Chapter Eleven

It had been a long night and she hasn't slept, her mind working overtime to process and try to sort all of the information that she'd been slammed with in the last twelve hours.

The meeting with the coordinator for the Nash Syndicate's supply line at the docks had gone as well as it could have. Li Zhao had been an odd woman with a wig and dark glasses even in the dead of night. She had pulled up a translation app on her phone, but seemed hesitantly pleased when both Solomon and Nez had been capable of carrying on the conversation in Mandarin.

Whatever issue Solomon had caused for the syndicate had been blamed on his initial point of contact and the man was likely at the bottom of the ocean by that point. Zhao seemed pleased enough with Solomon's results, though, and a deal was struck. He was in, and once the position was secured Nez had flown back out to the base, the other piece of information she had learned battering around her head with enough force to give her a headache.

Elizabeth Keen was awake.

That within itself was good news. It was what Tom had been fighting for, but he likely hadn't expected his parents to keep that information from him. He'd trusted them to be straight with him on that if nothing else. He trusted her too, and that put Nez in a hell of a spot in the middle of three Hargraves and a lot of secrets. Where that left her and her own loyalties pulled in more directions than usual.

Mattie had had a point in that Scottie and Howard likely had reasons for keeping the information from Tom. He was stubborn when it came to his family and had proven he was willing to throw caution for his own wellbeing to the wind if he thought it would protect them. He'd pushed and struggled through over a year of recovery at this point, and while he was mostly steady on his feet he wasn't field ready. They had done some sparring work, but they hadn't dared put him in the firing range yet. His hands weren't steady enough, even now, and she had suggested that they work on hand to hand before she smuggled a gun to him behind his parents' backs.

There was all of that and probably more, but Tom was a grown man, fully capable of comprehending what was at stake. He was also her partner - a man that had called her family more than once - and would see withholding the information as a betrayal. The man needed to be able to trust at least one person on his side without reservation.

Nez moved down the hall with purpose in each step, determined that she could sleep after this was handled. She rounded the corner into the playroom that Agnes had set up and was a little startled to find Scottie in with the little girl.

Her boss - former boss? It was hard to keep up with those two - looked up, her long fingers tangled in her granddaughter's thick hair and halfway through an attempt I braid it. "Nez. How'd the meet go?"

"Good. Great. Solomon's position is set."

"Great to hear. It's good to know he had someone at his back that he can trust."

"Grandma's braiding my hair," Agnes cut in.

"Trying. It's not cooperating very well," Scottie mused and Nez wondered if she'd fallen into some sort of alternate dimension.

She cleared her throat. "I'll make sure to have the full report on yours and Howard's desks in a few hours."

Scottie nodded. "Of course. Get some sleep."

Nez turned, grateful that Scottie seemed more interested in her time with Agnes than asking why Nez had gone there first instead of the office space the Hargraves kept at the base. She moved down towards the room they kept their research in. If Tom wasn't with his daughter, he was likely there.

Something caught her attention as she turned down the hall, and before she had time to register what it was she was being slammed back against the wall. She hit with less force than the momentum should have taken her and she just barely stopped herself from lashing out when she saw angry blue eyes that she recognized well. "Tom, what the actual hell?" she hissed.

"Tell me you didn't know," he growled. "Look me in the eye and tell me you haven't been lying to me for weeks. Months! I don't even know how long."

His grip on her was firm, but carefully controlled. "Tell me what you're talking about."

Hurt flickered through the anger for just a moment. "Liz."

Well that made more sense. "I just found out. Solomon let it slip on the op last night. I was on my way to talk to you about it."

She watched as he worked his way through what she was say, that clever mind of his likely weighing every inflection, every twitch in her face that would tell him she was lying. Good thing she'd made up her mind.

Finally she watched some of the tension fade and he stepped back, one hand falling to his side and the other moving across the top of his hair in a nervous motion. "Sorry."

Nez pulled in a breath. "I get it. You don't know who to trust and you jumped." She caught his gaze. "But you come at me like that again and I'll flatten you, you hear me?"

