Author's Note: there is no adequate excuse for such a long delay, and this chapter in itself is not so eventful. It's an establishing, emotional sort of exploration and I hope you will find some merit in it. The next chapter is already half completed so I'm hopeful it will be ready before the holiday, which is handy as it's holiday themed... after a fashion. If you wait long enough what was out of season because appropriate again i guess. I'm just glad to be past the bad place of the last couple months and be able to produce work again.

We sailed away on a winter's day

with fate as malleable as clay;

but ships are fallible, I say,

and the nautical, like all things, fades.

And I can recall our caravel:

a little wicker beetle shell

with four fine masts and lateen sails,

its bearings on Cair Paravel.

O my love,

O it was a funny little thing

to be the ones to've seen.

- Bridges and Baloons, Joanna Newsom

They went for a walk down to the sea the next day, early in the afternoon, bundled up well under the white winter sun. The grounds and the scenery was beautiful, though the walk was steep down to the sand, intervals of boardwalk and stairs. It was mostly an excuse to walk arm in arm while they could, pressed together from shoulder to hip. She felt flushed despite the freezing, whirling sea breeze and he kept looking over at her as though checking she was still there, and reaching over to stroke her fingers where they gripped the crook of his arm.

In the light of day it seemed impossible to speak with the openness and and intensity that they had in the night, but the feeling of connection, and relief had not lessened. She had not been willing to let him stray from her sight for very long at a time, and Raymond too seemed to feel that, now that touch was allowed, he was going to keep a grip on her as much of the time as was feasible.

She supposed she should feel claustrophobic, or find his behavior at least a bit possessive, but his hand against her back or cradling her arm or gripping her waist didn't feel like an attempt to dominate or control her, not in the least. She kept turning around to meet his gaze to find him looking her with such open affection and disbelief before he noticed her attention and tried to return to his customary nonchalance, and she was certain she was doing much the same. Now that she was allowed to look and look at him, take in every feature and affect without fearing what he thought of her, she was unable to restrain herself.

She wondered, kept wondering how they were going to manage this when they got back to DC, to reality. It was good they were away for this first magnetic clinging, but even so, people were bound to notice very quickly.

She had loved Malcolm completely, or believed she had. He wasn't like the confused, distractible boys she'd dated briefly, but in the end he was just as selfish, just as needy. He was thirty-seven and her professor for a semester in her sophomore year of college, and she had continued to seek him out. She approached him with the confidence of a precocious girl who had always spent as much time with her father and aunt's friends as her age peers and who was used to relying on her intelligence to make an impression. He responded to her as though she were a grown woman and not a girl of newly twenty-one, which she found intensely gratifying and yet terrifying.

Their positions as student and professor, though he was no longer her professor specifically, the complications of his estranged wife and her disapproving father, his intense genius, and her natural prodigy and her vanity in her awareness of it, all lent an air of drama and intensity that appealed to her. The sensations of persecution and escape, the initial ease of their discourse, the first wild attraction she had felt towards him all made it easy to fall into her first love. She let herself become enamoured of their own their own narrative, let it wind her up and make her believe in its permanence and inevitability. For years afterward she believed she would never feel anything quite that profound again, and given how badly, crushingly wrong it all went in the end, she had thought it was for the best.

The affair with Malcolm was an education in many ways. She began by trying to convince him of her maturity, many of their early fights had been about her fear that he viewed her as childish, perhaps not able to make her own decisions. She had overcompensated, she realized later, trying to take on a caretaker role for Malcolm she hadn't truly been prepared for. His tendencies towards despair, his grave self doubt had moved her, she'd tried to take him on but he was too much. She couldn't cope, not with how much he wanted from her, and how much she still wanted to accomplish in her own life. In time love had turned to claustrophobia, to bitterness, and she told herself she had learned her lesson, she would never again become so subsumed in someone else's life, never again be tempted down into the cloying trap of codependence.

