Before you read:
Author's Note: I own none of the creative content from The Blacklist, including the characters used in this fictional story. I'm sure as more details regarding the characters' past emerge with the show, much of what I'm writing won't make sense anymore. This is one account. Thank you, and enjoy.
THE INNOCENT - Chapter One
She hears the key turning in the lock, hears the mechanism click and release, but he doesn't enter the hideaway. Lily leans her head back against the overstuffed armchair and quietly closes the volume of poetry she had been reading. She mouths a quick prayer and makes the sign of the cross before sitting upright, ready.
"Come inside, Raymond," says Lily.
The door swings open, silent on its hinges, and reveals the immaculately dressed figure of Raymond Reddington. He wears a dark suit today, all shadow-tones. There are lambskin gloves on his hands. One of those hands holds a Colt 54.
"Come inside," Lily says again. Reddington nods and crosses swiftly into the room. He doesn't bother to close the door. There's no one else in the brownstone apartment building. He's seen to that. "I don't know why I lock it. Habit, I suppose."
Reddington removes his hat and places it on the mantle. She notices he avoids her gaze directly. "Good evening, Lily."
"Please, don't. It will kill me before you do, that formality."
He grips the mantle. His knuckles whiten.
"It's okay, Red," she says. "Is there any time?"
Reddington nods. "A little."
Lily reaches out her hand to point to a cushioned footstool before her chair. He moves noiselessly to it and sits before her, the hand with the gun draped over his knee. She notices the silencer attached to the barrel.
"This must be terribly hard for you," she says. Red looks up, frowning. He thinks she mocks him. "Am I your first?"
"My first?"
"Innocent. Am I?"
"I have caused the death of many innocent people in my lifetime," he answers.
"But never with a bullet fired from a gun that you held in your hand." He hesitates. "I'm your first."
"There's nothing I can do. It's either you or me."
"I know."
"I can't afford to make any other choice."
"Red, I know."
"I'd put it to my brow and pull the trigger if I could."
"Red."
They sit quietly for a moment before Raymond Reddington points at the antique manuscript in her lap. He points with his gun. "What were you reading?"
"Sonnets."
"The Sonnets? I've always…" She smiles. "This is cruel. Lily. I can't."
"If it helps at all, I know it's not that you value your own life over mine," says Lily. "I know this is about her. Elizabeth. Does she make you happy?"
"Oh, Lily, it's not about my happiness."
"Does she?"
Reddington's eyes flick up to her face and Lily isn't surprised to see the leaden weight of guilt behind the impenetrable gray.
"Happier than I did? Than I could?" He leans away from her. "I'm not pleading for mercy, Red, I just want to know."
"It's not about my happiness," he repeats, and she doesn't push. Lily slides from the chair, noticing as Reddington tightens his grip on the Colt, and lowers herself to the floor between his knees. Her hands float to his neck, cradling the back of his head. One finger caresses the skin beneath his earlobe and a faint, almost imperceptible flush rises to his cheeks. "Lily," he warns.
"So, shoot me, if you want to stop me," she whispers and fits her mouth to his. Lily closes her eyes. She runs the tip of her tongue along his lower lip and feels him respond. His breath falters. A cold kiss of metal presses against her temple. "I'll never regret any of it. I'd do it all again," she says into his mouth.
Reddington's free hand slides around Lily's waist and she smiles. A tear slips down her pale cheek. "Do it," she whispers. "I forgive—"
"REDDINGTON, FREEZE!"
Neither of them moves from the death position Lily has arranged for herself. The gun remains pressed to her temple. Lily feels Red's pulse accelerate beneath his skin. She knows it must be her.
"Reddington. Put the gun down," orders FBI Agent Elizabeth Keen. "Listen to me. Put it down. Now."
"Lizzie."
"The gun, Red."
Their faces separate enough for them to look into one another's eyes. There had been a time when they'd thought they could read the mind of the other, had sprawled naked and spent across his bed and tested this theory with alarmingly accurate results. It had been a time before scars and loss and fire and death. Lily's fingers pressed into his skin, willing him to understand once again.
"Don't," he murmurs. "Lily."
"Red, I'm not going to ask you again. I'll shatter your shoulder and have you in a sling for three months. You know I can do it," says Elizabeth.