"Yeah," he huffed, leaning against the opposite wall.

They were alone in the hallway. This was as good of a place as any to talk. "What are your plans?"

He didn't answer right away, which was a good sign. Hell, it was a good sign he wasn't already gone. If Agnes hadn't been there he probably wouldn't have waited at all.

After a long moment he sighed. "I need transportation out, documentation to travel on, and a go-bag."

"All doable." His gaze was instantly on her, shock written plainly across his features. "But-"

"There it is."

"-it's going to take time. And work."

"I know it's gonna take work."

"You can't even hold your hands steady enough to shoot right now, Tom."

"I know it's gonna take time," he huffed, frustration lining every word. "But I can't just let her think I'm dead though, Nez. She's going to think…. I can't let her think I did this to her. That I'd hurt her like that, betray her like that."

"I can get that, but there's a reason that only secured lines get patched through here. We can't give Garvey the chance to pick up intel that you're alive."

"There's a chance he'll have Liz's phone tapped."

"Hers and everyone around her, yeah." Nez pushed herself off the wall. "I'll make you a deal: you give this the time it needs. All the documents to let you travel without tipping anyone off, the continued training to get you field ready, and I'll go to DC and make sure your wife knows you're alive."

He stood there for a long moment and was so silent that Nez thought he was trying to find a way to turn what she thought was a very reasonable offer down. Finally he straightened, his eyes licking with hers. "Thank you," he managed, his voice breaking a little.

She tried for a smile. "I don't talk about my family much-"

"Ever," Tom countered with a small smirk.

"-because they're not worth thinking about anymore. You're my family, Tom. My brother. I'm on your side. Got it?"

He nodded slowly and she thought he did. He was going to go to Liz. There was no stopping that. There was only doing everything in her power to make sure Garvey never got a chance to finish what he started.

It felt good to hold a gun again after over a year of recovery. The range had been down there, mostly unused except for Nez and occasionally Scottie, though she would never admit to it. Tom had seen it, he had known about it, but had never made a move to use it. Not until then.

His long fingers slipped around the smooth metal, his palm pressing against the hilt as he slid his pointer next to the trigger without touching it. He had worked hard, and while his experience or the medication or come combination thereof had left his hands much less steady than they had once been, he hadn't actually tested out what that would mean at the range.

If he were honest he wondered if he might have been afraid to. Until he stood there, feet set, gun in hand, and eyes focused on the target it was all just theory. A theory that needed to be tested, and that afternoon seemed as good of a time as any.

Liz was gone. Ghosted, Nez had explained. No one knew where she was and she'd left no visible trail to follow. There were ways of tracking down someone that didn't want to be found, they all knew that, but Tom knew Liz. She had left Agnes and she had run. Whatever reason she had for it was one he was sure she thought was solid, but she didn't know everything. She needed to, and to get her that information he needed to be ready.

Tom drew in a deep breath, sliding his finger across the metal and repositioning his grip. He'd done this a thousand times. He just needed to let instinct and training take over and fill in the gaps left behind. One hard blink to steady himself and he leveled the gun, shifted his finger, and pulled the trigger.

It recoiled on him, but he was ready for it. He squinted through his contacts at the paper target a few yards down the stretch. A frown tugged at his lips and he stepped forward , finally having to admit that he had completely missed the mark. There wasn't a scratch on the paper.

The trained operative loosed a long breath and pulled the gun up as if he were going to shoot again, his dark eyes focusing on the way his hand trembled and with a frustrated huff he pulled his other hand up to help steady it, firing off three more consecutive rounds and then a fourth for good measure.

Paper swayed this time, the bullets clipping it as they still missed their mark and Tom set his jaw. It was okay. It had to be okay. Like everything else he would get there. He would hit his target again and he'd be able to hold his own in a fight. He had known this wouldn't be easy, that he'd have to fight and struggle to find Liz and to be able to help her. That was nothing new in his life.

"Hey?"

Tom turned, tugging the sound resistant muffs from his ears. "Hey, you guys find something?"

