Firstly, I own nothing to do with the Blacklist. I'm just a very big fan.
Wow, thank you all so much again for your lovely reviews, and the alerts I have received. I really wasn't expecting it, and as usual, I'm anxious as hell to update. Sorry for taking awhile, my inspiration left for a bit, but now it's back. I do hope this isn't terrible. Thank you!
Chapter Six
Red finds himself reading the paragraph in his book over and over, his mind not completely with it this evening. Sighing, he closes the book and places it back down on the floor on the side of the armchair, reaching for his glass again. The only sounds in the room that he could hear was her. Her breathing, in a constant steady rhythm. There's something oddly calming about hearing the noises someone makes while they sleep.
Finishing the last of his drink, he stands slowly as not to wake her, approaching the side of the bed where she sleeps, her legs akimbo and tangled up in the sheets. One arm is slung over her forehead protectively, the shirtsleeve so short he can easily make out the thinness of her wrist, the multiple scars, scratches, and bruises there.
He reaches down impulsively, taking her wrist in his hand gently and lifting her arm to get a better glimpse of all the scars, the purple and yellow bruises. He gets a niggling suspicion that she's been reduced to engaging in self-harm over the years and he sighs to himself pitifully.
Lizzie, what has happened to you? What has life done to you? What happened to Sam after he took you in?
He feels his eyes gather with moisture as he surveys her while placing her arm back down carefully at her side. He cannot believe she is that same little girl; that same little girl he had come across years ago during that fire. And yet she is more different than that little girl in many ways he can hardly comprehend. Jaded, cynical. Lost. Where has the time gone?
The creaking of the floor alerts Liz to his approach to the bed and she feels her heart race. She tries to keep her breathing normal as possible, her body still, when she almost senses his eyes on her, observing her. He thinks she's sleeping, yet she's finding she's having difficulty. While it was nice, sleeping in a bed for once, it's still nerve-wracking to be in a room with a total stranger she doesn't know, despite his insistence that she can trust him.
Her stomach clenches and her hand clasps the handle of the butter knife tighter from where she has it, hidden and tucked safely under the pillow. She'd taken it from the cart while he was distracted and he hadn't even noticed. He takes her arm that she has sat strategically on her forehead and lifts it, and it feels like a freezing ice block has slipped its way down her stomach. The instance he tries something funny on her, he's going to be in for a shock when she gets him with the knife. Only nothing happens. His fingers brush against her slender wrist, at her scars. Then he's placing her arm back down carefully. She hears his scuffled footsteps on the carpet as he retreats back to his armchair. Then that's that...
But then she's off, dreaming, not too soon after. Dreaming of him.
Him, crawling on his hands and knees against the pavement, trying to speak, trying to warn her to run, but the slit jugular prevents him from doing so. There's blood. Blood everywhere. His throat strangely misshapen, blood dripping everywhere. Moaning to her, run, run now, trying to tell her to run. So she does, she runs, fighting against the fear paralyzing her. And then she wakes up, bathed in sweat, in a strange room, in a strange bed, her heart the only thing she can hear pounding in her ears.
Liz sits up slowly, telling herself to calm down. It's just a nightmare. Another nightmare. Another one of the many that she's had like it, only this time, it doesn't feature her regular haunt, of flames and humidity. The pungent scent of burning plastic.
A lamps on in the hotel room, providing the only small source of light. Then she sees him, Red, still where he was, sitting in the armchair. Only he's dozing. It must be in the early hours of the morning, and sleep has finally called to him. She hears him snoring, making faint, deep noises of distress. Apparently Liz isn't the only one who suffers from night terrors. The book he has been reading slides down off his lap, thudding against the carpet. And then Red is jerking awake almost instantly at the sound of it, stirring, and his eyes meet hers from where she is, wide-awake and alert, sitting fearfully up on the bed.
His eyes are half-lidded as he blinks and squints at her. "Are you all right?" he asks gently, his voice thick from sleep.
Liz feels her throat tighten up at his question. "Yeah, I... I'm fine. I just had a nightmare. It's nothing new for me, though."
"Well, it was exactly only just that: A nightmare. You're fine, and you're safe here." Somehow she gathers the impression he is saying that to reassure himself as well. "What are your nightmares about?"
It surprises her; Him bothering to even ask about them. She doesn't like the relief that overcomes her, how touched she feels, that he is asking. "Well, I... I had a friend. His name was... Frank." Truthfully, she hadn't known the man's name at the time. They hadn't bothered to ask each other what their names were, but Liz just assumed to call him Frank at the time. He was stuck in the same situation she was; he had been out on the street at an incredibly young age, had a sordid past and battled his own addictions and due to that common ground they shared, they had become friends, in the loosest term of the word. "We met one day, we were both out on the streets, and we just followed each other around, and we'd look out for each other. But he got involved with a bad group of people, and he... he owed them."