"Yes, Lizzie, I know very well what you can do with that gun," says Reddington. His eyes are shooting fire into Lily's.
"Then, put the gun down."
Lily pecks Red on the lips. "Always."
In a flash of strength and speed neither Elizabeth nor Reddington would've expected of the wisp of a woman, Lily disarms the Concierge of Crime and forces him off-balance. He topples to the floor and she points the Colt directly at his forehead. Elizabeth Keen takes a step towards them.
"That's far enough, Agent Keen," Lily gasps. Her body trembles with the effort.
"Lily, please don't do this. Please don't do this."
"I'm sorry, Red."
"Put the gun—" shouts Elizabeth.
"Elizabeth, be silent. This will be over in a moment," Lily says, her eyes trained on Red's face. "I am sorry, Red. I thought I could be graceful about this. You always looked at me like a saint. Even saints get jealous."
"Lizzie, don't—!"
Lily swings the gun in Elizabeth Keen's direction, her fingers tight on the trigger. The Agent fires twice and Lily drops. Red scrambles to her. He sees the life seeping from her eyes as they fix on him. She opens her mouth to speak, but Reddington clasps his hands around her head and jerks hard and fast, breaking her neck.
"What the hell are you doing?" shouts Elizabeth. She holsters her gun and body-slams Reddington out of the way. "What the—what just happened?"
Reddington is silent.
"Say something! Who is this?"
He stares at Lily's face. Her eyes are open, but peaceful. He leaves them open. Red stumbles to his feet and crosses to the mantle to retrieve his hat. It takes Elizabeth a moment to register that Reddington is leaving.
"You've got to be fucking crazy if you think I'm going to let you walk out that door after this, Red."
"Then put a goddamn bullet in my back, Elizabeth, or learn to never make threats you don't intend to keep," he says. His voice is sharp with hatred and it takes Elizabeth off-guard. She glances down at the woman at her feet as Red makes for the door.
"Who was she, Red?"
"I'll be in touch," he says and disappears.
Twenty-five Years Earlier
Without opening her eyes, Lily Davenport reached across the tangled sheets and felt the mattress where he should've been sleeping. It was still warm, but she knew a search for him in the house was pointless. Red was gone.
She'd heard the phone ringing, heard him snatch it from the receiver as quickly as he could as she pretended to sleep. She'd heard him stretch the cord as far as it would allow so he could speak in hushed tones from the hallway. The voice on the other end was shrill and panicked—it echoed through the hallway and struck a deadly chill down Lily's spine.
Minutes later, he'd disappeared.
Lily rose from the bed and wrapped a shawl around her shoulders. She padded into the kitchen of her late-Victorian farmhouse and set a kettle on the stove. Her white-blonde hair fell into her face as she stared blankly out the window. A heavy snow had fallen overnight, covering her property in a thick, noise-flattening blanket of ice.
A shrill whistle cut through the silence and Lily poured the boiling water into a pot of loose tea.
It was not the first time she'd awoken in the middle of the night to find Raymond gone. He'd all but assured her that such disappearances would be a guarantee for as long as they would know each other. Sometimes he would be back by the morning. Sometimes she would not see or hear from him for days, weeks, even months.
Lily checked the drawer he kept in her home to find his belongings still there. In the loose floorboard she wasn't sure he knew she was aware of, she found his passports and the stacks of US and foreign currency. The gun was gone, but that was to be expected. From the looks of it, he wouldn't be away long. Whatever the incident, it was an emergency and an unexpected one. She felt sick.
She took a sip of the tea, rose from the kitchen table, and dragged a footstool to the cabinets. Climbing up, she reached deep into the highest cabinet neither of them could reach and extracted a bottle of whiskey. Lily abandoned the tea and carried the bottle back into her bedroom.
He'd been gone little over two hours, she guessed. There were no tire tracks leading from the house—they'd been snowed over. Lily drank deeply from the bottle and let her shawl and nightgown drop around her ankles. Her skin rippled with gooseflesh from the cold as she walked naked to her wardrobe to pull on a pair of jeans and a heavy, wool sweater she'd gradually convinced Red to let her adopt from him. She pulled on socks and snow boots and drank more of the whiskey. The wool kept her warm; the whiskey kept the feeling of dread in her gut at bay.
