Author's Note: This took a little longer than I was hoping, but on the other hand, it's twice as long as I was expecting, so. I guess that evens out. I'm very much looking forward to seeing how this one is received, I definitely debated with myself about some things. Please do let me know...

And all that we built

and all that we breathed,

and all that we spilt, or pulled up like weeds

is piled up in back;

it burns irrevocably.

(we spoke up in turns,

'till the silence crept over me)

Bless you and I deeply do

no longer resolute, and I call to you.

- Sadie, Joanna Newsom

The next day, Liz got up in the morning and washed and dressed in her work things and put on her makeup and it felt like putting on a costume. She didn't entirely recognize the woman in the mirror, but it wasn't the dark painted lips or the neatly styled hair, it was the coldness in her eyes, the flat watchfulness. She's seen that in the faces of others who had worked the job too long, the ones that got pulled in too deep, but she didn't expect to see it in her own face. It wasn't the job that had done this to her though, nor could she blame Red, not this time. She had chosen the man she would marry, she had chosen the life she would live.

Tom was still getting ready as she left, she told him she was needed at work. "Something came up, I have to go in," she told him, "I guess the vacation's over." She said lightly, and it was amazing how easy it had become in the last week, how casually she could lie to him now. How much satisfaction it gave her that she could, and did lie to him, that she could say almost anything and he would smile blandly down at her, expecting she was still his sweet and accommodating wife. He had no more idea who he'd truly married than she had, it seemed.

She walked into the blacksite like she was meant to be there and presented herself at Cooper's office. He didn't seem terribly happy to see her, but he didn't send her away immediately.

"Have you heard from Reddington?" Cooper asked her first thing, right after offering her a seat.

"No, Sir, I haven't," she said, and it was easy to lie to him too. Red might have told her to tell the truth, but that was before the rest of it, before she realized about Tom, and there were no polygraphs here. She'd known for years and years how to look up at men with her big blue eyes and look blameless, it was hardly her fault if all of them were so eager to underestimate her so.

"Then what brings you here today, Agent Keen?" he asked, and it was this that nearly made her flinch, hearing her false husband's false name spoken so easily, as if it were an everyday thing and not a mark of her failure.

"I need to be working, sir," she said, stiffly and as respectfully as she could manage with the sudden trebbling pace of her heart, "I understand it's a strange situation, and I'm aware I was hardly your choice for this team, but I do believe I have some skills to offer here. I guess what I'm asking, sir, is do I still have a job here or should I be requesting a transfer?"

Cooper looked her over carefully, with that stern, authoritative frown of his, and she wondered what he saw in her face because he seemed to soften, a matter of fact compassion in his eyes that surprised her. "I'll be frank with you, Keen. You were not my first choice, no, and your inexperience means you're still something of an unknown in my book. But I think you know how important this project is. None of us like Reddington, and I know it's not what you pictured for your first assignment. But you're our link to Reddington, like it or not, so if you request a transfer, I'm afraid it will be denied. At least until we have Reddington back, or he decides he is willing to work with someone else, you're a part of this task force."

"I understand, Sir," she said, wondering if he was leading up to sending her home again, or about to tell her she was still under suspicion, because Cooper's voice had a warning note.

"However," Cooper continued, his tone lightening, "You have potential, Keen, and I don't want to see it go to waste. Ressler's going to be out for weeks yet, and the team's still going through reorganization so I'm not going to be putting you on field duty. But as you insist, let's put your skills to the test. I want you to work up a profile on Reddington. Go through the files, talk to Ressler, go over your case notes. You've actually met the man, so you should have it easier than the last guy. I want your report as soon as possible. And if any leads come up I believe I can approve your participation."

A profile. On Red. She wondered why it had never occurred to her to attempt a real, extensive one before. Probably because she was too busy being dragged along in his wake, she supposed, but now the thought intrigued her. "I'll start on it right away, Sir. And thank you."

