"You Know, There Was a Time When My Life Didn't Include You"

Author's Note: My final contribution to Febressuary 2022. I have loved everything about this month! Reading the stories, looking at the fanart, enjoying everything creative that people have made for a character we all enjoy so much. He's an onion that keeps revealing himself over the 9 years of the show. Thanks to AlyBlacklist and Aussieokie and Nancyjoon for coming up with the prompts and the themes and for running this event (my first!). I even surprised myself and wrote a story for each day! Some were longer than others but I published and shared one a day-while ignoring my other WIPs (sorry!) but I'll get back to those soon enough.

If you enjoy my stories and haven't read my stuff before please check out my page for more keenler stories and let me know what you think about anything you read.

This one is my head canon and may or may not be everyone's cup of tea, but I felt the need to give it some legs and see where it went.

Let me know what you think.

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He walked into his office and slammed the door unceremoniously and started to pace. There was no fucking way this was his life; it was some mass fucked up alternate universe that he needed to wake up from. His reality couldn't be this. Because this was both the happiest and most messed up moment of his entire life, and he'd had some messed up moments; some moments when he couldn't even reconcile what had actually happened. He could feel the tears building in his eyes he was blinded by every emotion coursing through his body.

The door opened and Cooper walked inside holding his hands up in surrender.

"I can't," Ressler said as he stopped pacing and looked at the man.

"I know you are angry after everything you went through in the past 2 and a half years…" Cooper said.

"What I went though?!" Ressler snapped. He swore in that moment his voice was so loud the windows in the office shook. "What I went through?!"

"I know Elizabeth's death sent you on a spiral of addiction, pain, loss, suffering, moments where you did things that you aren't proud of, times when you drove a car so recklessly that you may have been trying to join her…"

Ressler turned his back to Cooper when he started to silently cry. Everything he had said was true. He had started with the oxy almost immediately, walked away from his job and life and family, possibly his thoughts while he chased Reddington that night had veered toward how easy and nice it would be to join her, he had been a drunk, he had been sexually promiscuous, he had not cared about anyone or anything for a good year. He had fought like hell this last year and a half to get his life back together, to build ties with his family again, stopped blaming Liz, tried to be well, stop snorting, start controlling his intake, stop fucking any woman who looked his way, enter rehab, stop wishing things were different, start being there for Agnes, stop resenting the lost time, stop blaming himself and everyone for her loss, stop wishing he was with her in the afterlife instead of alive and breathing in this life, and had started to date, started to build better relationships with friends and her child, started to feel himself again.

"You and Agnes were the first things she remembered," Cooper said. "Don…she went to your cousin's because it was the closest Ressler she could find in Alabama she assumed that was where…"

"She still doesn't…she's not…" Ressler said.

"She said her doctors said more memories will come back with time and exposure to her old life," Cooper said. "I think we'll eventually have our Elizabeth back, you'll have her back…"

"We had to tell her that her name was Liz Keen for fucks sake," Ressler said turning around and facing Cooper with his rage and watery red eyes. "She didn't know her own name and calls herself Julie….Julie Ressler."

"She knew, even when she didn't know anything else Don, she knew about you," Cooper said as he watched the man wipe at his eyes.

His mom had called him a week ago saying she had got a strange call from his aunt. His aunt had got a call a month before she went to Florida from her daughter-in-law, his cousin's third wife who he hadn't ever met, about this woman with short dark hair who had shown up on her doorstep asking if they were related almost a month before that. She seemed insistent that she was married to a Ressler or had the last name Ressler but didn't know her husband's first name or even her first name, but they had a young daughter with dark hair, and she didn't know her name either. At first, Helena had almost called the cops, but when the woman told her about her memory loss, that she'd been in an accident and needed to find her family, her husband, her daughter…Helena pitied her and sat with her on her front porch and talked. Helena was always one for a good story she could share at bingo night, apparently, so she was intrigued. His aunt, although she'd found the story interesting, hadn't thought to tell his mom until recently, and his mom, knowing this was strange had called Don right away.

The woman knew her last name was Ressler because she could hear herself saying it again and again, like someone who introduced themselves a lot. She didn't know her real first name but the nurse at the small-town clinic who had helped her had a daughter named Julie so she'd taken that as her name. The clinic was good, but by no means state-of-the-art and they had done more fore her than she should have considering she had no insurance. They had kept her for weeks, despite their policy of only 3 nights stay before they transferred patients to a facility that could handle long term care, they had helped her try and research the Ressler's finding only one in the state of Alabama where she had been found and none in Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, Mississippi, Kentucky, Arkansas, or Louisiana. Her nurse Kendra said she could be an illegal from Mexico for all they knew and might be wise to stay away from the police just in case.

"She's got a southern drawl for god's sake," Ressler chuckled darkly as a couple of tears flowed down his cheeks.