Something was dead wrong about this night.
The slam-bang of the screen door jolted Lily awake. She clutched at her watch in the armchair, shocked that she'd fallen asleep, but then she remembered the nearly-empty bottle of whiskey. Boots scraped and slid in the kitchen, accompanied by gasps and muffled cries. Lily sprang from the chair, her stomach burning, and sprinted for the kitchen. She heard cabinet doors opening and slamming shut, drawers rattling with silver as someone rifled through them.
Just outside the kitchen, something stopped her cold. Later, she would remember realizing that that moment was the last of her life before the end.
She pushed through the swinging doors into the kitchen and nearly fainted.
"Oh—oh, Jesus, Red—oh, my God…"
He turned from the cabinets and looked over his shoulder at her. His coat was black and burnt and fused to the skin of his back. Lily saw angry, oozing red patches of his skin through the coat—burns spread up to his neck. His face was almost unrecognizable from the layer of soot that obscured it.
"Lily. Where's the whiskey?"
"It's—I had it in the—"
"Get it."
"Ray, what happened to you?" she whispered.
"Get the fucking whiskey, Lily!" he shouted and hobbled to the kitchen table. Her eyes landed on a smoking pile of heavy blankets. "Lily!"
She ran, retrieved the whiskey and handed it to him. He glanced at the amount left in the bottle and looked at her with resentment in his eyes, eyes that were already clouded with unimaginable pain. "Get me a clean cloth."
Lily wrenched one from her linen drawer and passed it to him. He drenched the cloth with alcohol and pulled the blankets aside. Lily gasped and staggered backwards. There was a girl, a very young girl, shivering inside them.
"Okay, honey, this is going to sting a little bit," he murmured to the girl. His voice was tight. Lily frankly wondered how he hadn't passed out. Red poured the whiskey over a deep cut in the girl's upper thigh. "Give me the knife on the stove."
Lily realized he was talking to her. "The knife on the…" She turned around and saw that he'd set one of her carving knives on the stove and turned the coil up as high as it could go. The blade was steaming hot. Without question, Lily took the knife by its wooden handle and handed it to Reddington.
"Honey, shh, listen to me," he said, "I have to hurt you really bad to make sure that you don't lose anymore blood." Red glanced back at Lily. "Her femoral artery's been severed. I have to cauterize it."
He lifted the blade to her skin and Lily shouted for him to stop.
"She'll die if I don't—"
"Wait," Lily said and hurried over to the little girl. She put her hand in the girl's hand, which was bleeding and raw from a nasty burn to her inner wrist. "Hold my hand, okay? Squeeze as hard as you want."
The girl stared into Lily's face. She didn't cry. Reddington dragged his eyes from Lily and without hesitation pressed the blade flat against the deep cut on the girl's inner thigh.
"Squeeze," gasped Lily as the girl nearly broke her hand. She didn't break their eye contact. The girl's ice-blue eyes filled with tears. "She's not—she won't cry."
"No, she won't," said Reddington. He tore the clean cloth into long strips and bound the cauterized wound. His hands shook, and he clenched them when he couldn't control the shaking. "Good girl. That's my girl. That's my brave girl."
"Raymond, we need to get you to a hospital," Lily said in a steady, low voice. She knew he would go into shock, that whatever adrenaline was keeping him conscious through this would wear off and soon.
He shook his head. "Get on the phone. Call Sam. Now."
"Okay. Okay, Red," she said and ran to the rotary phone outside the kitchen. "What's the number? Red, I don't know the—"
"Lift up the phone. Underneath."
Lily snatched the phone from the table and a scrap of paper fluttered to the floor. With trembling fingers she dialed the number written on it in Red's calligraphic scrawl and waited.
A groggy voice answered. "Hello?"
"S-Sam? This is Lily Davenport. I'm—"
The sleep evaporated from his voice. "Red's Lily?"
"Yes, we met—something's happened. Red told me to call. I don't know what to do."
"Tell him to be ready. It's tonight. Tell him to be ready."