But in the beginning, before things soured, when they had been happy and playing house, she had found with Malcolm all the pleasures of intimacy that she had worried were reserved for other people - let down by earlier fumblings. She had been unafraid with him, at first. She had been unselfconscious and it had freed her from the remote tower of her still mind, that always seemed to want to watch the sticky business at a remove, so that she could experience immediacy, pleasure, reciprocation. She learned what her body could do, what it could feel, if she let herself live in sensation. She learned how to be bold and speak for herself even while naked, even while wanting, even while unwanting.

Malcolm was careful with her, wanted to say what she liked and didn't like all the time, liked the reassurance she supposed. Liked that she'd become his project, that little bit of masculine ego in him was proud of being her first great love and her first real lover. He was always so very sure that he knew so much about the human mind, about human sexuality, that he had so much to show her, so much he could tell her. She found it empowering, until she found it grating.

Eventually sex had become like a weapon between them, a tool to forestall arguments when she got frustrated with him, or to try to comfort him when he was gripped with doubt and anger. She lost track of how to stay in the moment, feel pleasure and sentiment together, felt some ever-deepening divide between her body and her mind, that lingered long after she and Malcolm had parted ways.

After Malcolm there were others, not many only a few, casual relationships she broke off quickly, feeling a sick sense of weakness, claustrophobia when they wanted to know her too well or keep her too close or questioned her ambition, or liked her body too well when she could only feel the simplest attraction that was soon sated and made almost repulsive. Then there had been Josh, and they'd been two independent people, she'd thought they had a chance, that they could care about each other without getting all tangled up in each other's lives and getting caught, but she'd been wrong there too.

She was sure that she was built without quite the same capacity for love that other people held, that she had a certain rigidity, a certain selfishness that didn't allow for it. She enjoyed sex as much as the next person, she supposed - though it was a pleasure that often soured quickly on her tongue like a treat craved for that disappoints - and she wanted companionship, to be supported and cared for. But she harboured a terror of being depended on by someone whose needs she couldn't meet, a horror of being expected to be something she wasn't for the rest of her life.

Everything else she felt on a huge scale, hopes and ambition, anger that sometimes seemed to singe everything around her or drive her into unintended consequences. And loneliness, longing, that too she felt like an empty space inside that was larger than anything she could possibly contain. Affection and tenderness seemed to come easily enough, given time, it was just that even when she thought love was within reach, she still felt impatience when she should feel fondness, dread when she had hoped to feel generosity.

As much as she wanted her normal life, her family and sense of home, the middle class american fairy tale that Tom had presented her, she had always been afraid that she was unequal to it. That she would begin to feel the walls closing in. That she would run out of love and patience with her husband and her potential children.

As much as she was hurt by Tom's betrayal, the trick he had played, it was also a relief. In some small way she knew she had been released from a dream that would eventually have strangled her if it had been real.

What she felt for Red, for Raymond, both of him, all of him, had been such a shock, such an impossibility. He didn't expect anything from her. Only expected her capability, her brilliance and competence, her fury and her fear, her trust. He didn't expect her to be his mother or his wife or his lover, he didn't demand her love. He was dumbfounded in the face of it. He touched her with such reverence, such care.

She would do anything for him, she realized, wouldn't be able to help herself. She was frightened, almost frightened but also relieved, also electrified with joy. The trick was, she supposed, to find herself in over her head while she wasn't looking, to be not trying to will herself to stretch but to open her eyes and find herself already stretched, already made massive and benevolent with love.

She led him to her room by the hand, hers because it was the nearer and she wasn't about to undress on some stranger's couch no matter how tempted. They'd gotten stalled on the library couch for more than a few minutes because Liz had wanted to catch her breath somewhere warm - although she hadn't exactly caught her breath because she'd dragged Raymond down on top of her, unwilling to be even inches apart and he'd eagerly kissed her until she couldn't even think - but the mohair plush was itchy through her soft knit shirt and she'd demanded a change of venue.

"We don't have to rush into anything," he reminded her gently, but the sentiment was undercut by the breathless quality of his tone, the way he crowded against her back, "Word and deed don't necessarily have to follow one right after the other, however… enjoyable it might be."

