For Disclaimer, see chapter one. Holy Toledo, guys. I'm so sorry for the late update. (So much for getting this done before Christmas) I had a ton of family stuff going on and relatives in town. My goodness, I didn't think I'd lag this far behind. For new readers, this takes place during Christmas. We're gonna pretend that Liz didn't get caught, and that the chase goes on for a lot longer than they're letting on, and that Liz and Red are actually stuck spending Christmas together. I've been playing with this chapter for a while, cause the dialogue was giving me grief, and I didn't want it to just be a filler chapter. Not so sure I succeeded in that or not haha but here it is! The next one is in the works. Sorry, again, for the wait!
She finds Dembe on the phone in the foyer. The mansion they've requisitioned has ceilings high enough to echo even the lightest of footfalls, but he manages to somehow keep his voice low enough as he's talking so that she doesn't hear anything except the deepest notes of his baritone. Not enough to discern words, but enough to let her know he isn't just moving his lips. She isn't sure what she's going to say to him. How? If she'll be able to keep it together. If the emotion she has kept suppressed will bubble up and choke her.
The few, determined strides she takes to close the distance between them are watched carefully, and if she weren't so wrapped up in corning him, she would have acknowledged that she faltered a little. His gaze is intense and she's worried that there is more showing on her face than she would like. He snaps the phone shut, a quiet sound that cuts into the air, and extends his arm to the sitting area to her right. Liz takes in a sharp breath and leads the way to the two chairs situated by the window. Everything is extravagant here. Expensive, old, a stranger's home to protect what's dear. She recognizes the fact that her thoughts have taken on Red's distinct pondering.
Words on words and sideways truths.
"Elizabeth," It's the way he says her name when they've seated themselves that makes her chin wobble, and she clenches her hands in her lap. She can't lose her nerve just yet.
"It's on his whole back, isn't it?" Measured and horribly controlled for how fragile she feels inside. The memory of a man lying facedown on the floor - no the snow. Their past, the re-collecting of the pieces, are jumbled and confused. She thinks she knows the answer and then she doesn't. Thinks she knows what she did that night and then she doesn't. It wasn't fair of him to keep all the information. She'd killed her father, that's what he confirmed. How could the rest of it be worse? How could any of it be worse? "The scarring, it's-" She makes a sweeping gesture with her hands, extracting them for the cure of restlessness.
"Yes."
Yes. So she doesn't have to ask again. Yes. Because Dembe is merciful with his patience and his love. Yes. All over his back. The echo of the fire that forever linked the two of them. The pain. The loss. She's the key and he's the lock to the door they long to see behind. Puzzle pieces with obscure edges.
Her eyes stray out towards the garden beyond the window. The old smell of the house is no longer a comfort. It suffocates her. If the memory of Christmas turned the most careful person she knew into a reckless, suicidal idiot...if the guilt of whatever he did that night was so bad that he went out and got himself abducted...sitting here, having Dembe watch her with his heavy compassion, she finds she can't reconcile her anger and her grief. The melding of the two feels so much like terror that it seized her mind; trapping her in the images she can recall and the lies they were twisted into so she wouldn't remember.
"We're safe here, right?" She needed to hear it. Grappling with this revelation, with Red's suffering, with what should be a shared pain...she needed this one thing. Right now.
"For now," Because Dembe wouldn't lie to her and this world is never safe. Vigilance was now a lifestyle. A demand for survival. "We have everything necessary for a quick and quiet departure." In other words, don't worry. She nods, a small and trailing thing as though she wants to say something more but lacks the words. His gentle eyes soften even further and he smiles. "You're going to be okay, Elizabeth." Promises, promises. She feels that lump in her throat again; either from her gratefulness or her frustration she isn't sure. The two emotions were so compounded, so simultaneous, these days that she could never tell. But she manages a smile and gets up, her stomach in knots.