"Of course, Agent Keen."

She rose and headed towards the door, eager to escape back to her office, but Cooper spoke again.

"I still expect the best chance we have of finding Reddington is him getting in touch with you. If he makes contact, I want you to notify me immediately, day or night. And if you don't you will have some hard questions to answer, do I make myself clear, Agent Keen?"

She glanced back, surprised by her lack of concern at this blatant threat, and nodded, "Perfectly clear, Sir."

"Good."

She sat in her office with the door shut and the blinds drawn, and thought out her next move. She had decided that she needed to be back in the Post Office, out of that house and back in with the resources of the FBI. She knew that she was still under suspicion, Cooper had just made it obvious that they still imagined they smelled Red's taint on her, or suspected that she'd swallowed his corruption. She'd been too near him, and he'd been too eager to be near her, and what does a monster want with a girl, unless she is his pawn already or else he means to devour her and make her his own to use. If she were in their place she would suspect too, only it seemed to her now that these confining terms no longer fit them, or their situation. She couldn't protest that to her superiors though, not without awakening even deeper suspicions.

She hadn't expected it would be so easy to walk in and talk her way back to work, and now she had a new project on top of all her other worries which she strongly suspected was busy work to keep her out of the way. But she needed access to the files from Tom's interrogation, and she was sure she could convince Aram to go poking through the life and background of Tom Keen. He had helped her look for Red, after all, and this seemed like a lesser infraction than going against the direct instructions from Fowler.

She hadn't exactly planned on lying about her contact with Red, but she hadn't actually planned on reporting it either. Maybe it was more old habit coming back to haunt her, keeping the prying eyes of the wider world from what was personal, what was family, what they wouldn't understand, what they didn't need to know. Maybe it was just that she couldn't mention some of it without explaining all of it and she wasn't ready to do that, she had to know what Tom was before trying to notify her superiors. She had to be sure she didn't mean to take care of him herself until she did anything irreversible, set any phantom wheels of justice in motion.

But it wasn't just that, she knew it wasn't. She's begun to realize that she had always viewed what was said between her and Red as neutral ground, untouchable, not for reports, not to be consumed and analyzed. No one but they need know how deeply they'd talked, how often. There were already enough assumptions made about what went on between them. It had been her instinct all along to downplay the importance of their conversations, and it seemed even more vital now, as though lines had been drawn, with she and Red on one side and everyone else on the other.

She had noticed it overtaking her, somewhere in the back of her mind, but no matter how firmly she reminded herself about who he was, what he'd done, she'd found no way to stop it. He hadn't even been in her life six months, but it had been time enough for the most terrific upheaval, and the most minute. It was a small sensation, quiet and so far within, but in the end tectonic, as if her thousand, thousand interior particles had slowly turned as one towards him.

She was assailable by him in a way she had never been by anyone, vulnerable to his will as it pushed and pulled at her, where before she'd always been proud and dismayed by her capacity for indifference to the intentions of the men around her. But he could pull her along so easily, she'd had to fight so hard not to become entirely subsumed by his world, by his opaque and alarming plans for her. Only now she could see that the water had closed over her head long ago and she'd never felt it happen. And now he was the only fixed point she could see while everything else wove and swayed and turned to insubstantial spectres around her.

She'd fought so hard to keep him from knowing that he could pull her along in any way, at any time he'd wanted. She'd argued with him at every step of the way, trying to see if she made enough noise, dug in hard enough she might be able to halt this instinct to turn to Red, might stop him noticing that she always moved towards him in that half second before reason returned to her. She'd always looked after herself well enough, she'd always been self-contained, even as a young girl under Sam's kind and bewildered care she'd been so independant, she'd always consulted herself before anyone else. But now every precedent had been overturned, and she found that she turned first to a man so unpredictable and dangerous he'd been hunted for years and never caught. Yet he'd hardly let her down, had he, the only one who hadn't in recent years. And he'd stopped trying to command her so, as he'd done at first, as though there was already a rapport between them. He'd begun to settle back and observe her with weary patience and this intent curiosity, as though he wanted to everything about her, as though he didn't already know. But he didn't know, she thought, He doesn't know who sent Tom, or what his real intention is. Is it possible he doesn't really know me either?