She caught his hand where it was splayed against her abdomen and pressed it tighter against her skin under her shirt and waited until they were safely shut into her room before turning to face him. Just the look on his face, the heat and intensity made her knees weak and she didn't even try to find reason or restraint.

There was only feverish, urgent wanting, and the surety of the love he had confessed, and the realization that she'd always expected to end up here, pressed together, asking his body to speak to hers - maybe not from the moment of their first meeting, but indecently soon after. His fingers had landed in the dip of her back as she turned and he stroked her there, making her shiver and lose her train of thought for several long moments as she leaned into him.

"This is not rushing," she managed at last, meeting his eyes, tracing the beautiful line of his cheekbone, his eyebrow with her gentle fingertips, trying to fix in her mind the image of how he looked at her as though she was a revelation, "If you you had any idea how long I've wanted… This is not rushing, I promise."

"How long, then?" he wanted to know.

But she distracted him by stepping the minimum distance away to strip off her loose, soft sleep clothes and stand naked before him as though daring him to try to think of anything but her bare skin, her body, her bold overture.

"Christ, Lizzy…" he breathed, low as she'd ever heard. She watched his eye darken, planning out exactly how he would touch her, take her, she could see it, she was sure - found herself moaning aloud at the hard ache that provoked in her in response.

Then he was crowding her again and she was tugging desperately at his clothes, trying to get to skin, hot and shaky and out of control. She found herself thinking again, anything, anything, I would do for you anything, I would let you do to me anything, and knew they were so far from healthy, that this was nothing to do with salvation, but she was too far in, she couldn't even wish for a different fate.

He wanted to go slowly, he wanted to savour, told her he intended to make a meal of her, show her all he could do. But she wasn't interested in planned and plotted intimacy, she didn't want honed skill, not at first, not as they were just learning how they fitted together - Later, she told him, that's really nice but later, and pushed and pulled at him and whined and clung until he was just as frantic as she, not separate and thinking, but immediate and present.

It wasn't that she didn't mind that he saw her in this state, or that she was unselfconscious. It was that she was eager for him and wanted him to see, it was that for once she wasn't trying to ignore the over-vulnerable, messy mechanics of the act in favour of whatever sentiment and thoughtless satiation she could find.

Raymond was there with her in every moment, eager and hesitant both, and he loved her enough to kill for her, to die for her, saw her as a whole person, wild, furious and untamable. And would go on doing so even though he saw her sweaty and naked, bent his mouth to her neck, her breast, spread her wide and dipped his fingers in her wet sex, heard her cry out in pleasure.

She was in love and in lust and she wanted him to know, didn't hesitate for she knew that inviting this, demanding it, would never diminish her in his eyes. And when she was recovered enough that she could do more than moan and writhe she turned her attention to his body with equal thoroughness and found that her power over him was just as absolute.

They could devour each other whole and still survive, she realized as she met his eyes in the low light, saw the taught, hungry, awestruck look on his face as she invited him in, as they were finally, finally, at last, joined, and she wondered if she would ever catch her breath again. She knew her face mirrored is, knew she was making a sound of such profound relief and longing, knew that they would only be stronger for this.

They had always been better without words.

Actually sleeping together, or resting and trying to sleep, was more fraught that she had anticipated. Having retreated each to their own side of the bed by tacit agreement, too hot and limp to lie together. Liz dozed for a while in mild euphoria and was somehow perfectly cognizant of Raymond beside her in the back of her numbed mind, and soon the weight of his sleep drew her down and down deeper into rest, and that was good, that was wonderful. Real sleep, real happy relaxation returning like an old friend for the first time in months and months, like slipping into a warm bath.

But she had spent too long half-dozing in stillness beside her imposter husband, months at a time, the first time when she had suspected and the second time when she had known. Her sleeping body remembered her profound fear of the sleeping body of the one who had lain beside her at that time, the cold alien thing that had called itself Tom. She kept jerking awake to check that it was her own love, her own protector that slept beside her and not the other one, fearful in a brain addled with sleep, that she had somehow slipped back in time, or that these last, overwhelmingly intense days with Raymond had only been a dream. That she was back in that cold room in that cold bed she had thought she'd left for good.