"I'm gonna go check in on Ressler." She hadn't forgotten about her partner but, after what she'd seen in the ambulance, she'd...shut down. Distance. She had needed it. She didn't know how to operate lately, feeling off and incredibly out of her depth. She didn't need Ressler knowing how wrecked she'd been earlier. Walking up the stairs, Liz knew that she would have to face Mr. Kaplan eventually, as well. As if being on the run wasn't enough. It was time to face things. Really face them. It would be the first time talking to her ex-partner since she'd been vilified, since she'd shot the Attorney General. There was a certain amount of trepidation in each step she took up the stairs, drawing ever closer to a point she didn't think she was ready to reach. It's what she'd been trying to do for two years. Come to terms with who she knew herself to be while trying to fit into the perimeters set by her peers and by the law she could seem to abide. Come to terms with her childhood, her past and all it contained.
...You can face it and confront it. Engage it. And maybe- maybe you prevail and rise above it...
It's as though his sonorous voice in her ear, urging her forward, filling her up with a simultaneous warmth and a chaotic exasperation. Telling her to pursue this, pursue him, and, inevitably, pursue the truth.
Next to him in the light, Sam draws a hand out of his jacket and grips Red's left shoulder in an affectionate gesture; steering him away from the center of the Piazza and towards the shadows where this other him had stopped.
"I told them that it might be too much," Red is captivated by the much younger, healthier image of his long time friend. Sam looks…resplendent in the soft light emanating from the Christmas tree. There's nothing sallow about his cheeks or eyes, his hair retains the color it had from his prime, from youth, and he's giving Red a smile that knots all the guilt and shame within his being. "I'm sorry that you couldn't- I wish this display of theirs allowed for more." More time, more options, more freedom. Red gets the impression of being watched in spite of being invisible to the world around him and Sam. Judged. Examined.
Sam turns his attention to the man in the shadows and Red watches himself, just four days earlier, as he trudged on through the snow; ignoring the buzzing burner phone in his coat pocket. Ignoring all of it. Sam has yet to move the hand upon his shoulder, and Red, feeling oddly quelled by the sight of himself before his abduction, remains quiet in anticipation of Sam's explanation. For want of more words than profuse apologies in the wake of everything he's done these past two years, he exhales to find that his breath isn't a substantial entity here even though he can feel winter's biting cold.
"Them?" His old friend gives him a smile that echoes the sardonic memory of a time gone by; holding all the necessary secrets.
"What you saw earlier were key fragments of your life: pieces for the desires of both sides." Red catches sight of himself up ahead of them. He remembers the desperate frustration with the phone. He remembers the coiled grief in his stomach. That feeling between nausea and a desire to scream or cry or-
The phone breaks in his hands.
Red finds he can't reach anything but the most poignant of emotions from what he'd experienced with Lizzie just minutes ago. The awful longing for his girls. The terror in his helplessness during the fire. The frustration over his lack of control in this...illusion.
"It's a test, Ray." They stop just five feet from the brooding version of himself; an angry, wayward vision of a man pining after ghosts. A memory's ghost. Seeing the shadows on his own face, the war, the lines, gives him a hollow emotion; a floundering worse than a balloon in the wind.
"Isn't it always?" He has to make himself speak. He has to force his lips to move as he watches himself in his misery; nearly sucked into the cycle of silence and indignation. The moment is right there in front of him and he can taste it, bitter and pitiful on his tongue.
"Don't be a smart ass," Sam's stepped between him and himself, a smile dying on his face. "I need you to focus. I need you to be aware that there is a wrong answer here, brother. That what you see and how you react, the answers you give when it's over, will determine whether or not you stay in the game."
"You mean whether or not I get to survive."
"Not so much if," Red knows he's frowning, making a face that shows he isn't following. "But how. You've had a helluva year, Ray."
"Hell of a life." Subdued by irony, his eyes slide back to the figure of himself just over Sam's shoulder. There's a sliding feeling, a wooziness that overcomes him as he watches himself look back in their direction, knowing full well that his thoughts had lingered on Lizzie. The look on her face when she found him staring out the window. When he couldn't explain to her why there was devastation on his face, in his eyes, why his voice was so rough. She and Dembe weren't supposed to be back for another three hours.
Half the amount of time I asked to be alone.
