A/N: Thanks for reading. Critiques are much appreciated, especially on characterization and psychology, pacing, use of tense, and holding interest.
Lizzy lifted her head. Half-asleep, his ribs felt its absence, and he swam up toward consciousness. "Red," she said softly, lifting one hand to his shoulder. "The tide's turned."
Yes. The sound of the water lapping was back. The air had changed over, and his headache was gone. He opened his eyes, swallowed, and looked down at her.
She was just shaking off sleep too, a few minutes ahead of him. Young lungs. Quick to recover. But not, and to hell with the Naval Academy for instilling useless gems like this, big enough to escape.
His back against the wall, legs stretched out, he filled his own lungs a few times and leaned over her dark head to check his watch. Five in the evening. Two hours since low tide.
"It's taking us longer to wake now," she said evenly, reading his mind.
"Yes." The unnatural flush in her face as she looked up over her shoulder at him, and the slight remaining constriction of the pupils, wrecked him again. Exactly as it had each of the last three times they woke. He closed his eyes for a moment, then smiled down at her. "Are you thirsty?"
"No. You?"
"A bit." He shifted slightly, to get at the water bottle without dislodging her. He unscrewed the cap one-handed and took thirty milliliters or so. At a liter and a half for each of them daily, the water had lasted last about as long as the air would. Perhaps another day.
With that swallow, he was up to a bit of storytelling.
"I once knew a man with an insatiable thirst for crème liqueurs," he started, and was rewarded by feeling her eyes roll as she dropped her head back against him. But she didn't stop him. "Also a reasonably good cat burglar. But first and foremost, a connoisseur."
"Did he get drunk and botch a job?" She shifted against him, trying to find a new place for her head; he slipped the offending vest button loose.
"Essentially, yes, but the story is in how. He did the job – Lunda artifacts in the DR Congo, if I recall - but missed his getaway, holed up overnight, and apparently felt safe enough to get drunk and spill some on his luggage. He risked a commercial flight the next day, and the artifacts sailed through security. But he'd forgotten the bottle in his bag."
She sucked in a breath, catching on. Quantico proved itself not entirely worthless once again. "And when they swabbed the bag for secondary screening –"
"Yes. The glycerin in the spill set off the explosive alarm." He shook his head. "One thing led to another, and then, Congolese prison for grand theft."
She laughed, and so did he. He wondered if it improved air exchange – a gap in his long-forgotten training.
The trouble with a prison that was airtight in high tide, however comfortable otherwise, wasn't the oxygen. Far quicker, it was the carbon dioxide.
Four tides ago, when they were more optimistic and certainly far cleaner, he'd calculated whether one person alone could survive the highest coming waters. Staring down through the air exchange grill in the floor at the dark waters below their cell, once a natural erosion in the ochre stone, he'd concluded it would take her six or eight hours longer to enter the last coma without him using the air. The Academy was getting its long-awaited vengeance after all. But Lizzy had given him a prescient, piercing look, and he'd put a stop to the idea of useless dramatics.
They had shouted at each other the day before that, in their first moments in the cell - stupidly, without real anger, and almost by unspoken agreement, knowing those would be the last normal moments of their lives. He had upbraided her for her stubbornness in finding her own path here against his will, and she him for his compulsive secrecy, still, after so long. It didn't matter. A missile control room with a two-man launch-cancel system had already made it clear they both were needed.
Afterward, he had offered up his empire for her release - contacts, funds, assets and secrets – and been rebuffed. A perfect example, if one were needed, of why he'd always hated purist ideological cults. He and Lizzy had saved half the eastern seaboard, and they were going to die, and he had failed.
"And, remarkably, I'm still not sorry," she had whipped at him, toward the end of that quarrel. When she heard herself say it, the both of them reduced to grade-school retorts, she had nearly run out of steam. She had just enough left to repeat it, softly, more gently. "You won't hear it this time, Red, if that's what you're looking for. I'm not. Let it go."
Whatever anger he'd held onto had drained away then. She was right, in a way. No prizes for the winner here. He'd thought that he had met despair before, and he had been wrong.
"I am." And then he'd said what he'd worked for years never to have to say to anyone, and bled out his empire ensuring he'd never have to say to her. "Lizzy, I don't have a plan."