He woke with her one time as she wrested herself awake yet again, just to check, half drowsing and half alarmed. He seemed to react to her tension, sitting up and reaching for the bedside lamp and any of his discarded clothes that he could reach, asking her urgently, "What is it? What's going on? Did you hear something?"

"No, no it's alright, it's nothing, Red," she mumbled as her mouth tried to catch up to her alertness, habit superseding familiarity. She reached out and pressed her hand to the smooth skin between his shoulder blades and stroked him there, feeling the taut muscles shift, trying to halt his progress from under the covers.

"Really," she said, fully awake now, and waited for him to give up on getting up and turn to face her, "I'm fine, nothing happened, it's just stupid. I… Asleep me doesn't seem to remember that I'm not still hiding from Tom. Habit, I guess."

He nodded slowly, sad realization smoothing his worried brow. "Yes, I can see… I understand habit," he said, voice rough with sleep.

And yes, she'd just seen, hadn't she? He had to be conditioned to react immediately on waking, to whatever situation he found himself in. She should have expected, she supposed, she hadn't really given it much thought. He gave the impression of being a man completely unafraid and completely in control and unassailable, but she was coming to understand that was just an impression, that the serene persona was largely cover for hard work and deep trauma and multitude of other things she was just starting to see. She didn't embarrass him by call attention to just how much she had perceived, not there and then in the middle of the first night.

She sat back against the pillows and stared blankly out into the dark room beyond the comfortable light of the lamp, regretting profoundly that she had said that man's name, bringing the specter of him, of her past with him into the room and into bed with them - but then, neither of them were likely to forget. Certainly her unconscious mind hadn't forgotten Tom so quickly.

"Would you like me to go back to my room, Lizzy?" Raymond asked, breaking into her winding thoughts, "You might rest easier that way."

"No, please don't, I want you to stay - I always want you to stay. Lately I've been wishing... But I got so used to thinking that you shouldn't, that I shouldn't," she stopped, too slowed with exhaustion to find a way to put words to the way she had wrestled with the stark divide between what she wanted and what she knew she ought to want. She shook her head and ran her hand across his shoulder blade, his firm shoulder until she felt him relax and decide to remain.

She slid back down under the covers, feeling chilled and over-exposed for the first time that night, and he carefully followed suit, watching her with dark, solemn eyes. She felt the crushing weight of all the horrors that surrounded them back in the real world rush over her again, and realized that for a time she had forgotten, but from the gentle look on his face she was sure Red hadn't. She gave a shaky sigh and reached over him to turn the lamp back off.

"Just hold on to me, will you," she said, very small and plaintive, "I'll know it's you if you just hold on to me."

He reached for her eagerly and he helped her turn so they were back to front, and curled all around her under the rustling eiderdown in a tight little knot that was sure to grow stifling hot later, but she felt secure at last. This was Red here with her, Tom was gone, she wasn't going to wake up alone and teetering on the edge of her old bed and the edge of terror.

"I thought you wanted space," he said, slowly stroking her side, her hip, as she went lax against him, "You pulled away and I didn't want to take more than you would give."

"I didn't want to crowd you," she said, embarrassed and unwilling to explain how asking for simple affection had always made her feel more vulnerable even than sex, and that it had only gotten worse as her relationship with Tom had worn on and she'd come to realize her husband had only tolerated her occasional clinginess.

"Oh, dear heart. That's just silly. You have actually met me, haven't you?" he said against the crown of her head, clutching her tighter for emphasis, "Always, always crowd me as much as you like."

She soaked in being held, completely held. She must have had this before, she thought, at least once - not Josh, she'd been so careful with him to keep herself independent, or Tom, after she's worn through his patience, but with Malcolm, she supposed, before they started wearing on each other's nerves. It felt familiar and yet completely new, lying limp and easy in his tight grip, feeling his warm breath against her scalp, stroking his wrists and forearms to encourage them more tightly in place.