Alone was not a new request from him to his friend. Dembe had suggested to Elizabeth that they go and see the city. She'd agreed, of course, and Red had ushered them out the door with enough pomp and flourish that Lizzie hadn't even gotten to ask why he wasn't coming with. I should have known.
"Butterball's figured you out," He hasn't even noticed that Sam has resumed his position on his left, watching him as he watches himself with a smile that recalls years and years of gratitude and enormous, self-sacrificing love. Knowing. Understanding. The benefit of the doubt. No bullshit. There is so much about this man that Red misses. "Well," Alive with restlessness for the next leg of the journey, Sam turns and holds out his hand to him. "Christmas-present waits for no man." There's a subtle, not even you, in his good friend's voice, and Red, sparing another glance at the earlier vision of himself, grips it, and the world they occupied pulls away from him.
A maddening hush has engulfed the second story hallway. Lined with rooms, littler studies, an office on the far end, it stretches out before her as though it will never end. Two doors down on the right. Ressler is waiting for her. Technically, he's being detained on her behalf by Red's people. Semantics aside, she pauses to listen for any form of sound coming from the middle of the hall. Taut in fear of having to face Mr. Kaplan and the room they'd put Red in, fourth on the left, she draws in a breath. Pull it together, Keen. Ressler. She had to deal with Ressler.
The fact that he'd been there, that he'd gotten mixed up in this…that he'd gotten that close to Red made her nervous in that same, possessive way she's felt upon first meeting Samar. It was new to her, this feeling. She was no longer what she used to be to them. Partner, agent, subordinate…the best in her class now a world class criminal. A murderer. She'd been so caught up, at first, with clearing her name, that she hadn't stopped to ask if she cared. And now, with the wolves growling at their door, she wasn't so sure a good, public name mattered anymore. The truth matters. If she had to bend the rules to get to that truth, so be it.
She steps up to Ressler's room, gives one final look at the door hiding Red, his doctors, and Mr. Kaplan from the world, and then turns the knob. Liz finds Ressler sitting across the room from two men in Baz's crew, hooked up to an IV and looking none-too-happy about his situation. The men glance at her and she dismisses the two of them with a smile and a quiet 'thank you'.
"You look like you're doing better." She tries for a smile as she takes a seat across from him at the small table and leans back, examining him as he stares at the door and then looks at the needle in his arm.
"My brain is still kinda...rattling around, but I'm good." A shrug and a boyish smile are afforded to her, and she nods as his expression grows a bit more serious. "What's going on here, Keen?" He fixes her with a stare she's seen countless times before and all those other times, in recent memory, were moments when she had to lie. Not gonna do that now.
"Two of the men are gonna drop you at your place once one of Dr. Renovich's nurses clear you." The statement seems to freeze the look on face, a kind of composure she'd seen when he'd been struggling with those pills. The kind of face that says he's closing up a vulnerable part of himself. The part reserved for her when they were partners. "What?"
"Nothin'." He'd taken his time answering her, and she feels the unsaid comments as if they were burning in the air between them. "I-uh, just thought we'd be going after those guys." She can't tell him that there is already a team rounding up the men that took Red, that they're being taken care of as they speak, that there was no way in hell she was going to include him in the sordid details of this life she was just stepping into. Even I don't know all the details, yet. And maybe Dembe would keep the darker parts from her. But one thing was certain, she would find one man or woman to tell them who had been following them in Italy. One. That's all it was going to take.
One person.
One word.
One night.
One fire.
One scar.
Two secret keepers.
Her life has been a series of singular events snowballing into full on shit storms.
"We've already taken care of it." It's a lie. Not her best, but it isn't so far from the truth that he notices. What seems to push him away is exactly what she expected.
"We?" God she hates the way he's looking at her. His tone. The fear from that lady in the diner was one thing, but the total disbelief on Ressler's face, the hurt in his eyes...she clenches her jaw. "Look, after what happened, I won't ask you to turn yourself in, but I will catch you eventually, and this will be over, and you can't keep venturing down this path, Liz. Look at where you are, Keen." Surrounded by the people of one of the world's most notorious criminals. Framed for acts of terror. Grappling with barely realized memories and obvious trauma. Red. "There is- there are things that can keep you from ever feeling the light again. You know who told me that?" She shakes her head, watching him with all the regret she feels, and finds she has a pretty good idea who'd said that. "Reddington. Right before I went after Tanida."