"She's been living in the middle of nowhere Alabama for over two years," Cooper said. "Trying to figure out who she was…where she came from…her last two and a half years have been similar to yours in many ways, dealing with loss, memories that don't connect, alcohol, drugs…"

Ressler nodded. She had admitted as much; the need to intoxicate herself some days to forget what she couldn't remember. She had started to take hallucinogens because memories came back easier, but she was always left wondering what memories were the drugs and what were real. She'd been working at a motel as a maid, drinking at the local bar, researching at the local library, shooting at the local gun range, trying to piece together her missing past while living in the present with the reality that she may never get it back, that anything she remembered may all be false anyways.

Julie Ressler had reached out to a couple of missing persons organizations but because she was alive and healthy and not a missing teen or child and she didn't match any missing persons reports, they said they'd get to her case eventually. She had spent her off time looking up newspaper articles in her state and the states surrounding her and had not found anything to point her in the direction of who she was. She'd given up for eleven months, deciding that no one seemed to want to find her so maybe she was better to just move on with her life; start fresh. But after eleven months the knowledge that she had to have a family, a family she wasn't with, gnawed at her enough that she started her search again.

She had found the one Ressler in her state and gone to her house watching it on her day off every week for three weeks before she finally convinced herself she needed to approach the woman. But, the next time she'd arrived, after her six-hour cross-state drive, the woman had gone on vacation and Liz didn't see her back for almost a month.

Helena had heard Julie's story and asked some questions that Julie didn't know the answers to. She'd also told Julie that every Ressler that she knew around Julie's age or older was married or gay and that none of them had anyone missing in their life that she knew of. She also said she was not terribly close to her dead husband's family, having married him only 5 years before he passed and being his third wife, they showed little interest in her to begin with and most of them lived up north. Helena also explained that the Ressler's she knew were all gingers for generations, so the likelihood that one fathered a dark-haired daughter was slim. She felt badly for Julie and told her she'd reach out to some of her departed husband's family and see if they knew anything. She'd shared the story with her bingo group and called her mother-in-law a week later, but Teresa didn't seem to know anything about this woman either and they talked more about her upcoming trip to Florida than Julie Ressler.

"Don, I know this is more than anyone should have to handle, let alone a man who hit bottom because he thought the woman he loved died, but…" Cooper started and was interrupted by a knock on the door.

They both looked up to see Aram and Liz standing on the other side.

Ressler wiped at his eyes and looked away as Cooper opened the door.

"Can I come in?" Julie asked.

"Of course, Elizabeth, I mean…I haven't asked if you prefer Julie or…"

"Elizabeth is fine," she nodded, not taking her eyes off the man with his back to her in the corner of the room, obviously wiping at his eyes. "I'm sorry."

Ressler turned and looked at her surprised.

"I'm sorry for…Aram told me a bit about your last two years…" Liz said as she took a couple of steps into the room and toward him.

Cooper nodded with his head for he and Aram to leave them alone and they walked out of the room.

"You didn't know," he said, his voice thick.

"I know," she said softly as she leaned her hip against the corner of the desk. "But I'm still sorry. He said you quit your job, disappeared, became a mechanic, and he said a past issue with addiction came back and ruined you for a while…"

Ressler nodded; it was all true.

"You loved me," Liz said softly. "And I know I loved you."

He swallowed hard and nodded.

He looked at her more closely now. He had told Aram about the weird conversation with him mom, never thinking it was connected to Liz. Cooper had received a call, she'd been transported to the Post Office, and Ressler had seen her for the first time, a walking ghost, not 20 minutes ago. The urge to touch her was overwhelming, but that was not appropriate considering she hardly knew who she was. The anger he felt was also overwhelming.

She was Liz, the rapid DNA test that Cooper had the lab conduct before bringing her here proved it. She looked the same, but different. Tan, rougher around the edges, her hair was cropped short with some green on the tips because she'd apparently dyed it for St Patrick's Day. She was freckled, wore cowboy boots and a pink shirt; Liz never wore pink. She was slightly thicker around the middle like some women get who don't exercise and who drink more than they should, with long thin arms and legs but a bit of a gut.

"And that one piece of information about myself, along with my daughter, is what kept me going on days when I didn't want to," Liz said. "I…once I tried to…"

Ressler's eyes went wide; she had tried to kill herself.

"But I called my friend Florina after I took the pills because I thought about that love, that daughter, and I knew I couldn't give up, not yet, not until I knew…"

Ressler took a couple of steps toward her. "Liz…"

"I like it when you call me that," she smirked at him. "That's what you called me, right? Not Elizabeth. When I heard your voice for the first time, and you said my name it…my heart started to race. Maybe it was the excitement of people recognizing me, but it didn't do that when Aram or Alina or Harold said my name."

He smirked at her.

"I thought I was from the south," Liz smiled at him. "Then I started to find Ressler's in northern states…"

"Yeah, the ones in the south are there in vacation homes not permanent addresses," Ressler said. "Except Helena, who I've never met."