And now she was to dig into his life, and her interactions with him and create a profile, like he was any subject she came across at work. She was curious, she was more than curious, there was a sharpness to the way she needed to know who he was, what he was doing that worried her. But to write it up, turn it in, report her findings to her superiors, the idea of that felt shameful, like it would cheapen them both. She hoped he would be back before she'd finished her profile because she wasn't sure she could go through with such a thing.

It was easy to convince Aram to help her out, although he looked her with enough sympathy to make her prickle with shame and defensiveness. She knew she had made a mistake with Tom, she knew what a mark against her it was going to be, once she reported him. She would be known as the woman who married one criminal and was willingly at the beck and call of another.

Collecting the Reddington files was also an easy task, now that she'd been granted access. There were a lot of them, some fat with creased spines and overflowing pages. She wondered even as she spread them out on her desk just how accurate they were. It was a daunting amount of material, and yet it seemed so impersonal, as though these paper trails and third hand accounts couldn't hope to define or contain or assess the man she'd met and spoken to, and been terrified and comforted by, argued with until they were both insensible with anger and raw nerves. Still, she'd been denied the chance to look most of it before, on grounds of her clearence level, her inexperience, and she suspected, more of that old same patronizing impulse of her superiors to keep her protected and ignorant of the worst that was tied to his name so she might be more willing to play the go-between, cater to Reddington's wishes and theirs. But inspite of their obfuscation, she'd always known how she was pinned between these two powers, and she'd always been aware they both presented more danger than they wanted her to know.

She took the files, stuffed them into her briefcase like she's not breaking several regulations in taking them, if she was caught out she would simply still her face and plead her rookie ignorance and say she didn't think she could be doing any harm, just having them to look at. Thus armed with this ream of official paper, she took herself to see Ressler again.

He was out of the hospital now, she'd heard, she'd received a couple text messages about his progress from Meera, but he was far from recovered. She felt overwhelmingly awkward standing at the front door of her sometimes partner, sometimes detractor waiting to be let in. The last time she'd seen Ressler he'd warned her, told her not to follow Red out into the dark, not to chase him until she was gone too. She shifted the bag slung across her shoulders, filled with the classified record of the Reddington life story, and worried what he was going to read on her face when she asked about Red and the five year hunt.

A woman answered the door, a slender youngish woman with long, soft brown hair and a pleasant, open face, and Liz remembered that Ressler might go prodding and peering in the depths and the dark, but he was still one of the normal ones. He had a human heart, and institutional mind, he spent time with people who had open, smiling faces like the young woman who ushered her inside, offered her tea, introduced herself as 'Don's friend, Audrey.'

Ressler himself was camped out on the couch, dressed more casually than she'd ever seen him, leg in a brace and carefully propped up. They'd had to put the muscle back together, he explained, and he wasn't supposed to move it very much yet. Audrey brought her a mug of herbal tea with honey, and one for Ressler that she handed over with a proprietary, comforting hand on his shoulder. She told Liz 'not to keep Don talking too long'.

"The vicodin knocks him out," she told Liz over Ressler's embarrassed scowl, "He won't take them if there's anything interesting going on." And then Audrey retreated deeper into the apartment, somewhere out of sight down the hall, though she suspected not out of earshot. She spent a few moments absorbing this, sipping her scalding mint tea and feeling herself at a great remove. She always had been the changeling child and always would be, she was more sure than ever that their kind of hearth-warm domesticity would always escape her, would always be something she couldn't quite fathom or grasp or claim.

"Okay, Keen, what's up?" asked Ressler when they were alone, "I'm guessing you didn't come by for the sake of moral support."

