Author's Note:I do apologize for the wait on this one, a combination of work, technological issues and sheer exhaustion kept me unable to work for a while, but I'm back with it now - and have a fairly definite plan for this. Realistically it will be about 5/6 chapters rather than the 3 I originally thought and progressively more canon divergent from here on out. One of the big things that put me off working on this for a while were certain revelations in the finale, and after much thought I've decided to stick to my original plan. With greatest thanks to my sanity saving beta and sounding board, Alicemorganss(harrietspecterwrites)

Summery: The machinery of the world is unrelenting, and a small discovery leads to a larger one.

While back in the world that moves, often, according to

the hoarding of these clues,

- Only Skin, Joanna Newsom

At times it seemed as though her life moved according to certain prohibitions on looking, as though she is in some strange and senseless fairytale. She wonders sometimes if she is the girl from the winter wood who must not hold the candle up to see the face of the Bear Who Was A Prince, or if she is the cursed and displaced Melusina, who grants power and love but gives birth to monsterous things and must not be observed while bathing - and she knows that one day, as was always meant to happen, the prohibition will be broken and the promised doom with come for them all.

When she was a child, transplanted into her new life and raw with it, she came to realize that there were memories that had to be banished, and she learned to turn her face away. They still played out for a time, in her dreams. She remembered awaking in the blackest part of night, sitting in the middle of her bed and crying and crying, until her father would come. She could never explain, she didn't have words, in the waking world, for what she saw and felt in that dream place. She grew out of it, though, and passed them off as the nightmares of any small child.

And then, later there was her father's business, that was not his business, or not at all what it seemed, and she must not question, never press too closely into what went on. After all he was just her father, at home, ordinary as anyone. By the time she was allowed in, let in on the secret, she was already almost on her way out the door to start her own independent life.

By the time Tom came along, she knew too well how to avoid seeing the whole of what she faced, how to see only out of the corner of her eye and not confront what it meant. She didn't even realize, by then, that she lived this way, saw this way. She had forgotten how to lift her head and see what had engulfed her.

She spent a lot a lot of time in the the spare room with the boxes after that, going through the files, and the records of her father's finances, sorting them into some semblance of order. It's rough system at best, piles of papers on the floor, things that were important, things to look into, things to store, things to make note of and shred. It was unsettling, seeing the truth of her father's business this way. She had known already, of course. She had helped out, at times, when he allowed it, when he realized she had a certain knack. But somehow he had still kept her in the dark about the scope of his endeavours. He and Vic had been getting up to much more for much longer than she had realized. It was hard to make herself process it all, she found over and over that she was skimming, hurrying through it all and not actually taking much in. It took her an embarrassingly long time to realize that she was searching for Red's hand in all this. She was sure it was there. She wasn't sure what good it would do if she found the signs, but she knew they were there. It was like searching for the earliest signs of some creeping disease.

It kept her busy every night the first week of her "leave" and Tom let her be, only appearing from time to time to peer down at her from the doorway as he came by to tell her dinner was there if she wanted it, or when he was on his way to get ready for bed.

"I thought you said the estate was all squared away," he said one night, arms crossed over his chest as he leaned on the doorjam. He couldn't come farther into the room and easily avoid stepping on the papers and files laid out over the floor in broad arcs, and then ranks and columns.

"Well, it turns out it wasn't. There's just a lot to go through. I think I'm almost done, though," she stretched and looked blandly up at her husband with a smile that felt like a wince.

"Okay. Well don't stay up too late with all this. I didn't even feel you come to bed yesterday." he gave her what she was beginning to think of as his Concerned Husband Smile and retreated.

She had fallen asleep on the floor two nights running, when she'd laid down to try and stretch out her back. She'd woken early, feeling as sore and ragged as after their most arduous takedowns, to Hudson snuffling around her face, obviously worried about the strange behavior of his human. She felt bad about that, her marriage had begun to drag at her like some kind of evil harness and her work, the sense of purpose she'd always depended on, had turned strange and unstable, but these were human concerns, and Hudson was a steady creature who needed his routines.