She'd closed her eyes for a moment. "I know." Then: "Tell me about this cell."
He'd thought for a sick moment she was gathering intelligence, trying to develop the plan he hadn't, and that he was going to have to tell her more plainly, the key fact about this cell is that we're going to die here. Then he realized she was only trying to give him something to do next.
"It's a waiting chamber, a softening-up room of sorts, for enemies slated for interrogation." He gestured to the bed and the water jugs. "The principle isn't suffering." Yet. "In keeping with their concept of the afterlife, it's dread." They hadn't even taken the pocket knife she'd carried ever since losing her service weapon. Keep your tokens of safety, the process said. It will not matter. There was a long history of breaking prisoners here, not without laying a hand on, so much as before.
Red had slipped off his suit jacket in the heat, folding it neatly on the twin bed's slate-grey duvet. The time would come soon when he'd lose any interest in neatness or order, but not quite yet. "We have a semidiurnal tide here, probably placing us somewhere off the East Coast." That was when the Academy had first started to creep back from its thirty-six years of exile.
Lizzy had given him the same patient look he sometimes got from her halfway through a long lead-in to a new case, the one that made him want to draw it out as long as possible just to watch her struggle not to shake him. "Every twelve hours, the tide will peak beneath us. On its way up, when it reaches the level of the air pipe below, the room will become a sealed chamber, silent, like now. The carbon dioxide level will rise. We'll experience flushing, headache, eventually loss of consciousness. Then as the tide goes out, the water will drop below the pipe's level, the air will freshen, and we'll wake and hear the lapping." He paused, fractionally, but there was no purpose served by keeping the rest back. "We're approaching spring tide with the new moon. The waters will…be higher. Near the limits of survivability."
"And then they'll question us."
When they came, they'd bring their instruments. But he doubted, at this point, that they had any questions left. They had made clear enough, and written on the bodies of enough faithful associates, how this was going to end. He had done things himself that would never leave him, to acquire information, but it was what they had done to men with no information at all that had made him understand how this would end.
He picked his way through the words in his mind. Finally he sat on the bed and held up a corner of the rough duvet between his fingers.
"Lizzy, this is synthetic. We can burn it at any time when the chamber is sealed. You never have to even see them."
He saw the light of his meaning rise in her eyes. He'd once seen a synthetic tarpaulin caught up in a shipboard fire. The fumes had peeled the waterproofing off the wooden deck, and here in a sealed cell, they would asphyxiate them within ten minutes of ignition.
The ghosts of the profiles and catches she could have made down all the coming years were so real, for that moment, that he had to catch his breath. She dropped on the bed beside him and said nothing for a long moment.
"Well," she'd said finally, "trust you to know your fabrics. I'll search, too, before we break out the violins."
And she had, inch by inch, less hoping he'd missed something than checking off that box. Quantico was good at boxes.
Red had lain back, saving his breath, and used the time to calculate how long this and future intervals awake should last. With her current activity level, he gave them about an hour of useful consciousness remaining now. Next time, subtracting recovery, perhaps eight. Meanwhile, Lizzy found the biscuits provided for them.
When the mattress dipped beneath him, he opened his eyes. She was beside him, drawing her knees to her chest, and dropped her forehead onto them, hiding her face. He'd seen many times before, but it never failed to strike him, how even terror sometimes took a back seat to embarrassment. He closed his eyes, the only kind of privacy they could offer each other from now on, and promised himself he'd only make her hear this once.
"Lizzy. I'm so sorry."
She didn't answer right away; she never liked to speak when her voice was unsteady. It made her silent at odd times sometimes. But after a moment she shifted over against him, shoulder to shoulder. "You know, you say that at all the wrong times." She rubbed her temples. "Does your head hurt, too?"
He nodded. "But we'll be asleep soon. Let it come, Lizzy. You'll wake again."
He could have laughed at himself for letting that habit – making offers of safety, however small - run on long past its usefulness. It was really himself he was comforting. But she'd dropped her head on his shoulder, and they spun down into the dark.
When they'd woken, the disorientation had lasted longer than he'd expected. It wasn't only the air; it was also the unchanging light and the cell itself. Yellow lamplight above; patternless, almost organically curving sandstone all around; dark water lapping below. It could have been midnight, or noon. It was about five in the evening. Another day and a half till spring tide.