"That old life-" She looks at him as he watches her, losing the words she wanted to say, losing the will behind them. She stumbles on the sentence and drags in a breath to steady herself. There are emotions she can't name writhing in her chest, that send her heart into a frenzy; getting her worked up. Frustrated. Angry. "It wasn't real. What I want? Nothing matters but the Truth." The truth about the Cabal. About Connelly. About her mother. About Red. About herself. "The rest..." will come.
"Keen, I can help you." What brand of justice does she want? What kind of filth does she want to toss her friends into? Aram, Ressler, they were the ones she had to protect at this point. Cooper knew the darkness better than he let on. Samar was already, sort of, working for Red. And me, by extension. "Let me." She barely hears him, can barely look at him. Fear and shame has her clammed up. Ressler is a good person. A loyal friend. She has given him the benefit of the doubt this entire time and she wondering if she was wrong to have done so. She can't think about that, she can't entertain the idea that he's blind to the gray area this time, because right now, there are voices in the hallway, and she wonders, with a jolt, if Red's awake yet, and what the verdict is.
How long they'll have to stay here.
How long he'll need to recover.
And just like that, her train of thought is drawn back towards the man that holds all the secrets, plays his cards close to the vest, too damn close, and tries, like a shepherd and master chess player, to herd and move everyone into position. She couldn't drag Ressler into this world. She doesn't think he'd let her. And, thus, the impasse they found themselves in now.
"I'm grateful to you, you know I am," her eyes trail off to the IV in Ressler's arm, to the bruising on the side of his face, and back to taking in the dusty condition of his dress shirt and slacks. The look on his face tells her that he knows he isn't going to win this discussion. That she'd decided who to turn to a long time ago and it wasn't him or his government. Justice was wearing a fedora and a three-piece suit, not a badge and an issued glock. "You gave me the benefit of the doubt when you let me escape, and I know you know that this is bigger than just clearing my name. It-that? It doesn't matter anymore."
She flipped and flopped, constantly, back and forth, in her mind about whether or not she cared if people believed her to be a terrorist; if she cared about the media. To a certain extent, clearing her name would keep her safer, less recognizable, and less notorious in the months to come, but it seems that the damage has been done.
"It does matter. Look, Cooper brought Tom in on it, they're close to getting Karakurt." She anticipated how quickly he would insist otherwise, as if, by some twist of fate, clearing her name would make her feel whole and good again. But a name wasn't going to bring about any fantasy. I don't have to know who I am to know what I want. Everything she'd worked for and achieved had been ruined because of her actions and hers alone. "You're not a terrorist, you're not a criminal, and we can prove it if you just come in with me." The sinking, sickening feeling of digging herself into a hole had always been there, and now, with Ressler filling her with that fantasy, the maybe in all the harsh definites, she was finally greeting her culpability with a numb affection. "We can fix this."
Maybe they could. Maybe she could work with him and accept whatever plan it was to get her exonerated, maybe she could fix it with Karakurt's confession...but in the end, it was still a huge 'maybe' it was still just an ideal. She meets her ex-partner's eyes and absorbs that fierce loyalty, that honest desire to do the right thing, and then she rises and sheds the notion of that comfortable light inside of her. It may not be safe in the dark but she at least had some idea of how to navigate the trenches, and a professional criminal to help her wade through the dark waters of her past and present.
"We captured some of the people that were holding you and Reddington." In the safety of a change in topic, she won't have to look at his quiet disbelief and that bit of resignation she sees in his expression when he leans back into his chair. Is it really that unbelievable? That she would choose a criminal life for a little bit longer if it meant a more secure end? She supposes that they can talk about how the ends don't ever, really, justify the means, but it would be pointless. A waste of breath. "They'll be dropped off with you at your place. All the information they've given Dembe will be relayed to the team after you've secured them." They couldn't have the information falling into the wrong hands. As time sensitive as everything was, as vulnerable as Red's inhibitions had made them, they couldn't afford any mistakes in this next leg of their sprint to infiltrate the Cabal.