Lily jumped as she heard glass shattering in the kitchen followed by a dull thud. "Red?" She stretched with the phone to look inside. Red was sprawled facedown on the floor. "He collapsed. Red collapsed. I've got to call an ambulance."
"Lily? Listen to me. Don't. We'll take care of him, I promise. But first, you've got to get the family out of there."
"Family? What family?"
"He didn't get the family?"
Lily shook her head. "There's just a girl. A little girl." The girl looked up from the kitchen table, shivering. In her arms, she clutched a small, stuffed white rabbit. Part of its body had been scorched black.
"Lily, do you have a truck that can drive in this snow?"
"Yeah, but…"
"You've got to drive her over to me. Can you do that, Lily?"
"Sam, what's going on? Please tell me what's going on."
There was a pause. "You know if I could, I would, honey. If you can move Red, do it. If not, leave him and bring the girl."
"I'm not going to leave him, Sam!"
"Lily, you're not going back to that house. Bring what's necessary and get out."
Lily began to sob.
"If you can't carry him, Lily, you've got to leave him."
In less than ten minutes, Lily had packed a duffel bag with—with something, she couldn't think straight. She trudged through the snow and wrapped chains around the tires of her ancient Ford truck. Tears froze to icy rivers as they ran down her cheeks.
"We've got to go," she chattered, hauling the girl into her arms. The girl did not speak as she carried her outside and into the cab of the truck. Lily left the vehicle idling with the heat full blast and fought her way back into the house. When she reached the kitchen, she knew immediately there was no way she could lift Raymond Reddington. She was barely five-three and built like a reed. Even the girl was a struggle.
Lily fell to her knees beside Red and she cupped his face in her hands, careful not to touch the charred skin on his back. "Red, baby, come on. You gotta wake up now."
She felt his breath coming warm and shallow from his nose.
"Come on, we have to go. Help me," she begged, crying. Her boots slipped and scudded on the kitchen floor as the snow melted from them. Lily hooked her arms under his shoulders and lifted with all her strength. She couldn't move him. She dropped down, flat on her stomach on the floor, her face next to Reddington's. She cupped his blackened cheek with her gloved hands. "Ray, please," she cried, "please help me. Ray…"
Red didn't move.
Lily screamed in frustration and scrambled to her feet. Through the frosted kitchen window, she saw the truck's windshield wipers frantically scraping back and forth. The girl's pale face stared back at her.
"I'm not leaving him," Lily said to the girl, and ran from the house.
Red came to as soon as his destroyed back came into contact with the rusty metal wheelbarrow. He screamed in pain as Lily pushed and scraped him into the barrel. His eyes were wild and unseeing, and when they latched onto her, she saw hatred fill them up, hatred for whatever masochist was causing him this pain.
"Baby, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry," she muttered over and over again as she used all of her bodyweight to force the wheelbarrow to roll. Reddington's legs dragged over the edge. Inch by inch through the snow, Lily pulled him to the truck. She felt a hot wetness inside her gloves and knew that she'd torn through the skin of her palms in the strain.
Lily pulled open the passenger side door to the truck and wrenched up her head to face the girl. "Move," she growled, and the girl struggled to the back of the cab, gasping as the movement caused her to irritate the cut in her thigh.
Lily climbed into the truck and prayed to God for strength. She braced her feet inside the cab and used her weight to haul Red up and into the truck. He screamed but abruptly went silent. He'd passed out. She slammed the door behind them.
Panting, Lily rested her head against the driver's seat. Reddington's head had fallen into her lap, his legs bent awkwardly at an angle so he'd fit into the truck sideways. For a moment, she sat motionless listening to the rush of the heat in the car and the arrhythmic pounding of her heart.
And then she saw the headlights.
Far out across the expanse of her property, winding through the snow, a pair of headlights cutting through the road. No other source but the moon provided any hope of light, so the headlights of the vehicle were as plain as day. Lily knew with her whole being that the men in that vehicle would be the death of all three of them. She threw the truck into gear, spinning her tires until the chains she'd wrapped around them caught traction, and burned out of her driveway.
She forgot to look in the rearview mirror. She forgot to reach for one last glimpse of her childhood home, the house her great-grandfather had built. Sam would be right. She'd never see it again.
A/N: Thanks so much for reading. More to come very soon!