"It's always been hard for me to ask for… I've always kept myself separate, you see," she confided into the quiet space they'd made, "I've always been on my guard, trying to not seem childish or needy, not to invite something that would give rise to feelings of… ownership. I have that kind of face, that kind of past, it makes people - men - want to take over for me, take me in hand. Wrap me up in batting and pat me on the head and tell me how I ought to be living. I was sure you were going to be like that, too, with that big, commanding persona of yours," she stroked his fingers lightly and wriggled backwards, trying to get closer to negate the implied criticism, "But you haven't been, you've let me fly around making my own, at times incredibly stupid, decisions and you've never once tried to bring me to heel."

She took a nervous breath and encouraged his hand higher, warm and smooth-palmed with calloused fingertips against her breast, and surely he could feel how hard and fast her heart was beating beneath with the vulnerability of her admission. He caressed her and she arched into his touch, love and desire running right through her like one great electric pulse under her sternum and between her legs.

"If I'd had to bully you into it, it would have been worthless, not real, not your choice. Of course we had our moments early on, I know I pushed too hard. But later on, you pushed right back so I had hope. I was never interested in taking you in hand, as you so delightfully put it. I think in fact that it has to be the other way around. I've wandered, over the years, gone wrong, gotten lost… and my decisions have only led me farther in. But you, I think, are blessed somehow."

"Blessed!" she exclaimed in disbelief, craning around to look at see his face but catching only a glimpse before his gentling hands coaxed her back down against him, "You should know better than anyone how ridiculous that sounds."

"But you are. You are clever and clear-sighted, you see right through me. Your moral compass still finds North," he murmured to her, so completely earnest and heartfelt, "You've waded into the mire and it hasn't claimed you. You're my tender-hearted girl with a core of steel."

"That's some pedestal you've put me on," she said, wary and stunned, flattered and alarmed, thinking oh god, he really means it, he really thinks I'm going to be the one to guide him through this. And then, after a few seconds on the brink of panic she relaxed, realized that this too was a part of the anything she would do for Raymond. Mine to look after, she thought, He is mine to look after. No one else ever could, but I love him so he is mine.

"It's not a pedestal, Lizzy, I promise you. It's just that solid ground is a long way up from where I stand," he said, and pressed kisses along the side of her neck and caressed her again and distracted her completely from anything less visceral than touch and scent and sensation.

As they walked down by the sea, down on the hard packed wet sand with the bone-deep sound of the surf and the churning cold air, they let all conversation die. It was beginning to sink in, she supposed, what they'd done, how they'd tied themselves to one another. The fine wires of trust they had strung not so very long ago had become entirely binding but she did not repent or regret, she was surer than she'd been about anything in years. But exalted feeling aside, the future seemed only more insurmountable.

It was just the same as when she thought he had rejected her, the framework of their lives, her job, his list, Berlin, Tom, the tenuous agreement with the Justice Department for his immunity, none of it was altered. They could not go on just as before, the idea of it was abhorrent, and yet they couldn't fail to. Her job would pull her back in, and his work, his network would have to be maintained just as much as before. To try to carry on an affair in secret would be recklessness incarnate and to have it in the open was downright suicidal, but to give it up, to give Raymond up was impossible. She couldn't even think of it without feeling a soft kind of suffocation.

She found her legs didn't want to carry her forward and she stopped, gripping Raymond's arm hard enough with both hands she felt him flinch just a little before he turned to look at her.

"What the hell are we going to do?" she said, sounding far more frantic than she'd meant to.

"Well, I assumed we'd head back to the house when we've soaked up enough sea air, and then perhaps lunch, or -"

"No, Red, you know what I mean," she cut in, "I mean when we go home and you're still you and I'm still an agent and nothing's really changed. Except everything has. What do we do? What's the plan?"

"I don't know," he said, and turned them to face the silver blue water rushing toward and from them.

