Liz woke up for the fourth-or was it fifth time that night. She checked her watch and saw it was 4:30. The meeting with Volkov wasn't for another three hours. She rolled over on the cot Tom had given her last night, when he'd grab some blankets for himself and left her to sleep in what Liz could only assume had been an office.
Liz sighed and sat up, resigned to the fact that sleep wasn't in her near future. She should be grateful she'd managed to get any at all. Things had been tense when she and Tom had left the museum. He'd kept trying to make small talk which she'd manage to shut down by being terse. Actually 'hostile' may have been the better descriptor. She couldn't help it. Every time he did or said something that approached nice, she immediately suspected an ulterior motive. Liz couldn't imagine what it could be, but without any real insight into the man, how could she possibly understand what he wanted from her?
It suddenly struck Liz that in less than four hours the man she knew as Tom Keen would be gone from her life. He would vanish like a puff of smoke and she'd never have any answers to the many questions that had haunted her for weeks. No, she wasn't going to let that happen. If she wanted answers, she'd find them for herself, right now.
Liz put her feet on the cool floor of the warehouse and eased herself off the cot making as little noise as possible. She slowly opened the door and scanned the hall for any sign of Tom. When she was confident the coast was clear she crept down corridor toward the area she'd been held yesterday. The duffel bag where he'd kept his phone was still up against the wall. If she wanted an unfettered look into the man who'd pretended to be her husband, that seemed a good place to start.
After scanning the room one more time for Tom, she unzipped the bag and looked inside. Clothes. Deodorant. Gun. Fake passport declaring Tom to be a British subject named Peter Crawford. Liz dug deeper into the bag, until her hands closed on a wallet. She flipped it open and found more fake IDs, and credit cards belonging to Mr. Crawford.
Liz's eye caught on a paper edge peeking out of the bill pocket. A photograph? She tugged it out and found herself looking at an ultrasound. It was their baby, or rather the baby they would have had, if she hadn't pulled the plug on the adoption. She closed her eyes, trying to push back the wave of sorrow that accompanied the memory. The image had disappeared from their fridge and Liz had assumed Tom had tossed it. He hadn't, he'd kept it. He'd held onto it, even after he'd left. Why? She thought back to his words at the Smithsonian. He'd said "Don't" as though talking about the adoption was something he couldn't handle.
She didn't know how long she sat there, staring at the picture, before the door to the outside swung open and Tom entered. In some remote part of her mind she noted he was holding a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. Tom smoked. That fact that would have ordinarily set her mind reeling, paled in comparison to the earth shaking discovery of the ultrasound.
"Why do you have this?" She held up the image in case there was any doubt in his mind what she meant. Tom swallowed hard and Liz heard the soft crinkling of the cigarette package as he squeezed it in his hand.
"Because I wanted to remember." He voice was soft, so soft that by the time it reached Liz's ears she wasn't even sure that she heard it.
"Remember what?" Liz hated the way her own voice sounded in her ears: breaking and weak. Tom was silent, staring at her, and suddenly in his eyes she saw the same look he'd given her when she'd told him she couldn't go through with the adoption. She felt like she was looking into the eyes of a child who'd just had every one of his dreams ripped away from him.
"Remember how close I was to having a family." Liz's heart felt like it was being squeezed in her chest. He sounded so lost, so grieved, that every fiber of her being wanted to run to him and hold him in her arms. Only the sight of the cigarettes in his hand held her at bay. Tom Keen was her husband. Tom Keen didn't smoke. This man was not Tom Keen. The thought alone saved her from own weakness, replacing guilt with resentful rage. Who was he to stand there and make her feel guilty for an action she'd only taken because somehow she had sensed his lies?
"Why are doing this to me?! Are you trying to hurt some more, is that it?!" The truth was motives didn't matter to her in that moment. She didn't care about his so-called "emotional involvement" or whether or not he'd truly wanted that child. She'd had a life and husband and a plan for a family and now that was gone. He'd taken that from her and she didn't care why.
As Tom had listened to her accusation she'd watched his face grow darker and darker. She reveled in it. Somewhere in the back of her mind it occurred to her that she probably should be afraid. This was a dangerous man, a killer, and she was alone and unarmed with no back-up on the way. Still as he took slow measured steps toward her, all she felt was the thrill of adrenaline, the welcome rush of rage that banished all thoughts of sadness and loss. Liz stood to meet him, getting as close to eye to eye with the her impostor of a husband as her 5' 7'' height would allow her.
"You said you wanted the truth, so I gave to you. If you want me to lie, I'll lie, but you have to tell me what you want. What do you want, Liz?!" His voice, which he'd kept so level got away from him at the end, betraying a little anger of his own. What did she want? She wanted to fall asleep and wake up back in their townhouse. She wanted everything that had happened to have been a nightmare. She wanted her life back with her dog and her husband and no go-box under the floor or Reddington watching from the shadows. She wanted to go HOME, but she couldn't, she never could, because of this man, who didn't even have the decently be the one-dimensional villain she'd built up in her mind. No, he had to come in here with his "emotional involvement" and make her already messed-up life that much more confusing. In a burst of anger Liz shoved Tom so hard and so suddenly that he stumbled a half-step backward.