"And what?" Ressler's tone has her drawing back into herself, casting that perfect, icy stare she'd adopted during her training at Quantico. It's the one that earned her a lot of lonely drinks at bars. The one that annoyed Nick so much. It's the one that people don't seem to understand, and she's just fine with it. "I'm supposed to just close my eyes and pretend I don't know where this place is once I leave?" She knows he'd been in the back of the van Baz and his team had arrived in, which meant it was likely he'd only pieced together certain roads, and not much else. She didn't like Baz's idea of getting Ressler out of here but she hadn't protested either. His mild concussion had been her obvious worry, but they'd supplied her with a suitable answer to put her at ease.
"Something like that, yeah."
It's the smell of sweat and burnt flesh that gets him first.
The sound of his body jerking against the cuffs.
The muffled grunt of pain when he's released from the electricity coursing through his body.
It's a show of agony upon a man who is both the unrelenting force and the immovable object.
There are no questions asked that first day. Round, after round, after round of physically weakening him. He remembers, of course, not all of it, but enough that he doesn't enjoy being here when Sam could have taken him anywhere else.
"What's the point, Sam?" Steely, aiming to remain as far removed as he can from this replay of his torture; a sick movie of something he'll work to forget at night.
"The point," Grim-faced and wincing, Sam watches as Red's former captors continue their interrogation, and Red finds it hard to look at his old friend. There is a veil of empathy written across Sam's face; a kind of knowing that comes from a hard life lived, given up, and fearful of returning. "Is you need to see how this life treats you."
Anger, a raging, inner demon, threatens to unleash itself on his old friend, and Red clings to his stoic expression. He had never expected those words from his friend's mouth. The sort of damning insinuation that came along with his sympathetic tone. As if I don't know what it does to me and the ones I love. Red is more than aware of how this life treats him. He knows better than most, and he doesn't need to see it, as though it will make him have some grand epiphany concerning his life choices.
"I'm not talking about your nefarious activities, friend." Swallowed by the rapid ticking of the stun rod being used against him again, he doesn't register that Sam seems to have read his mind. "I'm talking about your recklessness when it comes to your own life." Sam, like everyone else that claimed to care about him, draws Red away from the horror that is often present in his life, and towards the softer aspects of humanity. "You hate yourself, and you're waiting for the day when you're no longer necessary for this life." Watching the amount of pain on his face just three days ago, Red is struck by this comment; a comment he can't deny or claim due to the simple fact that he didn't know if it was as valid as Sam inferred. Red loved life, in all it's simplicity and in all the oddities, the beauty and the gruesomeness. Adaption was just one way of ensuring he remained...human.
"Why would you say that?" Voice rough and brittle against the weight of his friend's summation, he tears his eyes away from his own pain and locks eyes with him. It's but the span of a few breaths, but that lag is enough to show Red just how much pain his friend is in before this glimpse of what was.
"The Raymond Reddington I know wouldn't have walked so willingly into the lion's den." He points at the table where Red lies panting from his captors' ministrations, where just one source of his current predicament lied. Red didn't recognize the stolid expression on his face as he watches himself gather up whatever resolve was left. The reprieve, he remembers, had been a blessing, and it had been a long time since his patience had wavered so greatly upon being tortured. Electricity had never been an easy combatant to face.
"I'm not that man anymore, Sam." He'd walked himself into the back of one to many lion dens before this moment without hope of ever getting out again. Luck, God, fate...he was alive by some miracle and he was always keen to test how far those interventions would reach. But this time...he's ashamed to say he barely noticed the man tailing him until it was too late to shake him. The earlier version of him slips into unconsciousness, and Red looks back at Sam, a sad smile adorning his friend's features.
"There are worse things to be than a self-loathing man, Ray." This time, when Sam offers him the chance to get away from this place, he doesn't hesitate to take his hand.
It's a mansion.