She set aside her mug and pulled her bag onto her lap. "Cooper asked me to write up a profile." she said, taking in how he looked pale and pinched with discomfort he still looked, although far more alert than he'd been at the hospital. "On Red," she added, as though they could possibly be talking about anyone else.

"You've been in touch with him, haven't you," he said, not a question but not quite an accusation. Maybe it was it was the pain meds, dulling his usual bite.

"Not since that first night," she denied, meeting his eyes carefully and then looking away, "There haven't been any leads. But then I was off work until today, so," She shrugged.

"Really? Cause I gotta say, Keen. You look like hell for a person who's been on leave." He smiled the way her cousin Nick did when he used to tease her when they were kids, but she froze anyway, like a startled rabbit, trying to guess how much of her warp and weft was obviously and outwardly frayed for all to see.

"It hasn't been a great vacation, no," she said and looked down, pulling a file out of her bag at random.

"Sorry, that came out wrong. I just meant… they're not still interrogating you, are they?"

"No. They've moved off me," she said and opened a notebook on her knee, "Let's get through some of this, shall we? Before your girlfriend kicks me out."

"Don't mind Audrey," he said, a small content smile she'd never seen on him before taking over his face, "She's just a bit over protective."

So she interviewed him about Red, about his hunt for Red, about losing his trail over and over, how Red never seemed to be directly connected to anything when they needed to be able to make it stick to him. He told her what he knew of Red's story, which was different than the official version, though that could perhaps be accounted for by the filter of entrenched antipathy through which he viewed Red. He talked about all the informants he'd tried to turn who were terrified of Red, and all the different interpol agents he'd met who would love to get their hands on him.

But then, the more he talked, the more he turned the topic instead to Audrey, how he had gotten caught up in the work and focused on the wrong things, lost sight of perspective, pushed past even Audrey's apparently near saintly patience with his quest.

"This isn't a job for happy people," he told her, "It's so easy to forget, if you've got something important you've got to hold onto it or it'll just get washed away with all the rest."

He wore himself out quickly, and Liz put away the files and the notepad and called Audrey back in, thanking them both for their time. She watched them for a moment or two before she showed herself out, their easy comfort, fussing over each other with care. How do you do that, she wanted to ask them, how do you love someone? How are you happy?

The weather had changed in the scant hour she had spent in Ressler's townhouse, the clouds had slunk in low and iron grey and begun to drop a heavy, creeping drizzle that seemed to cling against her skin. Some of the trees along the sidewalk were draped with white fairy lights, because it was almost Christmas after all, and something in her stilled and stuttered at the sight of those sweet, ordinary lights, over a horrible cold wellspring of sadness. She'd suddenly remembered again, as though she'd just woken up or turned around and found that her reality was still true, that Sam was still gone and was not putting up a tree and looking forward to her flying home for the holidays, that Tom was still a deadly stranger who would expect her to go through the motions. She hurried back to her car around strange gasping breaths like she was crying but not crying, for her eyes were always dry, had been since that small spate of weeping the day she had made her realization. When her hands had stilled and her breath had slowed she drove back to work.

The Reddington that Ressler described didn't quite sound like the man she had met and yet it did, if she put aside how he was with her. The Reddington in the files was yet another shape, this time this one an ever shifting shadow that taunted and struck out at them, and yet she could see gaps in the reports, outlines left by redacted events that described ways in which various agencies had struck out at Red. And why wouldn't they, she reminded herself, he was a wanted man, a notorious and infamous and unmerciful. But it didn't settle easily with her now, the whole official story seemed to be muddied with competing male egos, his and theirs, and accounts that seemed to turn back on themselves.