Nez offered him a tight smile. "Yeah. A little girl asking for her daddy."

He opened his mouth to respond, but then let his jaw close again. Agnes. She had no idea what had changed to go from Disney-marathoning days and fort-making nights to her daddy suddenly spending hours a day at the gym or down in the range. She would be confused, maybe even a little hurt.

"You're not out of here yet," Nez reminded him quietly. "Dumont has an algorithm running for all the aliases that you gave him and we're at a holding point with the search until he finds something."

"Right." He looked back at the paper that just over a year ago would have been shredded. Liz wasn't the only one to focus on, no matter how important. "She in the playroom?"

"She wanted to show you her drawing."

A smile tilted his lips back up and Tom clicked the safety back on. Without another word he placed the firearm in its case, set the protective gear on the table, and started out of the room.

"It's the first thing you think about every morning," Ressler had told her before she left. "You wake up with this…. Pain that you can't make go away. It's every day and sometimes it feels like it'll never stop, but then, eventually, you think about something else first. It doesn't go away. I still miss her and my guess is you're always going to miss him, but…. You'll get there, Keen."

If Ressler had known she was going to disappear or not, Liz still wasn't sure, but he'd done his best to reach out to her in a way none of the others could: as someone who had been there. She had appreciated it, but it hadn't helped. She could imagine that it ever would, but she hoped that someday she might understand it a little better.

The cabin had come furnished, stuck back off the beaten path that wasn't very beaten. There had been something enticing about the idea of solitude, the only real contact that she would be forced to have with anyone when she went to town and on her terms. Without a phone there were no calls and no one there knew anything about her, much less looked at her with all the pity in their eyes and the condolences falling from their lips. They weren't a constant reminder of what she had lost, nor was she surrounded by the physical reminders that were little better than seeing an actual ghost walking through living room at night.

She had been there a little over a week when she finally had to admit that a lack of people didn't necessarily mean quiet. Liz jumped at every little sound, everything around her new and uncertain, especially when she tried to sleep. The days were okay. She could handle the cold and the fog that rolled in. She kept busy keeping the rickety old cabin habitable, but at night the branches scratched the windows and the wind howled low and mournful outside. The house creaked and she woke screaming Tom's name into the empty night.

Liz had always liked dogs, even if she'd owned relatively few over the course of her life. Sam had had a lab when she was little, but he'd died and she hadn't been able to bring herself to want another one after that. Sam had tried to ease her into it and told the story for years about how he'd had to carry a wailing Lizzie from the pet store as she sobbed the dead dog's name and held onto him like her entire world was coming down around her. She hadn't owned another dog until Hudson, and even that hadn't been a choice that she'd made. Tom had just shown up with him one day, that goofy grin of his plastered across his face. They'd hit another snag in the adoption process and he'd brought home a puppy. She could still remember standing in their living room, shaking her head, and reminding him that a baby and a puppy were entirely different. He knew, he'd told her, but she was still smiling, and that had been the point. She had been, and they had loved that scruffy mutt right up until Kate had had to find a new home for him when they'd left for Cuba.

Kate. The name seemed fitting when she brought the shepherd mix back to the cabin. The dog would be her protector, her guardian, both from the things that lurked in the shadows and if anyone ever tried to hurt her. The bond was instant for Kate and Liz was fond of her.

It was easy to fall into a routine out in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness. She slept, she took her meds, she ate, she chopped wood, she worked through her exercises. She fixed the generator, she fed the dog, she fed herself, and she took her meds before bed. In and out. Every day. Sometimes she'd go into town to pick up supplies or a package that she had shipped from DC. She gave them the name Grace. They thought they knew her, but all they saw was a façade, and that was okay. No one asked her how she was doing. No one knew to. Her health, her grief, and everything that meant anything was kept private and life marched on and she moved with it in a haze, waiting for something she wasn't sure was even possible to obtain.