He knows it by the hard wood, the expensive Dartmouth oriental silk rug on the floor under the desk, the carpentry, the bookshelves and their contents, the ripple in the glass of the windows that look out over a sprawling garden and lake. It's old, but parts of it are new; an ever expanding project to make it just right. It's one of his own. He'd acquired it after a friend of friend went belly-up due to a horse racing endeavor. He knew the bottomless pit that money could fall into if you didn't have the right animal. In too many ways, that sport was very much like his life; betting on the wrong thing in the wrong way at the wrong time could spell defeat and death for the less fortunate.
It is the light that spills out from the bathroom that catches his eye; a rectangle cut out into the softly lit room. From it, soft sounds of cry reach them, and Red looks back at his old friend askance and devastated. Sam's lips press together and he shrugs, those wise and jovial eyes of his adopting a latent sadness. He appears rougher, somehow, not as young as he had in the piazza.
"Same rules as before, Ray." Red turns from him, stomach tense and lungs pleading for breath. Though he makes no sound, and she can't hear him, he still walks as though every step might alert her to his presence.
A step further would take him directly into the bathroom, but he stops. The mirror is empty, and he knows that he isn't really here, that he can't help her or guide her, that he can't take her in his arms and hold her tight. There would be no lulling, no soft bids to help her quiet herself. She wouldn't cling to him or dive into his embrace. It would simply be that he would watch her cry and suffer without him.
"You need to see it." Sam's voice is edged in something that Red does not wish to see on his friend's face, and so he peers around the wall of the bathroom door and finds her just as he imagined she'd be. Her head is pressed back against the wall across from the toilet, her knees drawn up so her elbows can rest on them, and her shoulders jerk with every, quiet sob she elicits. For half a second, he is angry that no one is there for her. That Dembe has left her to her own accord, that they are not down stairs having some semblance of a Christmas.
And then he notices the phone on the floor beside her and his eyes zero in on it when her teary face watches it buzz on the honeycomb tile. The sound rattles around the tiny space and he remains watching her from the door as he had watched his girls in the kitchen. The sorrow this brings about is a visceral thing, closer to who he is now versus who he'd been back then.
"Tom?" Confirmation settles heavily in his heart and Red takes a step further, propping himself against the bathroom counter for some stability. It isn't that he's surprised, but there's an odd mixture of frustration and defeat within him; a resignation he didn't normally entertain. "Yeah, I'm okay. I just-" The sound of Tom's voice through the phone speaker, cutting her off, makes him grip the counter top and if he weren't so distressed by what he was seeing he might have questioned his ability to touch everything but that which lived. "Yeah, we found him." She continues to listen to Tom on the other end of the phone, gives little answers by way of actual information, and Red tries to draw in a breath around frustration. "We're safe."
"Is this happening right now? In real time?" He turns to where Sam still stands just beyond the door frame and is shocked to find the wrinkles on his friend's face. A vague, five o-clock shadow has spread itself over Sam's cheeks and jaw, there are bags under his eyes, and his hair has started to grey again. "What's-?" In all his years since those fateful moments where his life took inevitable and harrowing turns for better and worse, he hadn't truly recalled Dickens's version of A Christmas Carol. "You're my Ghost of Christmas Present." Which meant that Sam would keep aging until he'd shown Red what he needed to see.
"No, I don't want you involved, Tom." His attention wavers between Sam's silent, solemn figure and Lizzie. But it's her tone that draws his focus onto her. Her tears have let up, replaced by an irritation he knew to boil itself into the realms of anger and rage. "Because I said so. I appreciate it, really, but I'm not in danger here with-"
"It's almost time, Ray."
Time. He's aware that he nods, but it's dismissive. Time didn't really matter to him when Lizzie was talking to Tom. It wasn't supposed to be this way. Everything they'd overcome together unraveled with the appearance of Tom every few months. Karakurt's name comes up, and Red sighs, disappointed and just a little afraid that she'll settle for the idea that a simple confession will get the life back that she lost. She's never going to be able to return to that. And while he knows he should have told her, that he should have calmed her, sat her down, and discussed her future, seriously, with her...he thinks that it's too little too late.