It was the early years that most confused her. The narrative was clear up to a point, a steadfast, brilliant young man from a longtime Navy family who proved himself too useful in the field, too adept at intelligence work to let him move up the ladder and out of the field, as had originally been planned. From there the timeline degenerated into a mass of contradictions and impossibilities, filled with gaping holes and events that coincided and yet couldn't have happened concurrently. At some of the crucial moments there were only pages of redacted black lines. She put all of it back into her bag, it was more than her over taxed mind could unravel that day.

She went home that even armed with a new abundance of information, the Reddington files and a flash drive full of things about Tom Keen slipped to her discretely by Aram as she headed out for the night. She couldn't take them into the house, of course, but it was dark and raining heavily, it was easy to stop across the street and leave them with Kaplan's people. There was a room over there, unused by the surveillance team, where she's put most of her father's things like a stock pile to keep her safe through the coming storms. She felt better knowing they were safe over there, though what immediate use they'd be she wasn't sure.

Tom was waiting for her when she came in, his face so serious she was sure for a half-second he knew. But he put on his concerned frown, the one that always used to make her feel so guilty, and told her that he had a couple of job interviews in New York over the next couple of days, for nice, high paying private schools, and really it was for her own good, she could work at the field office up there, he could just tell the job was making her so miserable.

She protested, and it was an automatic response, conditioned from too many times around the same argument. She was lucky, perhaps, in that. It was more convincing than any planned lie, although later she would disoriented about how easily she'd fallen into a pattern that should no longer apply to her and should no longer be instinctual.

"Just, just think about it okay, Liz?" Tom pleaded with a furrowed brow, and she didn't have to fake any anger at his prodding, that came naturally too, "I'm taking the train up tonight, I'll be back day after tomorrow. Promise me you'll actually consider it, alright?"

She gave a shaky sigh and nodded, but he had already stopped paying attention to her, he was putting on his coat and gathering up his overnight bag and brushing past Hudson who had come it to watch the commotion. Liz rushed forward to hold Hudson's collar, to be sure he didn't follow Tom out the door as he still sometimes did and then found herself having to hold perfectly still while all her insides recoiled as Tom leaned over and gave her a kiss goodbye. She hoped he might attribute whatever strained look must be plain on her face to the reiteration of the argument that had dogged their relationship for months. He still believed he needed to continue his act and that, she knew, was proof enough of hers.

After Tom had gone she felt deflated, numb, too tired to feel relieved, but quiet and unthinking for the first time in days, weeks. She had a day at least, a little more, where she wouldn't have to walk the knife's edge of pretending and investigating, of trying to trying to present a relaxed and placid face and looking over her shoulder all the while.

She sat in her dark kitchen, thinking vaguely that she should have kept the files with her after all, but the rain was persistent and grim and her body didn't want respond to her call to action. And as much as it was necessary that she unravel Tom's origins, she needed to stop thinking about it for a few hours. There would be no use it trying work tonight. She thought instead of pouring a glass of wine to celebrate the quiet and dark and her aloneness, but it seemed to be a bad trend to set, so simply sat back in the hard dining chair and listened as Hudson wandered over to his dish to eat his dinner and then wandered back to his big cushion to relax, listened to the house stand quiet and the rain beat lightly on the windows. This wouldn't be her house for very much longer, she knew, one way or the other.

There was a noise from somewhere within the dim depths of the house, a footstep in the hall and a difference in the atmosphere as though she were no longer the only person there. She must have fallen into a light doze there at the table because she hadn't heard the door open, but she was sure someone was there, someone moving. The gentle torpor was gone from her limbs the instant she heard it. Liz stood carefully and moved toward the sound.

"Tom?" she called out, having to be sure it wasn't him back to catch her in the act of… something, but she was sure it wouldn't be, "Who's there?"

She stood in the wide door to her living room and there, with warm lamp light glowing behind him, hat gripped awkwardly in his hand, stood Red. He still wore his grey overcoat, the shoulders spattered with spots of rain, and his face was hard to read with the light behind him, but he looked still and wary, as though he was the one who was surprised to see her. She put her put her hand out to brace herself on the doorjamb, her breath seized with the sweet shock of seeing his silhouette in the middle of her familiar room.