She had been there at least a month when she sent for a box from her place in DC. It was stupid, she knew, and she'd hate herself for the impulse she'd given to, but once it was sent for it was difficult to undo without the box being lost in transit, so when it showed up at the post office two weeks later she had carried it out to her truck and into the cabin. Kate had danced at her feet, hoping for something to play with as Liz pulled the record player out from the careful packaging and set it up, placing the record that she'd specified on it. It felt like a good sign that she didn't break down crying as the tune played out from her husband's record and as she closed her eyes she could see him at their apartment, back to the living room as he cooked dinner and completely oblivious that she had stopped to listen to him sing along. He'd loved that thing, and if there were pieces of Tom that she could learn to keep maybe that wouldn't be so bad. Maybe that meant she was healing.

Some days she could listen to it, some days she couldn't. There were good and bad days, and sometimes the bad ones came without warning. It was part of the new normal, and with that everything seemed to blend in together and she felt herself fade into it.

The last handful of weeks knowing that Liz was awake and out there somewhere had felt longer than the year that Tom had been waiting for the news. He could feel it weighing on him, ripping at him, and Agnes was picking up on that. He didn't have to say a word - not that his three-year-old daughter would have been able to understand everything that was happening then - but he could see the shift in her. She was cranky, slow to smile, and clung hard the moment he moved to go anywhere she couldn't follow. It hurt, even more to know that he was going to have to leave her.

The alert came in first thing in the morning, an alias finally triggering one. They couldn't risk accessing the Artax Network for visual confirmation, but Tom knew. It was her. She was pulling away, handling her anger and her pain alone, but not forever.

His paperwork had come in piecemeal, but it was all there and ready for him. Nez was hesitant on actually admitting that she felt like he was field-ready, but she knew better than to fight him on it at this point. The one place she did put up a fight was in the fact that he wanted her to stay.

"Listen," Tom said quietly, hesitating just outside his daughter's room, "I can't leave her here alone."

"She won't be. Howard and Scottie -"

"Exactly."

Nez's expression tighten. "They would never hurt her, Tom. Either of them."

He squeezed his eyes shut, stress feeding into the motion. "I want to believe that, but right now I need to be able to focus. To do that I need someone here I can trust completely. That's you, Nez." Tom watched as the reality of what he was trusting her with sunk in. "I'll be okay."

She pulled in a deep breath and he knew he'd won this round. "Fine, but you keep your watch on. It'll give Dumont a full readout of your vitals and will send out a signal if anything goes too wrong."

"Like death?" Tom asked cheekily and Nez rolled her eyes.

"Preferably before it gets to that point," she grumbled. "We can only do so much from here though. You need backup."

"I hadn't planned on going at this alone," he promised her.

"Good. Everything's set. You have exactly half an hour before everything kicks into gear. Dumont will loop the feeds and you'll have a vehicle waiting for you out the southern entrance." She handed him a go-bag and shoved him towards the door. "Go say goodbye to your daughter."

The amusement faded immediately as Tom turned towards the door, the reality of what he needed to do weighing on him. To put his family back together he had to leave his daughter. Again. It hurt like hell now that he was facing telling her.

Tom set his jaw and turned the knob on the door.

Agnes was in the middle of her room with stuffed animals surrounding her like an audience. She had several sheets of drawing paper in front of her and she leaned over them, scribbling across the page breaks with absolute focus. Tom inched closer, his footsteps light, and he saw three stick people together, the smallest in the middle and the bigger ones holding the little girl's hands. "Is that your mom and me?" he asked after a long moment.

"Yeah."

He took a careful seat on the floor with her, careful to avoid both art and stuffed animals. "I like the smiles."

"Me too."

There was so much that he and Liz had planned as a family. The beach, the park…. it all seemed so normal, but things kept getting in their way. They had thought they would have time. And they did. They would. The sooner he left, the sooner they would get her back.

"Agnes? Hey, look at me for a second, kiddo? I need to tell you something." He waited for her to out her crayons down and crawled into his lap. When Scottie had first brought her here he'd been just another stranger to her, but now he was Daddy. He was the one that chased away bad dreams away at night and made her feel safe. Now he had to protect her in another way.