She took the dog for a long walk that morning, needing the time and space and movement begin to work through everything she'd read. Yes, her father's business was different than even she'd been aware of. Yes, he'd had contact with Reddington on and off for years. Yes, Reddington had almost certainly been the source of funds used to pay her school fees and college tuition. She wasn't sure what to think of it all, except it made her feel cold all over, it made it feel like her father was slipping away all over again, like he was turning into a stranger even in her memory, under the dark pall of Reddington's influence. But was that influence so very dark?

He'd been gone almost three weeks, and she'd still not let herself really remember the day of the incursion. During the investigation, she'd told her story over and over, but she'd spoken of it drily, from a distance, not letting any of it play out behind her eyes as she was interviewed. Not let herself revisit what had happened, really viscerally happened as she strode around in the dark, trying to take out enemy operatives and signal scramblers, as she had watched Red come out of that awful bloody box for her, with Luli's still-warm body lying on the ground between them, awful and lifeless, the bruising grip of Garrick's man hauling her along, and Garrick himself with his sagging face leering at her and what he had thought he'd seen between her and Red. She'd felt sick with terror but also strong, unbent, strangely clear and bright and alive as though someone had started a chemical reaction in her that lit her up, made her feel invulnerable, unstoppable. That had been hers and she wasn't going to let her interrogators anywhere near.

And she certainly hadn't let herself think about that terrible jolt she'd felt watching that woman with her scalpel and her finger in Red's neck, how wrapped round with horror she'd felt - and then how steadily her eyes had sought out his, how easy it had been to understand his silent instructions and act. Get herself out. It wasn't until she stood on the street, watching the ambulance speed away and feeling ragged and flung out by the momentum of the day, that she had realized how wholey and profoundly she was unwilling for that to be the last she ever saw of him. But it had been. So far it had been. There was just that one phone call keeping her from the creeping suspicion that he'd slipped away, mortally wounded into the dark, and she'd never been so glad to see the demise another human being as she was over that of Garrick. The small sting of satisfaction that Reddington had bested him in the end worried her almost more than anything. Perhaps she was becoming just as much a stranger as it seemed suddenly her father had been.

She walked and walked in the brisk and changeful morning air until her dog pulled at his leash, trying to lead them off the sidewalk, and she found she'd taken them to the park without even realizing it. It was a bleak, overcast day, and there was no one much around so she sat on a bench alone and Hudson sat at her feet until the both of them were rested enough to make their way home. As hard as she'd tried she found that still none of it fitted neatly or easily in her mind, she only knew that she was on the verge of something, that some awful realization was bearing down on her and was bringing on some tectonic shift and she might be able to grasp it if only she could remember how to look.

After a time she realized she'd gotten all that she could out of the files, so she packed them back away, and this in itself felt like passing through another threshold of distance. Her throat was scratchy and thick with dust and the smell of damp that lingered and the obscure sense of ruthless self denial she feels as she makes good on her categories of Keep, Store, Destroy. Tom doesn't interfere, doesn't question her again, makes the passing assumption that her little project is wrapping up.

She wasn't doing any better at being able to fall asleep beside her husband. Tom had started to look at her strangely in the mornings when he finds her camped out in the livingroom, dozing on the couch, having fallen asleep watching old movies or episodes of M*A*S*H on Netflix, trying to pretend that she's still a normal woman, without a past and a present that were both twisting wildly out of shape. He's getting this distant, calculating look. Sometimes she sees it out of the corner of her eye as they amble around like strangers in their house.

One night she gave in against the prohibition she had set upon herself, against the needy tenor of her curiousity. Long after husband and dog were both asleep, she went straight for the long metal box, armed with the little key, and pulled out the stack of pictures again. She looked at all of them this time, closely and carefully. Most of them are of Sam, Sam and Judy when they were teenagers, Sam and Maggie, the woman he almost married before he became a dad and moved away from Chicago. A couple of her, as a little girl in the house in the Chicago suburbs that she didn't really remember, wearing that bobbed haircut and those heavy straight bangs, smiling up the camera and clutching a tatty, floppy teddy bear. One of her dressed up for Halloween with Nick and little Amy, that first year in Nebraska, and she did remember that, her little cowboy sheriff costume with the little red cowboy hat that she and Nick fought over for months afterwards. Her cousins, she supposed, weren't and couldn't have been caught up in any of this. They, at least, had to be pretty much who she thought they were. It was she who was the changeling child, the wild, alien thing dropped into their midst, strange and fierce and soulful. She had never suited them terribly well, and she had never quite understood them.