"And so what happened to this friend of yours? This... Frank?"
"One night, I was sleeping. We'd take it in turns; One of us would watch out while the other slept in case someone tried anything on us. I woke up to all of these noises, and these people, they had somehow tracked him down. And there was just... all this blood, everywhere." She unravels then, and it just happens. She bursts into silent tears, but its somehow relieving on her, to cry for him, to cry for what she had seen happen to him. "So much blood. And he was dying right before my eyes and... I... I couldn't do anything to help him." She lifts her hands helplessly. "He just... he told me to run, and all the blood... they'd slit his throat, cut him up. He was trying to crawl to me, to get me to run." She can still smell the blood in the air, the metallic tang. She can still hear his moans, as if it was happening all over again. "I never did anything to help him, and I hate that about myself the most," she admits, inhaling in a shuddering breath. "I just took his advice and I ran, and I left him there to die, I left him there to just bleed out against the pavement, in probably what is... the most painful way to cark it."
Red nods at her story, his eyes creased and expression somewhat sympathetic to her, and just like that, she immediately wishes she hadn't been so eager to disclose of the story to him. She wasn't doing it to earn herself some pity from him, after all.
"And so that's what my nightmares are about," she continues after a moment, trying to make her voice sound more carefree, more positive. "Just the same old things, time and time again. They just... they never seem to go away." An awkward silence passes between them, where this Red simply stares at her deeply. She feels fresh tears trickle down her eyes, and she lifts her hand, wiping them away hurriedly with her fingers. "So what's yours about? Your nightmares? Let's hear some stories of yours now."
He finally tears his eyes away from her, huffing out a short, self-depreciating laugh. "Oh, I'd prefer not to."
"Why not? You don't think I could handle it?"
"Not at all. I'm just not sure I could handle it. Some things are best kept quiet, and not spoken or repeated of, to anyone." He adds quickly, returning his eyes to her, "But thank you."
"For what?" she whispers, confused.
"For telling me and being honest, despite how hard it must be for you, having to repeat what happened, with Frank. One can only just imagine how... traumatic that must have been for you, to have to witness a friend dying before you. I've lost many people throughout the years and I know, from experience myself, that it never gets any easier." Red stares at her for another silent moment, then she sees his eyes flit down to her arms, something unidentifiable coming across his expression. "I couldn't help noticing what you have there." He tilts his chin slightly, indicating her arms. "On your arms and wrists. How did you come about them? All of those... scars?"
Liz can feel herself immediately tensing up, closing up inside. She had been sure she had felt him awake and moving near her at the bed. She mustn't have been imagining him touching and lifting her arm then, however many hours ago it was. Now she realized why he had. Had he been inspecting the scars? But by the way his tone is when he asks the question, it's obvious he already knows the answer. She supposes he just wants her to say it, to confirm his suspicions. He's playing dumb with her; She can see it in his eyes, that he knows how she really came to get them already. He's just waiting for her to say it out loud.
"What are we doing right now?" she asks aloud wonderingly. There is singing spite in her voice, and she laughs shortly. "Are we really doing this? What; are we playing doctor-patient now?" She laughs again, deliberately placing her arms under the covers, wrapping them over her knees tightly. "I think you already know how I came about them; You just want me to say it."
"Yes," Red affirms quietly. His eyes are piercing, arresting. "Yes, I want you to say it."
"I've had my fair share of suicidal tendencies over the years. There, happy to hear me say it?" He looks anything but. "I've attempted to off myself a couple of times so that is where the scars are from, some of them." She doesn't feel embarrassed sharing that at all; She doesn't feel sad, or ashamed. She feels nothing. Absolutely nothing. "I've cut myself. I've... self-harmed. Whatever you want to call it, I've done it."
"Why? Simply because you enjoy the pain?" He shakes his head slightly, his lips parting. It doesn't appear as if he is making a harsh or unfavorable judgment of her, at least, so that makes her feel slightly better. He merely seems as if he is trying to understand the reason behind it all. Liz finds it ridiculous the man doesn't already truly know. "Because it makes you feel... alive? The pain and the... bleeding?"
Liz licks her lips, peering away from him for a moment, focusing on a shadow on the wall.
One hand under the blanket glides along her wrist, fingers feeling out the bumps and raised lines on her skin. "No, it wasn't because of... any of that. I didn't do it because I wanted to feel alive or because I enjoyed the pain on some level. I honestly just..." She pauses for a moment, narrowing her eyes, wondering how to say it best in words. Then she decides she might as well just be brutally honest and say it how it is, no sugar-coating. "I honestly wanted to die, at the time. Only I just... I never cut deep enough."