His syndicate's protocols for his death would activate in four hours. The ones for hers would wait another forty-eight.
They'd paced the walls to shake out their legs, and eaten just enough to steady themselves. The more of the biscuits they ate, the more water they'd require. It didn't matter, they agreed ruefully.
"Carbon dioxide poisoning does wonders to curb the appetite," he started, shaking the crumbs down through the grate below. And then he did laugh at himself.
She raised her eyebrows. "What is it?"
He shook his head. "The habit of lecturing you. I don't know when it started. I didn't use to, as a rule. You must have wanted to put any number of additional pens through my neck over the years."
Cross-legged on the floor, Lizzy had laughed. "I stopped using them and switched to a voice recorder. Same reason the Bureau took my piece - it wasn't worth the risk. Someone had told me the only thing worse than the anger was the regret."
Her pupils were normalizing again. She stood, shook the crumbs off, and leaned back against the wall. "But look, while we're still ourselves, I need to say this."
It was strange; they'd said any number of hurtful things over the years, despite all their best intentions, and that came with the path he'd chosen into her life. But they had come so far that the surge of apprehension he felt just then wasn't fair. Possibly the anxiety of the receding narcosis.
"You didn't fail. I didn't either. We're the stuff of legend. Six million innocent people safe." She bowed her head for a moment. "We're just depressed we're not two of them." She looked back up at him with something very much like pity. "But even you can't call it a bad trade."
He'd swallowed. He was grateful, oddly enough, that he hadn't been given the choice. The universe and her stubbornness had spared him that, and it was no small thing. "No. Just not the one I'd planned to make."
Lizzy nodded. "'Planning is essential, but plans don't work out,'" she misquoted, and somewhere Eisenhower turned over in his grave.
It was too much. She was too calm; any number of times, he'd watched her just win the battle for control over far smaller things. Control was a tool, and as useless here within these smooth walls as any other tool besides a crane and wrecking ball. He wondered if she'd caught it from him, the pathologic need to keep up a game face.
"Lizzy," he'd said carefully, expecting to regret it, "you don't have to be brave if you don't want to. You don't have to be embarrassed with me. I'm sure there's a pen here somewhere if you want to have another go."
She looked back at him steadily. "I'm staying in denial for now. I haven't made it to anger yet. You should join me. It's better here."
She paced the room again, halfheartedly, and dropped back on the bed beside him. "Besides, I could say the same thing to you. Could have said, any time the last four years."
"Did say, a time or two, as I recall," he agreed. But it was different for him. He'd been expecting a sticky end like this for years; he'd been cured of that instinctive human conviction about harm, it will never happen to me, thirty-six years before on a snowy Christmas Eve. But he wasn't sure how to say that without sounding self-pitying, so he said nothing.
It didn't matter. She wasn't a profiler for nothing. "Red," she'd said softly, ''you can't steam in guilt for the next three days. It's unreasonable as hell." She turned and sat cross-legged, facing him, and took his hand to take the sting out of her next words. "Don't you know that always taking on responsibility for things you can't control is exactly what makes you so damn scary?"
Having taken a literal bullet to the heart before, he knew this feeling was different; he imagined her words more as an arrow, thin as a thread of light, piercing without harming, illuminating something long in darkness. He laid a hand on her hair for a moment and could find nothing to say for a while.
There was no reason any more not to explain how a reputation for being ruthless and slightly unhinged also helped to keep down the need for manifest violence. But it seemed beside the point.
Finally he said, "Cooper will get the rest of the Blacklist in a few hours. A bit of an early – let's see – Earth Day present."
Lizzy nodded, in a kind of satisfaction. "Generous. Job security for life."
They'd traded stories for a while afterward, half of which they'd each heard before. They'd paced the room and stretched.
It was when the lapping water stopped again, in the sticky silence that followed, that she'd moved on from denial. She wept quietly against him, and then not quietly, on and off, till they both lost consciousness again.