She came again to the picture of Sam and Red and the girl. It was the only one with him, she was sure of that. The familiarity seemed obvious, and not at all begrudging. So they were friends. So Red hadn't pushed his way into Sam's life like a destructive force the way he had in hers. It only seemed more and more obvious that her father could not have been blameless and separate in this association.

It was with that same claustrophobic wrench she's felt so many times lately she knew she'd done wrong to never ask her father so many things. It was all left too late, even the most important things, and even regret so fierce it froze her skin wouldn't change that.

It was strange, but in the weeks since Sam's death, memories of her childhood had walked abroad in her, as she dreamt, as she sat in thought, like they never had before. It was like some door had opened or a latch loosed, and she who had never been one to dwell except on the facts and figures she need for her work, was filled all up with bruising nostalgia. A sense that she had somehow blundered through years and years as blind and unaware as a child, that for all her education, the unforgiving nature of her job, day to day experiences with human rankness, there had been nothing much to wake her into her own skin and make her see the reality of her own surroundings.

Now her awareness was limned with a terrible clarity, the details of her quietest days seemed to impress themselves on her, her familiar house, the dim, faintly green light in the corner store - even the lines of Tom's face stood out to her, as though suddenly new and unknown. She'd heard of this, of course; she knew that grief did strange things to the brain, but she hadn't understood what it would feel like to live inside it, with all her senses abraded and raw and the monstrous, unmasked machinery of the world pulling on her. Even here in the her cloistered fastness behind her maze of boxes, it pulled her.

She took the picture from the stack, assigning only the most basic reasons why it fascinated her so, and tucked the others away again, fully satisfied they held no other revelations. The next day, realizing she shouldn't leave it in her bedside drawer, she slipped it instead into a file of old case notes she'd kept tucked away, in a box of other old files, in the back of the bedroom closet. It was here that something occurred to her, long delayed and awful, sending her stumbling for the support of the chest of drawers. She breathed slowly and carefully, reminding herself that Tom was out the way he always was at 10 am on a Tuesday, until she regained her footing.

She slid the files back into place and washed and dressed, her mind blank and numb and flinching from what she'd just discovered. She had to keep reminding herself there was no reason to keep checking over her shoulder. She collected Hudson's leash and called for him, her voice verging on frantic until he wandered over, calm and curious, from his big round cushion in the living room with his tail wagging. Liz shepherded them both out of the house and into the car with the sensation of something chasing, watching her her all the way, like an impossible fantasm, though she knew she was alone, that there was no real danger. It was just that now that she knew, that knowing spread backward in mind, all that time she has walked so unaware and unprotected spurred her forward now like a thing chased.

She wound up in the park, by the little pavilion where she had waited out Tom's interrogation, and Red had waited with her. Her dog whined and pulled at his leash, unsure why they were outside and not walking or playing, but Liz sat limp and immobile, clasping hard at Hudson's leash 'til her hands stiffened up and started to cramp around it and she finally moved enough to release the lock on the line to let him roam a little farther afield.

It had been important to her to get out of that house, and Hudson with her, and after a time he seemed to sense her distress, and came to force his head under her elbow and rest his chin on her knee, brown eyes confused and worried as they gazed up at her. She ran over it again in her mind and could find no new solution. The box she had pulled out from under the floorboards had been tucked into her box of old case notes, under all the folders, in a storage bin in the back of the closet with her old college stuff. There was absolutely no reason for Tom to be looking through all her things, unless he had discovered that the box wasn't in it's original hiding place, and why would he have looked for it in it's hiding place if it was planted and he didn't know it was there? Even if he had suspected her of having an affair, he might have checked her coats, her phone, her bag, things she used every day but it strained all credulity that he might go looking in things she hadn't touched in years, save for day she had stashed that damned box, when he was out at school. Supposedly. Was he ever really at school? He must be sometimes, she reasoned, she'd met some of his coworkers, she went to the little Holliday play the year before, not all of it could have been pure fabrication, could it?

