlas of mauled, raised skin covers Red's back, from the backside of his upper arms to the base of his spine. Burn scars. Horrific burn scars. Red saved her, and his scars were the definitive proof she had been pursuing of what had transpired.

Rivulets of moisture tread down her cheeks as she lowers her head in shame. Her conscience drowns in guilt from what has emerged here tonight.

Now, she understood why Red had taken her to Sam, but it did not make her pain to subside. Her anger is misplaced, but her sorrow is insufferable. Red casually seizes his discarded undershirt he had tossed on the back on the armchair and pulls it over his head to put on.

Lizzie slides her rigid finger off the trigger, flicking her eyelids wildly. He stops his movements, staring at her with tears of his own still running down his face as he approaches her once again. She allows her levee to rupture into resounding moans of torment that could have been heard a county away. She tucks her chin to her chest, pressing upon it so harshly that she wanted it to hurt. Bringing her free hand to her temple and splaying her quivering fingers across her face to hide her puffy eyes, she begins to descend into oblivion.

"Lizzie-"

His voice falls to a murmuring tenor, using the gravelly texture of it to his benefit. She squeezes her eyes shut at the raw emotion that is laced within the whisper of her name from his lips. She knows his intentions have always been to protect and care for her whenever no one else ever could. His lulling serves its purpose, and Lizzie lowers her gun in fits and starts, then drops to her knees in front of him. She leans back on her haunches and clutches at her chest, tossing her weapon to the floor. Lizzie quite literally feels her heart shatter into tiny fragments of meaningless debris.

Red crouches down on his hands and knees, mere inches from her. As he warily extends his arms, he hopes that even after all the horrible atrocities of their past, he could still be the one to soothe her while she was in such a disorienting emotional and mental state. Steadily melting into his chest, Lizzie buries her face in his neck and weeps uncontrollably.

"Lizzie, I am sorry. So sorry. If I could go back and sacrifice my life for each one of those children, God knows I would." He knows the words themselves sound empty, cliché even, and he could be misconstrued as the type of man readily wanting to say them after such traumatic times. But, he means them. He pulls her closer to him as Lizzie grasps at his undershirt tightly. Something to hold onto. Something real and unfaltering. Someone she knows cares about her.

Red cradles her in his lap, running his fingers through her russet-colored hair and over her arms. He rocks her gently back and forth to console her. Thoughts begin to sharply press upon his mind as his fingertips make contact with the scar on her wrist. How long I have waited to hold her like this, to touch her and feel her like this . . . do not take advantage of the situation, she is hurting and needs you to comfort her, nothing more. He places soft kisses on both of her tear-swollen eyelids, using his thumb to wipe the wetness away. After she settles down a few beats later, she speaks without making eye contact, timorously refusing to lift her eyes to meet his pinpointing gaze.

"I know that you care about me, Red. But love comes in many forms. Are you in love with me?" Her voice is so low, she wonders to herself if she is even speaking at all.

She had been in denial since the beginning about how much she truly cared for him, pushing feelings she could not characterize away as they would bubble up while she would be in his presence. Some days, she would catch herself lost in her own musings of him while standing in The Post Office, pretending to appear attentive and eager as she listened to Cooper and Ressler drone on about a current Blacklister. The push and pull of the kinetic forces behind their love was complicated, but clear.

"Are you serious?" Red asks almost attentively. Lizzie nods ever so slightly. He suspends his words for a brief moment, long enough to shake his head at the absurdity of the question. A sly grin appears that turns up the corners of his lips, allowing a soft sigh of reprieve to escape his mouth.

"I have been in love with you for what has seemed like several lifetimes, Lizzie. Ever since I saw you outside that little corner store in Omaha when you were nineteen. Alba's? I think it was? Ever since that moment, I haven't been able to stop what I began feeling for you." Red's heart begins to thump loudly as the nervousness from his official confession sets in. He is worrying about what Lizzie's response is going to be, and how they will proceed from this day.

"That's when I began to see and feel for you from a different perspective. You were no longer a little girl. You were a woman. A stunning, intelligent, vivacious woman."