He'd woken from a stew of memory and dream. Lizzy, exasperated, in her living room – "You have to stop breaking in. I admit your timing has been excellent, and I was wrong about the Wyvern here finding me, which is why I'm giving you this key. But I need you to pretend to be a normal person long enough to knock." Dembe at fourteen, watching from a doorway, still eyeing him with unboyish suspicions after two months in his care; he heard his own voice saying, "I'm many things, Dembe, but I am not that sort of man." Tom Keen, bloodied and broken against a wall, but this time Red didn't take a chance on whether Lizzy could finish it; he did it there in front of her. The scores of people he'd killed ringed round him silently, still pleading, each a different picture of fear; they did not realize they were dead already.
Lizzy was shaking him. He was talking in his sleep. He came to, enough to stop, and opened his eyes. She was scanning his face, inches away, watching his pupils. His throat was dry.
He was well aware he talked in his sleep occasionally. A peculiar cross to bear for an information dealer, and another reason he'd long preferred to sleep alone, and to own the room he slept in. In their months as fugitives, without morphine to keep him quiet, it had been an unending challenge to ensure separate rooms all the way, cementing her image of him as absurdly prudish where she was concerned. It wasn't even, any more, about what he was afraid she'd hear; she knew the bare facts of enough of his crimes to get the picture. It was the tones she'd hear it in.
And now she had.
No doubt it was only fair his secrets be stripped away in these remaining days. It was only that he hadn't expected not to know which secrets, precisely, he'd been stripped of.
He'd groaned. "Are you going to tell me what I was saying?"
Lizzy sat back, the muscles round her eyes relaxing, in obvious relief that he was coherent. "You sang like a canary, Reddington. I wish I'd thought of doing this to you sooner." There was something underlying the lightness in her tone, but whatever it was, it wasn't the revulsion he'd expected.
But she didn't, apparently, plan to elaborate. As his head cleared, he couldn't remember ever feeling naked in quite that way before. The austere, lofty, ruthless justifications for the secrets he had kept for her were gone now. The men he'd killed to keep them might as well have lived, and he could hear them pleading still.
"Lizzy," he'd said quietly, after a moment. "Is there anything you want to ask me? I'll tell you, if you still want to know."
She laughed once, a wild, almost unhinged sound. "I may not have really believed we were done for, till I heard you say that."
Red had braced himself and waited, while she took a sparing drink and sat in silence. Then, for the second time that day, she undid him.
"Do you still think it's better if I don't?"
The fog in his mind was still receding; he looked at her, gut-punched. In his years of redirecting and deflecting her, losing ground inch by inch as she pried and slipped round him into her past, the one constant had been her rock-bottom certainty he was wrong to block her. Arrogant and inflexible. To hear that question from her…once in Delhi, a city dog, at once heavily pregnant and obscenely skeletal, had wandered out of the mist into his doorway like a canine madonna. He'd set out a bowl of milk; after gulping it down, she'd lain on her side, and then laid her head on his knee and closed her eyes for a moment, before padding off into the night. She knew that in the morning she'd be hungry again and he'd be gone, and he doubted anyone in her memory had ever kept up humanity's side of domestication's ancient bargain. Her trust was neither a habit nor a request. Just a gift.
"I think it would spin you around," he said finally. "And for nothing. Perhaps, by the way I kept your secrets, I made them seem more…more, than they should have been. They were never what made you." Her parents, he hoped strangely, might have managed just enough love for her to agree.
Lizzy shook her head, and when he turned at the motion, he saw tears in her eyes. "Then let it go, Reddington," she said softly. "I can always interrogate you further in the morning."
"What on earth," he'd asked her in wonderment, "did I say in my sleep? Why couldn't I have said it years ago while awake?"
She laughed a bit, and then sobered. "Not what. How."
He looked at her questioningly, but she didn't elaborate. He supposed a taste of his own medicine was in order.
They'd cut the bedsheets into strips with her pocket knife and dipped them into the grate below, where the waters lay a few feet beneath them now. They took turns using them for seawater sponge baths, each facing the wall in turn for privacy's sake, though after three months on the lam together she'd long ago seen all the scars that mattered.
Of course, they then had to re-dress in the decent minimum of the same grimy clothes, but it was still immeasurably better; bodies were like children, indifferent to context, wanting what they wanted. He told her about his months imprisoned in a former Gulag site repurposed by the Russian mob, and the things some men longed for more than anything else – women and alcohol, but also a parrot, a Sunday paper and a weekly poker game. For him, it had always been a bath.
"I've been thinking about regret," she said afterward.