"Kaplan assures me he's on a train to New York," he said, and his voice sounded wrong, faint and formal and rough, but it was still definitely him, his voice, standing in her house, almost expectant, perhaps waiting for her to acknowledge him. He twitched his hat tightly in his hand, tapping it against his leg.

She had planned to keep her distance when he reappeared, to remain sure and aloof and let him know she felt strung along and toyed with. But she didn't, she couldn't.

She moved to him, driven by desperate impulse she couldn't check, and there he was, solid under her hands, sturdy and hale and breathing. She had never thought to fling herself into his arms but here she was, reaching up to curl her hands around his shoulders, fingers scrabbling to find purchase on the plush, damp, heavy fabric of his coat. His arms at first were hesitant, he made a soft noise of protest or surprise as he reached up to steady her, then nearly crushing around her. She pressed her face into his coat collar and smelled fresh wet outside air and soap and smoke, and found that she was trembling as though there was nothing left holding her together and she made a helpless sort of noise she didn't recognize.

"Sorry," she said, muffled and into his shoulder which shifted slightly as she spoke, "I don't know what's wrong with me. I don't think I thought you were really coming back. Done with all this, too much trouble." And the last time I saw you, you were bleeding and and bound, she thought, and I couldn't stand that it might be the last I ever saw of you. She huffed an embarrassed sort of laugh that came out more like another sound of despair and she had to hold her breath for a moment to try and undo the fluttering sound.

"There was a time not long ago when you would have been relieved," he said against her hair, and it was a poor imitation of his usual ironic tone, low and tired, but warm and close and so much richer than version she'd heard over the phone.

"Don't," she said, chastising his impulse to deflect, dismiss, "Not now." She shifted so she could breath better, restless against him rather than comforted, as though she was still looking for him, and his hands didn't sooth but clutch, one hand cupping the back of her skull, caught up in her hair and the other gripping her back so hard it almost hurt. She noticed then that he was wire-taut in her grasp and she pulled back to get a better look at his face, a sinking worry gathering in her. "Red? Is everything alright?"

He offered a little smile that was more of a wince and she wondered just what hellish journey he'd been on these last several weeks that he was so out of practice with her, just how much pain had he caused and been caused on his hunting trip. With that in mind, her certainty about what he'd been up to, this shouldn't feel so easy, so necessary.

"Yes," he said, after a long pause, "There's nothing here to worry use tonight."

There was such a look on his face, such a raw look, and he was still so close, so that she had to look up at him. She could see there were smudges of exhaustion under his eyes, though he seemed unharmed. He was watching her so intently and his mouth wore a strange shape, longing, she thought, longing. He moved his hands to rest at her waist, slowly, so carefully, but his grip was firm, as though he was tracking the movement of her ribs as she breathed, his palms warm through the fine crepe of her blouse.

"I don't think that can be true," she said almost at a whisper, wary of disturbing him or this new and clinging mood between them, "Everything's fallen apart."

"Would you really have wanted to keep something so false?"

"No, of course not. Feel free to say 'I told you so,'" she said, feeling defensive, drawing back from him on reflex, feeling a little over-exposed under the weight of his attention. She was perhaps a little out of practice at being in the same room with him. His fingers tightened at her sides for a second and then he let her go without protest as she stepped back.

"I'm hardly glad about this, Lizzy. I did want to be wrong about him when it first came to my attention. I wish that I had been," he said and now that he stood two paces away he seemed once more unreachable, his tone frustrated and almost chiding.

"I don't think I have to give you credit for that, you don't get to make this about you too," she snapped, prickling and defensive and wrong-footed. She watched as his face froze for a second before it smoothed, and regretted immediately how quickly their small comfort had dissolved.