She is unresponsive since his answer was nothing short of subtle. Silence hovers between them as Lizzie broods over the actuality that Red has been in the shadows watching over her her entire life. Love can be defined in an infinite amount of ways. Red giving himself up to Anslo Garrick could have been labeled romantic, if the situation had not called for dead allies lying in their midst.

Also, when Lizzie transferred Berlin's money back into its original accounts to keep Red from being murdered in cold blood? That could be classified as love as well. She had shuddered at the thought of losing him that day, so making the decision to put the money back was an easy one. At the time, she did not want him to know that. "You're an asset I'm charged with protecting. I transferred the money to keep you safe. I was just doing my job". Her morality as an agent of the law had gotten in the way. Today, that agent was nowhere to be seen.

"Loving you has been easy. But, being in love with you? Well, that's a different story all together. I have fought for so long to keep my feelings for you at bay, from rising to the surface, but after my little coup with Berlin? I just couldn't deny it any longer, sweetheart. My heart has been telling me one thing, and my mind another."

"And what was that mind of yours telling you?" Lizzie retorts as she tilts her head up to gaze into his stormy green eyes, nearly cutting him off.

Red smiles gleefully and replies, "That I should never let you know how I truly felt. I didn't want to push you even farther into the darkness than you had already traveled. The last thing I wanted to destroy was our professional relationship. I just thought, if I couldn't have you, all of you, then I would just take what I could get and try to be satisfied with that. I am not a greedy man, Lizzie, and I was not about to put you in a compromising position by dropping a bomb on you like that."

Lizzie wraps her arms around his neck, feeling more bold than usual. She raises herself up in order to be eye level with him, leaning forward ever so gradually. She moves in to place a lingering kiss next to his lips, running her fingers along both sides of his face, tracing his five o'clock shadow with her fingertips. The realization of the intimacy of her movements hits Red like a brick wall.

"I have been in love with you from the moment I saw you shackled to that damn chair, Red. I just never knew you felt the same. I thought maybe there was something wrong with me. Me, an FBI Agent falling in love with a man who is not only one of the most wanted men in the world, but a man I had believed to be biologically related to me. I just thought that, mentally, something was off. That I was twisted, and irreparably... fucked up."

Red suddenly stops his movements and grasps Lizzie's arms with his hands gently, pulling her back away from him to get a better look into her eyes. He thought his heart had stopped beating and for a second, Lizzie saw the surprise of her confession in his eyes. It affected him to no end, stopping not on the surface of his heart, but penetrating his very soul. They stare into one another's eyes for what seems like an eternity. Red could not believe what he was hearing. Elizabeth Keen, his Lizzie, loved him, too.

"There is nothing wrong with you, nothing at all. Don't think that way, sweetheart." He clears his throat, and feels his heart seize up as he searches Lizzie's face. He does not know why he is so afraid in this instant. Maybe it is just the anticipation of what is to come. "I think it's been a trying day, and you are just emotional. Perhaps you simply feel an obligation to—"

Lizzie cuts him off, "I might be emotional, but I don't feel obligated to you. I have been drawn to you since I met you. For the longest time, I couldn't figure out why. It was all just a bundle of emotions and raw nerves, but now, I see it. I see . . . you. You're the reason, Raymond Reddington."

The use of his full name on her lips makes his face light up in a smile that reaches his eyes. Lizzie continues, "I see the man, not the mystique. I see a man who cares for people, who is empathetic, compassionate, and would do anything for those he cares about. I see a man who hurts just like the rest of us. Who is swimming in sorrow and remorse for his past sins and for the people he has lost whom he cared so much for. I also see a man who was unjustly accused of treason. Your dossier? Everything in it? It's complete bullshit, isn't it?"

Red grins like the cat that ate the canary. He was beginning to wonder if she would ever figure out that he was framed for treason, and disappeared that night on Christmas Eve to keep his family safe, and not to abandon them. He had in his possession some very damning evidence against some very influential people. Once they had discovered Red had said proof, they made sure he could never live normally again, and that people would recognize him as a wanted criminal. He gently strokes the side of her face, before finally leaning down and whispering into her ear, "That's my girl."

AN: Really hope you guys enjoyed this chapter! And again, I do apologize for any terminology I used incorrectly, or if I was too wordy in some parts. At any rate, please leave me a review, LOVE YOU GUYS!