He'd wanted to stop her there, tell her not to waste time on it, but there were limits to his capacity for hypocrisy. He had let men live for hours longer than he'd planned to make their peace with their regrets sometimes; he'd offered an ear for those who wanted one. The idea of being that ear for Lizzy now made him feel unmoored, as if the floor had dropped away and there were only the dark waters beneath them. Aloud, he said, "Tell me."
She twisted, away from him this time, showing him her back; he could see the muscles moving over the thin vertebrae as she bowed her head. "We've hurt each other a few solid times. Do you remember that, that sick certainty, knowing that from this one, this time, there was no coming back?"
Her face as she'd handed him the Fulcrum. When she'd first learned how Tom died, before she understood why. Her awakening memories of his presence in the fire. Sam. Always the wrong piece of knowledge at the wrong time, going off like a small landmine, and him always hamstrung from fixing it for fear of stepping on the next one. All the things he had done because he saw the need and no one else to do it, and she was always wrong about why, and she was still always right that they were vile.
There had been far less hurt, he was dimly aware, than they might have had – he could feel the shadows of the ghost history they could have made, if he'd stayed as overbearing and secretive, and she as impulsive and single-minded, as they'd begun. Which other pleading specters, strange or familiar, would be ringed round him here tonight, had they not learned a little from each other?
He'd laid one hand on her scalp, his thumb on her warm living ear, flushed with the hypercapnia. "I remember."
"Regret's a bitch," she concluded, decisively, and they both laughed. "But we were wrong, weren't we? You can be wrong about that. I'm glad we had the time to find that out."
"Time. Lizzy." He shook his head. "I had intended you to have so much time. These few years were meant to be the squall. To scour out the skies and waters, and leave you a calm sea for the decades to come. I would have done things differently, if I'd known."
She scooted herself round to face him. "Four more years alive, and a better death. That's not nothing. We both got a better death out of it." Her lips quirked slightly. "You made some epic adenda to your case file. And I got a truly incredible music box."
Her courage was ebbing and falling like the tide, running high now, soon to drop, and every time it changed he loved her differently.
"It wasn't you talking at all, in your sleep," she'd added, apropos of nothing. "You were others. Begging yourself for mercy."
His body was clean, but it was amazing, how quickly one could feel filthy again.
"Talking to that other Red, the way I used to watch that other Liz." She swallowed; obedient, under her gaze, he didn't look away. "What I'm trying to say is, we've both been wrong before, about what was unforgivable."
The tunnel might have opened and unfolded like a book beneath them, the air changed over entirely, the way those words filled him.
He'd decided to chalk it up to the hypercapnia, one day from spring tide.
Somewhere outside, the next parts of his death protocol were activating. The pieces of his empire were shedding off, dissolving, transforming. Paying his debts, providing for his people, finishing his wars. It didn't do to have only one set of plans. Here inside, he was still reeling, light with equal parts grief and gratitude, when he pulled her over between his outstretched legs, her back against his chest, and they leaned back to let the darkness take them again.
And now, after waking again to the quiet lap of the water below, and drowning it out for a few minutes with an airport security story, here they were. Lizzy, who clearly would have flourished in a Congolese prison, had wrapped a strip of bedsheet round her finger and made a toothbrush of it. He followed suit, reflecting in passing that of the many devices he'd improvised in captivity, none had been intended for hygiene. They relieved themselves over the grate in turns. Lizzy proved have a shy bladder, which annoyed her to no end, and it took his quoting passages about water mercilessly, lying on his side facing the wall, before she could pull it off.
"For the love of God, Red, do you have them catalogued by subject?" she asked, finally finishing. He heard the sound of her zipping and replacing the knife in her pocket.
"Water is fluid, soft, and yielding," he went on, to annoy her further. He didn't remember the rest until he'd gotten that far, and then regretted it. "But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield." That was a bit on the nose, but no harm in finishing. "This is another paradox: what is soft is strong."
"Aristotle," she said decisively, utterly wrong, to annoy him in turn.
He decided to bear it patiently. "Lao Tzu."
And then to his astonishment, behind him, she answered, "In that case, being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage."
He turned, eyebrows raised, impressed. "Lizzy."