Agnes leaned in against his chest. "You're going away," she said softly.

Tom swallowed hard. It still amazed him how much she picked up on around her. "I need to help your mom."

"Will you bring her back?"

"As soon as I can," he promised, kissing the top of her head. "I hate leaving you, you know that right?"

She leaned back so she could crane her neck and look up at him. "Can I come with you?"

The question was so innocent and he wanted to tell her yes no matter how unrealistic it was. He squeezed his eyes shut and cleared his throat to keep his voice steady. "I wish you could, baby girl, but it's gonna be dangerous."

"I'm brave, Daddy."

"I know you are," he managed, "but someone's gotta stay here and watch after your grandma and grandpa. Can you keep them out of trouble for me?"

She seemed to think about that for a minute before nodding. "Okay."

"Okay," he breathed and pulled her into a hug. She wrapped her arms around his neck, burying her face in the crook of his shoulder, and Tom held on, desperate not to let the moment slip past him. He wanted to lock it away like the photo he carried in his wallet. He wanted to remember holding his little girl and wanted her to know - beyond a shadow of any doubt - that she was loved.

"You'll come back," she whispered, and he wasn't sure if it was a question or a statement.

He pressed a kiss to the side of her head. "Always," he swore. "I'll always come home to you, Agnes. No matter what happens, I'll always come back to you."

She nodded against his shoulder and he pulled her in tighter, not ready to leave just yet.

It had been a long few days. Hell, it had been a long few weeks and even a longer year, but the last few days chasing down Reddington's newest Blacklister while trying to balance Prescott's increasingly insane demands left Donald Ressler jet lagged and exhausted, and apparently it had showed. Cooper had told him to take a couple of days. He'd argued, knowing that that would just leave him with hours to dwell on things he'd rather not spend the time thinking about, but Cooper had insisted. He was on a twenty-four hour leave, minimum.

Ressler dragged himself up the stairs of his apartment building, a bag of takeout Chinese food in his hand for dinner. He would crash, see how long he could sleep, and figure out the rest in the morning. There had to be a night where that actually worked, right? He snorted a mirthless laugh at the thought, wondering just when this had become his life.

When he'd called a cleaner after killing Laurel Hitchin. When he'd broken the law to save his own skin. Some moments he remembered it wasn't just him on the line. He'd been there for the investigations that had been conducted into the Task Force and how they put everything at risk every time. The moment an outsider started poking their nose in everything they had built, all the good they did was put at risk. This could have been the one that blew it all hell. He'd been protecting them too.

The thoughts slammed to a standstill as Ressler moved to slip his key into the lock and clear blue eyes focused in on small scratches around the lock like someone had slipped as they tried to pick it. He set the food and his travel bag down on the hall floor as he reached to pull his gun from the holster. Carefully he turned the key, every muscle tensed and ready for whatever or whoever was on the other side.

He pushed the door open and let it swing, his gaze sweeping his open living room. There was no one immediately visible, but he saw his personal laptop set up on the coffee table next to an open box of pizza. Next to the table sat a bag that didn't look a whole lot different than his own now out in the hallway. He inched forward, finger hovering over the trigger of his gun, to try to get a better.

A noise drew his aim towards the kitchen and he froze at the sight of a dead man standing in his apartment, an unopened beer in his hand and a slow grin creeping to his lips as he raised his hands slowly as if to show he wasn't a threat. "Hey, Ressler."

"Tom."

Notes: If you follow my Tumblr you know I've been working on Tessler moments just a week or two ago and we're finally here! I'm so excited that Ress gets to join in relatively early in this story. I've missed our One Man Justice League and all the Tessler snark. XD

Anyone have any predictions/theories for the finale tonight? I've been disappointed that there hasn't been a lot to add into my story from canon this season, but it's been very thin on mythology, so what can a girl do? We've been promised answers tonight, so we'll see. Fingers crossed and I bet there will be a lot of plotpointing tonight after it to fill in some gaps.

Next Time: Solomon finds some trouble while Tom and Ressler go looking for Liz.