She shrugs, turning her eyes back on the man in the armchair again. His eyes stare deeply into hers, unblinking. He looks sorry for her, sympathetic, but really, she doesn't want all of that. She doesn't want his pity, not at all.
"I suppose, maybe, there was a part of me, deep down inside, that was... frightened of the idea of dying. Maybe I subconsciously never cut deep enough or hard enough? I don't know. But this was about after... after Frank. After I saw what happened with Frank, how bad I felt that I hadn't helped him and that I'd just ran and saved my own skin, all the nightmares, as well as... a whole lot of other reasons." Since he is making her talk about it, she can't seem to stop. And perhaps its liberating? Getting it all off her chest? She has kept it to herself for so long, it was only bound to burst out of her eventually. "Life just hasn't turned out the way I thought it would be. You know, I thought I'd be married by now. Married with a husband and we'd be starting a family, and we'd have a nice house with the whole... white picket fence thing."
She smiles slightly. She'd imagined her life so differently from how it is now.
"Sometimes I'd have nice dreams about it and then I'd wake up and realize it was just a dream, that this is the cruel reality. I've accomplished nothing and I have... nothing. I know that if I died, no one would miss me. My life has officially turned to shit." She sighs heavily. "I suppose, all that was why I tried to kill myself those couple of times. Life has just turned to shit and I have nothing, I'm nobody, I'm so far from what I thought I would be. And then there's the hunger, there's Frank dying and me saving my own skin, there's the shame... there's everything. Death had just seemed the best solution at the time and so I... cut." Finally, she brings herself to look at Red again. Still, he is watching her, unblinking, literally hanging off her every word. And she can't pretend it isn't nice; It's nice to have someone there to listen to her, even if she is moping and prattling on to her hearts content. "And then you come along today, and here I am, in this room with you, and I don't even know you. But you want to know something?"
"What, Lizzie?" His voice is hardly audible, it's so deep and low.
"Part of me is hoping that this will turn out badly. I took my chances, and you're practically a stranger. You could do anything to me; Murder me, torture me. Rape me, even." She spots the muscle under his eyelid twitch at her words. "And you want to know what's truly sick? It's that there is some part of me, deep down inside, that hopes that you will. There is a part of me that hopes that you will end up murdering me, putting an end to me and my pathetic nothing life, because... I think I've worked out with all of my unsuccessful suicide attempts, that I can't do it alone. I'm not... strong enough to do it myself, and maybe I'm hoping you'll do it for me?" Even as she utters it, she knows she isn't coming across as exactly the most sane nor sound person in the world. Yet she just can't bring herself to care. She's way past caring. "I can be reckless and impulsive and take dangerous chances and get myself into bad situations, but... maybe that's because I want the worst of it? Maybe I'm just waiting for someone who is kind enough to put me out of my misery, seeing as I'm so incompetent as to do it myself?"
She realizes then just how much so she is unsettling him by sprouting out how she feels with no apology whatsoever. She knows she probably sounds insane to him, but she's thought about this. A lot; probably more than what is considered healthy of her. The embarrassment, the shame of spilling her guts out to this man hits her so suddenly and overdue, that she bursts out laughing sadly at herself. Then she realizes she isn't so much laughing, but that she's crying. She's actually sobbing, and it's mortifying to be doing it in front of him.
"God, I sound like such a horrible person, don't I?" she gets out weakly. "I sound so messed up. But I am." Lifting her arms out of the blanket, she waves them at herself pitifully. "I am really, truly messed up. I am, aren't I?"
Before Liz even can completely comprehend what is happening, Red is there, sitting on the bed beside her, an arm coming around her, pulling and holding her in close to him. Her cheek rests against the open collar of his shirt, his skin warm. He both smells and feels safe to her. How ironic; She barely knows the man at all, but she's relieved, so very relieved, that at least someone is comforting her for once, hushing her as she cries silently and trembles.
"You're going to be all right," she hears him assure her soothingly, stroking the back of her hair with his hand, kissing her on the temple of her forehead. His closeness despite hardly knowing him stuns her for a moment but she closes her eyes tightly, telling herself to just let it be. "I know it mightn't seem that way right now- that everything is bad and that the world is a terrible place- but everything is going to work out the way it is supposed to, I assure you."
She'll regret in the morning, letting her vulnerable side peek through, letting herself become so exposed and open to someone else.
A/N: Hope this one wasn't bad? Hope you guys are all well and happy. :)
As usual, I would love to know your thoughts. This is probably way out of character and AU, sorry. Thank you!