Later, he would think that it was actually that moment, when he saw the look in her eyes, that the points of the compass began to wheel round him like stars, old pieces spinning into new places. Not the moment later, when for the second time in memory, she stood over the edge of the bed and said to him, "Can you make some space?"
And certainly not when he sat up and she sat down beside him, shoulder to shoulder, turned her head and gathered her courage, and asked him, "Red, would you like to come to bed with me?"
It was sweet, clear-eyed, and the least seductive proposition he'd ever received.
It wasn't seduction she was going for.
Abstractedly, he made note that the physical signs of hypercapnia on her were no worse than before. His mind was running possibilities unbidden. Using sexuality to interdict mortal fear was ancient, effective, and under the circumstances, entirely reasonable. If that was what she wanted, perhaps he should have suggested it himself sooner, and spared her having to overcome FBI ethics training and social gender conditioning to come out with it herself.
He was blindsided by an image of it - soothing her with his hands, drawing her out and exhausting them both, consciously overwhelming themselves, so that when the dark closed over again they'd be inured to it. In his body, biology stirred and half-raised its head; bodies cared little for context. Was that what she wanted?
Or was it just the freedom of helplessness, the persistence of that small long-burning itch with no reason any more not to scratch it? He had seen the small occasional evidences of her attraction, but they were involuntary, unwanted because of what he was and so much the better. And so he had sympathized and filed them away to be ignored. The thought of giving himself license to play on them, and her to own them, was forbidden and unbalancing.
Except that now it wasn't. Like a last cigarette, it was transformed by circumstance into something harmless, even innocent.
Or was this some continuation of what she'd said before about guilt? Using his body to silence for a few moments his memory's recital of his crimes and regrets? As a solution, it was both everything and nothing, acceptance without absolution. But he couldn't help it, he was so touched at the idea, like refrigerator art from a loving hand, something softened absurdly in him at just the possibility.
Whatever her thinking, Lizzy wasn't wired for no-strings encounters, or she could have found relief in them any number of times in the past years. If there was some place on Earth, at some time before death, that she could want this with him, what it suggested she saw in him was too wrenchingly sweet to risk thinking of.
"Lizzy," he said finally, "I'm adrift here. Make me understand."
She was still for a moment, the way she always was when unsure of herself, trying to give nothing away but broadcasting everything, in rough-edged, heart-twisting loveliness. "We're going to be in unfriendly hands soon. I had this thought - it might be better, it might be something good, to…put myself in your hands first, and let you put yourself, if you want to, in mine."
He swallowed, and cocked his head. "Have you considered," he asked finally, "what you would do if, against all reason, my associates arrived before tomorrow?"
Her lip quirked. "'Or the task force,' I'm sure you meant to add."
"Lizzy," he answered with visible patience, "I'm trying to keep us within the realm of possibility."
As he'd hoped, she laughed, and relaxed a bit. Careful of the new charge of meaning in touching her, he folded his hands. "You could come to regret it. To blame one or both of us. And whether you blamed me or not, you'd want…distance. I'm not certain I'd be in a position to afford you that any more than before. The evidence hardly suggests your world is getting safer."
He heard how absurd that was as he said it, a psychological projection off a hypothetical situation too improbable to count. Judging from the look in her eyes, she was thinking the same thing. He decided to fillet himself open a little more.
"You don't think, do you…if I ever made you believe I came with this intention..." I am so many, many things, but I am not that sort of man. Not fool enough to think fantasies could be kept penned in their place, he had not imagined being with her; he had at times put considerable energy into not imagining it. Not, however she might profile him, out of a compulsion toward self-punishment, but in too much kinship with Chesterton's diabolist – 'I tell you I have done everything else. If I do that I shan't know the difference between right and wrong.'
"I know," she said solemnly. "I do. And you're right, this could absolutely go back in time and change the purity of your intentions in retrospect. Because that is how time works."
He blinked.
"I'm not going to hurt you," she said softly, perched there beside him, for the second time in memory. "Whatever you decide. There's no wrong answer." And then, with a curious directness, "But I wanted you to know either way - if you can possibly help gloating about it - that for a while now, the most beautiful sound I've heard is your voice, saying my name."
Those words pulled him in over his head, grief and love and regret and the shining impossible gratitude that he had ever been given the grace to know her.