"I want to HATE you! I want to HURT you! I want to HIT you until you feel every single bit of pain that you have put me through!" She wanted vengeance, so badly that her blood was singing with it. Breathing heavily she watched Tom's expression go from angry to thoughtful.
"Okay." Tom tossed his cigarettes and lighter onto the duffel bag and then peeled off his hoodie, so he was only wearing the wife-beater underneath. Around his neck there was a chain of some kind, tucked beneath his shirt. Dog tags maybe? "You want to hit me? Hit me." Liz's eyes moved from his torso to his face. Did he seriously expect her to walk over and punch him on the nose?
"Don't tempt me." As appealing as the prospect of breaking his face was, she wasn't just going to start wailing on him, no matter how much he deserved it. It was too dangerous for both of them. Liz knew she had...anger issues. She'd been warned about them constantly by the psychiatrist she'd been forced to see as a teenager. Liz had them beat, for the most part, though they had flared up a few times during the past year, resulting in things like Tom's broken thumb and Red's punctured carotid artery. She worked so hard to keep her feelings locked down, and she had no idea what she was capable of if she let the floodgates open.
"Come on. I'm a big boy I can take it." Tom sounded so damn sure he could handle whatever she dished out that she almost acceded to his wish, but she resisted. Tom didn't know her as well as he thought he did. She'd hid that part of herself from him, that angry teen who picked pockets, got into fights, and raged against the world without ever understanding why. He had no idea how deep that well of hers went, especially now with everything that had happened between them.
"You're out of your mind." Liz tried to walk past him, back toward her cot, but he grabbed her arm in a vice-like grip. She tried to yank it free, but he held firm.
"Let. Me. Go." Blood was pounding in her ears. Ever since he'd abducted her Tom hadn't made more than incidental contact with her. Her personal space, which he had up to this point avoided, was now invaded by him.
"Make me." Liz had reached her tipping point. She closed her fist struck him squarely on the nose, which broke with a satisfying crack. Tom released her arm and stepped back. He shook his head, blinking the tears out of his eyes, and raised his fists. "That's more like it." He waved her forward and this time she didn't hesitate. All the pain and uncertainty fell away as she devoted her entire being to inflicting as much damage as possible on her opponent. In her mind he became the personification of every blow she'd suffered, every heartbreak. She had no idea how longer the fight went on. Time didn't seem to matter.
Eventually she found herself straddling Tom, pinning him to the floor. She grabbed a handful of his shirt, getting ready to hit him again, when her finger caught on something metal. It was the chain she'd seen early. She tugged and the rest of the necklace came out from beneath his shirt. On the end wasn't dog tags, like she'd suspected, but a ring. A wedding band. Her heart skipped a beat. She lifted it closer, reading the inscription she knew would be there. Forever and always, Liz.
Liz looked into the blue eyes of the man she'd been treating as her personal punching bag. There was pain there, but she suspected not from his injuries, injuries Liz suddenly realised he could probably have avoided if he'd wanted to.
All the time she'd been fighting him, he hadn't thrown one punch, or kick. He'd hadn't even really defended himself except from a few potentially crippling blows. She said she'd wanted to hit him, and so he'd given what she wanted, despite the harm it caused him. The reason he'd done it? The answer was staring her right in the face, the evidence in the palm of her hand. It was the truth she'd been dodging since Tom had forced Red's confession. He loved her. Whoever this man was, whatever lies he'd told her, he loved her. She would have to deal with that.
Liz's vision blurred with tears that had begun spilling from her eyes. She started to stand, but Tom caught her hand and wordlessly pulled back down into his lap. Unable at the moment to resist, Liz leaned her into his chest and wept. She could feel his hand on the back of her hair, stroking her as he'd done so many times before, whispering a mantra of "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry."
These tears felt different than the others she'd shed lately. When she finished crying she discovered she no longer felt empty. There was sadness, yes, but also peace. Liz wondered why she felt that way. Perhaps it was that she hadn't been totally wrong about Tom. The fact that she'd been so deceived had tortured her, not just because of the heinousness of the betrayal, but because of what it said about her instincts, her judgement. Tom was her greatest failure as a profiler, but she'd only failed, because so much of what they had, had been true. That was oddly comforting.
"I was in the foster care system." Tom's words jarred Liz out of her thoughts.
"What?" Tom was sharing apparently, but she didn't know for what purpose.
"That day in the dining room you asked about the baby. I lied and I said I was doing my job, but the truth is I really...wanted that baby. I wanted to adopt because I knew what it's like to be given up, to grow up in the system, be bounced from home to home, never belonging to anyone. Living with people who care more about getting their monthly check then whether you lived or died. I thought maybe we could stop that from happening to somebody else. I had this idea that I could keep them from...turning into me. It was stupid. I should have known Reddington was never going to allow it." Interesting that he thought that Reddington was the main reason the adoption had not been a good idea.