She needed a plan. She needed to know if she was sure. She needed to talk to Red. The avenues open to her, he had said, well what did that even mean? She'd had to explain about being in communication with one of Red's contacts in the effort to find him, the FBI did know, in the vaguest sense, about Mr. Kaplan, and she assumed that Kaplan would have moved somewhere new and secret in deference of that fact, but she could think of no other recourse.

She called the hotel and asked for the right suite, for Mr. Kaplan, and the bland voice on the other end politely told her that no one by that name was currently in residence.

"Wait," she said, in desperation when the clerk went to hang up, "I think… he'll have left some way to get in touch, please, it's very important. My name is Elizabeth Keen, he might have a message for me."

"Hold on one moment," said the anonymous voice, "Yes, we do have a message for one Liz Keen, I'm afraid you will have to come and pick it up in person, though, we have strict instructions to check your ID."

Understandable precaution she supposed, "Alright, I'll come and pick it up."

The message was brief, just another hotel and another suite number, so she sat in car and made the call, not quite willing to present herself at Mr. Kaplan's door, unsure of her welcome, unsure of how desperate she wanted to seem to get in touch with Red.

She had some idea, if she really thought about it, what it was he was up to. He was hunting. When the way is clear, he had said, and there was a mole in black site, there had to be a mole among his own organization as well, and he was hardly going to let them live with their guilt once he found them. She was sure that notion should chill her, make her fear him, but she was already chilled, she was already in fear, she had already let a man into her life and her bed who had blood on his hands, and all she could feel was rage that someone had let that vile man Garrick and his mercenaries into their midst, that her partner was going to be doing physical therapy for months, had nearly lost his leg, and that Luli Zheng, as little known as she'd been to Liz, had died crying in fear. Red had gone hunting, and that was all right with her. It's just that she couldn't think now, except to turn to him. It was just that he knew more than he'd said, and she'd refused to hear it, and now she needed to know, it was just that it now seemed that Sam had stood by him, so either he was a better man than he seemed or all three of them were much worse, much farther gone than she'd ever realized.

Her phone rang, an unlisted number on the screen. she answered.

"Hello, Dearie," said Mr. Kaplan, "I wondered when I was going to hear from you."

"I... was hoping you could," Liz began, and then stopped and began again. "I need to talk to Red. Do you know how to reach him?"

It wasn't hard in the end, to convince Kaplan to give up a number that would let her contact him. She had sounded almost fond, almost amused. "You are protected, Elizabeth," she'd said. "He wouldn't have it any other way, and neither would I," and she'd bid Liz to look after herself, that she would be reachable by the same contact information, "barring any outside interference."

When it came to the moment when she must make the call, she hesitated, sure she was about to set the implacable gears turning, put into motion, another awful string of events that once started would drag her on through 'til their unknown conclusion. This is what she'd felt, perhaps, looming over her for weeks and weeks. But the day was growing long, the weather was turning, the winter sun dimming down into late afternoon, and Tom would soon be wondering where she was. So she called him.

"Lizzy," he said and his voice sounded rusty, tight and flat and not the warm sound she was used to, "I didn't expect to hear from you while I was… away. Is there something I can help you with?"

"I know," she said, and found she was nearly whispering though she sat in the safety of her car, with only her dog sleeping in the back seat, "I know about Tom. He found the box."

"Yes, Lizzy, I remember. It was only a few months ago-"

"No," she cut in, her voiced strained, frantic, and suddenly as she said it, all of it was real, pressing on her, choking her, and she hated how she needed him to tell her what to do, she needed him to understand her immediately and show her that way out through the woods, "No, I mean I know he couldn't have found it, he should never have, unless he was looking for it. He must have been looking for it, Red. He was looking for it."