She was right, of course. The ends of things brought a moment of weightless, impossible freedom, and there was nothing more reasonable here at this end than seeking out friendly hands. The many-raftered edifice of plans he'd built round her was coming down in wreckage, and there was nothing left but love.
"Lizzy," he said softly. "I know this may be difficult for you, but you're not going to need that pocket knife."
She laughed, and held it out to him. Almost a solemn moment, but he wanted something other than solemnity. He set it on the floor and took her face in his hands. "Nervous?"
Lizzy gave a small, half-embarrassed shrug. "Used up all my calm getting us this far. You?"
"Absurdly so," he agreed, laughing, and released her and stretched out lengthwise. She leaned over, watching him. "I once knew a man," he started, "who –" and as he'd hoped, she laughed and covered his mouth with her hand, and then lay herself down beside him.
It was more like freefall than anything else he could think of, to be suddenly free to touch her differently. To stroke an unbroken line down her back, to hold her head lightly as she explored his neck, carefully at first, then with his encouragement, more boldly. To take her shoulders, lead her onto her back, and run his fingers over her abdomen and ribs, noting the muscles tense where he crossed a ticklish line, and relax again when he switched to his flattened palm.
He let her accustom herself to his touch, stroking areas that were intimate but not completely vulnerable, and gain confidence in touching him. Her fingers explored the back of his head, lightly, then travelled down to tug his shirt untucked; he rolled on his back, folded his hands behind his head and watched her work on the buttons with the focus of a woman disarming a bomb.
When she looked up, something in his eyes must have tipped her over, or at least that was the moment he became certain. Her flush had changed, her pupils widened. Nervous or not, she was affected; she saw him noticing and paused to let him watch, and oh, there it was, the answering tug of passion pooling in his own gut.
"Lizzy," he heard himself say, absurdly reverent, certain she would laugh at him, hoping she would.
"Still beautiful," she answered. "I used to have to work at it, not to be hypnotized by that voice." She faltered for a moment. "I would have liked to hear it longer."
He pulled her down beside him and passed one hand over her eyes. "Then just listen now." He smiled. "When I become insufferable, you'll interrupt me anyway."
He whispered to her as they peeled each other's clothing off, article by article, taking unspoken turns as if it were any other game. A shade too pink, but so extremely alive, she was spare and endearingly soft at the same time, and he hoped wryly that she would think something similar of him; they were both of them active, but no dedicated athletes. He murmured encouragement till her hands hesitated at her last bits of clothing, and then caught them in his own for a moment. "When you're ready. If you want. You don't have to be embarrassed with me."
She rose up on her knees and leaned her forehead against his. "Not embarrassed." She flashed a grin. "Just processing. Not all of us plan twenty moves ahead." He laughed, mouth open, and that was when she leaned in to kiss him.
It caught him off guard; he hadn't been sure if that was part of this, and he was still for a moment, unsure of what she wanted from it. But her confidence seemed to grow as his faltered, as he let her lips touch him like a burst of sunlight, and by the time she pulled free, something had changed, or clarified.
She laid her hands on his chest and back, deliberate and gentle, tracing the scars' edges and then sliding flat-palmed straight across them. It was a language he almost understood; not pretending the marks could smooth away, but reminding him the flesh beneath was sound. He bent his head and, feeling strangely daring considering the circumstances, kissed her again, careful of his stubble, and was warmed through by her response.
She relaxed under his hands and, later, his mouth, her open enjoyment seeping like rain into the cracks in him. Then, and later as she slipped onto him and rocked sweetly, he began to understand. This was all those things he had thought it might be, love and grief and fear and tenderness, but it was also a benediction.
Most of his regrets weren't hers to forgive; that belonged to someone else, if it was possible. But she was urging him not to bear them without hope. Like the missile control, she had profiled him as a two-key system; she had turned the first with her words and the second with her hunger for and delight in him now. It was a gift she could only have given him here, that he'd had no chance to disbelieve because he couldn't have imagined it.
He lost track of how many times he said her name, as he brought her home and then as he followed. For a while, it was the only language that made sense.
He was tracing the vertebrae on the small of her back afterward, watching bemused as she kissed the fingers of his other hand and didn't seem to regret him yet, when the time came for her death protocols to kick in. The air was tight enough in here, but outside, in six very bad places on four continents, it was raining fire.