"What do mean, 'Reddington wouldn't allow it'?" Tom shrugged and then winced, probably at a bruise she'd recently given him.
"I'm pretty sure that's why he turned himself in when he did. He'd sent warnings before and they hadn't worked so I guess this was him stepping up his game." Liz frowned, considering his words. She'd worked out that many of the cases they'd worked connected back to the war with Berlin, but Red's war with Berlin had been going for years. According to what Reddington had told her, Berlin had known about her for at least as long as she and Tom had been married.
Everyone at the Bureau, herself included, had assumed Reddington had timed his walk-in to coincide with her first day as a field agent, but that hadn't been the only major event in her life that day. The last adoption meeting had been scheduled, a meeting she'd been forced to miss because of Reddington. That, in it of itself, could have had an adverse effect on their chances to get a child. Tom could very well be right, though something else was bothering her about what he had said.
"What do you mean 'warnings'?" Had Red been in contact with Tom without her knowing it?
"Remember when my car hit a deer on the turnpike? Well that wasn't ACTUALLY a deer I hit. Zamani wasn't the first guy he sent after me, just the first to catch me off guard." Okay, so she hadn't been missing covert phone calls, just attempts on her husband's life apparently. That was good to know.
It was interesting to hear Tom open up about this, particularly when he'd been so tight lipped when she questioned him before. Maybe he was feeling the time slipping away from them, just as she was. Maybe she wasn't the only one who needed some closure. She thought of the ultrasound Tom was still carrying around in his wallet. He'd given her a gift, telling her the truth when he didn't have to. Protocol be damned, she was going to return the favor.
"Before I...called of the adoption, Reddington put me on a case. It was an adoption agency and the guy who ran it was a real sick bastard who was kidnapping women, putting them in comas, and impregnating them with his sperm." Liz shuddered at the memory. Just thinking about him made her want to shower.
"That is some sick shit." Liz nodded in hearty agreement, then swallowed, preparing herself to tell the most difficult part of the story.
"The thing is, this guy, he was a foster kid who'd been adopted by this couple. Their marriage was troubled and he was more than they could handle. They sent him back and that was what started all of it. You wanted to save the baby, but I was afraid that I'd ruin his life...I couldn't live with myself if I'd done that to some innocent kid." She looked into Tom's eyes imploringly, willing him to understand that fear she'd had. He stared at her for a long few seconds before slowly leaning forward and kissing her forehead. She closed her eyes and leaned into his chest.
"Thank you for telling me. I get why you thought that it was the right choice and with how everything turned out, it was probably for the best, but...you wouldn't have ruined his life. No matter the circumstances, you would have been an amazing mom. I know you still will be...some day." Liz was glad her eyes were closed, because she didn't think she could take looking at him just then. What he'd said was perfect. She shouldn't be surprised, given he'd always known exactly what to say to make her feel like the most cherished woman in the entire world. At that moment she felt safe and loved in a way she hadn't for far too long. There was a part of her that just wanted to stay in his arms forever, forget all that had come before. The dream was so sweet and it seemed so real. The larger part her, however, was reminding her that reality was waiting. She sighed and opened her eyes.
"We should probably get cleaned up. The meeting with Volkov is in," Liz checked her watch, "two hours."
"Yeah...and arms dealers are known to be sticklers for punctuality." After a moment's hesitation Tom released her from his embrace and allowed her to stand. After she was up he followed suit, a little morely stiffly than she had. She started walking back toward the office, then stopped and turned to look at the man who was, technically, still her husband.
"Tom? Thanks for..." What? Letting her kick the crap out of him? Holding her when she cried? Telling her the truth? Maybe just for loving her, despite all odds? She let her voice trail off, allowing him to fill the rather lengthy blank for himself. Tom smiled, one of his old familiar smiles, and to Liz's surprise, it didn't hurt her to see it.
"Don't mention it."
Author's Note: Thanks to everyone who's been reviewing so far! I love the feedback! Takada Saiko and Karen: I hope you enjoyed the adoption stuff! Ever since we found out Jacob was carrying that ultrasound around in his wallet I've wanted an open and honest discussion between them about what happened. I think things went as wrong as they did in 2A with Jacob and Liz because they seem incapable of talking to each other about their issues. I wanted to give them the opportunity to that, if only in my head.
Kou Shun'u I completely agree with you about Liz's internal tension. Liz to me is the kind of person who pushes her emotion down until she can't anymore and she does something like stab someone with a pen, break a thumb, throw someone on a boat and interrogate them for four months, etc. Liz obviously had a lot of rage at Tom/Jacob and I felt there was no way of getting past that with him taking a bit of punishment, hence this chapter. Any way I hope everyone enjoyed!
Next up: The meeting with Volkov doesn't exactly go as planned, do to a surprise guest.