"What? How can you not know, you always have a plan. You may not always tell me but I know you always have one."

"Oh, my dear… I should have come clean with you sooner, I suppose, but you look at me with these big, worried eyes sometimes and I can't help but try to be reassuring," he said, "The truth is I'm an old fraud. I must maintain an appearance, I do that very well. But in actuality I have a plan far less often than you seem to think, although your faith in me is heartening. For the smaller gambits, yes, I have notions and contingencies and suspicions, but on the larger scale, for what I began when I came to you… I knew that I must save you and I knew that I had something to offer you to get your attention, and I knew that whoever had targeted you to get to me had to be stopped or risk dooming us both. I had a trajectory in mind, but recently the waters have become muddied."

"Muddied. What does that mean?"

"It means I didn't initially see how powerful an enemy I would be facing, or that his, or their, motive would seem to be something more than simple greed. I still don't have a clear vision of the situation and don't know if I can explain how unusual or how dangerous that is. But mainly, if I haven't adequately buried the lead, it means you. I didn't expect you. How I would feel about you. How you would really be, what a force of will you would bring to bare. How I would… lose all perspective. I didn't expect you might willing to accept me farther than just enough to save your life - and even that far looked like a stretch after we got off to such a start as we did."

And oh, what a rocky start it had been, she'd never been so angry at someone, or so often, in her life, the memory of that rage still sparked a kind of fear in her - that she could be that out of control. That should have been a sign, she supposed, that he could make her feel everything so much more than anyone else she'd ever met. But it wasn't a romantic thought, it frightened her right in that moment. What if she was ever that angry with him again, now that they were locked together in this way, what if he was? It would be a blood bath, they would tear each other to pieces long before they would give up and let go. She knew this, she knew it. Oh god, what are we going to do?

But just as much as it frightened her, it didn't inspire her to want to give up or run away. She looked down prospect of their joint futures with a sweet kind of inevitability. If they were to make each other miserable later, at least they were happy now - and this was all supposing either or both of them had futures that lasted past the next few months. There was still Tom. There was still Berlin. There was still that goddamn list of human monstrosities he was feeding them piece by piece like shovel-fulls of coal to keep the steam-contraption moving.

He was still the weary General in the Invisible War. And he didn't have a plan. He didn't have a plan. He'd never had a plan.

Between the roaring sea and the changeful air and this revelation she had a sudden feeling of insubstantiality. She felt as though she was the still pinprick spot in the center of something great and wheeling and out of control. She drooped in the face of this, her hands going lax around Raymond's arm, her head dropping down so that she could press it against the curve of his shoulder.

"You don't have a plan," she said against the rustling material of his blue coat. Her favourite one of his, she'd always thought in some corner of her mind she'd pretended not to notice.

The one he'd worn down into that underground bunker and she'd had to concentrate on pretending to be a hacker while he rested his hand on her back. That whole stint under cover he'd rested his hand on her back, clutched protectively at her arm, hovered right behind of her or right in front, and she'd felt… warmed, calmed, more secure by his proximity. That was the first time. And then he'd killed without hesitation in her defense and she'd felt sickened, and annoyed at herself for letting her guard down. But that night was still the first night she'd dreamt of him, him in that blue coat, watching her, hovering, crowding against her while guiding her through dark, confusing places with his hand firm and hot on her spine.

He had seemed all-powerful then. But even then he hadn't had a plan. He had a trajectory in mind, he'd said, whatever that meant. And notions, and contingencies. It was like finding out that the person chauffeuring you around for the last six months never got their license or finding out that your parents were never married, or that gravity only worked by a collective effort of wishing very hard, a sudden counting up of ways that you were not safe, had never been safe, and you'd never even realized.

He reached out, to comfort her, to support her but she took a step back and looked out over the long stretch of deserted beach and dune grass and grey sea instead.

"Why did you even tell me that?" she asked, sharp, annoyed.

"I thought we were being honest now. You deserved to know, it concerns us both in the long run. Even if we hadn't become… it still would have concerned us both," he said calmly, solemn but unapologetic.