There were several long beats of silence, and she listened hard for any signs of movement or reaction down the line, she found she was once again curled in, slouching protectively around her phone, her tenuous connection to the next criminal in whom she was placing her trust, the man who had promised to lead her through the dark.

"I'm sorry," he said soft and low and there was the tone she knew, her tone, "I'm sorry this has happened to you and that you have discovered it now when I can't - the way is not clear, do you understand, Lizzy?"

"Yes," she said, and her voice wobbled precariously. Her vision whited out with tears. "But when will it be? It's been a month, how long can it possibly take?"

"Has something happened, Lizzy? Where are you?"

"In my car," she said, putting her hand out to the door panel and then her forehead as if to check that it was so, that she and the car were both still there, "Near Mr. Kaplan's old hotel."

"Have you done anything? Said anything to him?"

"No, I haven't even seen him since I figured it out. Do you suppose he ever really goes to that school in the day? No, it doesn't matter - What do I do, Red? You have to tell me what I do now?" And she was weeping now, she knew, and hoped he couldn't tell, her forehead pressed hard in her hand, because all of it a was wrong, all of it felt like her world dissolving around her again, and all of it was his fault, except all he'd done was open her eyes to what was there, and hadn't she wanted to remember how to see? Only she had failed to anticipate how much it would feel like being pitched off the edge of the world.

"If you go to Kaplan, she can put you somewhere safe, if that's what you need, Lizzy. But I'm so sorry… I'm afraid I have to advise you to remain in place, at least for now. If you are sure he doesn't suspect you know. The truth is," he paused and gave a sigh, she could hear a hint of it over the line, "I'm not sure what his purpose is here, or rather, what his master's purpose is. He was put into place to show me they have access to you, but more than that…" he trailed off.

"Well then, what good are you?" she demanded, thinking you were supposed to know all of it, you were supposed to tell me as soon as I showed I would ask. She wished he was there so she could reach out and strike at him or rail at him but it wouldn't work at a distance, and besides she frozen inside at the thought that he didn't know - that perhaps Red wasn't an omniscient force, for all that he'd done to prove himself knowing, and perhaps he wouldn't have had to try so hard to impress that on her if he really had been.

"There is no way for me to say how much… I regret that this happening to you," he said, and he wasn't supposed to sound so tender, so much like she was causing him pain, when she was well on her way to being furious with him. "I won't be gone much longer, I will come to you as soon as I am able, and it will be soon, I promise you. You can leave and be kept safe, and I won't fault you in the least, but we will have lost a chance to track down the hand that holds the leash. You can remain in place and do nothing to give yourself away and I will be back to help you investigate him. Or you can, I suppose, try again to try again to turn him in, but he was already cleared once, I'm not sure it will be any more effective this time. The choice is yours, Lizzy and no matter what you choose, there is nothing that will make me think any less of you."

So the decision fell to her, and maybe she was still in freefall, but she remembered that chemical light within that told her she was able, she remembered all the ways Tom had touched her and realized she had consented to wear a false name, and wearing that name walked into her training to become a Special Agent, had tried to become an agent for the side of good, and maybe that was why it had never quite taken. She wasn't going to let him, and his flat eyes and his accommodating smile slip back into the woodwork just because she didn't have the stomach to wait for his inevitable mistake, the thing that gave him away once and for all. Or his head on a platter, whichever came first

"What if I shot him," she said, and didn't recognize her voice at all, it was hard and dry and past all tears, and she knew the instant she'd said it that she wasn't ruling it out.

"You could do that," he said and he sounded speculative, maybe almost like he approved, or maybe like he disapproved, she has having a hard time hearing over the sound of rushing blood in her ears, "If you do, call Mr. Kaplan again, she's a miracle worker."

"You want the man that holds the leash," she said.

"Yes."

"You think this unknown person is a threat to you?"

"Yes. To both of us, since obviously he knows you are… important to me."

"Well." She took a deep breath that was almost a gasp, her hand against her clavicle to steady her pounding bird-heart that was ready to take flight, knowing she had already decided but just needing to say the words, "I'm going to stay put. I'm going to wait it out. And you're going to come back soon. And then you're going to tell me everything you know."