Liz nodded. It was surreal finally talking with someone who knew her; probably knew everything about her because of the nature of their relationship before everything happened.

"Do you have a scar on your clavicle?" Liz asked him.

His eyes went wide.

"That one," she said pointing to the right side of his body by his shoulder.

He unbuttoned his shirt and pulled the collar to the side for her to see the scar.

She stepped toward him.

"What happened?" She asked, wanting to touch it but knowing she shouldn't…couldn't.

"I was shot," he said quietly. "A long time ago. But you remembered it?"

She turned a shade of pink. "I remembered kissing it."

"Oh," he said as he pulled back his shirt and started to do up the buttons again, not sure what he should say to that to this woman who he knew better than anyone but also didn't know at all right now.

"My last name isn't Ressler," Liz said. "Aram said I always called you by your last name."

He nodded.

"Always?" She asked, her question clear.

"No," he said softly. "You went between Don and Ressler when we were…alone."

"How long were we involved?" Liz asked him. "I thought we were married so…"

"We were complicated," Ressler said as he crossed his arms over his chest. "You were my partner and friend for a long time before you were anything else. But we were together, in that way, for about a year before you…we'd talked about plans…a future…"

She nodded.

"You know, I thought I was in sales or something," Liz chuckled. "I had memories of being on different airplanes, people speaking other languages like Spanish and Russian and…I thought I travelled a lot for work. I didn't know I was an FBI agent…a psychologist…"

He gave her a tight smile.

"We have a daughter?" She asked, her head nodding.

"You do," he said with a small smile. "Her name is Agnes."

He reached for his phone and pulled up a picture of her from a hockey game he took her to a few weeks ago. "She's almost 12."

Liz looked at the picture and felt all the blood rush from her head and started to waver.

"Jesus Christ," Ressler said, catching her before she fainted and helping her sit down on an office chair.

"I assumed she was 6 or 7 or…"

"No, almost 12," Ressler said as he reached for his water bottle and handed it to her so she could have a drink.

He crouched in front of her, his hand on her knee as she drank back his water and tried to steady her breath. She nodded and handed him back his water bottle and he, reluctantly, broke contact with her and stood back up.

"I remember reading her a book and the two of us giggling about a cat with a crayon. I researched it for almost two months, looking at every cat book in the children's sections of bookstores and libraries within 3 hours of where I lived. And when I finally found it, I cried."

"What book?" Ressler asked.

"Chester the Cat," Liz smiled at him. "You wouldn't believe how many children's books there are about cats."

He chuckled.

"But she's…she's almost a teenager," Liz said, disbelieving. "I remember her little…footie jammies, missing teeth…I thought she was still little."

Ressler took a cleansing breath.

"She's pretty amazing, plays violin, dances and sings," Ressler smiled at her. "She's going to be so excited to see you."

Liz looked up at him scared.

"I don't want to hurt her," she said, her eyes watering as she wiped at them with a shaking hand. "She's still a child."

Ressler nodded and stepped toward her, taking her shaking hand in his.

She started to cry upon contact; gasping for air as he crouched down in front of her again and pulled her into his arms.

"We'll figure this out, Liz," he said as he hugged her and rubbed her back, memories of the other times he'd hugged her flooding back and overwhelming him. "I promise."

He held her for a long, long, time as she cried. He cried a little as well; it was a lot to take in when she was dead until today. He whispered reassurances, told her a couple of things about Agnes, him, them, and her work. Ressler stayed away from the more difficult topics of Reddington, the death of her husband and her sister, her time in jail, the blacklist, and the secrets that tore her up. No, for now, she didn't need to know that. He was tempted to never let her know those things ever again.

"You know," he said softly as he pulled back and wiped at her eyes. "There was a time when my life didn't include you and…and as much as I tried to get over you, I couldn't. Because, honestly Liz, I can't imagine my life without you in it. I feel…I feel like the last couple of years have been the worst of both of our lives because we weren't together. But we're together now, by some miracle we're here and together and…and I intend to keep it that way. We'll figure this out, okay? You and me?"

She nodded and leaned forward and kissed his lips softly.

It was tentative and different from how Liz had kissed him before. She was unsure, exploring, seeking, trying. His Liz had kissed him with abandon; this Liz didn't.

She pulled back and looked at him nervously.

"I'm sorry, I needed to…" she said shyly.

"It's okay," he smiled back at her. "I know you, Liz. And pretty soon, you will too. And whatever Liz you end up being, I know I'll love her."

She smiled at him and leaned her forehead against his.

"We used to do this, right?" She asked, her warm breath mixing with his in the intimate and small space between their faces.

"Sometimes, yeah," he smiled at her.

The end.

If you have not left a review yet for my Febressuary stories, we're at the end of the month and this is the last one, so please leave a review.