She knows. She has to know that the possibility is minute. His eyes trail her bowed head, how her hair always seems to fall into her face, how her breathing is jarred and unsteady. How he wishes he could reach out and sweep her up and away from this conversation she's having, away from her sorrow, her nerves, her worries, and her uncertainties for a little while. But I was selfish. Always selfish with himself. Withholding and giving when the moment suited him. So, I've lost the privilege.
"Ray." Sam is beside him, older still, and Red is prepared, offering his hand first.
They land in the middle of a field, and Sam staggers.
He is the picture of sickness. Haggard, drawn, the meager amount of graying hair on his head just as Red remembers it the last time he'd seen him. Red knows what's coming next, he knows the story, he knows why Sam is aging and why they have come to this unfamiliar place. And while his friend's coughing begins to drag a peculiar sense of panic into his own chest, Red can do nothing but support him; his hand wrapped around his friend's arm to hold him up, another placed gently on his back. Soothing motions and soft hushes to keep Sam from falling apart. This is what I missed the first time around. Lizzy must have been terrified when Sam battled cancer the first time. Alone, inexperienced with this kind of dying, and young...the things she'd gone through during her college years.
"You have to stop fighting it, Ray." Hand clutched to his chest, breathing ragged and painful, Sam extends his left arm to hold to his friend's shoulder; propped and sagging. "Not everyone you love will be taken from you." Another round of hacking coughs makes Red nod; an impulse to ease his friend.
"Sam," Placating, his wobbles and catches as he peers down at his friend's face, not enjoying the topic at hand. Please, anything but this. Right now. Anything.
Struck so suddenly by Sam's frailty, he guides his friend down into a sitting position, steadying him and maneuvering him gently into the ground. There was no easy way to make his churning gut calm down in the face of Sam's steady and tired gaze leveling with his own. So many things pass between them in the next moment that, should he survive this ordeal and remember it, Red imagines he'll be mulling it over for years to come.
Nothing about this was just a dream. Sam's arm was too solid under his grip, his eyes too clear, too precise, his voice too physical. Bent there, looking at his friend, movement at the edge of the field catches his attention and he sees Lizzie moving off in the direction of the trees.
The faintest breeze tugs at the grass around him and Sam, waving in a sea of gold and wheat, rattling the thicker strands in a whisper hissed across time and space. She seems...tense, her shoulders up, hair pulled back into a pony tail. Something makes her hesitate as the shadows from the trees begin to swallow her and he feels himself frown. A gnawing realization starts to draw in on him from all sides and Sam grips his wrist in firm but gentle consolation.
"Love warrants a response from us, Ray." Lizzie slips into the trees and disappears from view as Sam's words sink in; all the weight and guilt of his most recent actions leaves him like Atlas in his punishment. Feeling as though he were bearing the world on his shoulders wasn't a new sensation. But sharing that burden, allowing some of it to be lifted...
I wouldn't know how to let go.
He looks down at where Sam should be and finds the man has gone; vanished from sight as if he'd never been. The ghostly weight of Sam's hand on his wrist makes him reach for the place where it had been, rubbing away the sensation as best he could. Just like before, there was no goodbye. No hug. No apology. Just death and leaving. Red looks around, drawn by the beauty of this place and the peaceful sound of the wind through the field and the surrounding trees. It was the beginning of fall, by his estimate, and he imagines this place would be stunning in the summer. Green. Humming with bees and crawling with wildlife. Wildflowers blooming here and there. And always, always, a cool breeze in the shade.
His eyes come to rest on the distant treeline where Lizzie had gone, and the moment he takes a step forward, a looming figure appears before him. Clad in black, a force, silent and deadly, pushing out all around it, sends him clambering a step or two back. Reeling, feeling very much as if the life has been sucked out of him, an icy fear crawling up his spine, he stares at the figure, who lifts its head and removes its hat, and he swallows.
Hard.
Welp, that was waaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyy longer than I anticipated it being. Again, sorry for the wait! I don't think I'll ever be satisfied with this stupid chapter, but I hope you guys enjoyed it! Next chapter coming soon! (I swear, this time haha) thanks for sticking with me!