The wall vibrated against his ear.
The expected runabout, the same late-model Scarab jet boat as earlier by the sound, coming for the final act to take them while unconscious. It was the last element of dread, to circle while they sank down into darkness again, knowing what, this time, they'd wake to.
They dressed quickly, as if it mattered; no point fighting habit at this point. He broke open his watch and kludged together the wiring and battery to give them a spark.
Lizzy watched silently. She had seen too much here on this island to disagree, but instinct was strong, and he sensed that that silence was a victory in itself. He sat down beside her when he was ready.
She covered his working hand with hers. To stop him, he thought for a moment, but it lay lightly on top instead, shaking because of course one shook; it was only so he didn't have to do it alone. The weave of the duvet wouldn't catch at first, and he had to cut and unravel a bit to start with a thinner tuft, hands clumsy from the thickening air. The world had no interest in cooperating with making it smooth or poetic.
And then it did catch, a pale coruscating flame and a thin stream of oily smoke winding up to the ceiling. The fumes were light; they'd collect at the top before layering down. "Lizzy," he said quietly, "the fire won't touch us this time. You understand? It's not the same."
But it didn't matter; she was visibly terrified now, hugging her arms to her sides to stop herself from stopping him, eyes watering, jittering her feet. "Sorry," she whispered, because her voice was breaking, and embarrassment held on till the end. "Thought I had this."
The helpless rage he'd been keeping at bay rose like a thunderclap, or a tidal swell. They would kill her monstrously – he could see her body in front of him, disfigured like the others – so he was killing her instead. He knew he could still do it, and hated himself for that, and the world for doing this relentlessly down all the years, hunting him down like a dog with always another terrible necessary errand.
He moved back beside her and pulled her head down into his chest, slowly to give her time to pull back. She'd pulled inward already, though, stiff with the effort of doing nothing. The stink of chemical flagration was rising, his throat was beginning to sting, he gave them another five to eight minutes, and to hell with the world and everything in it, if this was the best it could do and he was the best it could send. He slammed his free palm against the wall.
"Raymond," Lizzy got out suddenly, in a truly appalling misquote, "I forgot. I was saving this one. The world must try to break the ones who try to save it."
It was apropos of nothing. The fumes must be getting to her. Grief nearly closed his throat. "That's not what I wanted for you."
She wheezed and shook her head. "I wasn't talking about me."
It was a better epitaph than he'd ever expected. Just enough for him to still himself and hold it together for her just a few minutes more.
He turned his eyes to the ceiling and marveled at how the world was literally going to pieces; he could see the blackening cracks in it breaking through the low ceiling. The fumes must be hitting his brain already, because the cracks were clean and sharp, spreading as he watched; the sky was about to crack like an eggshell.
He blinked.
That, or the polymer fumes were corroding a color-matched oil-based sealant coating cracks in the natural wall.
"Hey," Lizzy hacked out, "Is that –"
"Yes."He scrambled up, eyes stinging and tearing so that he had to take in the world in serial freeze-frame. The concierge of crime, tripping over his own feet to find his five-hundred-dollar shoe to beat out the flame with.
Lizzy was better off; she clambered upright on the bed, jumping to touch one of the spidery lines on the wall; her finger came away with an oily smear of glistening sealant, and left behind a visible run of crack along the ceiling.
"Lizzy, where's that pocketknife?" His head was pounding; he kicked away the smoking ruin of the extinguished flame, found the knife on the floor by touch, and climbed up beside her to take it on.
Sealant meant an air leak. An air leak meant when the executioners came, they could be awake lying in wait.
"This is awkward," he heard himself saying brightly as he worked at it. "But it's possible we might not die."
Lizzy coughed and blinked her eyes clear; somehow she had fished out a flat plating from the wreckage of his watch, and was going at a second crack.
He had no intention of thinking about the possible future as he dug, none at all. Certainly no intention of facing what to do with his empire wrecked, his secrets broadcast to the world – well, the FBI, but it was very nearly the same – and whatever mad brilliance had just happened between them in the shadow of death.
And when Lizzy glanced over at him, flashed a grin like sunlight in the dark, and wheezed, "Your shirt's inside out, and everyone's going to know," he had no intention of laughing aloud with her, lungs burning like hell, as they bruised their fingers digging for the light.