Red took another step back and settled on her couch, not looking exactly comfortable, but weary, his shoulders round as he leaned back. "Come sit with me, Lizzie," he said gently, holding out his hand, more as a gesture than with any hope that she'd take it, but she did without thinking, and it was cool and dry and rough against hers. They were nice hands, she'd always thought, eloquent and capable and frequently restless, the movements of his fingers were always far more telling than the disciplined way he held his face. She let him draw her forward until she turned to sit beside him, stiff and carefull because she was still filled with that trembling but she managed to relax enough to curl one leg under herself so she could face him directly. This was supposed to be easier than over the phone, with more cues to read than from a staticky voice, but it was somehow so much harder. Red was sitting in her livingroom and he was just a man, in person, not the grand and capricious figure of the files she'd been reading all day. She had so much to tell him and so much to blame him for, but she couldn't seem to say any of it because she was buzzing with nervous energy.

"I want you to listen to me," he said gravely, shifting until he caught her gaze and held it, "You deserved so much better, so much more than this. You have every right to be angry. I know you've only suffered by your association with me. You should never have been put in this situation, you never would have been if your name hadn't been tied to mine." He sighed and reached out as if to touch her hand again, but hesitated, his arm falling back to his side. He settled back deeper into the cushions, shifting and down and looking away. He adjusted his coat as he moved, fidgeting and lost in a way she'd never seen. Everything about this night was making her feel like the world had gone over sideways. At last he continued, contemplative and as if he were looking back across some great distance, "You have been loved and protected in your life, so you expected love and protection from the man who said he wanted to be your husband. You couldn't have known to look for something like this. You've done nothing wrong, Lizzy, you have nothing to be ashamed of."

"Sometimes I wonder," she began, high and strained, somewhere between tears and fury and a morbid impulse to dig brutally at old wounds, and so far out in the wreck of it, "If Tom Keen was false, just a cipher, if he's just an act after all, was the woman who married him false too? Because I think she might be, Red. She tried so hard, she played along so well, she thought she was happy but… as soon she found out, she just disappeared, like she was just a figment, or a sham. I was so hurt… I was. I am. But. I was also just so, so relieved to stop being her."

Red was looking at her again, staring in his way that made her feel sure he could see every aspect of her, even those she didn't know, and was giving her all his attention. "She is you, Lizzy, maybe not all of you, but she was still you," he said very softly, very kindly, "And you were happy, I think, or you would have been more willing to believe me about him. Maybe there were doubts accruing in the back of your mind, but holding onto hope doesn't make you dishonest. Please don't believe this is some catastrophic death of self. You're grieving, isn't that enough? You are so strong, Lizzy, so bright and bold, and so kind, to reach out to me even though you know what I…" he shook his head, "This won't define you, do you hear me?"

He had leaned in close, and seemed to expect an actual response from her, but when she tried, something in her seemed to crumble instead. She found herself crying, and floating out in the wordless bleakness of it, because Red had said she was grieving so matter of factly, like he knew just what that was from the inside of it, and she realized she'd forgotten it was true and remembering was such an awful shock. She was grieving and she was barely coping and Red talked to her like he still thought she was sane and human, and for some reason she believed him, accepted it when she didn't entirely believe it herself. And that made all of it worse, that made all of it real, pinned it to her skin, made it all a real thing that was happening in her life, immediately, inescapably.

She pressed her hands to her face, curling in on herself, sobbing and trying to stifle herself. Red reached out to grip her shoulders, to try and gently gather her up but she pulled away.

"How is that going to help?" she said wildly, wiping roughly at her eyes with the side of her hand, sure she could not be comforted. She was tired of crying already, and tired of Red seeing her cry, but had yet to figure out how to stop.

"Maybe it won't, maybe it will only help me," he said and she looked at him, startled, to see him give the saddest smile she'd ever seen, his thumb stroking gently against her shoulder bone. So she subsided and let him pull her against his side, still lost on the tide of sorrow. Red's arm was tight around her, and he seemed to lean against her just as much as she leaned into him, and she realized what a foreign sensation that was, that the person there with her was actually there with her, not simply accommodating her from a vacant distance.