"You really don't have an exit strategy for all this?"

"Not as such, no. It's an evolving situation, you see that, don't you? You and I, the both of us and Berlin, the both of us and the Bureau, or the Oversight Committee, however you choose to define it, it's all in flux." He sighed and took her elbow in that gentle but possessive way that always made her go still and biddable, and made her turn, caught her gaze to be sure she was paying attention. His eyes looked clear green and depthless in this blue and silver day and he seemed awfully amused and exasperated for the way she knew she was frowning at him.

"It's not as though I've got no idea what I'm doing," he continued, insistent, "I've come to find it the most effective method over the years. I learn as much as I can, I excavate the situation, get the lie of the land and then I let the course of action… formulate. It's not as if you can guarantee that all the players in your play will perform exactly like components in an immense Rube Goldberg machine. I can't afford be rigid in my thinking. I can't be predictable, do you understand?"

"Yeah, actually, I guess I do. If you had been at all predictable, Ressler's team would have brought you in years ago. Now there's a strange thought."

"Yes. Not our Donald, of course, he was never very close at my heels, though I'd wouldn't tell him that if I were you. It would bruise that fragile ego of his. But there were certain others with darker motives who might have came close."

"I don't understand how you can live like that, with so much uncertainty. I keep looking into my own future and…," she shook her head, "I've always had a set of goals, always some next thing I'm working towards and now there's just this haze... and it makes me want to curl up in a ball and hide."

"It gets easier with practice. Not quickly but it does - Which is not reassuring, I know. I wish I could promise you something better, something definite and concrete, but I have only myself to offer. It's not the home and the stability you deserve but... no matter what else may happen you'll be safe, and I will do everything in my power to make you happy. You will have me, Lizzy, for as long as you want me. I know that's not much in the greater scheme, but it's all I can offer."

"No, you're wrong… It's a lot, it's huge. It's more than I've had in so, so long. I do depend on you, you know, I have. Maybe for longer than I've trusted you, even. And I want you, I want this so very much, I don't know the words to say how much. It's just. I have a lot at stake here. We both do, of course we both do, but I think I have more that's directly at risk. My job, my standing with the law, a career and a settled life, things which to you are already forfeit, and I think extraneous and uninteresting to you. I don't know. I've felt them all slipping away from me, but if we were discovered, even the hope of them would be taken away."

"I know. Believe me, Elizabeth, I know just how much you have to lose here. I'm not blind to how my influence warped the path of your life even before I blundered in to tear it all apart," he said, "But this is who we are and where we are, and nothing I know can change that. And I can't and won't apologize for being so very glad you're here with me now, or for wanting what we have. However, it's your decision, it must be. Please know I won't hold it against you if you find the risk is too much."

"Don't be idiotic, of course it's worth the risk. Why would you say something like that? We're here now, this is what we are, just like you said. I won't give it up, no one can make me, not even you, do you understand?" she said, sharp and urgent, and remembering that she could, she wound her arms around his waist and dug her fingers in, wanting him to see that she was not giving up, not proposing surrender.

"Don't worry, I wouldn't make it easy for you to send me away," he said and smiled with the sly humour she was used to, but still she thought he looked a little resigned. He pulled her closer. "But you are the one with a life above ground you can still turn back to. I don't want you to go into this thinking I would put my feelings ahead of your needs and pressure you into something that you wouldn't naturally choose."

"Well I choose us. You know me, once I've chosen somebody I don't let go, it takes a crack in reality to shake me off. I just... think we have to be extremely careful and I don't really know what that looks like."

"We have time for that, a little time. Let's just be us for now, alright Lizzy? The strategy will come, but for let's just try to be..." he shook his head a little as though the word escaped him.

"Happy?" she said and marveled a little at how the concept had become almost fantastical.

"Yes, my love, let's try to be happy," he said and kissed her temple, smiling, beaming in a way she'd never seen.

"Alright," she said, thinking it might, in spite of everything, be possible, "let's try."