"You were right at first, this works better," he murmured, almost to himself, resting his cheek against the crown of her head, and then more firmly, definitely, "We're going to figure this out, Lizzy, you're going to get get through this."

"Are you lying to make me feel better?" she asked, reaching for the lapel of his coat as an anchor.

"No."

After some time, after her distress receded Liz found she was still sitting with Red, almost boneless, pressed to his side, in companionable silence. She felt calm, nearly buoyant in the aftermath of tears, solid again and nearly cleansed, except for the way her eyes still stung from salt and disturbed makeup, but finally some of that fear and worry had been bled away. She noticed that Red, too, seemed relaxed beside her, no longer taught and on edge. She shifted back a little so she could read his expression without craning her neck.

"Hi," she said with a wry smile, as though she was surprised to find him still there, "I'm guessing that wasn't the reception you were expecting. I never used to be so…" she shook her head, not quite willing to say 'out of control' or 'needy' and those were the words that came to mind, though they didn't quite fit.

"Hmm. Perhaps not what I had expected, no," he said, but his tone was far from disapproving.

"Are you actually back? Are you done with… I've been calling it a hunting trip in my head, you know. That's what you were doing, right? Cleaning up? Exacting vengeance?"

"I was looking for the people who betrayed us, yes. I had to know who and I had to know why. But it was hardly the bloodbath you're picturing, Lizzy. The faction who set Garrick on us was very efficient at cleaning up after themselves, there weren't many… avenues left to follow. But I found my way back to the source eventually. The matter has been resolved, my house is clean, and I am back. But your house is not clean, and we will have to proceed very carefully for the time being."

"Do you mean Tom or do you mean the Bureau?"

"Both, I'm afraid. They will honor the agreement but there is still a mole within the ranks. I have yet to decide if it's better to rout them out, or to let them think I am satisfied, leave them in place and keep them in mind for when I need my... detractor to believe I am acting in one way when I plan to act in another."

She was surprised that he was so willing to actually share his strategy, but she had extracted a promise from him over the phone several days ago, that he would tell her everything. She had thought it just a gesture to placate her, but apparently he meant to keep his word. Apparently he trusted her to know things that weren't, perhaps, for anyone else to know.

"So Garrick was set on us?" she asked, moving on to another line of thought before he changed his mind about his divulgent mood, "Who would do that? Does that have to do with Tom, too?"

"No, I'm certain it has nothing to do with him. We're safe enough from that quarter, as it stands, now that the point has been made," he said with a sort of finality she definitely recognized, it was almost a reassuring to hear him sounding as vague and portentous as she was used to, "As strange as it sounds, considering recent circumstances, they are by far the least of our concerns for the time being."

Liz stood, unwilling to break through the sea-calm quietness that lingered in her by chasing down the details of those pronouncements just yet, the way she usually felt compelled to do. Instead she looked down at Red speculatively, and he tilted his chin up questioningly in response, as if to say 'go on.'

"If I go and wash my face, will you still be here when I get back? Or will you have vanished into the aether?" she asked, half wry, half in all seriousness.

"Which would you prefer?" he asked, voice carefully neutral but there was a hint of challenge on his eyes.

"You should stay. We still have a lot to talk about."

He nodded his acquiescence, so she slipped upstairs, turning the light on in the hall as she went, casting the house in a warm familiar glow. In the bathroom she tied back her hair washed all of her makeup and tear stains carefully away, until the steely but disheveled Agent Keen was gone from her mirror and only Liz remained, with her pale cheeks and solemn mouth and dark arched brows which she'd always felt stood out too starkly on her face. Then she stopped in her closet to take the little old snapshot out of her file box and put it into her pocket instead, and went back downstairs.